In this episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speaks with his daughter Mikayla about her father's journey with depression and anxiety, and how she and her dad have come together to create a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling the same issues. Next week's episode features Wim Hof, a young, intelligent man who has been struggling with anxiety and depression for the past two years. Special thanks to our sponsor, Helix Sleep, for sponsoring this episode. Without Helix, we wouldn t have the podcast, and without them, without these guys, we would not have the Podcast. To learn more about Helix and their products, visit helix.sleep.co/podcast and check out their website. If you don't have a mattress, you can get up to $200 in free when you order a Helix mattress from Helix. You'll even get a 10-year warranty, and you'll get it for 100 nights for 100% free. Get up to 20% off for up to 200 nights, and get a free night's worth of rest and relaxation in the process of getting a good night's rest. Thanks to Helix for sponsoring the episode! I'm pretty unique, right? I'm unique. I don't know what else you can do, but I'm going to try it out and see how you like it. I'll let you know how you feel about it! Check it out! I love it out on my YouTube channel, and I'll tell me what you think it's good, right here. . Thank you for listening to this episode, and sharing it on Insta: Insta-tweet me what it means to me, and what you're listening to it, I'll be back with me on Instapod and I love you, I'm not only that I'm a little bit more than that, and that you'll have the most comfortable mattress I've ever heard of it, right there, right or you'll be helping me get a chance to help me out in the next week, and it's going to be a little more like that, right in the rest of the world, and all of that kind of thing, and so much more. - Thank you, Krista, - Krista Peterson Thanks for listening and sharing the episode, Krista -
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00:01:08.020Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:01:13.380Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
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00:02:01.640Welcome to episode 34 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:02:41.260We interviewed Mr. Coleman Hughes, a young, extremely intelligent man that dad will introduce when the podcast starts.
00:02:48.220I was so happy to see him able to work that it really ended up being more my dad's podcast than mine.
00:02:54.340It's probably 90% him and of course Coleman speaking.
00:02:57.480As you know, dad has been incredibly ill with something terrible called akathisia and hasn't been able to work much, not like this, for almost two years.
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00:04:57.940We're privileged tonight to have, as a guest, Mr. Coleman Hughes, who is one of the most promising young intellectuals on the American scene.
00:05:08.520I met him a couple of years ago at a function, I think it was in New York, although it might have been in Washington.
00:06:08.760The notion that we should strive to treat people without regard to race and eliminate racial categories as a criteria on which to base public policy.
00:06:24.700It's something that is enormously unpopular in elite circles, but still enjoys widespread support in the public, in the general public.
00:06:37.040So I'm trying to make the best defense of the colorblind ideal that I possibly can, because I think it's an enormously important principle to defend and to have the language to defend.
00:06:51.720So if you made a case for the people who hold the contrary position, that race, for example, or perhaps ethnicity or even cultural background might instead be regarded as a category of critical importance, how would they justify their particular perspective?
00:07:12.180I think you could justify the opposing perspective in a number of different ways.
00:07:20.200I would say the strongest would be to appeal, to critique the notion that racism is merely a psychological phenomenon in the minds of individuals.
00:07:39.080A deviation from rational and objective treatment because of somebody's skin color.
00:07:46.620You can make the case that because of the circumstances of American history, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, convict leasing, all of the ways in which black Americans were subjugated.
00:08:00.180Given that particular history, it makes sense for black Americans to form a group consciousness and to practice group-based politics.
00:08:10.980And that you can't abstract away from the circumstances of that history and...
00:08:44.620Problematic, at least in some regards, right?
00:08:47.160It's some effort to become colorblind.
00:08:49.000And the argument that, because of history, race might be used, at least in some circumstances, as a factor for promotion of, let's say, affirmative action policies,
00:09:10.700has certainly struck many people as a powerful argument.
00:09:15.380You, in your book, you're obviously going to take this argument on, despite its power.
00:09:21.620Yeah, so the very first thing I plan to do in the book is clarify what I don't mean by the admittedly misleading word colorblind.
00:09:31.580Colorblind is a word like warm-hearted.
00:09:33.780When you describe someone as warm-hearted, you're not literally talking about the temperature of their blood-pumping organ.
00:09:40.480You're speaking about the kindness of their spirit.
00:09:43.420Likewise, with colorblind, it's a word that employs a physical metaphor of not being able to see color, to name an underlying principle,
00:09:52.660which is to strive to treat people without regard to their race and to enshrine race-neutral public policy.
00:10:01.300The notion that we could ever completely get to a place where we are truly colorblind, which is to say you almost, in the literal sense, you basically don't even notice people's color, is naive and utopian.
00:10:16.000It's funny, though, you know, to argue the other side for a moment, is that it doesn't seem logical in many circumstances to use race as a criteria for judgment,
00:10:29.920because race per se has little or nothing to do with, let's say, desired outcomes for the task at hand.
00:10:38.280If you're doing something like hiring or if you're engaged in any activity with someone else that has an end in mind,
00:10:46.120you should judge the people with whom that pursuit is going to be undertaken on criteria that have something to do with their ability to manage the pursuit.
00:10:58.200So it seems purely logical to, in some sense, to be race-blind.
00:11:03.680I mean, that's the argument that people make when stating that prejudice is its own punishment,
00:11:09.380because you lose, if you're prejudiced against women, for example, or if you're prejudiced against someone from a different racial background,
00:11:16.960then you lose the ability to hire them, let's say, and therefore decrease your pool of talent.
00:11:23.120Yeah, that's Gary Becker's The Economist's famous theory of discrimination, and there is certainly something to be said for that.
