The Megyn Kelly Show - John McWhorter on MLK's Message, Fixing Our Culture's Focus on Race, and Nasty Words

00:00:00.000 When I found out my friend got a great deal

00:00:02.160 on a wool coat from Winners,

00:00:03.760 I started wondering,

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00:00:08.560 Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.

00:00:11.260 Are those from Winners?

00:00:12.780 Ooh, or those beautiful gold earrings?

00:00:15.260 Did she pay full price?

00:00:16.600 Or that leather tote?

00:00:17.620 Or that cashmere sweater?

00:00:18.840 Or those knee-high boots?

00:00:20.280 That dress?

00:00:21.060 That jacket?

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00:00:25.720 Stop wondering.

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00:00:30.600 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.520 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:41.900 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.020 Oh, we've got a treat for you today.

00:00:47.080 Professor John McWhorter is here.

00:00:50.580 He is brilliant.

00:00:52.820 He's so smart.

00:00:54.260 He is a linguist at Columbia University.

00:00:57.000 He teaches linguistics, among other subjects.

00:01:00.140 And we're going to talk to him about what the hell does that mean?

00:01:03.220 I didn't totally understand it until just now.

00:01:06.100 He also is pals with Glenn Lowry.

00:01:08.520 And the two of them do The Glenn Show together and do a show on Blogging Heads TV together.

00:01:14.580 He has his own podcast called Lexicon Valley, which this is how it's described.

00:01:19.540 A show about language from pet peeves, syntax, and etymology to neurolinguistics and the death

00:01:25.100 of languages.

00:01:25.740 So you can check that if you want, but you're going to love him on this show, I can promise

00:01:30.240 you.

00:01:30.640 Because in addition to just having authored a book about swears and other nasty words,

00:01:36.160 the name of the book is Nine Nasty Words.

00:01:38.320 He's a thinker.

00:01:39.820 He's a deep thinker on especially issues of race.

00:01:43.620 And unlike Glenn, he's not a conservative.

00:01:45.920 He's a liberal.

00:01:47.220 But he's where I think a lot of us are, which is just in the land of reason.

00:01:50.760 No matter his political stripes, he's in the land of reason.

00:01:53.680 He's been called all the names, but he keeps saying the things that you're not supposed to

00:01:57.400 say and really has some deep thoughts on is systemic racism a thing?

00:02:01.700 And is it even the right question?

00:02:03.340 Or should we be talking about solutions?

00:02:04.820 Should we be talking about something else entirely?

00:02:07.080 And what are they?

00:02:08.000 And he's got real ones to offer, which we could actually do like tomorrow.

00:02:12.560 Anyway, you're going to love John McWhorter.

00:02:14.260 He's super funny, which I don't I don't know if I totally understood that until today.

00:02:19.180 Maybe it's the little boy in me brings out people's humor from time to time, including

00:02:24.360 my own.

00:02:25.600 Anyway, enjoy him.

00:02:27.000 We'll get to him in one second.

00:02:28.360 First this.

00:02:34.820 I'm really excited to have you on this program.

00:02:38.000 I've been I've been your fan for a long time and I've been listening to you for a long time.

00:02:42.020 And I feel like you and Glenn got me through the past year.

00:02:45.460 And even prior to that, when I just, you know, like a lot of people felt like I was losing

00:02:49.220 my mind, you know, and it's like I need sanity.

00:02:52.160 And I love that you in here are not totally aligned politically so I can hear different

00:02:55.480 points of view.

00:02:56.680 Thank you.

00:02:57.160 So I'm going to start with a thank you.

00:02:58.840 Oh, gosh.

00:02:59.420 Yes.

00:02:59.580 Thank you for what you do.

00:03:00.940 Honestly, it's very brave.

00:03:02.900 Have to stick with it because somebody has to do this.

00:03:05.940 That is my feeling and Glenn's feeling.

00:03:08.540 But yeah, thank you.

00:03:09.340 Thank you very much.

00:03:10.740 Well, and I, of course, am late to the party because you've been talking about this as far

00:03:15.840 as I know, you've been black your entire life.

00:03:18.060 And pretty much you've been talking about these issues for years now.

00:03:23.800 I mean, way ahead of it.

00:03:24.660 And when I was preparing for the interview, I got to see that.

00:03:28.580 And that's where I want to start.

00:03:29.580 So I went.

00:03:29.960 One of the things I watched was you at the Soho Forum, which is this place where they

00:03:35.200 do debates, open debates on smart things that people should check out back in 2018.

00:03:39.700 And you were debating Nikhil Singh from NYU, right?

00:03:43.680 The history professor, I think, at NYU.

00:03:45.780 And the two of you were debating the question.

00:03:49.680 Everyone should watch this, by the way.

00:03:50.840 You can Google it.

00:03:51.460 Whether anti-racism is a religion that is more dangerous to the United States than racism.

00:03:59.280 That's my own summary of it.

00:04:00.460 He dismissed what he called the intelligentsia's power to really dominate this discussion.

00:04:07.160 And he downplayed the influence of people like Ta-Nehisi Coates back then as a thought

00:04:11.440 leader who's really driving people's beliefs on this.

00:04:14.240 Because you were sounding the alarm saying, no, no, no, no, no, they do have the power

00:04:20.040 to dominate the discussion.

00:04:21.180 This is a real problem and it is taking over.

00:04:23.880 And three years later, would you like to go back and do a mic drop?

00:04:29.800 You know, Megan, I had genuinely never thought of that because you live your life, you know,

00:04:34.620 month to month.

00:04:35.280 I didn't realize that that was now as far back as 2018.

00:04:39.560 And I had never thought about the fact that, yeah, his point, you know, he was very, very

00:04:44.200 good.

00:04:44.580 He knows an awful lot.

00:04:45.840 His point was that really I was somebody who was getting my knickers in a twist about things

00:04:51.380 that people talk about who read The Atlantic and, you know, listen to NPR and, you know,

00:04:57.020 this intelligentsia.

00:04:58.040 And that it didn't have anything to do with the real world where, for example, what he

00:05:02.180 meant, although he didn't really stress it that much, is that there is disproportionate

00:05:05.960 police brutality against black men, which is a whole other question.

00:05:10.240 And I was trying to do an N run around him by beginning that whole thing by saying that

00:05:14.900 we don't hear about the white people these things happen to.

00:05:17.360 But still, he had his point.

00:05:19.800 And, you know, it's true that nowadays I'm not one for patting myself on the back in this

00:05:25.200 sort of sense.

00:05:26.060 But nowadays, I think it has been resoundingly proven since last summer that this kind of

00:05:30.260 ideology is not just a bunch of pointy headed people talking about Ta-Nehisi Coates.

00:05:34.820 It now really is clearly permeating the way ordinary people are living and thinking all

00:05:40.160 over the United States.

00:05:41.240 I can't say that I would have predicted it would have gotten this extreme in 2018 because

00:05:45.240 I'm not that good.

00:05:46.380 Nevertheless, I do feel that if he and I had that debate now, things would be quite different.

00:05:51.120 And he would have a harder time because what I was portraying America as it even now more

00:05:57.060 is than it was then.

00:05:59.120 I'd love to get his thoughts on it because one of the points he ceded to you was, I agree

00:06:04.140 that the way to bring people around on my way of thinking, this is Professor Singh saying

00:06:09.980 on my way of thinking that anti-racism is the way and we should be more attentive to race

00:06:14.660 and so on, is not to berate them or shame them or guilt them, right?

00:06:19.260 Like he gave you that point.

00:06:21.120 I'd love to hear what he thinks about that three years later, because I feel like while

00:06:25.920 both of you were agreeing, the real answer to racist systems or racism in the United States

00:06:33.140 is really policy or certainly to the plight of people who are struggling in black America,

00:06:38.400 for lack of a better term.

00:06:39.140 Exactly.

00:06:39.960 Is policy, is policy prescriptions.

00:06:42.620 You both settled on that.

00:06:43.920 And meanwhile, it seems like all of the explosion over the past year or so has been in the stuff

00:06:51.260 even he didn't like, which is the lecturing, the berating, the guilting, the words that

00:06:56.220 we're trying to and just trying to thought police everybody as opposed to prescribing actual

00:07:01.720 actions and policies that might improve race relations and life for black people in America.

00:07:07.820 And of course, a lot of people are listening to you saying that and they're going to tweet

00:07:11.580 out, no, that's not true because I'm also interested in these active policy, activist

00:07:15.780 policies.

00:07:16.320 But the problem is that the substrate, especially since roughly last June, has been so dominated

00:07:22.020 by all of the thought policing and all of the language policing and all of the shaming,

00:07:26.960 often for transgressions that no one would have thought of as such before about 10 minutes

00:07:32.800 ago.

00:07:33.080 And yeah, what's scary is that a whole generation of people is beginning to think that all of

00:07:39.080 this attitudinizing and kabuki is the work, as you put it, that the idea is to seek this

00:07:45.320 quixotic and rather romantic psychological revolution that all whites are going to go through

00:07:50.620 and that after that we'll reach the rapture or whatever it is that's supposed to happen.

00:07:54.860 When really what we're supposed to be thinking about is what do you do out on the ground to

00:07:58.700 create real change for real people?

00:08:01.740 And the only reason that this confusion is allowed such hegemony is because of social

00:08:06.480 media.

00:08:07.220 Basically, all of this is a nation of intelligent people operating out of fear into pretending

00:08:14.620 to be aligned with a project that actually doesn't make any sense.

00:08:19.020 I've never known anything like it.

00:08:20.760 I couldn't have predicted this is what social media was going to do.

00:08:23.140 But what we have is a reign of terror, not of people being beheaded, but a reign of terror

00:08:28.680 where people pretend that activism is essentially a kind of a furious twerking instead of going

00:08:35.860 out into the world and helping real people.

00:08:39.540 Yeah, right.

00:08:40.240 That it's so well put.

00:08:42.620 And if you dare step outside of that performative behavior, if you dare say, I'm not totally

00:08:50.860 buying it and I don't really like the way you're talking about it and I'm not sure I'm

00:08:54.360 on board for the discussion to be framed this way, of course, you get called names.

00:08:59.620 And I mean, I will.

00:09:00.400 Of course, I've experienced this many times, but the most reason was I went on Bill Maher

00:09:04.100 and I was talking to him about what's happening in New York City private schools where I pulled

00:09:08.260 my kids because of all this crazy, quote, anti-racism, critical race theory agenda being

00:09:13.680 shoved on them, not to mention like really crazy stuff on trans education.

