00:01:05.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:11.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:47.000Well, 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.
00:01:58.000So something maybe an encounter may be perceived as racist, or it may be seen as just innocuous.
00:02:04.000A 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.
00:02:16.000All 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.
00:02:30.000And so really this report goes through a lot of data and survey data to show this.
00:02:48.000Because the way I grew up, learning about racism, it's one person being discriminatory or prejudiced against another person based on their skin color.
00:02:57.000Now racism is portrayed as a power struggle.
00:03:04.000Well, I mean, you're actually putting your finger on one of the things that sort of moves and expands and contracts depending on ideology.
00:03:11.000So 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?
00:03:22.000One of which might be, have you experienced racial discrimination?
00:03:25.000Some of them are more concrete questions like, people acted like I wasn't smart, you know, or I was stopped and searched.
00:03:33.000So some of them are a bit more concrete and some of them are a bit more define it yourself.
00:03:37.000One of the points here is that depending on your ideology, you will define this term more broadly or more narrowly.
00:03:44.000And that's partly what accounts for greater reported racism.
00:03:47.000So 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.
00:03:58.000And 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.
00:04:28.000And 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.
00:04:58.000I 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.
00:05:16.000People who read that paragraph were much, were about 15 points less likely to say they could make their life plans work out generally.
00:05:24.000This 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.
00:05:32.000And 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.
00:05:45.000So 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.
00:06:01.000So you can imagine being exposed to this narrative everywhere.
00:06:07.000And so it's, it's a, you know, in a way, it's doing the opposite of what it is supposed to do.
00:06:11.000It'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.
00:06:21.000I'm not sure if Tahanisi Coates actually wants, that's a different conversation every time.
00:06:25.000Intentions 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.
00:06:34.000But intentions are tough and that we're not going to spend time on that.
00:06:54.000And they want a narrative that will confirm their power grab.
00:06:59.000You 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.
00:07:23.000Well, 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.
00:07:41.000So 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.
00:07:57.000And 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.
00:08:11.000And 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.
00:08:25.000All of the behavioral attitudinal indicators are moving in the right direction.
00:08:29.000And yet, if you ask people, is racism an increasing problem?
00:08:36.000And 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.
00:08:45.000After being stable, by the way, for about 20 years, suddenly they've taken a nosedive since 2014 with the Ferguson riots.
00:08:58.000It's one of the most interesting pieces of data.
00:09:00.000But I want to just follow up with one point here.
00:09:05.000Is 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.
00:09:19.000Is that a conclusion that you found repeatedly through your inquiry?
00:09:24.000Yes, 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.
00:09:39.000So 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.
00:09:52.000So people are seeing more racism when actually there's less of it by any traditional figure.
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00:10:56.000So this is a really important point because I don't think that a BLM incorporated activist would disagree.
00:11:03.000They'd say, of course, if you go to college, because we're awakening you, that's why they call themselves woke.
00:11:09.000So they would say, yeah, of course, because they've been informed and they've been enlightened more.
00:11:14.000Where my argument would be, no, no, no, no.
00:11:16.000If it was really as oppressive as you say it is, you don't have to go to college to figure it out.
00:11:22.000For example, in the 1930s, it was really crummy to be a black person in the American South.
00:11:29.000Can 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.
00:11:57.000I 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.
00:12:15.000So you see this sudden increase in the, and that was quite a deliberate editorial strategy.
00:12:20.000It was partly about getting readers, partly about becoming more partisan.
00:12:24.000That actually happens within the mainstream media outlets.
00:12:28.000And then you get, as a result of that, the survey evidence, more and more people saying racism is a bigger problem in the country.
00:12:35.000And 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.
00:12:50.000A postmodernist would say, though, that perception very well is the truth.
00:12:54.000They'd say that these charts and graphs don't mean anything because you don't understand you're not as educated as I am.
00:13:01.000Well, 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?
00:13:12.000You 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.
00:13:21.000I think it becomes quite meaningless when you get into that territory.
00:13:25.000But I think this follows a bit on what Coleman Hughes was saying that, you know, racism is a quantity that is conserved.
00:13:31.000So even if it declines, you have to expand the definition so that it takes up the same amount of room.