00:11:33.600I just read an NPR interview with a public health official who was talking about the coronavirus vaccine
00:11:43.780and how they plan to triage the vaccine once it's available.
00:11:47.940Who's going to get the vaccine first, second, and third?
00:11:51.100And what this person laid out made total sense.
00:11:56.260It was the people with conditions, comorbidities, and the elderly would get it first,
00:12:04.600and then people like me, perfectly healthy 24-year-olds, would be last in line.
00:12:10.940And then the NPR interview asked them,
00:12:13.540given the fact that communities of color are disproportionately affected,
00:12:19.320do you, you know, it was pressing her, this person to inject race as a category or a criterion among the risk factors.
00:12:28.000And you can hear in the interview, the public health official getting a little bit nervous and dancing around the issue a little bit,
00:12:40.560but saying not in so many words, we're just going to look at the risk factors themselves.
00:12:48.100And inevitably, if black people are disproportionately having comorbidities or having risk factors,
00:12:55.640then our race-neutral system will inevitably favor them as a side effect.
00:13:03.320But we don't need to use race as a proxy because it's such a poor proxy for any given thing in this world that you could care about,
00:13:12.000whether that is getting the best sound editor for your podcast or whether it's, you know, vaccinating the highest risk populations first.
00:13:26.640So many of the arguments I make in the book are arguments to stop using race as an imperfect proxy for things like socioeconomics, public health, and merit.
00:13:40.340But why did you decide to take this on, you know, I mean, it's obviously not something that's going to make you particularly popular.
00:13:47.740And I think you have a history of taking on topics of that sort.
00:13:51.700I mean, what's driving you to do this?
00:13:55.180Well, I think there is something slowly slipping away from us as a culture that's worth holding on to.
00:14:03.300And I feel that from roughly ages zero to 16, I was living about as colorblind a life as one could.
00:14:14.700I effortlessly had white friends, black friends, Hispanic friends, and Asian friends.
00:14:21.220I didn't think of race as anything more than something to occasionally make a joke about.
00:14:29.880And, you know, on the rare instances where I did encounter racism, I felt something closer to pity than anger for the racist, the small-minded bigot.
00:14:42.660It was obvious to me and everyone I knew why racism was evil.
00:14:47.240I grew up feeling goosebumps watching Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, as many people do.
00:14:55.740But around the time I was 16, which would be 2012, I started to get a download of an entirely different kind of anti-racist ideology
00:15:07.460that explicitly rejected aspirational colorblindness, which told me that, by definition, as a black person, I was a victim of white supremacy,
00:15:18.780which encouraged me to focus on any way, no matter how minuscule, in which I had been made a victim of white supremacy.
00:15:31.580And it seemed to me that this was not something that was encouraging a closer collaboration and a closer intimacy between people of different races,
00:15:41.800but was, in fact, creating neuroticism and paranoia around people of different races.
00:15:49.020Now there's an expectation, oh, you know, as I'm talking to this person, is this a person who's going to assume that I'm worried about microaggressions all the time
00:16:02.400Or in the reverse, is this a person who is, you know, highly self-conscious of quote-unquote white privilege?
00:16:10.120And now it just like it creates a space of nerves and anxiety around race and dishonesty that I found was not in any way, shape or form fighting racism,
00:16:24.760but was making people racially neurotic.
00:16:29.680Do you think that the effects of that highlighting of race as a defining characteristic has particularly pernicious effects in, like, the white community or the black community?
00:16:46.700Or do you think that it's equally pernicious across communities?
00:16:55.140I suppose it affects folks in different ways.
00:16:59.680I know for white people, there's a, I think there's a dividing line between white people who feel what is often called white guilt and those who don't.
00:17:14.460And I think Shelby Steele's point is worth reiterating, which is that white guilt is really misnamed.
00:17:38.220And, um, I think those white people who do feel that often end up doing, um, strange and unhealthy things in order to relieve that feeling of, of terror.
00:17:57.960Um, they, they, they often end up, you know, debasing themselves and playing the, the masochist or, um, turning off the skeptical portion of their brain at any claim a black person makes.
00:18:21.080That's a terrible, that's a terrible, that's a terrible thing to do to an interaction to make it so that real communication can't take place.
00:18:29.740And, and on the other side, um, with black people, what it encourages us to do is to, to hone in on everything that's, uh, to, to blame the world and society for everything that has gone wrong in our lives.
00:18:46.860Uh, which is, uh, it, it, it, it, it encourages us to get a sense of meaning and identity out of the notion that we are victims, that the, that society is arrayed against us, that we are part, part of a noble struggle against us, against a society that is fundamentally hostile to people who look like us.
00:19:05.500You can, you can, you can see what a pervasive problem it is, eh, because the last five or six minutes of this conversation, both you and I automatically assumed that there would be something in common about what the idea of race as a core category does to white people and perhaps something different about what it does to black people.
00:19:26.920You know, you know, I'm just bringing that up to, to show how tricky it is to manage the notion of colorblindness, given the, given the perceptual presence of racial differences.
00:19:45.000I often find for what it's worth that children tend to understand colorblindness intuitively much more easily than adults do.
00:19:54.620They understand how, how skin color is, um, you know, skin deep.
00:20:02.740Um, it doesn't mean anything more than, than you make it mean.
00:20:07.820Um, and so I, I often feel that we are miseducating our children or, or, or, um, reiterating and re, um, reifying our own racial neuroses and perpetrating in them on the next generation, generation after generation.