00:09:18.660 And so it's not just all race.

00:09:20.320 Exactly.

00:09:21.000 And I saw some YouTube videos of I confess they weren't very popular hosts because they

00:09:27.620 didn't have a lot of followers, but a fair amount of black commentators who host these

00:09:31.860 YouTube shows saying that the remarks were abhorrent, that they were horrific.

00:09:36.440 Bill Maher and I talking about how this is not the way forward, telling little white

00:09:40.800 kids that they're white supremacists, no matter what they do, because they were born with a

00:09:43.980 certain melanin, is not the way forward.

00:09:46.640 And I was like, I can't believe that the discussion has gotten this nuts, right?

00:09:51.220 Like you can't even push back that much by saying, don't don't tell my seven year old

00:09:54.460 he's a white supremacist.

00:09:56.140 It's a it's a it's absurd.

00:09:58.280 What's interesting about all of this is that we really do have this new idea that, yes, you

00:10:03.140 are to be judged on the color of your skin.

00:10:05.620 So Martin Luther King said that that's not what things were supposed to be about.

00:10:09.660 And it wasn't just him.

00:10:11.200 The real idea among black people of almost all walks was let's get past this business

00:10:17.160 of judging us by the melanin in our skin.

00:10:21.400 And now here we are in a time when a bunch of people who feel like they are at the head

00:10:26.140 of time and have hit upon the truth, just as Martin Luther King, whereas in his case he

00:10:30.620 was correct, but Martin Luther King did.

00:10:32.540 They really think of themselves as bearers of a higher wisdom, think that we are supposed

00:10:36.500 to divide people into different groups so that white people will learn that they're

00:10:40.340 evil and black people will learn that what makes them interesting is that they're noble

00:10:44.240 survivors because they're dealing with whites evil all the time.

00:10:47.660 And, you know, if I put it that way, and I think a great many of us and I feel so sorry

00:10:52.120 for parents like you, Megan, where you have to take your children out of a school where

00:10:55.400 that sort of thing is being preached.

00:10:56.900 Everybody knows this doesn't make sense.

00:10:58.940 It's as simple as that I could explain this to my nine year old, I think it'd be a bit

00:11:03.120 much for the six year old, the nine year old would get it that there's been a major

00:11:06.300 perversion of the Martin Luther King who she's already been taught about in school, but you're

00:11:11.340 not allowed to say so.

00:11:12.920 Because if you really do push back against it in clear language and refuse to blink, you

00:11:17.420 are called a white supremacist on Twitter, on YouTube.

00:11:20.860 And most people aren't up for being bald like that.

00:11:23.420 And so everybody pretends.

00:11:24.960 It is the most mendacious moment I am aware of in the history of this republic.

00:11:30.840 And that is only partly hyperbole.

00:11:33.100 I know of no time when America has lived with such a lie.

00:11:37.820 And I know some people are going to say, well, what about the lie of racism?

00:11:40.300 OK, very poetic.

00:11:41.280 But I'm talking about a real lie.

00:11:43.600 All of us are being made to lie, except for a few of us who really just can't stand it.

00:11:47.480 And apparently we're terrible people.

00:11:49.880 It's a really peculiar time to be an American.

00:11:52.980 And just just for the record, it shouldn't matter.

00:11:55.000 But I would like to note you refer to yourself as a cranky liberal Democrat here.

00:11:59.660 You're not.

00:12:00.560 And then Glenn's not Glenn's.

00:12:01.980 He's a cranky conservative.

00:12:04.240 And so it's not it's not I've been saying so many times this isn't about black and white

00:12:09.040 and it isn't about left and right.

00:12:10.500 I think it's a question of reason versus unreason.

00:12:12.940 And you're on the side of reason.

00:12:14.960 This isn't about partisan politics.

00:12:17.260 It's about what you as you put it, what, you know, is a lie and finding the courage

00:12:22.120 to call it out, even though you know what they're going to call you.

00:12:26.460 Yeah.

00:12:26.620 And, you know, the funniest thing about this, I had to learn this from the beginning.

00:12:29.420 I've been whatever I've been doing about race.

00:12:31.980 I've now been doing it for 21 years.

00:12:33.620 And one of the first things I had to get used to was the idea that if I say the things

00:12:37.080 I'm saying to you, it means that I'm a conservative Republican person and I had to wrap

00:12:42.660 my head around and realize, OK, I see what they mean by that.

00:12:45.560 But even today, there are people who only know so much about me.

00:12:49.180 And that's fine.

00:12:50.000 You know, we can't all know everything about everybody.

00:12:51.900 But they assume that, you know, that I voted for Donald Trump, that, you know, I am against

00:12:57.840 a woman's right to have abortion.

00:12:59.460 They're going to associate me with various positions.

00:13:01.360 And that I'm a conservative and that I, you know, must be reading my William F.

00:13:06.360 Buckley, et cetera.

00:13:07.360 And I have respect for conservative positions.

00:13:10.380 And I will openly say I have some serious problems with what's happened to Republicans

00:13:14.860 over about the past 12 years.

00:13:16.440 But I am not one to dehumanize Republicans the way many people do.

00:13:21.020 But, yeah, the categories that people try to slip you into these days, nothing I'm saying

00:13:25.460 is about liberal, conservative, right wing, left wing.

00:13:29.020 It's just about, you know, what Glenn and I are both trying to do is make some sort of

00:13:32.660 sense of things.

00:13:33.940 And the old categories just don't work, especially because what's going on now is this takeover

00:13:39.840 by inflamed, although well-intentioned radicals in a way that really parallels the cultural

00:13:47.620 revolution in China.

00:13:48.800 It's the same thing, except people aren't being physically threatened.

00:13:51.700 And yet the people in question can't see it.

00:13:53.500 To be against that is not to be somebody who likes to go read a book full of speeches

00:14:00.420 by Ronald Reagan to put himself to sleep.

00:14:02.360 It has nothing to do with that.

00:14:04.020 It's just trying to make some sense of this crazy world.

00:14:07.240 That's right.

00:14:07.640 No, I mentioned this the other day, but all my friends here in New York are liberals, you

00:14:12.080 know, and that's the nature of our town.

00:14:14.420 And two of my most committed liberal friends have been so frustrated by the school shutdown and

00:14:19.880 the fact that their kids just they don't get to go on Wednesdays, their child, their

00:14:24.460 middle school child gets the pleasure of two 45 minute zooms.

00:14:30.320 That's his day.

00:14:31.240 And one day a week he gets to attend class for four hours.

00:14:34.500 That's not a year.

00:14:36.100 No.

00:14:36.520 Now we're a year into this as a middle school kid.

00:14:39.000 He needs to be with his friends.

00:14:40.460 Right.

00:14:41.020 So they went to a, you know, open the schools rally this past weekend.

00:14:44.840 And what did they walk into?

00:14:46.500 People chanting and putting up big signs, calling them white supremacists.

00:14:49.320 Because they want the schools to open.

00:14:51.840 So even they are who would have been, I think, 100 percent on board with sort of the, you

00:14:56.720 know, Abram X.

00:14:57.980 Kendi rhetoric a year ago are are rethinking things because they're that the lie gets exposed

00:15:03.380 bit by bit when you see how it's used so indiscriminately, situationally and versus

00:15:09.680 any given person.

00:15:11.680 We are we're animals, Megan.

00:15:14.160 I think all of us on a certain level enjoy having a reason to look down on other people.

00:15:20.980 We're all in it.

00:15:22.480 I have that.

00:15:23.600 It's a natural human impulse.

00:15:24.860 You see it in the sandbox.

00:15:26.160 Adults just do it in more genteel ways.

00:15:28.760 And that's part of what we're seeing here.

00:15:31.040 It's fun to call somebody a white supremacist, especially if you're white.

00:15:34.460 And so it's a way of just saying you're a bad person.

00:15:39.900 And therefore, a lot of this is a natural human impulse.

00:15:43.220 I don't think any of these people are crazy.

00:15:44.940 It's not about people going out of their minds.

00:15:46.380 It's not about people who are trying to accrue, you know, resources for themselves.

00:15:52.500 It's just that it's fun to diss people and to feel part of a group.

00:15:55.780 It gives you a sense of community.

00:15:56.880 But that means that you have a middle school kid who hasn't had real school for what to them feels like about 15 years.

00:16:02.940 And you start getting vocal about it at a time when the pandemic is very clearly and presently lifting.

00:16:08.080 And you get called the same thing that people used to be called who wanted to hang black men from trees.

00:16:13.500 Something is very, very wrong.

00:16:17.160 You know, it's it's I know you've got it.

00:16:19.500 You've got a book out now to nine nasty words.

00:16:23.060 It's the new George Carlin, who you talk about in the beginning of the book and his old seven words.

00:16:26.880 And you've got you've got more.

00:16:28.640 But just the discussion, because you're a linguist.

00:16:31.180 And I want to get to that later, professor of linguistics, among others.

00:16:34.580 And I was like, I think that means words.

00:16:37.760 So you can help us understand.

00:16:40.220 I went to public school, John.

00:16:42.920 Help us understand what that means and help us understand how like even your book about nine nasty words and the power of saying them kind of dovetails into what you're saying right now.

00:16:52.620 Calling somebody a white supremacist, how it makes you feel.

00:16:55.080 You know, Megan, I'm going to say to you that the honest truth is that they're kind of two me's.

00:17:02.040 One of them is this linguist.

00:17:03.500 One of them is this race commentator.

00:17:05.220 The intersection between the two is thin.

00:17:07.960 One of them is probably the N word.

00:17:10.000 And it happens that these days, for understandable reasons, people want to hear from me a lot about that.

00:17:15.220 And so nine nasty words was written long before the racial reckoning of last summer.

00:17:19.700 And I was just trying to be jolly linguist.

00:17:21.580 I put in an N word chapter because I think that's one of our new profanities.

00:17:26.060 And also as a black person, of course, I have a certain interest in it.

00:17:28.780 But, you know, there's the N word.

00:17:30.240 There's the F word with six letters that is used for gay men.

00:17:34.760 And there's some really nasty words used for women.

00:17:37.460 And the N word was just one of the slurs.

00:17:40.020 Then all of a sudden last summer happens and I got mad.

00:17:43.140 And when I get mad, I write books.

