Making Sense - Sam Harris - #42 — Racism and Violence in America

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.840 today i'll be speaking with glenn lowry glenn is the merton p stoltz professor of social sciences

00:00:52.380 and professor of economics at brown university he's taught previously at boston and harvard

00:00:58.520 and northwestern and the university of michigan he holds a ba in mathematics from northwestern and a

00:01:05.640 phd in economics from mit he's a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences a former

00:01:12.040 guggenheim fellowship recipient he has published widely and has written several books that i will

00:01:19.420 link to on my blog i discovered glenn through his blogging heads tv podcast where he's been having

00:01:27.180 some extraordinarily candid and clarifying conversations about race and racism with the

00:01:32.700 linguist john mcwarder from columbia and i highly recommend you check out glenn's podcast on blogging

00:01:39.560 heads tv and again i'll provide a link to that on my website and the purpose of my conversation with

00:01:46.600 him today was to dive headlong into these controversial waters of race and racism and violence

00:01:54.000 in america as though my work weren't controversial enough already but i've been wanting to do this

00:02:00.440 for a while because these issues are just so consequential and politically divisive but i've been

00:02:07.700 worried about doing this for obvious reasons i raised the topic in my podcast with neil degrasse tyson

00:02:13.040 if you recall but he didn't want to touch it which i understand he didn't feel the time was right to

00:02:19.300 weigh in on these issues personally but for some reason i've been feeling like the time is right for

00:02:25.560 me it's just really been bothering me that so much of what i hear about race and violence in america

00:02:32.700 doesn't make any sense and the fact that i've been worried about speaking about these issues in public

00:02:38.940 was also bothering me in fact the implications of speaking about race in particular caused me to

00:02:46.040 cancel a book contract i had last year it just seemed like too much of a liability but i have since

00:02:52.480 stiffened my spine and i was left wondering who i could talk to about these things

00:02:57.200 my goal has been to find an african-american intellectual who could really get into the details

00:03:02.780 but who i could also trust to have a truly rational conversation that wouldn't be contaminated

00:03:10.240 by identity politics as you probably intuit i think identity politics are just poison unless your

00:03:18.700 identity at this point is homo sapiens but i i certainly found what i was looking for in glenn

00:03:24.720 he is just so good on these topics as you'll hear he spends a fair amount of time giving the

00:03:29.620 counterpoint to his positions on each topic steel manning rather than straw manning the views of his

00:03:35.400 opponents anyway i found this conversation extremely helpful i felt like glenn and i could have gone on

00:03:41.300 for much longer and many thanks to glenn for being so generous with his time if you find this conversation

00:03:47.640 as useful as i did i encourage you to spread it around and follow glenn on twitter at glenn lowry

00:03:55.200 g-l-e-n-n-l-o-u-r-y and please tell him that you appreciate what he's doing and again check out his

00:04:03.880 podcast on bloggingheads.tv and now i give you glenn lowry

00:04:09.900 well i'm here with glenn lowry glenn thanks for coming on the podcast

00:04:19.340 sam my pleasure well listen i've really been excited about having this conversation i think

00:04:25.000 probably irrationally so because the the topics we're going to cover race and racism and police

00:04:31.780 violence really can't help but bring us some measure of grief so thank you for doing this and

00:04:37.300 i think most of the grief will come my way probably but i first i want to say that your podcast that

00:04:43.400 you do on blogging heads tv especially the ones i've seen that you've done with john mcwarder whom i'm

00:04:48.660 i also greatly admire i've got to say that those have just been fantastic and you guys are just i

00:04:54.940 mean it's so rare to hear two people talk about these topics honestly so i just want to point people

00:05:02.420 in in the direction of those podcasts and great sam can i can i tell your audience that that's the

00:05:08.140 glenn show at bloggingheads.tv that you're referring to and all viewers or listeners are welcome

00:05:15.140 yeah yeah and i'll put a link to your page where i embed this on my blog so people can find that link

00:05:21.460 just to kind of start us off what i'm noticing now and it's really as though for the first time it's

00:05:28.340 really been in the last year or so is that there's a culture of censorship and identity politics and a

00:05:36.300 kind of addiction to being outraged and and a resort to outrage in the place of reasoned argument

00:05:43.920 especially among young people that is just making it impossible to have productive conversations on

00:05:49.700 important topics and this is happening on topics other than race of course you know it happens on

00:05:54.740 religion and terrorism and gender but race is obviously one of those hot spots and from what

00:06:00.280 i've seen you've been illuminating this topic on your show in a way that's really unusual and just

00:06:06.880 cutting through confusion like a laser so it really is great to be talking to you

00:06:11.440 well that's good to hear i appreciate it uh yeah i i think one of my motivations and john mcwarden can

00:06:19.320 speak for himself but i think this would apply to him too is that in the face of this situation that

00:06:26.220 you just got through describing of addiction to outrage that's that's a an artful way of putting it

00:06:32.620 um of a kind of uh i don't know a moral certitude and uh intolerance of argument that doesn't check the

00:06:42.220 right boxes and all of that in the face of that because i care so much about these questions of

00:06:48.780 race and equality and justice i've i felt really compelled in the in the face of a lot of uh pushback and

00:06:57.400 and and vitriol and and and and you know uh contempt expressed toward me for doing so i've just kind of

00:07:03.940 felt compelled to keep you know well keep challenging keep raising questions keep asking questions you know

00:07:13.020 um and uh so i don't know i'm not uh i don't think i'm doing any kind of uh heroic uh you know celebration