00:20:24.620Um, I was going to say growing up in Toronto was pretty multicultural and I didn't like my best friends were, I guess, half black.
00:21:07.200Had really been achieved, I would say in many regards.
00:21:10.120When I, when I went to Montreal actually, um, and there were more Middle Eastern people and there were, um, less black people.
00:21:17.140I actually noticed that there was like something missing kind of there when I moved to Montreal, but growing up in Toronto, it was pretty good for that kind of thing.
00:21:26.400And I do agree that it's not good for people.
00:21:29.080It's made me uncomfortable about who I'm talking to, not based on their skin color, but based on what they think about skin color, whether or not I'm going to be blamed for something.
00:21:42.160Or whether or not there's already some animosity between us.
00:21:46.820That's exactly the kind of neurosis that I'm, I'm speaking of.
00:21:50.520And I think particularly in the past six months with the, uh, explosion of, uh, you know, social justice and anti-racism as a result of the death of George Floyd in police custody and the, uh, protests and riots that ensued.
00:22:09.600Um, there's a whole, you know, a whole underbelly of, um, you know, broken friendships and, uh, you know, brand new neuroses that people have developed as a result of seeing, uh, politics, political demands that cleave the world into good and evil.
00:22:34.260People import it into their Instagram feed every day and, and, and essentially been asked to pick a side in a, in a very simplistic caricature of the problem and, uh, made to feel evil if they have any kind of, you know, skepticism about it.
00:22:51.200So that, that, that problem that you describe, I mean, I was reading some of the things that you wrote a couple of years ago today and, uh, including your review of some of Thomas Sowell's work, the, the economist.
00:23:04.100And, um, you talked about inequality, essentially, like, it seems to me that what drives the continual discussion of race, particularly in the United States, because it's less intense here in Canada, is pervasive inequality.
00:23:21.000Um, particularly inequality between, let's say the Caucasian majority, although I don't believe it's a majority anymore, it's still close to a majority and the, and the black minority.
00:23:33.640Um, the fact that that inequality continues to exist seems to be the motivating factor for the supposition that racial prejudice is still alive and well.
00:23:46.400But you reviewed documentation, and I think this was from Sowell as well, that showed that black immigrants to the United States weren't characterized by the same levels of, the same levels of inequality did not obtain between black immigrants to the United States and Caucasians who were native to the U.S., so to speak.
00:24:12.000It was only the case for blacks who were born in the U.S.
00:24:19.340Okay, so that's, that's a real, that's really troublesome in, in about five different directions.
00:24:24.080It's troublesome because the fact of the inequality drives the presupposition that racism still exists, but the fact that the inequality doesn't seem to exist in the case of immigrants casts doubt on the claim that it is, in fact, racism that's produced.
00:24:42.000The inequality, and then you're left with a question, which is the question I wanted to pose to you.
00:24:46.580You know, you talked about, you've written about cultural differences.
00:24:50.760Do you think that there are cultural differences among the black community in the United States that is driving inequality forward?
00:25:00.640Is it, I mean, I think that's even a more, what would you call, incendiary topic than the ones that we've been discussing.
00:25:09.000Hmm, yes, it is an incendiary topic, but it's also very plausibly true.
00:25:16.220And it's, I think people are very terrified of this topic and they really shouldn't be.
00:25:21.240They have a notion that, A, if, if there are, if cultural differences and differences in behavior patterns at the median or at the mean in different populations is the driving force behind unequal outcomes, then that means we can't possibly fix it.
00:25:40.280Whereas, if it's systemic racism, then that's something we can fix.
00:25:45.100I think that's, that's probably a large exaggeration on both counts.
00:25:51.100Um, I, I, again, I'm not, I'm not necessarily the person that is going to lead a movement to, to, uh, fix behavioral behavioral patterns.
00:26:04.860For example, how, how many hours the average black student studies per night compared to how many average hours the average white student or, or Asian student studies.
00:26:15.820Cause there's also a large gap on that, on that score between whites and Asians.
00:26:20.260Uh, but I do think that local community groups can make a difference in those areas.
00:26:27.680Uh, not only that, I think it's, I think there's an unreflective assumption that systemic fixing systemic racism, um, and to, to give an example or, or, uh, whether we want to call this systemic is a separate question, but fixing, uh, a phenomenon of racial bias widespread throughout an industry,
00:26:48.380such as real estate agents treating black homeowners, uh, uh, uh, different than they, than they do white homeowners.
00:26:56.460Uh, that's, I'm not sure that's so easy to fix or any easier to fix than, uh, a cultural problem because they both involve changing the behavior of people in private moments when they may not have an incentive to.
00:27:10.200Well, and that's a big danger between reflexively assuming that prejudice is at the, is the fundamental cause of the inequality that, that, that is driving the, the, the debate.
00:27:24.600The fact of that inequality is, that is tragic and it's not going to be remediated or repaired until we actually get the causal story correct.
00:27:35.940And what that would mean if you were a good social scientist investigating this is that you would look at a whole array of potentially causal factors in an attempt to specify exactly what it is that is contributing.
00:27:47.640You'd probably find that there were multiple factors, you know, and hopefully they would be small enough so that some of them could be remediated.
00:27:54.720There's some reason that that black immigrants to the U S do better.
00:28:01.900I don't know the literature well enough.
00:28:04.300I w I want to propose, um, uh, a reason why I don't think inequality is as tragic as it seems.
00:28:13.840I think truly poverty and intergenerational poverty is tragic.