00:17:44.700 Nine Nasty Words was written out of joy.

00:17:46.840 But some of my books are written because I'm angry and I want to have my point.

00:17:49.720 And that is what the second book is about.

00:17:53.980 And so it's these two things.

00:17:56.240 And I can pretend that they were written by the same person.

00:18:01.160 But in a way, they were written by very different means.

00:18:03.480 But linguistics, for example, let me give you a sense of something a linguist noticed that no sane person would.

00:18:08.460 But you can analyze it.

00:18:09.700 So, for example, is not.

00:18:11.820 Those two words.

00:18:12.460 Now, you can contract it to say, he isn't.

00:18:19.080 Okay.

00:18:19.840 Or you can say, he's not.

00:18:23.660 Do you ever think about that?

00:18:24.840 You can contract in two ways.

00:18:26.320 He's not.

00:18:27.080 No, but I accept it.

00:18:28.160 He isn't.

00:18:29.280 Now, of course, you're thinking, well, who cares?

00:18:30.780 But the truth is there are reasons for things like that.

00:18:34.640 Often they vary between people depending on their social class or even their gender.

00:18:39.180 Do you know that men say, huh?

00:18:41.880 Women say, hmm, more often.

00:18:44.680 Not always.

00:18:45.320 But that's something that you never think about.

00:18:47.340 Nobody would tell you.

00:18:48.340 That's the sort of thing that a linguist might notice.

00:18:51.060 And so all of it, a lot of it is very pointy-headed little stuff that's a lot of fun.

00:18:55.520 You know, what language is related to which one.

00:18:58.200 Romanian is full of Russian words.

00:18:59.860 But actually, you can think of it as a kind of Italian.

00:19:02.040 Then there's this race commentary, which is about completely different things.

00:19:06.760 And so the intersection is the N-word, where, of course, you have to talk about the linguistics

00:19:11.620 of how you get from Latin niger, which means black, to, for example, a word that black men

00:19:16.740 use to mean buddy, and that now you have white men using to mean buddy, too, because they

00:19:21.360 grew up listening to hip-hop.

00:19:22.420 That's linguistic stuff.

00:19:23.740 But then it intersects with what it means to be black, what it means to be a white person

00:19:27.840 who likes black people, whether white people like black people enough.

00:19:30.440 All of it is a very large subject, where I am kind of straddling the two.

00:19:37.000 And it's awkward, but it's also fun, because the truth is, to me, linguistics and race relations

00:19:42.640 are like the film The Wizard of Oz and a slide with an amoeba on it.

00:19:49.920 They have nothing to do with each other, but I have to pretend that they do often.

00:19:53.980 It did catch my eye when I was sort of studying up over these issues, all of these issues over

00:20:00.700 the summer, because you, I noticed, are a professor of linguistics, and then there's

00:20:05.240 Steven Pinker, right, at Harvard.

00:20:07.100 He's a linguistics guy, too, and he talks about a lot of these same issues and gets in

00:20:11.240 trouble.

00:20:11.980 There's a big push to get him in trouble for using terms like urban, which some of his

00:20:16.560 colleagues said was racist.

00:20:17.860 I mean, it's crazy, as you know.

00:20:19.240 But I was like, what is it?

00:20:20.620 And also, Glenn, he's an economist, and there's a fair amount of economists who speak out about

00:20:24.160 things like this.

00:20:24.760 And I'm like, what is it, like Thomas Sowell, like, what is it with linguistics and economics

00:20:29.740 that are bringing so many people of different political stripes to the same conclusion when

00:20:34.380 it comes to anti-racism?

00:20:36.620 And I know you don't like the term woke, but wokeism and that kind of stuff.

00:20:40.340 You know, that's that's interesting.

00:20:41.740 And, you know, there's George Lakoff.

00:20:43.440 He's another linguist who has pitched in on political issues.

00:20:46.540 Race is not his beat, so we haven't heard from him as much lately.

00:20:50.720 But he was definitely especially popular in the media in the aughts and is, you know,

00:20:56.140 hardly unknown now.

00:20:57.520 Noam Chomsky, of course, is a linguist and then also is somebody who has political positions.

00:21:02.620 Steve Pinker, my friend, my friend Steven Pinker, he I don't know that he would necessarily

00:21:07.940 position himself as a contrarian, a professional contrarian, the way that I apparently am.

00:21:13.620 But yes, he is a linguist who does this sort of thing.

00:21:17.440 And then you have your your economists.

00:21:19.420 It's a funny thing.

00:21:20.360 I don't know what the reason for that would be.

00:21:22.300 I think you could also find many anthropologists and political scientists who are doing the

00:21:26.240 same thing.

00:21:26.760 But, you know, why is it, for example, you can see I'm thinking out loud.

00:21:29.800 Walter Williams and Glenn Lowry are economists and Thomas Sowell is an economist.

00:21:36.880 And here they are talking about race issues.

00:21:39.200 You know what it is with economists, it's that economics is so rigidly empirical in many

00:21:46.220 ways.

00:21:46.820 It's harder to data economics with bias.

00:21:49.660 And so if you're a black economist, it's easier and it's by no means inevitable, but

00:21:54.360 it's easier to see what I think of as the truth to not do what I think we're often trained

00:21:59.800 to do as if I may thinking people, which is that when you think about race, you're supposed

00:22:04.140 to sequester your thoughts into a part of your brain that is not entirely bound by logic,

00:22:10.000 which is what I mean by the religion on race.

00:22:12.180 You're supposed to believe certain things that, frankly, don't make a whole lot of sense.

00:22:14.980 That's probably harder for an economist in terms of linguists.

00:22:19.860 I think the linguists who do political commentary have such very different perspectives that I

00:22:25.320 think I would just say that we linguists are academics and academics sometimes like to

00:22:30.320 switch it.

00:22:31.420 And that might be it.

00:22:32.260 Coming up, we're going to talk about systemic racism.

00:22:35.480 Is it real?

00:22:36.440 Is it is it actually a thing?

00:22:37.860 You remember Adam Grant and I had a debate on this.

00:22:39.840 And is it even the right thing to be asking?

00:22:42.740 That's next.

00:22:47.760 So much of this discussion on systemic racism and so on is based on data, on numbers, things

00:22:53.720 that actually can be added up and judged.

00:22:56.520 I mean, listening to Thomas Sowell talk about mandatory minimum wages, you know, raising it

00:23:02.120 to the fifteen dollars or what have you really will change the way you think about those

00:23:05.880 things.

00:23:06.160 I mean, just growing up in a family that was middle class, I was always on the favor in

00:23:10.040 favor of the Democrats positions on these issues.

00:23:11.820 I'm like, yes, more minimum wage is better.

00:23:13.960 That's where I'm going to wind up.

00:23:14.980 Right.

00:23:15.180 That's that's that's my experience.

00:23:17.620 So you want what's good, be good for you.

00:23:19.720 Right.

00:23:19.940 And then you learn more.

00:23:20.920 You listen to somebody like Sowell talk about, well, no, because this is what happens.

00:23:24.460 It freezes out many people who are in the black community in particular or who are lower in

00:23:28.380 terms of the the skills that are required and they just won't get hired.

00:23:32.240 They'll get they'll wind up with nothing.

00:23:33.580 And then the people who call themselves anti-racist seem more like they're on the side of the racist

00:23:37.740 because this is going to be good for one group, but not the group they think it's

00:23:40.140 going to be good for.

00:23:41.040 Anyway, it just requires you to be open minded and go down the lane of listening to folks.

00:23:44.880 So on that front, let me talk to you about systemic racism.

00:23:49.020 This is the big term.

00:23:50.060 And I know I read you, you, you wrote a piece in Barry Weiss's amazing sub stack saying this

00:23:55.580 is the most nettlesome term in the English language.

00:23:58.760 I love the word nettlesome.

00:24:00.160 I also look that up.

00:24:02.520 It's annoying, right?

00:24:03.800 I don't know.

00:24:04.660 It's annoying.

00:24:05.520 That's my take on it.

00:24:07.940 And and and I understand why.

00:24:10.500 Right.

00:24:10.720 Because it just gets abused and I think misused.

00:24:13.520 And who the hell knows what people are trying to encompass with it.

00:24:17.980 But I do want to talk to you about it because I just had Adam Grant on the program author.

00:24:23.220 He's a professor at Wharton.

00:24:24.940 Great guy.

00:24:26.040 I know, Adam.

00:24:26.420 Yeah, that's right.

00:24:27.380 Yeah.

00:24:27.600 We had a good discussion about systemic racism.

00:24:30.400 And I said, you know, I've been questioning.

00:24:32.260 I don't rule it out.

00:24:33.040 I'm not like, you know, one of these far right firebrands.

00:24:36.260 He's like, no, no, it isn't.

00:24:38.820 It's all been solved.

00:24:39.660 That's not me.

00:24:40.760 I'm open minded.

00:24:41.860 But I'm also really data based.

00:24:44.020 And when I look at, for example, the number of shootings of cops by black men, I'm not

00:24:48.600 persuaded that there is a systemic problem on the cops shooting black men in disproportionate

00:24:54.000 rates to the crime rate.

00:24:55.320 I know you've spoken out on that, too.

00:24:56.400 But can I just ask you, when I look at other areas and I heard some of this in your debate

00:25:00.680 at the Soho Forum, again, with Singh, I'm like, OK, I'd like to know more because I know

00:25:08.300 you sort of have said, OK, I'm going to give you some of these things, but not all race

00:25:13.040 based inequities are due to prejudice.

00:25:14.700 Right.

00:25:15.080 We have to probe further.

00:25:16.200 But can I just get you to comment on a couple of the things he raised in particular?

00:25:20.800 Sure.

00:25:21.240 Because some of this stuff is cited pretty broadly.

00:25:23.800 And I got my attention for sure.

00:25:26.400 He was talking about, for example, the effect of race on hiring, saying employers will sooner

00:25:31.380 hire a white man who has a criminal record than a black man who has no record, citing

00:25:37.060 stats that say he was citing Dr. Deva Prager, who is a Harvard sociologist, now deceased.

00:25:43.220 Five percent of blacks with a criminal record got a callback for the job interview.

00:25:47.140 Seventeen percent of whites who had a criminal record got what?

00:25:49.800 Got a callback.

00:25:50.380 OK, so already disparate.

00:25:52.100 And 14 percent of blacks without a criminal record got a callback.