00:07:21.220 for doing it it just seems like the right thing to do but but that's uh that's a big part of my

00:07:25.660 motivation yeah yeah so before we dive into this topic perhaps you can just say a few words about

00:07:30.600 your background and just your kind of areas of focus intellectually what how do you describe what

00:07:36.620 you do in general okay so i'm a professor of economics here at brown university in providence

00:07:42.300 rhode island i've been here for 10 years i've taught economics at a number of other universities

00:07:47.940 uh harvard in the 1980s uh boston university in the 1990s um i'm a quantitative social scientist i was

00:07:57.280 trained at mit in the 70s took a phd in economics there and for much of my early career focused on

00:08:05.360 uh mathematical modeling of various economic processes uh in the labor market and uh industrial

00:08:13.540 organization firms competition research and development natural resource economics economics

00:08:18.680 economics of invention and exploration things of this kind game theory information economics this kind

00:08:26.840 of thing um i uh became a professor at the kennedy school of government at harvard and got very much

00:08:34.640 interested in public policy after taking up that post and began writing um essays and reviews

00:08:41.380 and commentaries on issues of race in the united states particularly and um was a um reagan

00:08:51.380 conservative during the 1980s quite rare to for an african-american uh moved away from that political

00:08:58.820 identity toward the center of the spectrum a bit uh and think of myself now as a kind of centrist or

00:09:07.400 maybe mildly right of center democrat though um that's not an identity that i cling to with any

00:09:15.300 particular you know intensity yeah yeah well so and you're obviously your background both in mathematics

00:09:21.520 and statistics and social science makes you really perfectly well placed to have the kind of conversation

00:09:27.120 we're going to have i've been wanting to talk about race and racism for a while because it's it's a topic

00:09:33.440 of just such huge consequence and it's a topic that again attracts a fair amount of logical and moral

00:09:41.200 confusion which renders people unable to to reason with with each other and this is just this is not

00:09:46.960 a problem just across racial lines and it's not just a problem in public i mean frankly i have white

00:09:52.900 friends who i find i can't have this conversation with because they've become so emotionally hijacked

00:09:59.400 and they don't realize from my point of view they don't realize that almost everything that is coming

00:10:05.020 out of their mouths doesn't make moral or logical or historical or psychological sense and this really

00:10:11.960 worries me because i i view the maintenance of civilization and and our moral progress as a

00:10:17.800 species really as as a a sequence of successful conversations i've said this many times before on my

00:10:24.980 podcast and and in writing it seems to me that we we live in perpetual choice between conversation and

00:10:31.400 violence just as a species so when i see conversations reliably fail like this i start to get worried and

00:10:38.620 so i've been wanting to talk about race and i just this is just the context of how i set up this

00:10:42.520 conversation i noticed the conversations you have been having with john mcwarder and i realized that i

00:10:47.880 had met john at a ted conference so i got in touch with him and then he suggested i speak with you and so

00:10:53.740 so you are my virgil who's going to guide me through this wilderness of error and again thank you for

00:10:59.560 agreeing to do this hope i'm up to the task here uh it's a tall order actually and i guess a final

00:11:05.140 preliminary point i feel the need to offer a disclaimer up front because i think you and i are going to

00:11:12.580 agree about many things and and i'm a little worried about this because because my staking out some of

00:11:17.880 these positions as a white guy is going to rub many of our listeners the wrong way and i and i really

00:11:23.380 don't want to be in a defensive crouch as we have this conversation so i think i should just

00:11:27.520 acknowledge up front a couple of things that should be obvious and it should be obvious that i would

00:11:33.080 acknowledge them and the first is just that the history of racism in the u.s has has obviously been

00:11:39.920 horrific right it seems to be no sane person could doubt that and there's no doubt that racism remains a

00:11:46.780 problem in our society and and just how big a problem is something that i want us to discuss but i you know i can

00:11:53.200 check my privilege at the outset here i i have no doubt that i have reaped many advantages from being

00:11:58.820 white and i have no idea what it's like to grow up as a black man in our society so so i i get that i

00:12:04.520 don't get it and if there's any way in which my not getting it seems relevant to the issues we're about

00:12:10.620 to touch i certainly hope you'll point that out to me but as we drive toward points that many of our

00:12:15.580 listeners will find fairly incendiary especially coming from a white guy i i just i just have to make it

00:12:22.240 clear that it is obvious how horrible white racism and its consequences have been in the past

00:12:26.780 and i am fully prepared to believe that the shadow of slavery and jim crow still hangs over our society

00:12:34.660 to a degree that i don't understand in any way certainly not from my first person experience but

00:12:40.360 my goal in this conversation is to get an accurate picture of race and racism and police violence

00:12:45.720 as it occurs now so that we can think about how to move forward so i just wanted to erect that

00:12:52.320 bulwark however ineffectual it will prove to be because i just have no doubt that we're about to say

00:12:58.120 some things that will lend itself to selective quotation and i've now learned through you know

00:13:03.760 rather cruel experience that some people listen to this podcast just for the pleasure of quoting me

00:13:08.920 out of context in misleading ways so you know but that's with this caveat which may do me no good

00:13:14.160 whatsoever i just want to i want to throw that up before we dive into into the details well i was just

00:13:19.640 going to comment that um i think you know your caveat is well taken as far as it goes uh and that speaks well

00:13:28.660 of you i would say but it's such a pity that it's necessary for you to make that kind of elaborate

00:13:35.340 uh uh you know a preemptive uh move here uh that um it bespeaks how um uh closed uh and uh tortured