00:28:20.260Uh, and we have to separate that from inequality because they're conceptually different inequality, you know, taking a snapshot of the country at a particular time where you're comparing this group of 40, 40 million black people in a freeze frame to, um, you know, over a hundred million, uh, white people.
00:28:39.960And looking at a single number that describes how they're doing, which is, is, is, is just a mean, um, what that doesn't capture is for example, the fact that this generation of black Americans is doing much, much, much better than their parents.
00:28:59.380So something like 70% of, uh, black Americans report on the federal reserve survey that they're doing, uh, they're better off financially than their parents, which is actually a higher percentage, uh, than of, of whites who say the same.
00:29:16.640Um, so there's two, there's two ways, importantly, different ways to look at this.
00:29:20.520You can compare a group to itself at an earlier point in time.
00:29:25.280And if you do this with black Americans, you know, huge progress on health, you know, rates of death from cancer going down, life expectancy going up, um, incarceration rates, especially for, uh, black Americans in their twenties have, uh, more than cut in half since I was, uh, in kindergarten.
00:29:40.860Um, or you can, you get a very different picture if you compare two different groups at the same time where one group had, had a massive headstart in every way imaginable.
00:29:53.840Um, it could be the case that both are making rather fantastic progress, but so long as one is ahead, it will look like nothing's changing.
00:30:01.940If you're only looking at the gaps between them rather than the objective progress they're making.
00:30:06.660So the, um, the, the racial issue in the United States is often framed too, in terms of discrimination against blacks on the part of Caucasians and let's say the white supremacy that has emerged as a consequence of that.
00:30:24.700But, but that also, um, seems to fail as a hypothesis, given the staggering success, let's say of Indian Americans and of Asian Americans in general, because if it was a, an issue that was somehow related to the Caucasian community per se, you'd think that we, they would have been just as efficient at holding back the progress of those other groups as holding back the progress of those other groups.
00:30:52.700As holding back the progress of the black community.
00:30:55.860I feel like Asian Americans aren't even involved there.
00:30:59.540They're, they're doing really well and we're squabbling about race problems.
00:31:04.380It's strange that it's, it does seem like that.
00:31:07.240I don't, I don't really understand that.
00:31:09.740Um, their success is an embarrassment to the theory, um, that white supremacy is crushing.
00:31:18.400Um, how, how do you, for example, uh, say what, what has been said about standardized test scores, um, standardized tests rather like the SAT and ACT that they are, they are created by Europeans for Europeans and are culturally biased in very subtle ways that, you know, there's some hand waving that's done here.
00:31:39.940But the point is the test is made by white people for white people and then Asians come with no particular background in European culture and destroy the white people on this test, right.
00:31:53.180So again, it's an embarrassment to the theory that all of society is tilted, um, in, in favor of white people in subtle and not so subtle ways.
00:32:03.560Yes. And a lot of that with the Asians, a lot of that does seem to be a consequence of, of work habits.
00:32:09.000I mean, I looked into, um, Asian versus Caucasian performance in the U S a number of decades ago for a federal government project that I was doing at the time.
00:32:19.240And the Asians, this was the children of first generation Asian immigrants, because the effect seems to go away by about three generations, maybe because they're Asians are more thoroughly enculturated into the American community.
00:32:33.320But the children of first generation Asian immigrants worked hard enough so that that, um, served as the equivalent to 15 additional IQ points, which is roughly the difference between the typical state university student and the typical high school student.
00:32:52.660So that's a good example too, of, of, of, of a situation where cultural differences really seem to play a role.
00:33:00.220Yes. And, uh, I've seen, I've seen data to that effect.
00:33:03.320Uh, in the U S as well, which suggests that just, you know, it's not that there's, there's, uh, what's explaining it is a genetic difference.
00:33:12.960It's that, it's that, you know, it's like more hours spent studying on average.
00:33:17.960It's mom and dad over the shoulder, um, you know, making sure that you do your homework and you do it right.
00:33:25.660Um, that phenomenon is not equally represented in every culture and it's underrepresented among black Americans.
00:33:35.620Well, that's, that'll be a statement that'll definitely make you popular again.
00:33:39.540So what, what, what, what makes you, how do you know that?
00:33:46.960Um, so that we do have, we do have survey evidence, um, you know, on self-report surveys of how, how much, um, how many hours per night, um, students study.
00:34:09.480So I think most academics understandably, uh, stay away from it.
00:34:15.540Um, we have, uh, extensive data from Nielsen, which is a, uh, uh, one of the leading market research firms and of the famous Nielsen television ratings, which, um, investigate everything.
00:34:30.020Everything from what people spend their money on to how many hours of TV people watch, uh, per day and breaks it down by race.
00:34:38.700And you find big differences in all of these things, um, differences that are consequential.
00:34:44.580If you are concerned about closing gaps in, uh, say wealth accrual and income and, and, and all of these things.
00:34:53.660So do, will your book contain solutions?
00:35:00.700I mean, to these, to these cultural problems, just because they're cultural doesn't mean they're easy to solve, obviously, right?
00:35:07.980Um, any more than they would be easy to solve if they were a consequence of prejudice or biological factors.
00:35:14.140Um, but it isn't, it isn't obvious how to get from the situation that you're describing to, to somewhere better.
00:35:28.860Uh, it's not, it's not, it's not for children that want an easy solution to everything.
00:35:34.620Um, it's for people who, uh, recognize the inherent trade-offs and the complexity in the world.
00:35:40.240And it's not to say that there will be no solutions offered.
00:35:43.640Um, I think there are probably more clear cut solutions to problems like problems, uh, of policing and criminal justice, um, than education.
