The Charlie Kirk Show - April 19, 2021


The Science of Racism with Eric Kaufman


Episode Stats


Length

40 minutes

Words per minute

168.95387

Word count

6,837

Sentence count

446

Harmful content

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

33

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Eric Kaufmann from the Manhattan Institute joins us to talk about his new report, Race and Racism in America: How Ideology Influences Our Perception of Racism, and the Science Behind It, a new report from The Manhattan Institute.

Transcript

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Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, this episode is brought to you by my friends at ExpressVPN, expressvpn.com slash Charlie.
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00:00:26.000 Hey everybody, what's the science behind racism?
00:00:29.000 This is a super interesting conversation with Eric Kaufman from the Manhattan Institute.
00:00:33.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:36.000 And if you want to support truth-telling episodes like this, go to charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.
00:00:44.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, start a high school or college chapter, go to tpusa.com, buckle up, everybody.
00:00:49.000 Here we go.
00:00:50.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:52.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
00:00:54.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:57.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:01:01.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:01:02.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:01:03.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:01:05.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:11.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:20.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:22.000 Hey, everybody.
00:01:23.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:25.000 With us today is Eric Kaufman.
00:01:27.000 I'm so excited for this episode.
00:01:29.000 First of all, Eric, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:32.000 Charlie, it's great to be here.
00:01:34.000 You do phenomenal work.
00:01:35.000 You have a new report out that is sending shockwaves throughout the country.
00:01:39.000 Tell us about the report.
00:01:41.000 It's about race and racism, the things you're not supposed to talk about in our country.
00:01:45.000 Walk us through it.
00:01:47.000 Well, really what this report is about is how racism is not just something that comes from people's lived experiences, but that is very much shaped by perception.
00:01:58.000 So something maybe an encounter may be perceived as racist, or it may be seen as just innocuous.
00:02:04.000 A lot of that depends on things like your exposure to social media and the media, your ideology, and also whether you're depressed or anxious, your psychological health.
00:02:16.000 All of those things actually, I would argue, are more important than your personal experience in explaining not just your perception of racism in society, but also your personal experience of racism as well.
00:02:30.000 And so really this report goes through a lot of data and survey data to show this.
00:02:34.000 No, sorry, go ahead.
00:02:35.000 I didn't mean to cut you off.
00:02:36.000 I'm just saying in your report, you conclude that ideology, partisanship, and social media influence the way that we perceive racism.
00:02:45.000 So I'm going to have to call a timeout here.
00:02:47.000 How do you define racism?
00:02:48.000 Because the way I grew up, learning about racism, it's one person being discriminatory or prejudiced against another person based on their skin color.
00:02:57.000 Now racism is portrayed as a power struggle.
00:03:01.000 How do you describe it in this piece?
00:03:04.000 Well, I mean, you're actually putting your finger on one of the things that sort of moves and expands and contracts depending on ideology.
00:03:11.000 So part of this is, it's defined in terms of subjective survey questions, one of which might just be a broad, you know, have you experienced racism in the past month or week or whatever?
00:03:22.000 One of which might be, have you experienced racial discrimination?
00:03:25.000 Some of them are more concrete questions like, people acted like I wasn't smart, you know, or I was stopped and searched.
00:03:33.000 So some of them are a bit more concrete and some of them are a bit more define it yourself.
00:03:37.000 One of the points here is that depending on your ideology, you will define this term more broadly or more narrowly.
00:03:44.000 And that's partly what accounts for greater reported racism.
00:03:47.000 So there isn't a single definition I'm using I'm allowing to some degree survey respondents to self-define, which accounts for some of the differences that we see.
00:03:58.000 And in fact, racism's been defined, arguably defined down or debased as a currency so that it means more and more things if you are of a particular ideological stripe.
00:04:09.000 Absolutely.
00:04:10.000 And there's one part here I want to focus on that really caught my attention because I really, I have a strong distaste for this person. 0.97
00:04:16.000 It's Taha Nisi Coates. 0.99
00:04:18.000 And he's a black pessimist, which bothers me. 1.00