00:13:48.720 is the environment in which we're having the conversation uh i mean i'm black all right uh i am

00:13:57.380 if anybody is i mean grew up on the south side of chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s from a working

00:14:04.380 class background uh have had many a run-in with american racism uh you know all across the board

00:14:12.500 uh and uh descend from people who had been slaves in the united states on the other hand uh we sit

00:14:21.000 here in the year 2016 uh 1863 is a century and a half in the past um jim crow segregation is a distant

00:14:33.540 memory uh barack hussein obama is about to step down having served two terms winning comfortable

00:14:40.480 national elections to the highest office in the land the commissioners of the police in many of the

00:14:46.440 cities in which police black community relations are most troubled are themselves african-american

00:14:51.620 as often are the administrative officers running the governments of those cities um we are 50 years

00:14:58.640 past the advent of the onset of affirmative action um this is not 1910 1950 or 1985 this is the year 2016

00:15:10.700 and uh the idea that white privilege is such a stain on the country that um an otherwise rational and

00:15:20.300 intelligent person who happens to be white needs to give an elaborate preamble before the conversation

00:15:26.160 about race relations in this country that the benefit of the doubt or the the the willingness

00:15:32.580 to hear something that one doesn't agree with without imputing invidious motives to the person who's

00:15:37.340 expressed that view is so rampant that um a person like yourself needs to in effect apologize in advance

00:15:43.800 for having an opinion that's that's awful that's poisonous that's good uh so that's just glenn

00:15:50.500 lowry spotting off and i don't know how that will leave me uh in the minds of some of your viewers uh

00:15:55.680 who might want to take what i've said out of context as well but that's where i'm coming from

00:15:59.120 needless to say i agree with you but unfortunately i think it still is necessary because again even my

00:16:05.280 conversations in private suggest to me that this is just this topic is so radioactive that it's it's

00:16:11.460 just very difficult for people to even hear what is being said much less trace the implications

00:16:16.160 so i want to start start with just a very simple question a deceptively simple question and just ask

00:16:24.040 you what is racism all right um this is not necessarily a scientifically precise response this

00:16:34.940 is just a more off-the-cuff response um i would say it is a a contempt for or devaluation of

00:16:44.720 the uh humanity of another in virtue of their uh presumed racial identity uh racism is the

00:16:57.100 uh suspension of rational faculty it's a um a uh disregard for a derogation of uh perception of the

00:17:09.200 unfitness of uh for intimate relations a presumption about the intelligence

00:17:14.700 a imputation of a bad character uh uh this kind of thing uh vis-a-vis another person or a group of

00:17:25.300 people in virtue of what one understands to be their racial identity okay so so given that definition

00:17:31.400 uh which which i agree with who is the evil genius who first convinced the world that being able to

00:17:39.100 honestly say that quote some of my best friends are black is not an adequate defense against the

00:17:46.560 charge of racism toward black people if the path forward toward some colorblind utopia doesn't entail

00:17:55.300 having best friends or even a spouse who is from a different race if that doesn't represent an adequate

00:18:01.860 surmounting of the problem of of racism and i'm now i'm speaking personally we can leave aside

00:18:07.020 institutional or structural racism for the moment but if having one's closest most intimate friends

00:18:13.500 be of another race isn't an adequate defense of what you just described as racism or a defense against

00:18:21.180 what you just described as racism explain that to me well it's funny that you use this phrase

00:18:26.780 some of my best friends are because i once wrote an article it's been over 20 years now about self

00:18:33.060 censorship in public discourse a theory of political correctness it was published in the journal

00:18:39.980 rationality and society in 1994 and in it i develop an account of political correctness which i could go

00:18:46.800 into in greater detail should you be interested but i can say this much about political correctness and

00:18:51.420 on my account a regime of political correctness is a moral signaling equilibrium in which people who

00:18:59.500 don't want to be thought of as being on the wrong side of history will suppress an honest expression of what

00:19:06.620 they believe about some controversial issue because people who are known to be on the wrong side of

00:19:12.460 history are prominently saying the same things okay so for example if back during the day when um the fight for

00:19:20.700 independence of blacks in south africa was going on a person thought that boycotting

00:19:27.620 south african businesses was not a good policy but that constructive engagement with those businesses

00:19:34.560 was a better policy for trying to help the blacks in south africa if a person thought that they might

00:19:40.520 not be willing to say so in public because there were other people who were criticizing sanctions who were

00:19:46.480 basically supporting the apartheid government the apartheid government itself is putting out the

00:19:50.880 line that sanctions were not as helpful as constructive engagement with the south african society so a person

00:19:58.540 might not want to say that because they don't want to be thought to be on the wrong side of history

00:20:02.420 so with that understanding of what political correctness might be thought to be um i was making the

00:20:10.120 observation that once a regime of that kind comes into existence it's very robust and and difficult

00:20:15.940 to dispel and in particular uh declarations of uh you know i'm not really racist some of my best

00:20:24.800 friends are black um are uh the sincerity of such declarations are are called into question because

00:20:32.280 who's going to say such a thing except for somebody who has the closeted view

00:20:36.380 that uh is being sanctioned by uh common opinion which they want to avoid being sanctioned for

00:20:42.360 by making a declaration talk is cheap anybody can say uh so there was a time in american history i think

00:20:49.460 american cultural and social history maybe the 1940s 50s maybe even into the 60s where a person could say

00:20:56.200 sincerely and be taken at face value some of my best friends are uh gay but i'm uh you know i'm against