00:25:55.520 So 17 percent of whites with a criminal record get called back.

00:25:58.420 14 percent of blacks who have no criminal record got called back.

00:26:00.800 So you can see the point.

00:26:03.700 He said black people pay more for identical housing than their white counterparts.

00:26:07.360 And the more white the neighborhood, the higher cost of entry to blacks trying to move in.

00:26:11.260 He said not having a high school degree is the greatest predictor of whether you wind up in the criminal justice system.

00:26:18.940 But he said four out of five black men who don't graduate from high school wind up in prison, whereas only one out of 10 whites do.

00:26:25.780 So and and all those things, I was like, hmm, all right, that does these sound problematic.

00:26:32.600 So and then we got you guys got into stop and frisk, which has been ruled unconstitutional because 85 percent of those stopped were either black or Latino.

00:26:40.280 And even though the crime rate went down in New York City, the courts have found at too high a cost, at too high a cost.

00:26:46.380 And I've heard very reasonable people talk about this, saying this is a big part of the distrust of police in the New York City area.

00:26:52.260 And black black men do not trust cops here because for so many years, 10 years, they were just pulled over because they looked they looked suspicious.

00:27:01.580 I mean, that was and that's real.

00:27:02.800 Yeah, exactly.

00:27:03.300 Yeah. So anyway, what are your thoughts on those numbers he was rattling off, which some of which we hear in modern day, modern day, three years later in those discussions today, too?

00:27:11.740 Yeah. The issue is not whether there are race based disparities in society.

00:27:17.240 The issue is, one, where they came from and to whether just standing with your hands in your pockets and saying what we need to do is get rid of the racism to solve that problem makes any sense.

00:27:28.060 And so, for example, with the 4 percent and the 17 percent, with what kind of person with a criminal record gets hired, those facts are not fair.

00:27:39.140 That's something that should be aired and the people in question should be made aware of their biases on that score.

00:27:45.860 But the question is, how much of an effect do those numbers have on whether or not a black person gets a job?

00:27:53.760 So let's say that there's one job where there is somebody with that kind of bias and so they don't get it.

00:27:58.260 Do they only apply to one job?

00:27:59.920 I don't think most of us would be able to imagine that becoming employed would mean knocking on one door.

00:28:05.460 The issue is, are doors closed to them to such an extent that it's unrealistic to expect them to have a job or that it would create some sort of economic crisis?

00:28:14.520 To me, a lot of those statistics, by no means all of them, a lot of them are kind of like men say, huh, and women say, hmm.

00:28:22.520 You have to be told.

00:28:23.840 You'll find it if you do an analysis.

00:28:25.820 But the question is, what effect does it really have on society?

00:28:28.920 The analogy is imprecise but still useful.

00:28:31.300 On the criminal justice system, what it comes down to is this.

00:28:35.080 Let's just try this.

00:28:36.340 Black men are overrepresented in prisons.

00:28:38.820 There's no doubt about that.

00:28:41.000 Now, you want to say, why is that?

00:28:43.580 Now, many people will say it's because black men get sentenced differently.

00:28:47.360 The data on that has always been dueling studies, very hard to come to conclusions.

00:28:53.540 But let's say that it is that black men tend to have those sentences tend to be there longer because of the nature of their records.

00:29:02.460 I think it's more productive to say, why is it that they have that kind of criminal record?

00:29:07.280 And many people would say because of the communities that they grow up in.

00:29:11.240 OK, what's the problem in communities that would lead young black men to commit more and more violent crimes?

00:29:17.680 Because, frankly, they do.

00:29:19.520 They just do.

00:29:20.060 The data is in.

00:29:20.740 But the question is, why?

00:29:21.960 Because the answer is not going to be that they're less human or that there's something wrong with them, that there's some pathology.

00:29:26.840 You want to ask, why do they commit more of these crimes?

00:29:29.000 And you might say that it's poverty and that's going to be part of it.

00:29:33.760 But there are other poor people, too, who don't commit that kind of disproportionate crime.

00:29:38.280 You can look at Latinos.

00:29:39.420 You can look at also poor whites, as we are now increasingly doing.

00:29:43.000 So it's not only that.

00:29:43.880 So there must be something else and it's not going to be pathology.

00:29:46.820 So how about the epidemic of fatherlessness?

00:29:50.360 Many people would say that most of those boys do not grow up with a dad.

00:29:54.020 Well, why is that?

00:29:55.220 Because often the dads do long spells in prison, and even when they come out, they can't really be dads.

00:30:01.240 Now, why is that?

00:30:02.620 Well, a lot of that stems from the war on drugs, which has had a disproportionate effect upon black communities.

00:30:09.060 Now, many people would say there's systemic racism because the war on drugs was designed to round up black criminals.

00:30:15.140 Okay, that's half true, but it was also designed to take care of a crime wave in general that was perceived in the late 1960s.

00:30:23.780 And also, and this is what people actually at the time said, to crack down on the hippies and people who are smoking, all of these sorts of things to get rid of them.

00:30:32.960 Both of those things strike us as unjust now, but more to the point, to the extent that many people would say we have to think about the racism and not the hippies.

00:30:39.900 Black people in stressed communities were all in favor of laws that got black criminals off the street both then and when there were similar legislations in the early 90s.

00:30:51.360 And nobody is going to stand in the face.

00:30:53.240 Well, nowadays, you know, the white woke person kind of does, but you're not going to stand in the face of that black minister who was very happy to see these laws enacted, didn't know they were going to have such draconian effects, but was happy to see it happen and tell him that he was a white supremacist.

00:31:08.500 We all live our lives month to month and we work with what we've got.

00:31:12.400 So then you want to look at something else, which is that fatherlessness was also encouraged by a chapter of black history that is almost never told, which is that white Marxists starting in New York City encouraged poor black women to sign up for welfare that they didn't think that they needed.

00:31:28.300 The idea being to bankrupt the government so that we would start again.

00:31:32.720 That was a noble idea.

00:31:35.080 I have no problem with somebody thinking that that was going to work out.

00:31:37.660 I'm afraid that it didn't, but it also meant that fewer black couples got or stayed married than had even as recently as 1960.

00:31:45.800 Be that as it may, was that racism given that these white Marxists were about as unracist as white people got at the time?

00:31:52.220 All of which is to say, that was long, all of which is to say, is systemic racism why these black men are in jail?

00:31:59.860 The disproportionate is one thing, but social history is more complicated than Ibram X.

00:32:04.700 Kennedy would like us to believe.

00:32:06.660 And therefore the solution is it to turn out your hands and say, well, we're going to undo the racism and get these black men out of prison.

00:32:13.360 I don't know what that means.

00:32:14.080 Just let them out.

00:32:14.980 What?

00:32:15.600 It's just too oversimplified.

00:32:18.100 We're all taught that astrophysics is hard.

00:32:20.220 We're all taught that art history is hard.

00:32:22.540 We're taught that it's hard to do math.

00:32:23.820 But somehow when it's black people and social history, all of a sudden we're supposed to reason like we're four years old.

00:32:29.720 It's got to stop.

00:32:30.720 And a lot of our discussion of systemic racism is basically a very sweet way of telling us to dumb ourselves down.

00:32:37.760 And that won't save anybody's life.

00:32:40.800 So we're focusing on the wrong thing is what you're saying.

00:32:43.720 Yes, some of these systems may have some sort of systemic racism in there or may not.

00:32:49.520 It's complicated.

00:32:50.580 It may be multifactorial.

00:32:52.940 But what you would like to do is take the discussion to now what?

00:32:56.620 Now what?

00:32:57.180 And the people who are dominating the public microphones right now are certainly the publishing world like, you know, Ibram X.

00:33:04.100 Kendi and Robin DiAngelo want to start with shame.

00:33:08.020 And what they would say is awareness.

00:33:10.800 You know, even like Adam had recommended to me and trying to cure me of my questions about systemic racism, the book Biased by Jennifer Eberhardt, which I did order.

00:33:20.780 She's from Stanford.

00:33:21.920 And I have it and I've been reading it.

00:33:23.320 And one of the things she says is this whole thing, this MLK thing of not seeing color doesn't work.

00:33:30.180 That's unrealistic.

00:33:31.280 And she says when people focus on not seeing color, they may also fail to see discrimination.

00:33:39.140 So her answer, and I think the answer of a lot of people like Jennifer, is focus on it.

00:33:44.300 Look at color.

00:33:45.140 Look at your own.

00:33:45.740 Look at your neighbors.

00:33:46.720 Be aware of it.

00:33:47.620 And if you're a white person talking about this, just realize it's a privilege not to have to talk about or think about color.

00:33:55.300 And you need to check that privilege and get in the game and see the realities of the power structure.

00:34:02.080 Yeah.

00:34:02.480 And see, she's right to an extent.

00:34:04.760 We can't be colorblind.

00:34:06.260 I completely understand that.

00:34:08.380 We can't pretend that race doesn't exist as a matter of social perception.

00:34:12.520 We can't pretend that race doesn't exist in terms of history.

00:34:15.260 We can't pretend.

00:34:16.280 But even in what you're talking about there, there's that slide into if you're a white person, look around and see race.

00:34:25.020 Okay, I get that.

00:34:26.180 But then the rest of it is becoming if you're a white person, think of your view about these issues as invalid in comparison to any black persons, no matter what the black person says.

00:34:36.980 And there's a short step from that to the idea that white people are evil and need to understand that and black people are correct and noble no matter what we do.

00:34:45.540 And that's where you get to Robin DiAngelo's white fragility.

00:34:48.900 DiAngelo is different from Eberhardt.

00:34:50.620 Eberhardt is a book of sensible counsel.

00:34:53.600 But still, it slides into that idea of making it into us versus them, which channels our natural impulses to do Lord of the Flies.

00:35:02.480 And next thing you know, you've got white fragility held up as a New Testament of the Bible.

00:35:06.460 And there's a short step from there to Kendi, where I don't think that he is as interested in this idea of white people and black people squaring off in a room.

00:35:15.480 But his idea is that if there's a problem, if black people are not doing as well at something as white people, then stop asking them to do it.

00:35:23.840 And that's where you get Ibram Kendi saying that we shouldn't have standardized tests and giving a certain imprimatur to the idea that whiteness is precision and objectivity and that we need to get rid of it in favor of roughly jamming and talking about the streets that you came from and pretending that that makes you Proust.