00:04:20.000 I do not like pessimism as a worldview, as a way to approach life. 1.00
00:04:27.000 I don't like it. 0.74
00:04:28.000 And I think that your study confirms everything I've been saying about Taha Nisi Coates for years, where he actually makes people less likely to believe that they can succeed in our country. 0.97
00:04:40.000 Can you talk about that? 0.97
00:04:42.000 Because I was so moved by the data backing of what I believed instinctually to be true.
00:04:48.000 Yeah, basically, if you, what we did, or what I did was I had a survey of African-American respondents.
00:04:54.000 I did it in 2018.
00:04:56.000 I repeated it in 2020.
00:04:58.000 I showed half the people, just one paragraph from Tanahasi Kosa's work where he talks about this very sort of exaggerated portrait of how dangerous it is to be black in America, how everyone's system's out to get you, and they're never going to let you live a normal life.
00:05:16.000 People who read that paragraph were much, were about 15 points less likely to say they could make their life plans work out generally.
00:05:24.000 This is a measure psychologists use of people's sense of self-control, which is linked to their mental well-being and other measures of success.
00:05:32.000 And so what we actually see is that exposure to this critical race theory-inspired passage, just one paragraph really, was enough to drop people's sense of self-empowerment by substantial levels.
00:05:45.000 So instead of 83% of African Americans who didn't read this passage from Tanehasi Coates saying they could make their life plans work out, only 68%, 15 points lower, said they could make their life plans work out after reading just one paragraph.
00:06:01.000 So you can imagine being exposed to this narrative everywhere.
00:06:05.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:06:07.000 And so it's, it's a, you know, in a way, it's doing the opposite of what it is supposed to do.
00:06:11.000 It's supposed to make the lives of African Americans better, and it's actually having a negative effect on their ability, their belief in themselves. 0.82
00:06:20.000 I don't know if I agree with that. 0.77
00:06:21.000 I'm not sure if Tahanisi Coates actually wants, that's a different conversation every time.
00:06:25.000 Intentions are hard to conclude, but it's hard to believe based on his literature that he actually, I think he's much more concerned on the external than the improvement of the internal.
00:06:34.000 But intentions are tough and that we're not going to spend time on that.
00:06:37.000 But that's TBD.
00:06:38.000 I want to get to this one, which is really interesting.
00:06:40.000 And I want to just compliment you again.
00:06:42.000 These studies are not easy to do because you're pursuing truth.
00:06:49.000 And in popular culture, people don't actually want the truth.
00:06:53.000 They want narrative.
00:06:54.000 And they want a narrative that will confirm their power grab. 0.82
00:06:59.000 You say here, liberal blacks with a college degree are nearly 30 points more likely to find a statement by a white person such as, quote, I don't notice people's race or quote, America is a colorblind society, end quote, offensive than blacks without degrees who identify as conservative. 0.77
00:07:18.000 Talk a little bit about that. 0.54
00:07:20.000 That's fascinating.
00:07:21.000 That's a major disparity.
00:07:23.000 Well, yeah, I mean, what we see is that even independent of ideology of being liberal or conservative, having a degree or not having a degree, if you have a degree, if you're African-American, that makes you more likely to believe that the so-called microaggressions, such as I don't notice race, are offensive than if you don't have a degree.
00:07:41.000 So in a way, the experience or the status of having a university education seems to be an independent force multiplier for this perception of racism, for this sort of expanded definition, if you like, of racism.
00:07:57.000 And yeah, so this is part of, again, all of these factors, ideology, education, social media exposure, are actually leading people to frame things as racist, which are arguably not racist.
00:08:11.000 And that's contributing to the perception, in a way, of this is a rising problem, because all the indicators of interracial marriage, police shootings of African Americans have dropped 60 to 80% since the late 60s. 0.79
00:08:25.000 All of the behavioral attitudinal indicators are moving in the right direction.
00:08:29.000 And yet, if you ask people, is racism an increasing problem?
00:08:33.000 That number has been remarkably high.
00:08:36.000 And in fact, the number of people saying that relations between the races are bad has increased, not decreased, in the last sort of five, six years.
00:08:45.000 After being stable, by the way, for about 20 years, suddenly they've taken a nosedive since 2014 with the Ferguson riots.
00:08:53.000 I have that chart.
00:08:54.000 I want to get to that because it's really interesting.
00:08:57.000 And it's by Gallup.
00:08:58.000 It's one of the most interesting pieces of data.
00:09:00.000 But I want to just follow up with one point here.
00:09:05.000 Is it fair to say then, those that are college educated tend to be more sensitive to the I don't notice people's race or America's a colorblind society, that some of this analysis is taught rather than experiential.