00:21:04.280 gay marriage some of my best friends are black but i think that affirmative action is really a very

00:21:10.360 poor policy and that would have some kind of weight but um once the the um uh convention

00:21:19.960 of value signaling in which correct positions on the sensitive issue uh in the case at hand

00:21:27.360 affirmative action or a homosexual marriage correct positions is a way of signaling moral virtue

00:21:33.660 um the the the cover that one might have otherwise gotten from making this declaration let's say

00:21:40.500 it's a verifiable declaration some of my best friends are uh no longer covers enough what does

00:21:47.240 shakespeare say somewhere uh me thinks he doth protest too much you know the guy who's saying some

00:21:52.660 of my best friends aren't protestive too much uh that guy is seeking an exemption from the moral

00:22:00.820 judgment of others for having what he knows the others know to be unacceptable positions and he's

00:22:06.740 declaring some kind of fig leaf here uh but we see it for what it is a fig leaf and we don't and we

00:22:12.920 don't take it seriously something like that and in your definition of racism i think we have to

00:22:18.160 distinguish between the mere harboring of certain biases and a commitment to enshrining those biases

00:22:28.500 or a sense that those biases are good or something that shouldn't be corrected for and so i mean so

00:22:33.640 racism can't merely be a matter of harboring certain biases because it can't be that you

00:22:39.640 you fail to be perfectly neutral on an implicit association test because if that's the standard

00:22:45.620 almost no one will escape hanging even many black people will be convicted of racism against blacks and i

00:22:51.160 i think that uh mazarin banaji the uh the psychologist at harvard who was one of the

00:22:57.740 founders of the implicit bias literature would agree with that i don't think she would claim

00:23:03.820 an equivalency between implicit bias uh as measured by one of her tests and racism or uh in the case of

00:23:14.020 gender uh differences implicit bias uh about women's roles in society which can be detected in

00:23:21.040 almost every population of uh of people who take these tests and misogyny i think she would want

00:23:27.600 to draw a distinction between those two and i think your observation that in the case of race many

00:23:32.480 african americans will also score uh you know positive in terms of the detection of implicit bias about

00:23:40.480 race and american society on these tests that doesn't make them racist it just means that their

00:23:46.540 cognitive processes implicitly incorporated certain presumptions or stereotypes about racial roles or

00:23:55.340 racial behaviors that are a part of our culture and that are shared across the racial lines so i agree

00:24:02.660 with what you just said i should briefly describe this test just so that people know what we're talking

00:24:07.120 about so mazarin is one of the founders of this test and she's used it probably for 20 years

00:24:12.420 and what it is is it's it's the purpose of the test is to expose beliefs and biases that people

00:24:18.580 hold that they're either unaware of so that they can't report or that they know to be socially

00:24:24.120 undesirable and so that they won't report it's just been shown that that for instance many white

00:24:29.160 people will will be faster at associating negative concepts with black faces than positive ones and

00:24:35.980 will show the opposite bias for white faces and this is interpreted as meaning that they harbor a

00:24:42.000 preference for white people over black people and it's easy to see why people would think this and

00:24:46.880 view this as either a source or a consequence of racism and as you pointed out you can do this kind

00:24:52.760 of test with other things you can do with cats and dogs or flowers and insects you can do it with

00:24:57.120 anything really but let's just stipulate that most people will show an in-group bias on the iat and we can

00:25:05.480 even go further and and accept that this underlying psychology has something to do with racism let's

00:25:13.060 say it's it's either the cause or the consequence or both but i mean racism as a a social problem to

00:25:19.520 be condemned and eradicated has to be something else i mean it's showing white bias on the iat doesn't

00:25:26.600 make you a racist racism is the endorsement of norms that support that bias so it's a person's

00:25:34.180 understanding that he's biased and his further claim that he's happy to be that way because he

00:25:39.780 believes that society shouldn't correct for such biases because they're good because white people

00:25:45.400 really are better than black people he's someone who wants society to be unfair based on the color of

00:25:51.760 a person's skin because he thinks skin color is a good way to determine the the moral worth of human

00:25:57.680 beings that is something quite distinct from just merely harboring these biases however they got there

00:26:05.600 and there's no question that such people exist but they have to be a tiny minority in our society at

00:26:11.600 this point and the rest of us people of goodwill and you know moral enlightenment who may or may not

00:26:18.500 be biased to one or another degree clearly now support laws and policies that seek to cancel that kind of

00:26:25.520 racism and as you say i mean we we've elected a our first black president who's who's finishing his

00:26:30.860 second term this isn't mere tokenism the people who voted for obama with with enthusiasm whatever

00:26:37.640 would an iat would have shown about them these are people who have canceled their personal racism

00:26:44.320 in the form in which any real racist worthy of the name would practice it yeah i think that's true

00:26:51.160 although i i know that many people if they were to hear this conversation would be objecting that you know

00:26:56.860 you've just you know more or less cleverly defined racism out of the picture because there won't be

00:27:04.400 very many at all racists left that we were to um if we were to have such a strict definition

00:27:10.820 um so i'm challenging myself right now to try to think where i think might be the problem and i while i don't have a

00:27:19.160 an entirely coherent development uh here let me just make an observation um suppose someone observes

00:27:25.600 that um you know the homicide rate is very high um in certain quarters of our society that can be

00:27:33.600 distinguished by race you know so many people in chicago have been killed in the last years

00:27:38.120 a disproportionate number of both the victims and apparent perpetrators are black um the um uh homicide