00:35:54.900Um, but I, I do think incremental progress is possible and I'm not, uh, I'm, I'm not, I'm not selling a solution really.
00:36:05.600I think, um, um, I think, you know, many people have just understandably grown skeptical of people who come and say, oh, well, I've got the solution.
00:36:28.260I think the world is, is far too complicated and has far too many trade-offs for that.
00:36:33.620So the, the book is about, um, defending, uh, defending a different kind of anti-racism, um, to go against the tide of the one that's currently sweeping, at least elite circles, um, in academia, journalism, you know, Hollywood, uh, corporate America and so forth.
00:36:54.680Um, uh, but it's, it's, it's not, it's, it's, it's not a, you know, if you want to, if you want a simple solution, this is not going to be the book for you.
00:37:05.460So you don't think anti-bias training based on critical race theory is the answer?
00:37:11.040So far, the evidence has not shown that, uh, implicit bias trainings reduce any kind of racism that, that we could measure.
00:37:19.720And, um, you know, I think what it does do is it, it alienates a lot of people.
00:37:27.240Um, you know, I, I'm not, I'm not saying that there should be no kind of diversity training in the, in the context of a workplace.
00:37:37.220Um, but if the, if the, if the, the sum total of the training is to tell people you are subconsciously racist in ways that you can't possibly, you know, by definition, consciously grab onto.
00:37:52.740And, uh, the solution is a kind of Robin D'Angelo-esque groveling.
00:37:59.660Um, you know, there's, there's nothing to suggest that that's the path forward for harmonious relations between people of different races.
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00:40:54.820I spoke with Chloe Valdry and she had worked, you know Chloe Valdry probably, she'd worked on a kind of an anti-racist or diversity, I guess you'd call it, course.
00:41:09.680And I looked through her course and it was way more reasonable than the, like part of the problem with this anti-bias training.
00:41:17.860I've had friends who go through it or if they're working at Starbucks or something and it makes people angry to be, to sit there and be talked at about how they're inherently racist.
00:41:28.380Like, I feel like it's more likely to, I don't know if there's any, there probably aren't any studies on this, but I feel like it's more likely to increase racism than decrease it.
00:41:38.200If you're just talking at people about how they're evil, like I'd be mad about it if I had to sit through that for a couple of days, especially if it was based on Robin DiAngelo's stuff.
00:41:48.540I mean, you know, I've been in a classroom at Columbia where the, a professor who, who happened to be white, though, though I think I would have been angry either way, said that all people of color are victims of oppression.
00:42:03.660And, you know, I wasn't, I was furious.
00:42:07.460I was furious that she would characterize it that, that bluntly and that broadly.
00:42:13.240Um, I, I have to imagine the experience of, of being told that you are by definition of racist, which is, uh, what, what Robin DiAngelo proposes in her, in her massively successful bestselling book, white fragility.
00:42:27.100I have to imagine that that's also, um, it's a non-starter for many people.
00:42:32.360Uh, it's, it's, uh, yeah, I don't think that, you know, many of these, um, social justice inflected bias trainings are inflected.
00:42:43.240With a kind of, kind of, uh, dominance and, and, uh, you know, it's a kind of, so, so for instance, in, in DiAngelo's book, um, you know, the thrust of the book is that if you're talking to a black person about race and you're white, uh, you cannot disagree with them.
00:43:12.100So what, what that essentially sets up is a completely unequal relationship.
00:43:19.300And I know what people will say, well, let's say, let's say in the broader context of, um, you know, a white supremacist culture, how can you possibly say that, um, you know, how can you possibly complain about, you know, white people being mistreated in, in any context?
00:43:36.140You know, whatever abstract ideas about, uh, you know, uh, white supremacist culture you have can't possibly justify a local explicit dominance of one race by another.
00:43:50.820Um, how does that help counter the alleged white supremacist culture outside?
00:43:57.560There's never any proposed link even between the two.
00:44:01.200Well, and there is no indication that those implicit bias training programs have their desired effect.
00:44:08.760I mean, it's not, it's very difficult to design psychological interventions that produce positive effects.
00:44:15.460And it's very difficult to do the studies necessary to demonstrate that those effects exist.
00:44:21.140And when you're dealing with a phenomena that's only weakly linked to racial attitudes, which would be say implicit bias as measured by the implicit association test, that's only weakly linked to actual behavior.
00:44:34.320And then the training programs at best have a weak effect if it's not entirely negative, um, it's not a solution to the problem that we're discussing, although it has the advantage of looking like it's a solution, which, well, which is often something that's saleable, right?
00:44:53.960Something that looks like a solution that's actually implementable, um, is saleable, even if it doesn't have an out, the outcome that's desired, because what is being purchased, isn't the outcome.
00:45:06.060People purchasing it, like, who knows if they even care, they, they might just want to look good, right?
00:45:11.700It's a lot easier just to look virtuous than to actually be virtuous.
00:45:14.520Well, you could give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they're likely to be as virtuous, they're as likely to be virtuous as the next person, you know, but these are very difficult problems as,
00:45:23.960as Coleman already pointed out, they're not going to be solved simply.
00:45:28.000And if you're a corporation that's pushed to take noticeable action on problems of race, the implicit bias training programs at least offer you the possibility of appearing state of the art.
00:45:45.000And you might say, well, you have a responsibility to assure that what you're doing works.
00:45:51.580Yeah, and I think corporations can't afford to adopt a tragic vision of human nature, uh, like a, like a writer can, um, corporations can't throw their hands up and say, well, listen, um, we actually don't know.