00:09:19.000 Is that a conclusion that you found repeatedly through your inquiry?
00:09:24.000 Yes, essentially, it's people are taught the framing, they're taught how to read these words, see them as microaggressions, see them as racist, where maybe before they wouldn't see them as racist.
00:09:39.000 So it's that sensitization, if you like, of people through universities, but also through social media and other media formats that actually has expanded people's perceptions.
00:09:52.000 So people are seeing more racism when actually there's less of it by any traditional figure.
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00:10:12.000 A lot of people like Mike Lindell.
00:10:13.000 In fact, I get emails from people.
00:10:15.000 They say, Charlie, how can I help you?
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00:10:19.000 Well, if you go to mypillow.com and buy anything with the promo code Kirk, it helps both of us.
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00:10:56.000 So this is a really important point because I don't think that a BLM incorporated activist would disagree.
00:11:03.000 They'd say, of course, if you go to college, because we're awakening you, that's why they call themselves woke.
00:11:09.000 So they would say, yeah, of course, because they've been informed and they've been enlightened more.
00:11:14.000 Where my argument would be, no, no, no, no.
00:11:16.000 If it was really as oppressive as you say it is, you don't have to go to college to figure it out. 0.52
00:11:22.000 For example, in the 1930s, it was really crummy to be a black person in the American South. 0.90
00:11:27.000 It was rather self-evident.
00:11:29.000 Can you help build that out a little bit more about how the perceptions on race, the disparity or the conclusion you could find is mostly it's either something that is externally transferred to the people that then communicate it.
00:11:42.000 Does that make sense?
00:11:44.000 Is that an underlying principle of your study?
00:11:47.000 Yeah, that essentially there has been this construction of racism, this social construction by the media.
00:11:55.000 And this is very ideological.
00:11:57.000 I mean, if you look, for example, the mention of the term racist or racism in major news media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, there was a huge explosion post about 2014, which is something that Matthew Iglesias, formerly of Vox, called the Great Awokening.
00:12:15.000 So you see this sudden increase in the, and that was quite a deliberate editorial strategy.
00:12:20.000 It was partly about getting readers, partly about becoming more partisan.
00:12:24.000 That actually happens within the mainstream media outlets.
00:12:28.000 And then you get, as a result of that, the survey evidence, more and more people saying racism is a bigger problem in the country.
00:12:35.000 And I think what we see there is a media construction and a sensitization, which is also something we see in the universities, which then produces this perception, not the reality, but it produces a perception of a growing problem that is actually a shrinking problem.
00:12:50.000 A postmodernist would say, though, that perception very well is the truth.
00:12:54.000 They'd say that these charts and graphs don't mean anything because you don't understand you're not as educated as I am.
00:13:00.000 Right.
00:13:01.000 Well, well, look, I mean, you can say, you know, I use the example of, would we say that the United States is a poor country or Switzerland is a poor country?
00:13:10.000 That's a phenomenon.
00:13:12.000 You can always compare to a utopian state of perfection and say, well, we're not there yet and therefore we are poor or racist or whatever.
00:13:21.000 I think it becomes quite meaningless when you get into that territory.
00:13:25.000 But I think this follows a bit on what Coleman Hughes was saying that, you know, racism is a quantity that is conserved.
00:13:31.000 So even if it declines, you have to expand the definition so that it takes up the same amount of room.
00:13:37.000 And I think that's pretty much what's been going on.
00:13:39.000 Incidentally, I would say that there have been various experiments where, for example, people are asked to identify threatening faces and the experimenters start to remove the threatening faces from the pack people are looking at.
00:13:52.000 And then people have a tendency to define these bland faces as threatening just to conserve the quantity of threatening faces.
00:13:58.000 And I think that's kind of the same principle to what we're seeing with racism, that racism is simply being defined more and more broadly to include saying, I don't notice race, for example, or some other, maybe some discrepancy in educational attainment or something is defined as racist.
00:14:17.000 Just to sort of fill that quotient, if you like.
00:14:20.000 I want to compliment you again.
00:14:22.000 The more I look into these charts, you did such a good job.
00:14:24.000 We're going to have this whole thing linked on charliekirk.com.
00:14:26.000 I love this one.
00:14:27.000 From 1960 to now, there has been, if this was a growth stock, I thought this was Amazon stock.
00:14:35.000 But it's the mentions of racism in American books.
00:14:37.000 Walk us through that.