00:27:47.240 rape and in terms of whites perpetrating the crime is much lower um and therefore there seems to be

00:27:54.620 something going on uh in terms of uh black proclivity uh to resort to violence and settling disputes or

00:28:04.180 something like that suppose someone says that suppose someone says no wonder the police are so afraid

00:28:10.360 when they encounter african americans on the street have you taken a look at the crime statistics

00:28:14.500 somebody says something like that somebody says yes it may be that blacks are more likely to be shot

00:28:21.500 by the police in terms of the rate of police killings per number in the population than are whites but

00:28:27.680 after all blacks are also overrepresented amongst violent criminals and so who can be surprised that

00:28:34.060 they are also overrepresented amongst the people who are shot by police officers someone says something

00:28:39.560 like that so now in all of these cases these are statements that are in some way or another could

00:28:45.380 be consistent with a person who uh might have certain kinds of implicit biases or whatever but who

00:28:53.540 wouldn't endorse the norm that um you know those biases are justifiable in some sense or are not a

00:29:01.400 problem or um or in no way indicative of any kind of um you know uh uh malady that needs to be addressed

00:29:10.260 that they they they would still nevertheless be thought to be racist by many people someone who says

00:29:17.420 the asians are all over the sciences and the engineering departments and our best universities and

00:29:24.160 the blacks are as scarce as in teeth there simply makes an observation about the facts that would be thought

00:29:30.220 by many people to be an act of racism and yet it couldn't be so classified given the definition

00:29:36.520 that you've just been developing but hence my definition because i i would argue while it's possible for

00:29:43.440 racists real racists to make precisely those observations those observations themselves being to my ear

00:29:51.360 quite factual i'm going to make observations of the sort you made with respect to crime in a minute

00:29:57.340 if that is the signature of racism well merely reporting statistics then we can't even talk

00:30:06.620 about the problem well yeah again i can imagine what a pushback might be a pushback might be something

00:30:13.900 like look you're talking and my talking about this problem is not something that's going on in the

00:30:21.640 abstract on the moon unconnected to anything else it's embedded within a structure the legitimacy of

00:30:29.920 which is up for debate a casual conversation of that sort merely a recitation of facts you call it

00:30:37.860 merely a recitation of facts without um laboring to place those facts within a context and discipline

00:30:44.920 our enunciation of those facts with a sort of deeper understanding of what history and contemporary

00:30:52.400 social structure have wrought in terms of racial hierarchy in terms of white supremacy in terms of

00:30:59.420 the comfort that you have in enunciating those facts in terms of the political consequences of so

00:31:04.880 many people enunciating those facts not taking that on board abets reproduces reifies legitimates

00:31:12.780 uh etches in more firmly hierarchical uh structures of racial domination and so the word racist uh is or

00:31:23.080 racism is entirely appropriate no maybe it doesn't in these cases that i'm describing uh identify a uh you

00:31:32.740 know uh kind of classical antipathy on the basis of race but uh we're no longer living in 1955 and yet

00:31:42.600 you know the disparities and um inequalities by race of wealth power privilege and comfort in the

00:31:50.440 society opportunity uh are very very great so it's uh laissez-faire racism is what larry bobo the

00:31:58.800 sociologist at harvard calls it he says you know you do opinion surveys of populations if you ask people

00:32:05.320 things like um would you be willing to see your daughter or son married to someone of the opposite race of

00:32:12.160 a black person if the subject asked is white and they say yes to that at high rates uh if you ask

00:32:19.080 them do they think blacks are inferior and they say no to that at high rates that would be the old

00:32:23.780 classical racism where they have answered differently still but still um if you say are white people

00:32:30.500 disadvantaged by affirmative action and they say oh yeah because my kid didn't get into harvard

00:32:34.760 and some black kid with a lower score got in well some white kid with a lower score also got in but

00:32:40.360 you focused on the black kid getting it you see you think you're not a racist because you're willing

00:32:44.540 to see your son or daughter married to someone who's black you're willing to stay in the same

00:32:48.180 neighborhood if a black neighbor moves next door but as a matter of fact you interpret your son's

00:32:52.340 rejection at harvard as a consequence of racial affirmative action where harvard only accepts one

00:32:57.260 in 15 applicants and a lot of people got in ahead of your son who were not black and who had lower scores

00:33:03.280 so so the i maybe i'm trying to make more elastic than makes sense this definition of racism but i think

00:33:12.180 some of the proponents of a more capacious definition of racism would say in the 1950s

00:33:18.340 your definition was fine in the year 2016 we need to have a more subtle and expansive understanding of

00:33:25.860 how this american you know disease is currently functioning so let's make it as capacious as

00:33:33.080 possible i want you to now define what is often called structural or institutional racism and it

00:33:42.540 seems to me that people talk about this in a way that you were just doing even in such ways that that

00:33:48.540 people can participate in a a structure that is de facto racist and and perpetuating unfair treatment

00:33:57.520 of people based on race and yet the the people operating in the structure may not in fact be at all racist

00:34:04.140 i mean let's say everyone passes mazarin's test nobody's harboring any bias and yet structures and

00:34:11.280 institutions could still be deeply unfair and and if you could just yeah i want to say at the outset i am

00:34:18.240 not personally glenn lowry a big fan uh of the current fad to um invoke structure quote structural racism

00:34:28.620 close quote as um a meaningful category of social analysis um i often don't know quite what people are

00:34:36.880 talking about beyond observing that blacks come out on the short end of the stick by many um measures of social