00:35:42.620 Proust, that's him. And that's where Jennifer Eberhardt's counsel tends to go.

00:35:48.980 So next thing you know, you have the, you know, a white woman, college educated, maybe about 45, who was afraid to say anything about these things because she's been taught that she's evil.

00:36:01.740 And I've known some people like that who I can tell when they're talking to me, they don't know what to do because they know that I don't agree with a lot of this stuff.

00:36:07.660 But on the other hand, all of we black people are supposed to think the same.

00:36:10.240 And so what, where quite do you go? And I'm sitting there and she's looking at me as this person who's going to tell a story of black pain, and that's going to filter everything that I think about any issue worth addressing.

00:36:24.620 And I think to myself, no, I'm not that cartoon character. Frankly, I have a wider range of interests than that. That is not what I am.

00:36:30.660 I don't want you to think of me as this black man who is here to help help you absolve yourself of your complicitness in white supremacy.

00:36:42.520 I don't want to be that person. And I don't think most black people want to be that person.

00:36:46.340 The tragedy is that so many do. But I frankly think that's the kind of brainwashing that happens.

00:36:50.740 I think it's easy to fall into the noble victim sentiment because it is for all human beings.

00:36:55.740 But black people who like being treated that way are noble victims, just like many white people and Asian people and Latino people are noble victims for other reasons.

00:37:03.860 That's a noble victim. That is not the only way that a black person needs to be because there was slavery, Jim Crow and redlining.

00:37:10.680 It's one way of being black.

00:37:12.920 Mm hmm. Oh, there's so much to talk about in there. That was funny and awesome.

00:37:18.320 The the I know you talked about this when when talking about the N word and you said I first of all, you said why many ask why black people give whites the power to harm us so easily with this word.

00:37:33.240 And then you write, but I know I'm missing the point.

00:37:36.100 This performative transformation of the N word into a taboo term affects a kind of power.

00:37:41.280 This is to the point you were just making black elects, which is your your other word for the wokes, get a way of getting back at whites by destroying their careers.

00:37:51.400 White elects spectating get to show that they aren't racists by cheering on the witch hunting.

00:37:58.880 And so there's absolutely a performative element to this, as you point out.

00:38:01.960 And it's something that makes both both groups, black and white within the woke karate.

00:38:07.420 I'm really struggling with that term. Makes them sound way too sexy and fun into the winners, the ones who are right, who are moral, who have virtue versus the rest of us losers.

00:38:20.100 That's that's what this is. And I should say I'm not against woke.

00:38:22.960 Woke. I think it would surprise many people to know I consider myself quite woke.

00:38:27.200 I was raised by somebody who taught a course at Temple University in Philadelphia that for a while was literally called Racism 101.

00:38:35.480 That was my mother. And I did pay attention to my mother.

00:38:38.420 So I have the woke. It's woke people who are mean.

00:38:42.520 The elect is you're woke in a way that makes you feel that it's OK to defenestrate people because they're not as woke as you.

00:38:50.420 If that is you or if you give likes with a capital L to that kind of person on Facebook, that is what I'm calling the elect.

00:38:58.140 And yeah, what it means is that something doesn't make sense and yet you're supposed to pretend it does.

00:39:03.460 Don't say that word. Don't say a word that sounds like that word.

00:39:07.280 Don't say a word that sounds like that word, even if it's in Chinese or I'm going to fall to pieces and I'm going to have to go to the diversity counselor and I'm going to have to have therapy because it's just so hard to be black.

00:39:16.860 Don't utter that sequence of syllables. And then at the same time, you're talking about how black people are strong.

00:39:22.620 You're talking about black power and how we have survived.

00:39:25.680 So we have survived in order that if somebody says nega, nega in Mandarin, you're supposed to fall to pieces.

00:39:32.180 That's that's being a survivor. I don't think so. It doesn't make any sense.

00:39:36.620 Why would you give the word that kind of power if you like yourself?

00:39:39.520 That's all. And yet, because pretending to be hurt by the word in that way gives you a power in our context, especially with social media, of making white people very, very uncomfortable and even destroying their careers by uttering that sequence of sounds.

00:39:55.360 You have to wangle this equipoise where, on the one hand, you're espousing weakness as power, but then on the other hand, you're enjoying exerting the power so much that you let that cognitive dissonance pass.

00:40:09.060 My problem is I just can't let it pass.

00:40:11.620 I feel diminished by the notion that if I hear somebody use that word when they're just referring to it, I'm supposed to feel hurt.

00:40:18.920 That makes me a hothouse flower. And last time I checked, that's not a psychologically healthy condition.

00:40:24.800 But somehow, when we're talking about black people, we're supposed to make an exception.

00:40:28.800 That's religious thought to the extent that anybody can hold that in their head and walk around with their head held high.

00:40:34.480 And I have to contest it. I'm sorry. I will not say that black weakness is black strength.

00:40:40.000 And I wish more black people would get over doing that.

00:40:44.660 I've never heard anybody use the term wangle this equipoise. I'm going to hold on to that one tonight.

00:40:49.080 Like a blanket.

00:40:50.120 Equipoise. Yeah, that wasn't bad.

00:40:52.060 Equipoise. Equipoise. Okay, got it. I like that. Okay.

00:40:55.840 I completely agree with you because I can relate to this as a woman.

00:40:58.840 You know, when somebody sort of treats you more gingerly because your lady parts, it's like, oh, can you spare me?

00:41:03.180 I don't need your tenderness. I'm fine.

00:41:06.660 And the N-word is one of those things where it's like, as you know, as a parent, you're like, I mean,

00:41:12.740 certainly as the parent of white children, you're like, oh my God.

00:41:15.400 So that word, it can never be uttered.

00:41:18.720 You can't, like, even saying the N-word, saying it like that is dicey.

00:41:23.100 It's not my kids are littles.

00:41:24.060 They don't say that word, but stories come up in the news or what have you.

00:41:27.660 And they're curious.

00:41:29.900 You know, like, they want to understand, like, what is it?

00:41:32.100 Why does the word exist if we're not allowed?

00:41:35.220 Like, you know, why do people allow it?

00:41:36.640 And you try to give them the history of why it's so bad and how it was misused and the power

00:41:41.040 structure that existed.

00:41:42.580 But it makes me feel uncomfortable talking about it with my kids because I feel like I

00:41:47.000 am giving the word all the power.

00:41:48.400 I am giving that word more power than it had yesterday.

00:41:51.780 And it does feel like, shouldn't we be somehow disempowering that word?

00:41:55.680 Like, what is the way of disempowering?

00:41:57.720 Wasn't that the reason rappers first started saying it so much, which is like, we're going to take

00:42:01.220 this hideous term, turn it around.

00:42:03.760 But now I don't think we've done that.

00:42:06.340 I don't think we're there anymore.

00:42:08.360 You know, it's interesting.

00:42:09.280 This is, you know, given that this part of this may be the one that gets around most,

00:42:13.500 I want to clarify something because there are many people who actually hear me saying

00:42:18.000 that it's OK for white people to run around using the slur.

00:42:22.440 That's not what I'm saying.

00:42:23.840 I'm not saying that if we're really strong people, we should be called N-words all the time.

00:42:27.860 No, my problem is this new thing that you can't even refer to it.

00:42:32.500 And what bothers me is that, like, if you're talking to your kids about it, you have to

00:42:37.240 talk to them about it in a way that basically says black people are so fragile that you

00:42:43.200 can't even utter the sequence of sounds, such as if somebody asks you when you're about

00:42:48.440 13, what was N-W-A?

00:42:50.520 What did it stand for?

00:42:51.620 You're not supposed to say niggers with attitude.

00:42:53.840 I can say it because I'm black, but you aren't supposed to say that because you're

00:42:57.540 white.

00:42:57.880 You're not supposed to use the word when you're talking to the kids about it.

00:43:00.820 You might even write it down but refuse to say it these days.

00:43:04.300 And the problem with that is that it makes black people look so weak and delicate.

00:43:09.180 And two, it's just it's unnecessary.

00:43:10.740 And the way that I know that it's unnecessary is because when I was in my 20s and 30s with

00:43:15.960 taste, you could use the word in reference.

00:43:19.500 And the world kept spinning.

00:43:20.860 And everybody knew what the hideous history of the word was.

00:43:23.400 But I had little snippets of white people I knew who would mention the word if they were

00:43:29.580 talking about something, usually in crit and critique, you know, they're talking about

00:43:33.440 how somebody used the slur or how they would never use the word.

00:43:36.900 But they would say, I would never say and they would use the word.

00:43:39.680 Nobody thought a thing of it.

00:43:40.920 Or if they did, they had no purchase on the general conversation.

00:43:44.820 It was OK.

00:43:45.580 And so that makes me an old man to say, oh, back when I was a kid, but I wasn't even

00:43:50.620 a kid.

00:43:51.300 I was 40.

00:43:52.320 And it was still pretty much that way.

00:43:54.360 And now here we are with this taboo term.

00:43:57.020 And I just I must admit, and I will own this.

00:44:00.100 I don't care what people say about me saying it.

00:44:01.880 I shudder at the thought of you having to tell your kids about the way we use it now,

00:44:06.300 as opposed to the way it was about 20 years ago.

00:44:09.160 Because it makes the rest of us, it makes black people look like babies.

00:44:12.760 I've just I it embarrasses me that we have gotten this religious about the word.

00:44:18.180 And I'll say one more time, folks, I don't mean the slur.

00:44:20.820 I'm talking about people referring to it and they are different.

00:44:24.380 Yeah, but that's right.

00:44:25.060 Like the The New York Times reporter, Donald McNeil, who got fired for repeating the word

00:44:29.420 in trying to understand a story that was being told to him about a girl who got in trouble

00:44:33.680 for using the actual word.

00:44:35.260 So he's like, wait, so she said this and he and he repeated the actual word fired.

00:44:39.160 All right.

00:44:39.940 In one second, we're going to get into an attack on Glenn Lowry that was launched by the head

00:44:45.360 of one of these New York City schools trying to ban Glenn Lowry.

00:44:48.980 What does John think of that?

00:44:50.180 And what does he think are the real life solutions to some of the problems that we have discussed?

00:44:57.500 You know, some of the crime rate problems and some of the imprisonment numbers that we went

00:45:01.520 over there.

00:45:02.220 He's got four real life solutions that I think you're going to want to hear.

00:45:06.800 So we'll get to that in one second.