00:14:39.000 Well, yeah, so it's quite interesting.
00:14:42.000 Matthew Iglesias says there's this new thing called the Great Awokening since 2015, and we have all the no platformings and cancelings.
00:14:50.000 I argue that actually there have been three great awokenings of this ideology, which I call left modernism, which is sort of the cultural left post-1960s.
00:15:00.000 The first is in the late 1960s, we get a big surge in the number in the use of the term racist and racism in American books.
00:15:07.000 You then get a second wave with the late 1980s, early 90s, when we hear about political correctness and Afrocentrism.
00:15:15.000 We then get to the third big wave, which is post-2014, post-Ferguson, you get another surge. 0.86
00:15:23.000 And we're living through that right now, this great awokening that Iglesias talks about.
00:15:27.000 And that's actually the spur, the ideological enthusiasm behind that really then underlies a lot of the new activism around race that we see just in the last, say, five, six years.
00:15:40.000 And so there's a couple of different ways to look at that.
00:15:44.000 I want to get to that in a second.
00:15:46.000 But I think a really good objective metric that we are becoming less racist, and you have this as your biggest chart, I think, in the entire study, is white opposition to a close relative marrying a black person.
00:15:57.000 That's a pretty agreeable statistic, right?
00:16:00.000 I mean, that's a life partnership, right?
00:16:03.000 That's not buying a muffin.
00:16:07.000 That is a covenant in a lot of our biblical religious views.
00:16:10.000 Can you talk about this why you included it?
00:16:12.000 Because I think that's a pretty objective metric.
00:16:14.000 We're actually getting less racist.
00:16:17.000 Right.
00:16:17.000 I mean, this is about, you know, if we're going to compare apples to apples, we need to have the same data series over time.
00:16:25.000 Opposition, white opposition to interracial marriage was 95% in 1958.
00:16:30.000 It had dropped to about 50% as recently as the mid-1990s.
00:16:35.000 So from the mid-1990s, we go from 50% opposition to interracial marriage to 10% today. 0.79
00:16:43.000 So we've seen an enormous amount of progress on that statistic.
00:16:47.000 And along with that, by the way, 17% of new births are interracial.
00:16:53.000 And so we've seen an enormous, huge surge in actual interracial marriages.
00:16:58.000 And so by any yardstick, that would be seen as huge progress, big decline of racism.
00:17:03.000 So we should have been shifting our attention from this problem to other problems.
00:17:08.000 Instead, what we've seen, particularly in the last sort of five, six years, is in fact the reverse.
00:17:14.000 This has been taking up more and more oxygen in the news.
00:17:17.000 So that in itself, I think, bears an explanation, which is what I try and do: that it's this social construction that's occurred through media, education, ideology.
00:17:26.000 Yes, and I want to get to the social media part of it because it's fascinating.
00:17:30.000 Now, just so everyone listening and watching knows, this is how a leftist would, I don't want to say left, it's too political, but you know what I mean.
00:17:38.000 This is how someone who believes in this nonsense would say they'd say, well, no, no, they're just as racist, but here's two things: they're afraid to answer it truthfully because they'll get outed as a racist, or because they're actually not for it, they're just less, they have to be in the shadows, or this is not even the true metric.
00:17:54.000 Real racism is in police statistics, brutality.
00:17:58.000 Can you help reinforce why this is actually a good metric to use?
00:18:01.000 Because I could already hear their counter argument if I were to say something like this on campus.
00:18:06.000 Well, the first thing to say is that even if you were to believe, which I don't, that people are simply lying more, the fact they feel oppression to lie more is in itself telling you something.
00:18:17.000 I totally agree. 0.59
00:18:20.000 But if we leave that aside, again, what belies that is that even leaving aside the interracial marriage laws being repealed, the actual behavior of people in terms of interracial marriages and interracial births and so on has shown the exact same trend.
00:18:37.000 So people are actually voting with their feet. 0.78
00:18:40.000 I totally agree.
00:18:42.000 So it's pretty hard to massage that.
00:18:44.000 Well, their new argument, though, is that the interracial marriage is whites owning blacks. 0.74
00:18:49.000 That's their new thing, right? 0.85
00:18:51.000 Is that it?
00:18:52.000 No, that's true. 0.99
00:18:53.000 It's a new piece of literature out of the mountain of trash called the Academy. 0.99
00:18:57.000 And they say that interracial marriage is a redux of colonialist, let's say, domination of black bodies. 0.99
00:19:07.000 Right. 0.97
00:19:07.000 So the narrative has to remain that of white domination of people of color. 0.97
00:19:13.000 And to maintain that narrative, you simply have to inflate the definition of racism to include things which wouldn't have been considered racist in the past.
00:19:20.000 Now, I'm happy to have the debate about what should or shouldn't be called racist, but the people who are making these arguments, the critical race theory arguments, are typically not scientifically oriented.