00:34:44.700 um achievement or status and therefore structural racism i mean let me give incarceration as a case in

00:34:53.700 point uh so blacks are 12 or so of the american population and 40 or so of the people who are held behind

00:35:04.700 bars now uh that's a complicated big uh social phenomenon and uh you could do uh very elaborate

00:35:14.640 you know kind of social scientific investigation of what all the sources of that disparity are but

00:35:21.120 uh simply put the weight of the state the the violence of the state where the police come and

00:35:27.940 they drag you away in handcuffs and they lock you up in a cage um where you're guarded you're surveilled

00:35:34.220 you're um you know you're pursued by agents of the state you're you're stigmatized you're civically

00:35:40.480 excommunicated you're um held in contempt you're treated badly and such a large um disparity in the

00:35:49.480 incidence of that kind of treatment by race exists in the society that is sort of ipso facto uh an

00:35:57.800 indication of structural racism the state stands up police forces they build these cages they corral

00:36:05.060 people in them and look at the impact that this is having on the black community uh in some cities

00:36:10.660 the proportion of young men who are incarcerated or have a criminal record who are black is a third

00:36:16.160 40 percent it becomes a normal way of life um you know young women go to the prison to try to find

00:36:23.860 mates and pen pals and such like that kids see the role models of ex-cons with their tattoos and their

00:36:30.580 buffed up bodies who are coming in and out of the prison um it becomes normative in these communities

00:36:36.720 um we have uh a school to prison pipeline because discipline of uh youngsters in schools seems to be

00:36:45.980 somehow connected to their subsequent development into criminals we have a prison industrial complex

00:36:52.500 because indeed there is money to be made in the provision of the services that are associated with

00:36:59.300 incarceration and it's being made by private corporations and so on um so this is structural

00:37:06.420 racism this is what i think many people would say this is a prime example of structural racism the

00:37:12.680 structures of law enforcement come down uh like a ton of bricks on people who are situated in the society

00:37:20.120 at the margins because of our history of race and by the way if the same forces had been coming down

00:37:28.280 with the same degree of severity on white people the structure would be able to reform itself

00:37:33.900 questions would arise three strikes and you're out would look very differently if most of the people

00:37:38.240 suffering under that kind of punitive regime were white but because they're black and brown

00:37:44.280 we can write them off we don't question ourselves the um you know business as usual seems acceptable

00:37:53.260 when uh the people who are bearing the cost of it are black so so um i'm not sure i'm answering your

00:38:01.420 question no you are but it was or not but this is one of the reasons why i think the term structural racism

00:38:06.800 is so compelling uh to many people and i a social scientist find the evocation of that um kind of

00:38:17.520 one size fits all um narrative structural racism inadequate to giving an account of what's actually

00:38:25.380 going on in other words um you know it's not as if there are a bunch of this is glenn lowry now

00:38:30.680 speaking a contra the reliance on structural racism as a category i want to say it's not as if there's a

00:38:37.300 bunch of white people meeting somewhere deciding we're going to make the laws this or that in order

00:38:41.800 to uh repress blacks and moreover it's not as if the outcomes that uh people are concerned about in

00:38:48.820 the example at hand disparities in the um in the incidents of incarceration are independent of the

00:38:55.860 free choices and decisions that are being taken and being made by uh people in this case black people

00:39:03.200 who might end up finding themselves uh in prison they made a decision to participate in criminal

00:39:09.480 activities that were clearly uh known to be um illicit and perhaps carry the consequences that they are

00:39:16.220 now suffering didn't they uh sometimes the decisions that they make have enormous negative consequences

00:39:23.320 for other black people don't they uh do we want to inquire about what's going on in the home and

00:39:30.140 community lives and backgrounds from which people are coming who are uh the subjects of this racial

00:39:37.080 inequality or are we to assume that any such deficits or disadvantages that are causally

00:39:44.860 associated with their involvement in law breaking and that are related to their own community

00:39:50.480 organization structures of family uh attentiveness of parenting and so forth are nevertheless themselves

00:39:58.080 the consequence of white racism black people wouldn't be acting that way if it weren't for

00:40:02.660 white racism if there were greater opportunity if the schools were better funded uh if it hadn't been

00:40:07.820 for slavery uh the black family would look at it so forth and so on and if that's what you mean by

00:40:13.220 structural racism which is to say every racial disparity is almost by definition a consequence of

00:40:20.360 racism either because it reflects the contempt for the value of black life the neglect of the development

00:40:27.200 of black people or because to the extent that it is a consequence of choices that black people are making

00:40:31.640 themselves they only are making such choices because of the despair the the neglect the lack of

00:40:39.000 opportunity etc that they have experienced then um it seems to me that that's a kind of tautology that

00:40:46.660 that that says any disparity by race is by definition a reflection of structural racism and it's a tautology

00:40:55.340 that as a social scientist i don't want to embrace and as an african american i'm profoundly skeptical of

00:41:00.560 because at some level it seems to me and i'll conclude i know i've been going on for a while

00:41:05.320 it kind of surrenders the possibility of african american agency uh saying that everything

00:41:12.960 uh that is of a negative uh character uh that is a reflection of inequality uh of disparity

00:41:22.980 in which blacks are on the short end everything uh is a consequence of this um of this history

00:41:29.760 how is it that blacks are unable to make our own lives notwithstanding whatever the history may have

00:41:34.420 been uh are there not variations and differentiations within the black population that perhaps one could

00:41:39.660 identify and extol the virtue of certain patterns of behavior and reactions to environmental conditions