00:13:37.000And I think that's pretty much what's been going on.
00:13:39.000Incidentally, 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.
00:13:52.000And then people have a tendency to define these bland faces as threatening just to conserve the quantity of threatening faces.
00:13:58.000And 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.
00:14:17.000Just to sort of fill that quotient, if you like.
00:14:39.000Well, yeah, so it's quite interesting.
00:14:42.000Matthew Iglesias says there's this new thing called the Great Awokening since 2015, and we have all the no platformings and cancelings.
00:14:50.000I 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.
00:15:00.000The 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.
00:15:07.000You then get a second wave with the late 1980s, early 90s, when we hear about political correctness and Afrocentrism.
00:15:15.000We then get to the third big wave, which is post-2014, post-Ferguson, you get another surge.
00:15:23.000And we're living through that right now, this great awokening that Iglesias talks about.
00:15:27.000And 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.
00:15:40.000And so there's a couple of different ways to look at that.
00:15:46.000But 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.
00:15:57.000That's a pretty agreeable statistic, right?
00:16:00.000I mean, that's a life partnership, right?
00:16:17.000I 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.
00:16:25.000Opposition, white opposition to interracial marriage was 95% in 1958.
00:16:30.000It had dropped to about 50% as recently as the mid-1990s.
00:16:35.000So from the mid-1990s, we go from 50% opposition to interracial marriage to 10% today.
00:16:43.000So we've seen an enormous amount of progress on that statistic.
00:16:47.000And along with that, by the way, 17% of new births are interracial.
00:16:53.000And so we've seen an enormous, huge surge in actual interracial marriages.
00:16:58.000And so by any yardstick, that would be seen as huge progress, big decline of racism.
00:17:03.000So we should have been shifting our attention from this problem to other problems.
00:17:08.000Instead, what we've seen, particularly in the last sort of five, six years, is in fact the reverse.
00:17:14.000This has been taking up more and more oxygen in the news.
00:17:17.000So 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.
00:17:26.000Yes, and I want to get to the social media part of it because it's fascinating.
00:17:30.000Now, 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.
00:17:38.000This 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.
00:17:54.000Real racism is in police statistics, brutality.
00:17:58.000Can you help reinforce why this is actually a good metric to use?
00:18:01.000Because I could already hear their counter argument if I were to say something like this on campus.
00:18:06.000Well, 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.
00:18:20.000But 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.
00:18:37.000So people are actually voting with their feet.
00:19:07.000So the narrative has to remain that of white domination of people of color.
00:19:13.000And 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.
00:19:20.000Now, 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.
00:19:30.000So in a scientific argument, you have to have an argument that is potentially falsifiable.
00:19:36.000That I can measure something and test your argument.
00:19:38.000You have to be able to refute counter arguments with evidence.
00:19:54.000They don't consider it to be an acceptable way to make decisions or analyze reality.
00:20:00.000They prefer much more narratives and feelings, emotions.
00:20:04.000This 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.
00:20:15.000And 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.
00:20:25.000They've become narrative-driven, which is what's so refreshing about your study.
00:20:32.000I 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.
00:20:40.000So 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.
00:20:50.000So we should be able to have the maturity to point to places where there still is a bit of racism.
00:20:56.000While not, instead, there's this need to back up this narrative of systemic totalizing white supremacist society, these superlative claims.
00:21:09.000And what that means is it's impossible to contest any part of the narrative without committing blasphemy.
00:21:15.000It'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.
00:21:25.000It's got to be sweeping and revolutionary.
00:21:28.000Yeah, I think this is a very negative trend.
00:21:31.000Really, it's concentrated in certain sections of the academy, which are anti-scientific, anti-empirical.
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00:23:01.000So 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.
00:23:18.000And 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.
00:24:01.000So 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.
00:24:14.000But 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.
00:24:20.0002016, it goes to 13%, where in 2012 it was 2%.
00:24:26.000Now, again, I'm reading numbers of Americans who cited race or racism as the most important problem faced in the United States.
00:24:33.000It goes up in what looks to be 2018 to be, no, it's 2016, almost 17% down.
00:25:14.000So these events are what are driving perceptions of what are important issues.