00:45:08.160 But first, we're going to bring you a feature.

00:45:10.060 This is a new one, a new feature here on The MK Show that we're calling Thanks But No Thanks.

00:45:15.660 In this case, we're saying thanks but no thanks to Justin Trudeau.

00:45:20.280 So what exactly is the virtue signaling former blackface wearing?

00:45:23.920 I mean, we think it was former.

00:45:24.980 It's unclear.

00:45:25.640 You know, he wore it so many times he can't remember them all.

00:45:27.780 We assume he's finally learned his lesson.

00:45:30.280 Prime Minister of Canada up to these days.

00:45:32.800 Well, besides not distributing a whole lot of COVID vaccines, he is focused on the new budget

00:45:36.860 for his country.

00:45:37.900 Oh, it sounds like a yawn, you may think.

00:45:39.420 No, stand by.

00:45:40.440 In a tweet thread this week, actually, it's last week, Trudeau explained some of the elements

00:45:45.080 of the budget, which would make up his, quote, recovery plan for jobs, growth and resilience.

00:45:50.040 It includes such details as new jobs, new training, innovation.

00:45:53.720 But Trudeau chose to focus on one particular element.

00:45:56.580 You see, he tweeted that we're going to do everything we can to make sure women can fully

00:46:02.400 and equally participate in our country's workforce, promising he would make the COVID recovery

00:46:07.700 one that is inclusive and feminist.

00:46:10.380 They're going to have a feminist COVID recovery in Canada.

00:46:13.060 What's wrong with us?

00:46:13.880 How come ours isn't feminist?

00:46:15.280 What the hell does that mean?

00:46:17.000 And then he said this.

00:46:18.860 The pandemic has threatened to stall much of the progress women have made over the past

00:46:23.320 decades.

00:46:24.040 In fact, many women have left their jobs this past year.

00:46:27.500 This isn't just a recession.

00:46:29.320 It's a she-session.

00:46:32.860 Oh, Justin, a she-session.

00:46:36.880 First of all, try to say that.

00:46:38.060 Go ahead and try to say that at home.

00:46:39.080 She-she-session.

00:46:40.160 She-session.

00:46:41.260 It's not easy.

00:46:43.460 And it's stupid.

00:46:44.840 Also, this tweet was not the first time he debuted his very woke word.

00:46:49.200 No, he used it back in March in a joint video with his wife,

00:46:51.860 on International Women's Day.

00:46:53.700 So he clearly likes it.

00:46:55.020 He likes it.

00:46:55.940 Listen.

00:46:56.620 This is about young women everywhere in our country.

00:46:59.540 It's about making sure they grow up in a world where they can do and be anything they dream of.

00:47:05.560 And everyone has a role to play in making that a reality.

00:47:08.960 It's especially important right now when women are bearing the brunt of the impacts of COVID-19

00:47:14.380 and we face a she-session.

00:47:16.520 I think you're saying it so seriously.

00:47:23.480 You're saying it like it's a real word there, wasn't it?

00:47:28.540 Oh, my God.

00:47:29.640 I don't hear him speak that often.

00:47:31.260 He sounded, I don't know, like a little, he sounded slightly feminine.

00:47:36.280 And he sounded very woke and he sounded kind of pathetic and definitely not like a man who you'd want next to you in the bedroom.

00:47:46.120 I'm sorry, but that's, sorry for, you know, that's how I feel for the wife.

00:47:52.000 And I think he should work on his theatrics because he may be a very good blackface wearer, but he is not a very good actor.

00:47:58.520 He sounded ridiculous.

00:48:00.060 It's ridiculous.

00:48:00.880 It's false.

00:48:01.480 Canadian Debbie weighs in.

00:48:03.320 Debbie, I had no idea you were so this fired up about Justin Trudeau.

00:48:06.580 Why is it his fault?

00:48:07.800 It's his fault.

00:48:08.900 No mom can work because there's no freaking school.

00:48:11.840 There's no daycare.

00:48:12.840 There's no nothing.

00:48:14.020 Ugh.

00:48:14.680 Ah, Canadian Debbie.

00:48:16.560 She's mad.

00:48:20.400 Anyway, Justin Trudeau working very hard to signal his feminism to the Twitter crowd.

00:48:24.760 Thanks, but no thanks.

00:48:27.040 Back to John McWhorter right after this.

00:48:31.480 There's something else you said about what people expect of you and whether and how you're

00:48:39.020 just not going to play the role that that they want you to play made me think of, you

00:48:43.560 know, I had Paul Rossi on the show not long ago, the teacher at Grace Church School in

00:48:47.920 New York, right, who spoke out about the crazy critical race theory going on there and the

00:48:51.680 messaging.

00:48:51.980 And one of the things that jumped out at me in his story was he wanted to assign Glenn

00:49:01.420 Lowry's writings, your buddy, you know, on Blogging Heads.

00:49:06.940 Is it Blogging Heads TV?

00:49:08.440 I just look you up on YouTube, but it's just to get it correct for the audience.

00:49:11.500 Blogging Heads dot TV.

00:49:13.180 And the Glenn Show also.

00:49:14.580 And the Glenn Show is where I watch it.

00:49:15.600 So anyway, he wanted to assign some Glenn Lowry to his students just to have some alternate

00:49:21.480 voice to all the messaging that they were getting.

00:49:23.860 The administration said, no, this is Paul Rossi's recitation of what happened.

00:49:29.780 The head of school responded to me that people like Lowry's lived experience and therefore

00:49:35.680 his derived social philosophy made him, Lowry, an exception to the rule that black thinkers

00:49:42.440 acknowledge structural racism is the paramount impediment in society.

00:49:46.460 So we can't listen to Glenn because it's going to make people think black people think

00:49:52.060 this way when really it's just Lowry.

00:49:53.720 He added that the moment we are in institutionally and culturally, this is the admin, the head

00:49:59.980 of school, does not lend itself to dispassionate discussion and debate.

00:50:04.840 And discussing Glenn Lowry's ideas would, quote, only confuse and or inflame students, both

00:50:12.060 those in the class and others that hear about it outside the class.

00:50:16.560 And the head of school's suggestion was instead for Rossi to assign, quote, mainstream white

00:50:23.400 conservatives.

00:50:26.440 Your thoughts on that?

00:50:28.400 Does that man or woman not realize that they are a zealot?

00:50:33.560 Do they really not get that they sound like some religious figure in 1250 in France?

00:50:42.560 They really think that when it comes to these race issues and only these, that they have

00:50:47.380 arrived at this unassailable truth that means that you can make an exception to the idea that

00:50:53.340 there's a marketplace of ideas that people need to think for themselves.

00:50:56.900 And of course, this person has to feel that Glenn Lowry is an exception.

00:51:01.560 And I'm sure they would say, you could say, well, there are also some other people who

00:51:04.640 think like this.

00:51:05.240 And they'd say, well, those nine, 10 or even 100 people are exceptions.

00:51:08.980 There is this truth about black people and oppression.

00:51:12.840 And the way they know it is because they read it in Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, and they

00:51:19.980 liked Ta-Nehisi Coates' work in The Atlantic.

00:51:22.840 And I guess that's not fair.

00:51:24.340 They also get it from what you learn from most classes on race in most institutions of

00:51:31.360 education.

00:51:32.160 And as far as they're concerned, there could be no other truth.

00:51:35.460 Once again, race is simple.

00:51:38.260 So astrophysics is hard.

00:51:40.340 Algebra is hard.

00:51:42.260 Black people is simple.

00:51:44.400 Well, no, that head of school, one, is a zealot.

00:51:47.580 Two, I'm going to rhyme.

00:51:49.320 They're a zealot.

00:51:50.300 They're a prelate.

00:51:51.020 Zealot and also, in a way, like some sort of priest or something.

00:51:57.660 It's P-R-E-L-A-T.

00:51:59.540 I'm pronouncing it right there.

00:52:00.480 I'm learning so much.

00:52:01.720 Keep going.

00:52:02.380 I want them to rhyme.

00:52:03.240 Zealot.

00:52:03.620 And also, that head of school is a racist because that head of school thinks that blackness

00:52:09.240 and black people are just so simple and that we're all so oppressed.

00:52:14.200 And that person has frankly read, Ta-Nehisi Coates and I do not agree on much, but I would

00:52:20.460 never say that his writing doesn't make any sense.

00:52:23.180 I think that a lot of his writing is more performance art than racialization, but that

00:52:28.680 doesn't mean that he's wrong.

00:52:29.960 It's that I think people read it in a way that I would not.

00:52:33.200 But with Robin DiAngelo, frankly, White Fragility is literally the worst book I've ever read.

00:52:39.740 Now, other people may have read worse ones, but that is the worst book ever written, as

00:52:43.840 far as I'm concerned, in terms of its logic.

00:52:45.720 And then, in terms of Ibram Kendi, his work is simplistic.

00:52:50.220 He has some good ideas, but Ibram Kendi operates in very broad strokes.

00:52:56.180 There's a book called The Sunny Day.

00:52:59.280 It's a wonderful children's...

00:53:00.940 The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.

00:53:03.260 It's a wonderful children's book about a black child.

00:53:06.920 If you were a black child who grew up in my time and even afterward, it's a beautiful

00:53:10.940 book, but Ibram Kendi's ideas look like the illustrations in that book.

00:53:15.960 Broad strokes, only a few colors.

00:53:19.060 You can't quite see the personhood in a lot of the drawings.

00:53:22.520 That's what I always think of when I read him.

00:53:24.800 And the head of school here cannot possibly have missed that.

00:53:28.280 But as far as that head of school is concerned, blackness is about these simple oppositions,

00:53:32.700 such as between anti-racism and I forget what the opposition is.

00:53:35.820 And that's really just all there is to be thought about.

00:53:40.480 He or she is talking down.

00:53:43.240 That's a zealot.

00:53:44.480 And I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

00:53:46.800 And Paul Russi is a hero.

00:53:48.640 He must be joined.

00:53:49.960 There need to be more people like this because that zealot cannot be reached.

00:53:53.880 You cannot change the zealot's mind.

00:53:55.540 You have to have an uprising, a civil one, but an uprising.

00:54:00.280 Well, that's the thing.

00:54:00.900 So I also just taped with Andrew Gutman, who's the parent who spoke out at Brearley School.

00:54:06.020 And he lit a little bit of a can of gasoline in his letter.

00:54:10.000 But he was mad.