00:41:45.280 that seem to be um you know more effective more life-affirming more uh successful than others so so i don't

00:41:54.900 like structural racism because it's um imprecise because it's a kind of dead end in a way it leaves

00:42:02.200 us dependent upon leaves us i mean african americans dependent upon a kind of um dispensation to be bestowed

00:42:11.060 by powerful whites who actually are moral agents who actually do have the ability to choose or not

00:42:17.160 uh various ways of life uh including responding affirmatively to our demands for redress of our

00:42:24.500 of our subordination whites are powerful whites are agents whites can do the right thing or the wrong

00:42:30.120 thing blacks are merely historical chips we're merely cogs automata being driven by the fact of slavery by

00:42:38.200 the fact of jim crow segregation and so on and ultimately not responsible for our own and our children's

00:42:44.660 lives yeah i mean it's a very complex picture and i think one thing i just got from what you said is

00:42:51.800 that even if it's true even if you could draw a straight line from slavery and jim crow to the state

00:42:59.700 of inequality and social dysfunction in the black community as a matter of history and a matter of

00:43:07.760 just causality through time that's not to say that in the year 2016 the ambient level of white racism

00:43:17.660 is the ongoing cause of these problems and that if you could just get white people to be less racist

00:43:26.820 but if you could wave a magic wand and literally dissect out all of the racism harbored by white people

00:43:33.100 on any level that would magically correct for all of the problems you just articulated that that doesn't

00:43:40.680 follow so what does it get you if you really can trace that line that 200 year old line to the present

00:43:48.260 where does that leave you i mean it leaves you with something like you know ta-nehisi coates's picture

00:43:54.240 of reality where what we should be talking about now is you know paying reparations for slavery and

00:44:00.240 and that's i mean i don't i actually don't have i don't know what i think about that i i know what

00:44:04.940 i think about coates's style of talking about this issue and the fact that i'm talking to you and not to

00:44:11.540 him suggests you know where i think the more profitable and civil and rational conversation is

00:44:18.220 going to be had frankly i at one point i thought i would you know someone recommended that i have him on

00:44:23.700 the podcast and i just you know honestly i feel like the conversation would be a disaster

00:44:28.280 this style of talking just strikes me as i mean you know but to put this in kind of starkly

00:44:34.400 invidious terms from which he would want to defend himself it just it just strikes me as not

00:44:38.500 intellectually honest in its totality it's very there's a kind of pandering to white guilt and black

00:44:45.160 rage that never stops and we can't just talk about facts you know in a civil way and so that

00:44:54.180 that worries me let me say something here um and we can talk more about coates if if it suits you

00:45:00.300 and i'm happy to not do so but i there are a couple that i want to say uh one of them is um i want to

00:45:07.360 mention the name thomas chatterton williams he's a african-american um he's uh uh younger than coates

00:45:16.900 he's maybe 10 years younger than coates puts him in early 30s um he lives in paris he's a trained

00:45:24.940 philosopher uh graduate of georgetown uh university and um i'm not sure where he did graduate study but

00:45:32.240 i think he did some graduate study in philosophy as well and he has a essay it's published in the

00:45:37.640 london review of books uh and it is a review essay of ta-nehisi coates's book between the world and me

00:45:45.520 and the burden of uh thomas chatterton williams argument in that essay is that uh coates's

00:45:54.360 uh open letter to his son in which he advises his son that america is so thoroughly contemptuous of

00:46:02.320 your value as a human being that you must not ever ever relax you must not trust these people

00:46:08.860 or turn your back on them they will rip you to shreds they will there's nothing more american than

00:46:15.340 taking a guy like you hanging you from a lamppost and tearing your limbs off one by one don't believe

00:46:21.520 in the american dream uh we are uh up against an implacable force that force erases your humanity

00:46:31.620 it's always been so and it will always be so this is a paraphrase of the posture that coates takes in

00:46:38.240 between me i think it's an accurate paraphrase and uh williams thomas chatterton williams in the

00:46:44.760 london review of books uses it as a point of departure to say um there's no place to go from here

00:46:50.960 you know for black people this is an absolutely bleak uh landscape and it is disempowering

00:46:57.440 uh it just surrendered agency there's only one possible future here in this and it's a it's a

00:47:04.020 very bleak one indeed and he thinks that's both untrue of the actual historical socio-historical

00:47:10.400 circumstances in the united states rather more complicated than that but he also thinks it's

00:47:15.480 soul killing that it's an existential surrender of one's humanity to take such a posture so i just

00:47:22.300 want to mention that so that your listeners uh who might not have uh come across thomas

00:47:27.260 chatterton williams who by the way submitted that essay to the new yorker i happen to know on good

00:47:31.900 authority and it sat on an editor's desk uh for many months and was eventually killed it's an

00:47:41.280 absolutely brilliant if controversial engagement with ta-nehasi coates's book and so williams ends up

00:47:47.480 taking it to the london review of books because it couldn't get published in the united states yeah

00:47:51.700 because the liberal if you will cognoscenti uh the the the ruling class of cultural mandarins

00:48:01.560 um will not tolerate that kind of argument from an african-american contra uh the stance that uh

00:48:10.680 that ta-nehasi coates has taken so that's one thing i want to mention the other and i'll be very brief is

00:48:14.440 mitch landrew mitch landrew former mayor of the city of new orleans um out at aspen at the ideas

00:48:22.660 festival at aspen a couple of years ago landrew and coates were paired up in a panel in which they