00:19:30.000 So in a scientific argument, you have to have an argument that is potentially falsifiable.
00:19:36.000 That I can measure something and test your argument.
00:19:38.000 You have to be able to refute counter arguments with evidence.
00:19:42.000 None of this is happening.
00:19:43.000 It's all based on smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand definitions.
00:19:47.000 So, yeah, I think it's not really worth engaging that too heavily.
00:19:52.000 And they want to dismiss science.
00:19:54.000 They don't consider it to be an acceptable way to make decisions or analyze reality.
00:20:00.000 They prefer much more narratives and feelings, emotions.
00:20:04.000 This is why Jordan Peterson, drawing a line in the sand when he did in Canada years ago, was so important, saying that if we don't fight now, they're going to come.
00:20:13.000 And people thought he was nuts.
00:20:14.000 I didn't.
00:20:15.000 And it turns out his prophecy came true way quicker than we realized, where in a lot of these social science disciplines, they've become anything but science.
00:20:25.000 They've become narrative-driven, which is what's so refreshing about your study.
00:20:29.000 Do you have a comment on that?
00:20:31.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:20:32.000 I mean, I think that, you know, we should be able to have the maturity to be able to say, well, look, we've discovered a small amount of racism here.
00:20:40.000 So roughing up suspects, there's a discrepancy between black and white that cannot be explained by prior sentencing and various other things which would explain it that are not racial.
00:20:50.000 So we should be able to have the maturity to point to places where there still is a bit of racism.
00:20:56.000 While not, instead, there's this need to back up this narrative of systemic totalizing white supremacist society, these superlative claims.
00:21:07.000 That's the narrative part of it.
00:21:09.000 And what that means is it's impossible to contest any part of the narrative without committing blasphemy.
00:21:15.000 It's kind of what John McWhorter calls a religion of anti-racism, which means then that you can't start to pick this apart and test little bits of it and make incremental changes.
00:21:25.000 It's got to be sweeping and revolutionary.
00:21:28.000 Yeah, I think this is a very negative trend.
00:21:30.000 It's not all of academia.
00:21:31.000 Really, it's concentrated in certain sections of the academy, which are anti-scientific, anti-empirical.
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00:23:01.000 So you have a chart here that shows, and it's by Gallup, the percentage of Americans who cited race or racism as the most important problem facing the United States.
00:23:14.000 A fascinating trend.
00:23:16.000 I've never seen it until now.
00:23:18.000 And in 1965, it was at its highest level, right near the Civil Rights Act, right near the death of Martin Luther King, if I'm not mistaken.
00:23:26.000 Might have been a little after that.
00:23:27.000 Yeah, 52%.
00:23:29.000 And the next highest threshold was in 1969, 35%.
00:23:35.000 And then it went down with a couple bumps, but it was 3% in 1978.
00:23:42.000 3%.
00:23:43.000 Now, help me explain this.
00:23:45.000 Why did it suddenly escalate to, was it the Rodney King riots, 15% in the early 90s?
00:23:51.000 Is that right?
00:23:52.000 Yeah, it jumps to 15 then, yeah.
00:23:55.000 So it was the Rodney King riots and what followed.
00:23:59.000 Then it went down again.
00:24:01.000 So that kind of is a little bit of a predictable trend then, is what we're seeing is that there's an incident like George Floyd that gets widely publicized that motivates people to change perceptions, but then it kind of normalizes.
00:24:14.000 But what we see here in your chart is that, and I'm saying this for our audio podcast, I'm sure you have the chart memorized.
00:24:20.000 2016, it goes to 13%, where in 2012 it was 2%.
00:24:26.000 Now, again, I'm reading numbers of Americans who cited race or racism as the most important problem faced in the United States.
00:24:33.000 It goes up in what looks to be 2018 to be, no, it's 2016, almost 17% down.
00:24:40.000 And then 2020, 19%.
00:24:41.000 Now, weirdly enough, these are all election years.
00:24:44.000 I'm not going to get into that.
00:24:45.000 It's Candace Owens' point, not mine.
00:24:47.000 But help us walk through what you learned in this chart.
00:24:51.000 Well, the key point to take away there, Charlie, is that media is driving this sentiment.
00:24:57.000 Events are driving this sentiment, not knowledge of statistics, right, about the number of police shootings per capita.
00:25:04.000 So this is narrative-driven.
00:25:06.000 It's Ferguson, for example.
00:25:09.000 It's Donald Trump's election.
00:25:11.000 It's George Floyd, so on.
00:25:14.000 So these events are what are driving perceptions of what are important issues.
00:25:18.000 Now, that's well known in political science.
00:25:21.000 We know media drives the political agenda, but it's just to point out then that media framing and I won't say manufacturing, but these issues are seemingly being driven by vivid imagery rather than people's sort of knowledge of how likely it is to be shot by police.