00:46:06.900The honest truth is we do not know how to take someone who is biased racially or otherwise and, and change their fundamental, you know, neural chemistry or personality or whatever you want to call it.
00:46:21.400So as to make them less biased, that is something our species has not yet figured out.
00:46:26.760And frankly, we, we, we, it's, it's not just inevitable that we will be able to fix, you know, any, any problem.
00:46:37.620Um, of course, corporations can't be seen, people mistake that for, uh, callousness.
00:46:44.600They mistake, uh, a, perhaps like, like a sober assessment of what is possible and what's not for not caring about the underlying issue.
00:46:53.620And, you know, people in, in whether they're at corporations or in academia or otherwise, um, they lose face if they can ever be construed as not caring about an issue.
00:47:05.280Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's partly why the implicit bias training programs have proved so popular, you know, in the absence of an alternative solution that's easily implementable and, and in keeping with the spirit of the times, they dominate the marketplace.
00:47:27.760Hmm. And it's probably not useful to be too cynical about that, even though I think the tests, the programs are reprehensible.
00:47:38.180I understand why they're being employed.
00:47:42.940A question I wanted to ask, just so I can sneak it in here. Uh, if you are, um, I guess, mandated to take one of these, uh, diversity trainer and training or anti-bias programs, say as an employee of somebody, and you're not comfortable doing that, or it's based on Robin DiAngelo's work.
00:48:04.400Um, are there suggestions you have for, for those people? I threw up a couple of questions on my Instagram, just asking people if they had questions for you.
00:48:13.800And one of the main ones was as a student or as a worker, how do you, they use the term fight back, but what do you do if you're like stuck in one of those anti-bias things? Is there anything you can do?
00:48:26.860Hmm. I really, I really feel for people. Um, uh, this is another area where I'm afraid I have to say, I don't have a solution to that problem. Um, all I have is sympathy with the problem itself to be stuck in a scenario where you are asked to hold your tongue when you have eminently reasonable things to say about the underlying issue.
00:48:52.260But you know, but you know that the moment you open your mouth, there is nothing you can say clear enough or profound enough to prevent you from being labeled, um, you know, a bigot or an uncle Tom or what have you.
00:49:11.800And the reputational cost you pay is likely to outweigh, you know, the benefits of having, you know, of having diversity of opinion in the room. And it's so much easier to just stay silent, go along.
00:49:28.380Well, that's one way in, in, in, in which the faulty information is so harmful, right? Is, is once a false theory gets instantiated and a false treatment program, if you question it, your reputation is at stake.
00:49:46.940But if you don't question it, it can never be replaced by something that might actually work.
00:49:53.000So a bad theory in, in that sense, at least of this type is worse than no theory at all, because standing up against the bad theory appears to make you a bad person.
00:50:06.680Yeah. And ultimately it's a coordination problem. If there were enough people to stand up to it at the same time, it wouldn't be a problem.
00:50:15.160Um, but there is a, uh, this is what, what self censorship, self censorship does is it makes every person in that implicit bias training who is having skeptical thoughts in their mind, feel like they're the only person in the room having such thoughts.
00:50:35.780Yeah. And they're not, they're not right.
00:50:39.740That's why these kinds of conversations are important. That's why what Coleman's doing is important too.
00:50:44.120So if, if you talk about some con talk about topics, even you remember, um, that black box thing that happened on Instagram where everybody put a black box up, which I thought was ridiculous.
00:50:56.480But I woke up that morning and I looked at my phone and everyone had this black box up and I thought, Oh my God, now I have to put a black box up on Instagram.
00:51:03.660And then I thought that is a ridiculous thought to have now.
00:51:07.760Because you have to know that everyone is noticing who doesn't put up the black square.
00:51:11.620That's the most crucial part about the black square.
00:51:14.420Yeah. So I didn't end up putting up a black box because I had that thought about, no, now I have to.
00:51:20.060And thought like, no, I don't. It's a black box on Instagram. It's not going to make a difference to anybody.
00:51:23.780Um, but it is hard when you get this, like, anyway, I didn't put up the black box.
00:51:30.820And then I had a whole bunch of people message me who had put up this black box saying, Oh, I really didn't want to, but I did anyway.
00:51:36.880I know at some point, I mean, it's different, I guess, if you're going to lose your job, but if you don't talk, if you don't speak out about some things that you think are wrong, you corrupt your soul.
00:51:49.740Well, that, and isn't that how entire societies get totally screwed up? Like, doesn't that, can that potentially screw up entire societies?
00:51:59.620Yes. It, it, it, it certainly, it certainly has that propensity across time. Well, Coleman, you're standing up to this. Like, how is it that you're able to manage that practically and philosophically? Because there's a practical side to it.
00:52:16.880Hmm. Um, there's an uncanny valley of, that, that I have successfully escaped, which means, uh, when you come out as a heretic on these issues, um, you, you, there's a price to pay, an immediate price to pay that can last a long time in terms of your reputation, reputation, your friendships,
00:52:45.380your career, your career, and so forth. Your health. Yes. Your mental health, no doubt. Um, your family. Um, and, but, but on the other side of that valley, valley, if you're, if you're, if you're someone like me, which obviously, you know, most people, most people aren't and can't, can't be because of circumstances.
00:53:09.060Um, and you have a podcast like I do, that's grown a lot over the past six months. And, you know, I've, I've put myself in a position where I'm successfully my own boss and I'm, I'm known as a heretic, right? So I have, I have nothing to lose from further heresy at this point. Um, because I, I've lost everything that I'm, that I'm going to lose.