00:48:28.840 were discussing well race and inequality in america and coates was taking the posture that we know

00:48:34.800 he would take uh and landrew was armed with what he called the books of the dead now the books of the

00:48:41.160 dead were literally the case books from his police department in the city of new orleans

00:48:46.880 that recorded the details of as yet unresolved homicide cases in that city there were hundreds of

00:48:54.600 them um and 90 or more of the victims in these cases were black uh people and uh landrew was trying

00:49:05.680 to say to coates in uh response to coates's uh arguments about the implacability of american

00:49:13.500 racism and the erasure of black humanity and the devaluation of the black body that black people

00:49:20.300 are killing themselves in very large numbers in the university now he's not uh sean hannity

00:49:24.520 conservative with the wagging his finger about black on black crime this is mitch landry centrist

00:49:29.780 democrat mayor of a city new orleans in this case a sky in of a political family of some prominence

00:49:36.600 democrats in louisiana and served as mayor of new orleans and confronting ta-nehisi coates at the

00:49:42.520 aspen ideas festival in a debate about race and inequality in america in which coates had taken a

00:49:49.180 position that we know that he takes and uh landrew had tried to call to gently call to the attention of

00:49:57.160 the audience uh the observation that uh much of the threat to um the integrity of black bodies and

00:50:04.360 black life are coming from other black people uh offering as evidence of that his uh so-called books

00:50:10.720 of the dead which were the case books um that were a compendium of the details about unresolved

00:50:18.240 homicide cases in new orleans the vast vast majority upwards of 90 percent of whom were uh the victims were

00:50:25.520 um were african-american um coates's response to landrew was to dismiss him with the back of his hand

00:50:34.740 this by the way is written up in new york magazine uh one searches new york magazine um coates and um

00:50:43.420 landrew uh you'll find a very long uh essay that uh is about ta-nehisi coates and that reports on this

00:50:50.860 encounter coates's response was to give landrew the back of his hand there ain't nothing wrong with

00:50:56.380 black people that ending white supremacy wouldn't fit what do you expect people to do they're rats in

00:51:06.020 a barrel you've got the lid on the barrel you you'd open the lid and peek down in there and you find

00:51:10.960 that they're at each other's throats well what would you expect to happen it's the frigging barrel

00:51:15.540 man you're going to blame the rats okay that's my metaphor not kind of hussy coates might have used

00:51:22.740 but it's capturing this idea that the mayhem of the um despicable devaluation of life attendant to

00:51:32.940 people riding up and down a street in an automobile with heavy weapons firing them uh more or less

00:51:40.300 aimlessly out the window at their gang rivals and killing innocent bystanders along the way

00:51:45.080 and this happening in the scores and hundreds uh within a year in a given city that that kind of

00:51:52.200 mayhem that that kind of despicable contempt for human life shown by black people toward other black

00:51:57.640 people is not relevant to assessing uh what it is that actually imperils black life because those

00:52:06.440 behaviors are understood themselves to be the consequence of a system and a history of oppression

00:52:13.500 now you can say this you can say this with eloquence and and style you can say this with fury and anger

00:52:20.760 you can say this with economy of word and clever turn of phrase as ta-nehisi coates has been given to do

00:52:27.640 but it doesn't make it a valid moral argument uh it seems to me and i've said this that coates was holding

00:52:37.960 a pair of queens and that he was looking at an ace face up and that he was bluffing in other words he was

00:52:46.860 daring mitch landrew to come back at him and say what an absurdity you're telling me that people have

00:52:53.740 to run up and down the street firing guns out of windows and killing their brethren because uh we

00:52:58.880 didn't we didn't get reparations for slavery handed over to you yet because uh somebody who was mayor of

00:53:05.400 this city 10 years ago having to be a racist because the police department has somebody who's

00:53:10.140 affiliated with the ku klux klan in it and you're telling me that that explains or somehow excuses or

00:53:17.320 cancels out the moral judgment that i would otherwise bring to bear against any other community in which i

00:53:23.680 saw this happening you're telling me that the history of slavery and jim crow now a century in the past

00:53:29.280 is pertinent to our reaction to this lived experience on the daily basis of african americans

00:53:35.140 in my american city you're beneath contempt to in that way you're the one who has no real respect for

00:53:43.140 the value of black life you live in a bubble why don't you get out of it and walk the streets of

00:53:47.700 some of these places where people have died now coates will flash out oh well i was raised in baltimore

00:53:52.540 at a time when and i've seen enough gang activity and i know what's going on inside and out and i've been

00:53:56.940 there whatever and landrew can say the body count continues to mount while your blather titillates

00:54:04.280 the um the the cultural elites in washington dc and new york city and gives guilty white people an

00:54:11.360 excuse not to feel so guilty while you blather on we're actually burying the dead landrew might have

00:54:18.440 responded to him like that he might have told him to get the heck out of here with that uh nonsense

00:54:23.280 that attempts to intellectualize what any person with common sense can see as an absolute disaster

00:54:28.340 you're blaming white people for black people living some like barbarians you're blaming white

00:54:34.060 people for that he might have said to him that's what i said to him landrew folded the hand with a

00:54:39.860 pair of eggs now you've convinced me that we need to stage a public debate between you and coates and

00:54:45.000 put it on primetime television that'll be worth seeing let's talk about the mayhem let's get into the

00:54:51.060 the question of violence so so here's the basic picture as i understand it america is distinguished

00:54:57.940 as one of the most violent societies

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 09, 2016

#42 — Racism and Violence in America

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