00:25:39.000 And so we then get on top of that the likes of Tanahasi Coates and others almost suggesting that if you are black, you know, and you're a young person, you are at high risk of being shot, which is just nonsense.
00:25:51.000 But that then gets perpetuated as a myth that seems to perpetrate throughout the society.
00:25:57.000 And that's only, that sort of goes to my point about a lot of this being socially constructed by ideology and media.
00:26:04.000 And what that does is it distorts people's perceptions.
00:26:07.000 And I don't know whether we'll come to this chart about, you know, when I ask people about is it more likely a young black man is going to be shot by the police or killed in a car accident.
00:26:18.000 You know, it's about 10 times more, they're about 10 times more likely to be killed in a car accident.
00:26:22.000 That's just a fact.
00:26:23.000 Okay, this is not about interpretation.
00:26:26.000 This is just a fact.
00:26:27.000 What is a greater cause of death for a young black man? 0.99
00:26:30.000 A car is a much more dangerous object than a police bullet by 10 times.
00:26:35.000 And yet, if you were to ask, so, for example, black Biden voters, 81% think it's police shooting.
00:26:42.000 Unbelievable.
00:26:43.000 White liberals who think that, quote unquote, all Republicans are racist who agree with that statement, which is about 60, 65% of white liberals agree with that statement. 0.52
00:26:53.000 Well, amongst them, 70% think that young black men are more likely to be killed by police than in a car accident.
00:27:00.000 So it's actually distorting people's perceptions in a provable way in the sense that they're getting the answer to this question wrong.
00:27:07.000 And it's a factual question.
00:27:09.000 It's not one we can argue with.
00:27:10.000 And that number is even more telling because the people that are killed by police, studies show, are almost always in the act of committing a crime or they are in the process of an inquiry of a crime.
00:27:24.000 Whereas the car accidents, that's not always the case.
00:27:26.000 And so there is a human action involved in one where you're almost like the innocent bystander effect in the other. 0.52
00:27:31.000 So the number is even more telling because the narrative is if like there's a black person walking the street and you get a bullet in the head by a police officer. 0.73
00:27:41.000 Like, no, actually, if you even look at the statistics, most of them are actively involved in committing a crime. 0.74
00:27:48.000 Right, right.
00:27:49.000 Well, yeah, exactly. 0.97
00:27:50.000 And so, this is really a hugely dishonest and hugely damaging perception for young black men to be walking around with. 0.95
00:27:58.000 And it's not their fault.
00:27:59.000 It's what society is teaching them that somehow their life is in danger from the police.
00:28:05.000 This means they're less trustful of the police.
00:28:07.000 This causes all sorts of negative impacts on young black men.
00:28:11.000 And so, it would just be more responsible if somehow we don't seem to hold people responsible for perpetuating these myths.
00:28:18.000 We somehow think it's virtuous when it's actually very negative.
00:28:21.000 Yeah, they get to buy many homes, as Patrice Cullers does.
00:28:25.000 So, I want to get to some other charts here.
00:28:27.000 It's and you're making such a good point.
00:28:28.000 This one I love because I am a vocal critic of social media.
00:28:32.000 I think it's destroying our humanity.
00:28:35.000 So, I have to ask, is this your study or this?
00:28:38.000 No, this is not your study.
00:28:39.000 This was done by racial activity.
00:28:42.000 That's a Pew study.
00:28:44.000 Yeah.
00:28:45.000 Okay.
00:28:45.000 And it's helpful.
00:28:48.000 So, if you polled blacks that are on social media, not you, I'm sorry, Pew polled blacks that are on social media, not on social media.
00:28:57.000 And so, for example, Pew asked the problem: the issue, do you think it's harder to succeed?
00:29:04.000 Basically, the issue is this: every single one of the predominant narratives: are you discriminated against?
00:29:09.000 Are people acting suspicious of you?
00:29:11.000 Are you people acted like you weren't smart?
00:29:13.000 Harder to succeed, hiring, paid promotion, unfair police stop.
00:29:16.000 Every single one was remarkably lower to believe that if you were not on social media, is that correct?
00:29:23.000 Correct, yes, yeah.
00:29:24.000 This effect that, you know, so on some of those questions, people acting suspicious of you, people acting like you're not smart, the gap was sort of 20 points.
00:29:35.000 So, so if you weren't on social media, about 30% of African Americans responded that they'd experienced this.
00:29:41.000 If they were on social media, it was around 50% or just over 50%.
00:29:45.000 So, this is an enormous difference.
00:29:47.000 That difference holds even when we control for people's education, their age, and even their ideology and party identity.
00:29:54.000 So, social media is having that independent effect of just placing those images, circulating those images in people's mind, reinforcing a narrative which is not based on statistical reality.
00:30:06.000 So, people are inhabiting a different reality.
00:30:09.000 This is amazing, what you just said.
00:30:11.000 I'm looking at this finely.