00:53:34.940Which makes it paradoxically easier. Right. You have to put yourself in a position where you can sustain yourself during that initial period of loss, or you have to be fortunate enough to be in that position. And that, that's not a situation that characterizes many people. Correct.
00:53:54.640So what do you hope your book will do?
00:53:56.380Um, that's a good question. I mean, I hope the book will be persuasive to people who are on the fence. Um, I hope it will, uh, give people who have a gut level, um, doubt about, uh, race conscious anti-racism, the, the language to express where their doubt might be coming from.
00:54:20.900Um, I hope it, uh, I hope it, uh, I hope it, uh, enlightens and I hope, uh, I hope people get joy out of reading it. I hope people, uh, learn something. It helps me writing. It helps me clarify my own thoughts. Um, and I hope, I, I, I really hope for it to be a book that people can read, uh, 20 and 30 years from now.
00:54:44.380And, uh, it would, it would, you know, hopefully some of the issues in question will have gotten better by then, but I hope the book will still make sense and resonate. Um, because, you know, the, this issue isn't going away and I hope to write about it in a way that isn't merely responding to, you know, events of the past six months, but is actually getting to philosophical bedrock on the issues in question.
00:55:11.140Do you think things are going to improve in the next couple of years?
00:55:17.840Um, in terms of, uh, the, the, the prevalence of colorblindness versus race consciousness?
00:55:24.920Yeah. Just the tensions that we're having now. I mean, it's definitely gotten worse in the last six months. So do you see that?
00:55:32.020Yeah. Do you think that if Biden becomes president, which seems to be a virtual certainty that the racial
00:55:40.120tensions that characterize the United States are actually going to decline?
00:55:44.360Hmm. Um, so that's, there, there are, I think two countervailing trends. One is, uh, you know,
00:55:53.040the, the, the problem of, of woke anti-racism, uh, precedes Trump. Um, and it is an, is a, is a,
00:56:05.240by and large, a trend that occurs independent of who is or isn't in, in the white house. So that will
00:56:12.640keep, uh, that the engine of wokeness is going to keep running. Um, and it seems to have only been
00:56:21.380getting more powerful in the past six years, especially, uh, on the other hand, I do think
00:56:26.660that there were, there are lots of liberals and centrists who, uh, especially among elites
00:56:36.420that were so alarmed and, uh, appalled by Trump's rhetoric and his, uh, you know, authoritarian
00:56:44.260tendencies, um, and you know, his, his style, um, that they felt, um, they felt that they couldn't,
00:56:56.680you know, given the choice between criticizing Trump and criticizing the far left, they felt more
00:57:01.920cautious criticizing the far left under a Trump presidency than they might now under a Biden
00:57:08.820presidency. Oh, that's an interesting, that's an interesting idea. So you think a
00:57:14.220Biden presidency might give people the opportunity to liberal people, let's say this opportunity to
00:57:20.800separate themselves from their more radical compatriots, say within the democratic party.
00:57:27.480It certainly offers that opportunity, whether or not people take it, uh, is, is anyone's guess,
00:57:32.800frankly, and I wouldn't, I don't want to signal too much optimism on this score, but it's certainly
00:57:38.280an opportunity given that Biden has been fairly good in rejecting most of the,
00:57:44.220policy prescriptions and sensibilities of the far left. I think it would make sense for, um, people of
00:57:54.060influence to rally around him as, as, um, you know, a, uh, a, a president that hopefully will embody
00:58:03.800actual liberal values rather than, um, illiberal social justice values.
00:58:10.060I was, I was hopeful about that. And then Harris put her pronouns in her bio on Twitter.
00:58:16.640Seriously. I was like this, you know, this actually, maybe this isn't so bad. I think Biden might be
00:58:21.140more center than he's putting on, um, you know, given his past, but then Harris put her,
00:58:26.460her pronouns in her Twitter. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that's not good.
00:58:34.640She's phony. No, she doesn't mean it. Yeah. Not that that makes it, uh, no, that might even,
00:58:41.620that might even be worse. Yeah. I mean, isn't it, I, what I find to be strange is the word,
00:58:48.260the, I have an obsession with this word Latinx. Oh yeah. That's a bad one. Um, I have an obsession
00:58:55.660with this word. I think it's, it's partly because, um, as a kid, I grew up around my Spanish speaking
00:59:02.160family members on my mother's side often. And, um, you know, by the time I was adolescent, I,
00:59:10.300I wasn't fluent, but I had a, you know, enough of a familiar familiarity with the language to
00:59:15.920communicate. And when I got to Columbia, I heard this word that I'd never heard before in, in all my
00:59:21.360days speaking to my Puerto Rican family members. And it was sold as a word, you know, the new polite
00:59:28.880term for Hispanic Americans that, you know, Hispanic Americans are demanding, uh, much like the
00:59:36.660succession of African American and black from the earlier Negro and colored, which used to be the
00:59:42.860polite terms. Of course it's, it couldn't be further from the truth, right? When Pew polls Hispanic
00:59:49.080Americans about what they prefer to be called, they find 95, 96% say, please don't call, call us
00:59:55.400Latinx. Either. I haven't heard of that or I've heard of it and I don't like it. Um, and so the,
01:00:01.020the, you know, so it's one thing for there to be an elite bubble. How could there not be? There's
01:00:06.620nothing inherently wrong with that. Everyone lives in a bubble, but what, what strikes me with particular
01:00:12.260force is when the, the elite are completely unaware of how their peculiar, I should say our peculiar
01:00:22.200moral sensibilities are not shared by the general public and therefore force their sensibilities on
01:00:29.420the general public. You know, and there's nothing, there's almost nothing more philosophically repugnant.