00:25:18.000Now, that's well known in political science.
00:25:21.000We 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.
00:25:39.000And 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.
00:25:51.000But that then gets perpetuated as a myth that seems to perpetrate throughout the society.
00:25:57.000And that's only, that sort of goes to my point about a lot of this being socially constructed by ideology and media.
00:26:04.000And what that does is it distorts people's perceptions.
00:26:07.000And 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.
00:26:18.000You know, it's about 10 times more, they're about 10 times more likely to be killed in a car accident.
00:26:43.000White 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.
00:26:53.000Well, amongst them, 70% think that young black men are more likely to be killed by police than in a car accident.
00:27:00.000So it's actually distorting people's perceptions in a provable way in the sense that they're getting the answer to this question wrong.
00:27:10.000And 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.
00:27:24.000Whereas the car accidents, that's not always the case.
00:27:26.000And so there is a human action involved in one where you're almost like the innocent bystander effect in the other.
00:27:31.000So 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.
00:27:41.000Like, no, actually, if you even look at the statistics, most of them are actively involved in committing a crime.
00:29:24.000This 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.
00:29:35.000So, so if you weren't on social media, about 30% of African Americans responded that they'd experienced this.
00:29:41.000If they were on social media, it was around 50% or just over 50%.
00:29:47.000That difference holds even when we control for people's education, their age, and even their ideology and party identity.
00:29:54.000So, 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.
00:30:06.000So, people are inhabiting a different reality.
00:30:14.00095% 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.
00:32:04.000Well, so the question here asks people about, you know, how often they experience racism and looks at their ideology.
00:32:12.000And 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.
00:32:29.000And 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?
00:32:42.000But if they voted for Biden, it somehow shot up during the Trump era, which is interesting.
00:32:50.000That goes to show that it's purely political perception, not actual reality.
00:32:54.000Well, 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%?
00:33:14.000And those black Biden voters report that only 20% of them said they experienced racism in the Obama era, against 40% of the Trump era.
00:33:22.000The 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?
00:33:42.000Another question here is: is political correctness demeaning to black people or necessary to protect blacks?
00:33:50.000And 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.
00:34:05.000Before you answer this, can you just give us an idea of how big the sample sizes were here?
00:34:09.000Just some of the inputs that you used for this.
00:34:33.000And, you know, there was some variation because they were asked at slightly different time periods.
00:34:38.000But in both cases, a majority, a slight majority of African Americans said political correctness was demeaning rather than necessary to protect blacks.
00:34:48.000And white liberals were more likely than black liberals to say political correctness was necessary to protect blacks.
00:34:55.000So 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.
00:35:12.000So it suggests that political correctness doesn't have the level of support within the black population that one might surmise.
00:35:21.000I'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?
00:35:30.000I mean, you know, I'm not sure he would deign to respond.
00:35:34.000I 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.
00:36:11.000Yeah, 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.
00:36:28.000So, 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.
00:36:43.000And that holds, by the way, for white and black people.
00:36:47.000So 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.
00:37:00.000The point here being that your underlying psychological state, again, is going to predispose you to answer, yes, I experienced that as discrimination or racism.
00:37:11.000It makes you more sensitive to these issues.
00:37:13.000And so a lot of this comes down to, again, perception and framing are at the heart of this problem.
00:37:20.000It's not a matter of lived experience alone.
00:37:37.000It's seen as something that's just real that bubbles up out of people's experience.
00:37:42.000Whereas 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.
00:37:53.000So to summarize it all together, we'll post this study on charliekirk.com, also the Manhattan Institute.
00:38:02.000There'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.
00:38:18.000And that, I guess I have one last question is back in the 1960s, were people, do you have this data?
00:38:25.000Were people's racial attitudes, a view of race as different?
00:38:31.000Were there disparities based on political viewpoints in the Black community?
00:38:38.000The differences within the Black community, first of all, are smaller based on ideology than within the white community.
00:38:46.000Those differences within the whites have increased over time with partisanship and polarization.
00:38:51.000So I would say those differences would have been pretty small among African Americans in the 60s compared to now.
00:39:01.000But 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.
00:39:15.000And 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.
00:39:34.000We'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.