00:30:12.000 I'm a visual person. 0.90
00:30:14.000 95% of black voters who think that white Republicans are racist think that young black men are more likely to be shot to death by police than die in a car accident. 0.81
00:30:23.000 95% believe a pathological lie. 0.98
00:30:29.000 Right, yeah, that's correct.
00:30:31.000 In the sense that this is a this is not about whether racism exists, which we can argue about the definition.
00:30:38.000 But if we're talking about being shot by the police or killed by a car, those are hard facts.
00:30:43.000 And so, we can see then that this perception is being distorted enormously.
00:30:48.000 And by the way, in that survey, I gave people the option of saying neither.
00:30:52.000 Well, I don't know if it's car accidents or whether it is police bullets, but they didn't choose that option.
00:30:58.000 They chose no, it's police.
00:31:01.000 And by the way, 70% of white whites who also believe that most white republic white Republicans are racist also agreed with that.
00:31:08.000 So, it isn't a race Trump voters.
00:31:11.000 What's that?
00:31:11.000 Yeah, it's not an education thing either.
00:31:15.000 There's no difference between college-educated, non-college-educated.
00:31:18.000 So, that's not what's driving it.
00:31:20.000 It is this, it's the ideology which is really at the heart of this.
00:31:24.000 No, it's actually the opposite.
00:31:26.000 White Trump voters are on average to be less college-educated, and 15% of them don't believe the lie.
00:31:32.000 So, it actually goes to show that the less degrees you have, the more likely you are to believe this particular truth.
00:31:38.000 It's very, at least in my rough overgeneralization of this.
00:31:44.000 Right.
00:31:45.000 Yeah, well, yeah, white Trump voters got the question right at the highest level.
00:31:50.000 So they were least likely to have a distorted picture.
00:31:53.000 Yeah.
00:31:54.000 So let's get to it.
00:31:55.000 These are just fascinating.
00:31:56.000 So help us walk through this one.
00:31:58.000 Blacks who experienced racism at least monthly.
00:32:03.000 Yeah.
00:32:04.000 Well, so the question here asks people about, you know, how often they experience racism and looks at their ideology.
00:32:12.000 And once again, you can see that blacks who are more like, who say that all white Republicans are racist are much more likely to report experiences of a whole series of different racist incidents, such as people acting suspicious of you and so on. 0.56
00:32:29.000 And so they, the blacks who say they personally experienced racism at least monthly, if they voted for Trump, they say it's the same during Trump and same during Obama, right?
00:32:42.000 But if they voted for Biden, it somehow shot up during the Trump era, which is interesting.
00:32:50.000 That goes to show that it's purely political perception, not actual reality.
00:32:54.000 Well, it's not purely political perception, but what it shows is, for example, if let's say racism went up during the Trump era, why would a black Trump voter be reporting a lower rate, say 30% versus a black Biden supporter at 40%?
00:33:14.000 And those black Biden voters report that only 20% of them said they experienced racism in the Obama era, against 40% of the Trump era.
00:33:22.000 The point here is, if someone's going to be racist to a black person, what is the likelihood they can identify them as a Biden supporting black person or a Trump supporting black person?
00:33:31.000 Just doesn't make any sense.
00:33:33.000 Again, goes to show that that partisanship is skewing one's perceptions of even personal experiences of racism.
00:33:40.000 It's fascinating.
00:33:42.000 Another question here is: is political correctness demeaning to black people or necessary to protect blacks?
00:33:50.000 And 62% of white conservatives think that political correctness is demeaning to black people or necessary to protect blacks, where out of the black voters, 54% of black conservative voters.
00:34:05.000 Before you answer this, can you just give us an idea of how big the sample sizes were here?
00:34:09.000 Just some of the inputs that you used for this.
00:34:13.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:34:14.000 We had essentially two surveys of African Americans.
00:34:21.000 The second one was 800.
00:34:22.000 The first one was about, I think, 900 or thereabouts.
00:34:26.000 And the survey of whites was, I think, something like 1,000 or thereabouts.
00:34:30.000 So these are large samples.
00:34:33.000 And, you know, there was some variation because they were asked at slightly different time periods.
00:34:38.000 But in both cases, a majority, a slight majority of African Americans said political correctness was demeaning rather than necessary to protect blacks.
00:34:48.000 And white liberals were more likely than black liberals to say political correctness was necessary to protect blacks.
00:34:55.000 So in a way, white liberals have this more protective attitude, whereas black liberals have more of an emphasis on, no, political correctness is demeaning, more of an emphasis on, I think, resilience rather than the need for protection, which I think is quite interesting. 0.51
00:35:12.000 So it suggests that political correctness doesn't have the level of support within the black population that one might surmise.