00:54:11.380 You know, he's ticked off about what's happening to his daughter in the education.

00:54:14.240 And he came on.

00:54:15.280 And the thing that's bothering me about both of those guys is, where's the cavalry?

00:54:19.680 You know, where are the rest of the parents who I know from having been in the New York

00:54:23.100 City private school system now for several years feel as they do?

00:54:28.060 They're hiding.

00:54:29.900 They're afraid.

00:54:31.300 They won't even come out anonymously.

00:54:33.140 You know, like go to the New York Post and say, here's 30 of us.

00:54:36.540 And we want to tell you our our feelings and they'll put it in there.

00:54:39.920 They won't require your name.

00:54:41.240 You know, they can do reporting like that.

00:54:42.660 But they're so afraid, John.

00:54:45.360 They're terrified.

00:54:46.200 Like they're they're letting those guys twist in the wind like they're just these, you know,

00:54:50.380 one one racist teacher at Grace Church and one racist parent at Brearley.

00:54:54.460 And it's not so.

00:54:55.720 It's really it's it's angering me that the cavalry does not come.

00:54:58.460 Isn't that the saddest thing, because it's a funny point in our society to be called a

00:55:04.800 racist is almost like being called a pedophile that starts in the 70s.

00:55:08.600 It continues and reinforces itself in the 80s.

00:55:11.100 And it's a good thing to the idea that it is one of the most incorrect things to be a racist

00:55:16.840 is, as humanity goes, quite an advance.

00:55:20.220 But here we have these people where social media allows them to take advantage of that.

00:55:24.800 And everybody is so afraid of being called a racist on Twitter that these poor parents

00:55:30.880 are almost willing to sacrifice the education of their kids.

00:55:34.400 Or I don't know what they're doing because my kids aren't old enough to be affected by

00:55:37.300 this yet.

00:55:37.660 But I imagine some of them are saying that they'll supplement what happens to their kids

00:55:41.540 with educating them from home.

00:55:43.280 But I think they need to think about the fact that that's easier said than done.

00:55:46.000 Are you really going to have the time?

00:55:47.500 Is that really what you're going to do with your summer?

00:55:49.360 You're going to sacrifice your kids' education because you don't want mean things said about

00:55:55.080 you in places that other people can see it.

00:55:58.380 I think that's really sad.

00:55:59.900 Those people are simply afraid.

00:56:02.820 And what they need to realize is if they started, you know, frankly, not only just saying things

00:56:07.240 anonymously, but releasing their names, there is safety in numbers.

00:56:10.700 And pretty soon they could do real good in America by saving Black people from this condescension.

00:56:17.240 And, you know, you get a bonus.

00:56:18.240 You get to have your own child have a real education instead of having to basically seep

00:56:24.240 in this anti-racism academy that seems to be taking a page from some communist nightmare.

00:56:30.120 Is that really okay just to show that you're not a racist, parents?

00:56:34.000 Please join these people.

00:56:35.400 It shouldn't just be the occasional scrappy, usually male person.

00:56:40.140 It has to be a much broader cross-section of the parents, given how, from what I can tell

00:56:45.560 in every one of these schools, most of the parents don't like this.

00:56:48.900 Stand up, folks.

00:56:49.980 And the thing is, it's not just the white parents.

00:56:52.280 You know, we had an underground group at our boys' school of parents who were objecting

00:56:56.620 to this.

00:56:57.260 And I think about Jason Riley and his wife, Naomi Schaefer Riley.

00:57:00.580 They've got, I think, two girls.

00:57:02.840 It could be wrong.

00:57:04.280 I think it's two girls.

00:57:05.320 But anyway, they're in a private school up in Westchester.

00:57:07.800 And she's written publicly about how, you know, so these girls are mixed race.

00:57:13.800 And they identify as black.

00:57:15.580 And they're really angry about what their daughters are being taught.

00:57:20.960 Like, because it is so disempowering.

00:57:23.020 It's so paternalistic.

00:57:24.220 It's so diminishing of their actual power.

00:57:28.140 You know, you see when a black person dies, a lot of people on Twitter will say, rest in

00:57:30.880 power, rest in power.

00:57:31.640 It's like, how about being alive with power?

00:57:34.840 And what does that mean?

00:57:36.300 Right?

00:57:36.540 It doesn't mean being told constantly that everyone has to lower the standards for you,

00:57:40.220 has to tiptoe by you, can't confront you with ideas that are different from your own,

00:57:44.120 can never put a person like Glenn Lowry in front of you because you're too fragile to

00:57:47.140 even hear what he has to say about race.

00:57:49.600 Like, that's one of the things that drives me nuts about it.

00:57:51.980 My audience has heard me say many times, sometimes when I'm tweeting or I get into one of these

00:57:56.460 stupid Twitter wars with somebody, I've asked myself, oh, gosh, you know, it's like,

00:58:00.680 it's a black person.

00:58:02.380 It's always, you know, somebody who's considers themselves wokeers, you know, you would say

00:58:05.500 elect.

00:58:07.080 And you think, OK, I don't really want to be at war with, you know, yet another black

00:58:10.560 commentator, whether it's Soledad O'Brien or whomever, you know, Colin Kaepernick or

00:58:15.260 Ava DuVernay.

00:58:16.440 And then I say to myself, OK, that is racist to not fight back because the color of their

00:58:22.060 skin is to be the person you're trying to fight against.

00:58:25.680 And then I fire away and everybody calls me racist anyway.

00:58:27.920 But it's fine.

00:58:28.320 In my in my heart, I know that's not racism.

00:58:30.220 That's true anti-racism.

00:58:32.760 Yeah, this is that stuff is hard.

00:58:34.260 I mean, I try to avoid Twitter battles with the kind of people you're talking about, because

00:58:40.520 in my experience as a human being, I know that it's no fun to back down.

00:58:47.400 And so when you challenge people like that, they're never going to say, OK, you're right.

00:58:50.620 They're just going to yell louder.

00:58:52.320 And maybe you've planted a seed in their mind.

00:58:54.680 But for the most part, they're just going to yell louder and louder.

00:58:57.500 And so as far as I'm concerned, as soon as I hear a certain kind of language, I just back

00:59:01.220 away.

00:59:01.460 And I've made a few exceptions during the pandemic because I was a little bored and it only

00:59:05.040 reinforced me in saying, no, just don't don't engage.

00:59:08.280 But when it comes to not being jumped on Twitter, but just something happening in real life where

00:59:13.740 a black person has said something or done something that really is subject to question.

00:59:18.700 Yeah.

00:59:19.160 The idea that you just pat the person on the head and you say anything that you say or

00:59:22.660 feel goes because you're black and there was slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and

00:59:26.880 somebody microaggressed you last month.

00:59:28.920 No, that means that you are treating black people like babies.

00:59:32.360 And I can tell that for a lot of white people, that is a very uncomfortable point.

00:59:37.160 The idea that you might actually challenge a black person on anything, unless that black

00:59:42.460 person is a quote unquote conservative, in which case you can tell them that they're a

00:59:45.560 white supremacist in black clothes, quote unquote normal black person.

00:59:49.800 No, you just bow down and let them go.

00:59:52.120 And of course, what a lot of these people are afraid of is that they're going to get called

00:59:54.820 a racist on Twitter.

00:59:56.060 And I frankly think it's at the point where people who could stand it and maybe it's not

01:00:01.360 everybody, but people who could stand it need to stand up with their back straight and

01:00:05.240 let that person yell.

01:00:07.140 And frankly, if that kind of person starts to learn that calling you names and putting

01:00:12.800 up with the gifs, et cetera, on Twitter doesn't have the effect that it used to have, if they

01:00:16.340 can't get what they want by calling you names, then they'll sit back down at the table and

01:00:20.880 start acting the way they were before, say, roughly June 2020, which is one voice among

01:00:25.940 many, but not trying to turn us into China in 1965, which is what they're trying to do.

01:00:33.560 I know you said, I listened to you on Sam Harris at the time he went on and you were saying

01:00:38.020 people, people should be prepared to be called a racist, that we've got to learn to stand

01:00:43.660 up to these people who are taking over this discussion within these terms and just say

01:00:47.620 no and be prepared for the name calling that follows.

01:00:50.720 Yeah.

01:00:50.880 It's just people often ask me, what can I do to have a productive discussion where they

01:00:55.040 won't call me a racist?

01:00:56.100 And my answer is no, they will call you a racist.

01:00:58.600 You cannot have a productive discussion and they are going to call you names.

01:01:01.740 The issue is how you respond to being called names.

01:01:03.960 And frankly, as somebody who's called a lot of names, I can tell you life goes on.

01:01:09.260 And often a person who calls you names actually deep down has been made to think about something.

01:01:14.220 They may not acknowledge it for a long time, but you've probably planted a seed.

01:01:18.100 And that, unfortunately, is the way societal discussions happen.

01:01:22.700 It doesn't normally happen through people peaceably changing one another's minds.

01:01:26.560 That's not how science works.

01:01:27.900 That's not how social history works.

01:01:29.360 It's friction.

01:01:30.160 It's difficult.

01:01:30.660 It's Hegel.

01:01:31.420 But you plant seeds.

01:01:33.240 But that involves that you have to be able to look at somebody frown.

01:01:36.360 You've got to see your name taken in vain on social media.

01:01:39.460 But life goes on.

01:01:40.900 The planet keeps spinning.

01:01:42.300 And overall, although you're not supposed to say this, things get better.

01:01:45.740 So I want to talk to you about to speak on that front.

01:01:50.240 Just two things.

01:01:51.420 Number one, how do we fight the elect?

01:01:54.340 What do you think is the best way?

01:01:55.440 Because I know I've heard you say, including on that podcast with Sam, there's no you can't

01:02:00.440 look at them and say, why don't you be open to my opinion?

01:02:03.440 And let's talk about it.

01:02:04.320 Like you've said we've sort of got to go around them.

01:02:07.580 It's like the woke are no good to us.

01:02:09.660 We've got to move on from the from the elect.

01:02:11.720 Move on.

01:02:12.180 They're no good to us.

01:02:12.800 So so I want to talk about what what do we do to fight them in your view?

01:02:16.660 And then I also really would love for you to say the four things that you think are most

01:02:21.220 important in addressing some of the problems we've been talking about when it comes to what

01:02:25.020 some would call systemic racism or just some of these inequities or disparities between

01:02:29.640 black success and white success.