01:00:35.420It's almost spiritually repugnant than the attempt to force a particular language usage. You know,
01:00:44.660there's something about that. That's a deep violation of, of, of individual freedom. It's not
01:00:50.460obvious how language evolves and how we all accept new words, but to have them coined by ideologues and
01:00:56.440then forced, uh, into usage by moral threats, let's say there, there's, there's something about that,
01:01:06.420that that's, it irks you. Yeah. It irks me too. I, I, yeah, I mean that, yes. Um, it, it irks me very
01:01:18.620deeply. Um, it's an act of domination, but, but it's an act of domination that, that is all the more,
01:01:27.100pernicious for the fact that the people doing the dominating often don't even know it. Like,
01:01:32.620like, you know, Elizabeth Warren in her presidential campaign, um, use the word Latinx.
01:01:39.160If you think about it from her perspective, she should be desperate to win over the 95% of Hispanics.
01:01:45.240She should be desperate not to alienate them, right? She has every incentive to,
01:01:49.640and she still uses the word Latinx. The question is why? And it, you know, I can only think it's because
01:01:55.980the Hispanics in her immediate circle are all themselves elites within the bubble who like
01:02:01.800this word, right? So, so the, the, the, the bubble that is not aware of itself ends up imposing
01:02:09.760things on, on, on, on everyone else and, um, just alienating the pop. I mean, so the, so Kamala using,
01:02:19.520putting her pronouns in her, her, her bio is, is the example that, that made me think of this. I mean,
01:02:26.600who are, who are, who are, what are you, who are you signaling to when you do that? I think you're
01:02:31.320signaling to my peers at Columbia are going to like that. Um, but is the democratic base going to
01:02:38.020like that? Hell no. You know, the, the democratic base and the wider country, of course not what
01:02:44.960you're signaling to what you're saying is I'm perfect, perfectly fine alienating, you know,
01:02:51.18070% of the country say, um, if it means ingratiating myself to this particular minority that has a lot
01:03:03.000of cultural power and sway right now. And that sends, that sends a very bad signal. If Democrats
01:03:08.420keep doing that, they should be very worried about just losing. It sends a signal of weakness too,
01:03:13.340I think, you know, that it would seem to me to be more logical in this early stage of the new regime
01:03:20.640to signal the ability to resist that sort of temptation rather than the willingness to
01:03:27.840be preemptively intimidated. Do you think she's, maybe she's not even intimidated. I mean, maybe she
01:03:35.260is, but maybe she's just surrounded by so many people telling her that that's the right thing to
01:03:41.680do, that she believes it. Is that possible? I mean, her circle might be a whole bunch of people who all
01:03:47.700have their pronouns in their bio. No, I think that, that, that is likely true. Um, and, and who knows,
01:03:57.320maybe they're trying to play a split strategy where Biden plays to the middle and Kamala appeases the
01:04:03.260woke. True. But we'll see. Yeah. Well, I, I hope, I hope that things go well. I mean,
01:04:13.540obviously this transition is a mess. Um, yeah, I hope that the vast majority of people up here in
01:04:21.760Canada wish everybody in the U S well, well, they, well, you go through this convulsive process of,
01:04:27.240of changing your government and that it's a change for the better. That would be something.
01:04:32.620It should not be convulsive. I'm, I'm personally embarrassed as an American
01:04:36.920that a sitting president is declaring victory. Um, like as if we're, uh, a third world nation that
01:04:46.880struggles with, you know, authoritarian dictators coming to power. It's embarrassing to me.
01:04:52.080Well, it is striking though, how close your elections have been what for the last four elections.
01:04:59.620Um, your country is so evenly split down the middle that it's kind of miracle.
01:05:03.580Or you could say that the, the parties just do a very good job of competing with one another
01:05:10.240is another way of thinking about it. Yes. Yes. Fair enough. And equally valid way of thinking about
01:05:18.060it. Any idea when your book is going to be finished and, and then also published a depressingly long
01:05:25.340time from now, so much so that it's not worth dwelling upon. Oh, well, that's good. It gives you
01:05:30.800something important to do continually. Yes. And the opportunity, as you said, to, to clarify your
01:05:36.780thoughts. There's nothing like protracted writing to help you manage that. Absolutely.
01:05:47.080Well, that, that's usually when I call time at about an hour. If you want to continue,
01:05:54.200we can continue, but, uh, I think we should probably call it a night, especially with first
01:06:00.540podcast in two years. Well, I think, I think, um, let me say on behalf of, you know, of, of everyone
01:06:08.880that, you know, the world is very glad to have you back. Yes. Well, I'm very glad to be back if I am in
01:06:17.320fact back. So, but it was certainly a pleasure to be able to do this tonight. And, and as I said,
01:06:23.320to see you again and to hear about what you're up to, I hope that your endeavors continue to breed
01:06:29.300success and that you have the best of luck with your podcast. Thank you very much. That podcast is
01:06:35.340conversations with Coleman, by the way. Um, you can subscribe to that on all the normal channels and
01:06:42.320routes. Where else can people find you? You can find me on Twitter at cold X man. You can find me
01:06:49.320at colemanhughes.org. And, um, yep. Those are my main avenues. Well, thank you very much for coming on.
01:06:58.360My pleasure. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Absolutely.