00:35:21.000 I'm curious, as I look at this chart of Tahanisi Coates, has he responded to this or even acknowledged it, that he's making black people less optimistic?
00:35:29.000 No, no. 0.71
00:35:30.000 I mean, you know, I'm not sure he would deign to respond.
00:35:34.000 I mean, there are some people who are, you know, trying to claim that, oh, well, this effect will, you know, you can produce it with a short paragraph, but it quickly fades away.
00:35:43.000 It's not going to last.
00:35:44.000 You know, other kinds of methodological critiques, which are fair, fair enough, you can make such critiques.
00:35:49.000 I just don't think that given the amount of messaging of that type that is around, that this is really a convincing counter connection.
00:35:57.000 Especially the disparity.
00:36:00.000 It's rather telling.
00:36:02.000 So you also have one here: personal experience of racism and discrimination by level of sadness and anxiety.
00:36:09.000 Walk us through that one.
00:36:11.000 Yeah, so again, in addition to your partisanship and ideology and how much exposure you have to social media, you also are more likely to report experiencing discrimination and racism if you're generally sad or anxious.
00:36:28.000 So, for example, if we people who say they are sad or anxious at least half the time are twice as likely as people who say they're never sad or anxious to say they've experienced discrimination and racism.
00:36:43.000 And that holds, by the way, for white and black people.
00:36:47.000 So whites who are sad or anxious half the time or more are twice as likely to say they experience discrimination and racism as whites who never experience or who say they are never sad or anxious.
00:37:00.000 The point here being that your underlying psychological state, again, is going to predispose you to answer, yes, I experienced that as discrimination or racism.
00:37:11.000 It makes you more sensitive to these issues.
00:37:13.000 And so a lot of this comes down to, again, perception and framing are at the heart of this problem.
00:37:20.000 It's not a matter of lived experience alone.
00:37:23.000 I mean, lived experience matters.
00:37:24.000 I don't want to devalue that for real racist incidents.
00:37:28.000 But a lot of this is sort of governed by social construction caused by psychology, ideology, exposure to media, and so forth.
00:37:35.000 And that's just not being recognized.
00:37:37.000 It's seen as something that's just real that bubbles up out of people's experience.
00:37:42.000 Whereas I think we need to be more skeptical and say, yes, yes, it could be, but there's also a lot going on in terms of perception to frame these issues.
00:37:52.000 I think that's very wise.
00:37:53.000 So to summarize it all together, we'll post this study on charliekirk.com, also the Manhattan Institute.
00:38:02.000 There's a direct, I don't want to say direct correlation, but there's an argument to be made that one of the major contributing factors to people's view on race and racism in America is media, social media, and even political views.
00:38:18.000 And that, I guess I have one last question is back in the 1960s, were people, do you have this data?
00:38:25.000 Were people's racial attitudes, a view of race as different?
00:38:31.000 Were there disparities based on political viewpoints in the Black community?
00:38:35.000 I don't have that data with me.
00:38:38.000 The differences within the Black community, first of all, are smaller based on ideology than within the white community.
00:38:46.000 Those differences within the whites have increased over time with partisanship and polarization.
00:38:51.000 So I would say those differences would have been pretty small among African Americans in the 60s compared to now.
00:39:01.000 But just, yeah, just overall, I mean, I think what this gets to is, you know, we race racist incidents and even police shootings are never going to be zero, just like crime is never going to be zero and poverty is never going to be zero.
00:39:15.000 And the question is, are we going to have a moral panic and an emotional response, not a rational, contextualized, proportional response, but an emotional response and a moral panic whenever one of these incidents is circulated on social media as because social media allows you to circulate powerful images.
00:39:34.000 We've got to become more scientific, more skeptical about contextualizing just how important and how representative these stories and images are and not to overreact because that has very negative consequences for the very people that we are trying to help.
00:39:51.000 I think that's very well said.
00:39:52.000 Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining our program.
00:39:55.000 Anything in particular you want to plug, a book or a website?
00:39:59.000 Well, I mean, you can always check me out on social media or on Twitter at EPKA U-F-M.
00:40:05.000 And my website is www.snapsneps.net.
00:40:12.000 Thanks again.
00:40:13.000 Awesome.
00:40:13.000 Thanks so much, Eric.
00:40:14.000 Talk to you soon.
00:40:17.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:40:19.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:40:22.000 And if you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:40:25.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:40:27.000 God bless.