01:02:31.340 Because I thought that was very powerful.

01:02:33.080 And I don't know how you think we're doing on those.

01:02:35.040 Take them in whatever order you want.

01:02:36.140 Yeah, I think we have to realize that telling these people about John Stuart Mill and a

01:02:43.820 diversity of ideas makes no sense whatsoever.

01:02:46.840 When you say to them, why can't you open up to other views?

01:02:49.380 The first thing they'll say is that I am open to other views, but they're not.

01:02:52.500 And if it's clear that they're not, then next, you have to understand that what you're

01:02:57.360 asking them is, why can't you be open to pedophilia?

01:03:00.040 For them, when it comes to race issues, there is no question of diversity of opinion outside

01:03:05.540 of a very narrow band.

01:03:07.640 The issue is to them as if you're saying, why can't you accept pedophiles as productive

01:03:12.320 and acceptable members of society?

01:03:14.480 And you have to realize that it's very surgical.

01:03:17.200 What that kind of person is committed to, not just the woke, but the woke who are mean,

01:03:20.820 what they're committed to is the idea that battling power differentials is paramount, that

01:03:27.880 battling power differentials must be the focus of all intellectual, moral, and artistic

01:03:33.200 endeavor.

01:03:33.720 That sounds a little clinical, but power differentials is what matters to them.

01:03:37.580 Listen to the way they use the word power.

01:03:39.480 And power differentials relating to race is of particular concern with them.

01:03:43.980 For them, that's everything.

01:03:46.480 There is no argument to be had.

01:03:48.180 There is no discussion to be had.

01:03:49.640 And that means that a discussion really just can't get anywhere with them.

01:03:54.620 You have to basically say to them, I do not believe that battling power differentials

01:04:01.080 is to be the central goal of this endeavor, such as a school.

01:04:05.260 You can say, I believe in combating systemic racism.

01:04:08.980 I believe in helping people to be more enlightened about racism.

01:04:11.540 But no, I don't believe that that should be the focus of our entire curriculum.

01:04:15.400 That's something that you believe because you're part of an ideology that believes that.

01:04:19.040 I believe that that should be one of about six or seven things that we focus on.

01:04:23.040 In other words, the way it was before, you know, because it's not as if these schools

01:04:26.180 were conservative academies.

01:04:27.660 It's going to be the way it is before you put power differentials in that place.

01:04:31.560 You have to address them with what they are.

01:04:33.260 A lot of them don't think of it that way, but that's a seed that you would plant.

01:04:36.360 Just telling them, no, you think power differentials are supposed to be the center and the focus.

01:04:41.520 I don't.

01:04:42.420 And then the person's going to say, you know what?

01:04:44.340 You're a white supremacist.

01:04:45.620 And you say, no, I am not a white supremacist.

01:04:49.000 I am not a white supremacist at all.

01:04:50.840 And we're going to keep doing things the way we're going to do it.

01:04:52.720 Then on Twitter, they're going to say, oh, look at him, the white supremacist.

01:04:56.300 There he goes.

01:04:56.960 Same as usual.

01:04:57.940 And you just look at that on Twitter and you look at all the likes.

01:05:00.360 And then somebody else chimes in and says, yeah, he's a white supremacist.

01:05:03.740 They're going to keep doing it for about three days.

01:05:05.760 And, you know, have a picnic.

01:05:07.880 You know, start watching the third season of Stissel.

01:05:10.620 Something.

01:05:11.240 Just keep your mind on something else.

01:05:13.840 And pretty soon they'll stop it.

01:05:15.300 And in the meantime, devote yourself to four things.

01:05:18.100 This is what the black community needs.

01:05:19.240 One, the war on drugs needs to stop.

01:05:22.300 It was developed in part to give black people a hard time.

01:05:25.960 That was a very long time ago.

01:05:27.480 But if there were no black market in hard drugs, then there would be a revolution in the black

01:05:32.780 community where black men would be more likely to seek legal work.

01:05:36.660 That would change so much and more to the point because, you know, you're waiting for me to say

01:05:39.780 the cops and I'm not going to.

01:05:41.040 If there were no war on drugs, a great many black men would encounter the cops less.

01:05:47.460 And that would be a great many black men who are going to prison less.

01:05:51.520 No, the cases that we hear, such as George Floyd, et cetera, are not always about people

01:05:56.220 being stopped for drugs.

01:05:57.320 They're not always about people who are doing or selling drugs.

01:05:59.860 But nevertheless, that's a big part of the story.

01:06:03.260 That's a big part of the reason black men wind up in prison.

01:06:05.660 Not necessarily for selling drugs, but often whatever this person was doing, whatever

01:06:10.240 the violence was about, for example, it's not just that black men walk around being violent

01:06:14.580 just to be violent.

01:06:15.460 Often it was because of gang-related violence.

01:06:17.780 What was the gang warfare about?

01:06:19.600 Often maintaining turf because people are selling drugs.

01:06:22.560 It's indirect, but it all often comes down to that one thing.

01:06:25.560 Kill the war on drugs and you save the black community.

01:06:27.960 Second, what do the black men do if they're not going to sell drugs?

01:06:31.360 And of course, it's not even a majority of black men, but too many.

01:06:34.040 What are they going to do?

01:06:35.660 Well, they're going to go to community college.

01:06:37.260 They're going to go to vocational schools.

01:06:38.920 They're going to go there for free.

01:06:40.040 They're going to spend two years.

01:06:41.540 It is absurd to keep telling black America that the ideal is to go to four years of college

01:06:47.560 and pretend that you like Shakespeare.

01:06:49.020 That is not for everybody.

01:06:50.860 That is an idea that kind of crept in after the GI Bill in the 1940s.

01:06:55.420 Everybody shouldn't have to do that.

01:06:56.880 Most people don't want to do it, including probably about half of the people who are in four

01:07:00.500 year colleges now.

01:07:01.460 Really, if you go and you learn how to, say, be an electrician, if you go and you learn

01:07:08.200 how to install cable, if you learn some kind of trade with your hands, being an ultrasound

01:07:14.140 technician, all of those things afford a person a thoroughly middle class, sometimes upper

01:07:19.520 middle class existence.

01:07:20.520 You will send your kids to college.

01:07:22.380 That is something that we ought to emphasize instead of the idea of looking at men from those

01:07:26.540 communities and thinking, oh, it's so sad that they don't go get to live in a dorm and go

01:07:30.940 to the football game and take classes and graduate with a mortarboard after four years.

01:07:36.340 No, that should not be thought of as the default American experience.

01:07:39.520 Then there's another thing, which is reading is not taught well, especially to poor kids.

01:07:45.120 It should be phonics and not whole word.

01:07:47.880 You should not have your teacher saying, look at that word, L-I-T-T-L-E.

01:07:51.800 Now, just kind of, what do you think that is, especially since this page is full of small

01:07:55.440 things?

01:07:56.040 What do you think that might be?

01:07:57.360 And the person kind of guesses around it and thinks, little.

01:07:59.720 No, you take them through each word and you do it by sound, including making your way

01:08:04.760 through little as much as you can.

01:08:06.500 That sounds really kind of picayune, but that is a major difference between the way poor kids

01:08:12.940 from bookless homes learn to read versus middle class kids.

01:08:16.760 If you're a middle class kid, you grow up and the books are surrounding you.

01:08:19.900 Can you give me another line on that?

01:08:21.380 Like, how would that work?

01:08:22.320 How would you, how would the phonics work with the word little?

01:08:25.320 Here's it.

01:08:25.880 Well, with little, you'd have to sit there and you'd say, okay, oh, it's, and then what's

01:08:30.440 next?

01:08:31.280 Oh, and then there's this E and that's silent and that's unfortunate.

01:08:34.320 That sucks about English, but you're going to teach them about silent E.

01:08:37.520 But what's important is that you teach them, for example, c-a-t-t.

01:08:42.220 The big thing with kids' minds is learning that it's not C-A-T.

01:08:46.740 It's not c-a-t-t.

01:08:47.840 It's cat.

01:08:49.020 Cat.

01:08:49.320 I've taught both of my daughters that.

01:08:51.440 I have watched the magic happen where you teach them that these sounds go together into

01:08:56.620 a word.

01:08:57.640 I did it with phonics-based books.

01:08:59.620 You should learn, teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons by Siegfried Engelman.

01:09:04.620 I'm going to say it again.

01:09:05.800 Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons by Siegfried Engelman.

01:09:09.920 I've done it with both of my daughters.

01:09:11.620 Watch the magic both times.

01:09:13.280 Listen to my podcast, Lexicon Valley.

01:09:15.100 On one episode, I actually have Dahlia, my first daughter, doing this after having been

01:09:20.820 taught from that book.

01:09:21.940 Later, I have her sister, Vanessa, doing the same thing because that is the way they should

01:09:27.040 be taught in school.

01:09:29.000 Now, of course, you might guess I do have a book lined home.

01:09:31.960 But kids learn faster with that phonics method than they do being taught to kind of guess

01:09:37.900 at what the words mean based on the pictures and maybe looking at only the first letter.

01:09:44.340 And beware people who tell you it should be a combination.

01:09:46.940 Phonics alone does the trick.

01:09:49.120 The science has proven it.

01:09:50.320 And that is especially important with kids who are poor.

01:09:53.440 And that includes disproportionately black kids.

01:09:56.440 So that's important, too.

01:09:57.540 Then the fourth thing is more controversial.

01:10:00.180 I know I believe that long acting reversible contraceptives should be available to all poor

01:10:06.220 women for free.

01:10:07.120 They're expensive.

01:10:08.240 And yet, if you want to do family planning, if you want child rearing, if you want child

01:10:13.820 bearing to be something that you plan rather than an accident that you then have to deal

01:10:18.980 with, well, those should be available to all poor women without having to pay a whole lot

01:10:24.240 of money so that you can wait a bit before you have kids, you know, you have kids when

01:10:28.600 you want to, instead of too many children are born by accident to too many people in

01:10:33.340 general.

01:10:33.780 And I think that that has a disproportionate effect upon the black community.

01:10:37.500 And it makes me sad.

01:10:38.660 And I think that something should be done about it.

01:10:40.800 Now, I know that there's a controversy about that.

01:10:42.760 Some people see an air of eugenics about these.

01:10:45.720 And I can only say that there have been studies done with women of both colors, as if they're

01:10:50.340 only white and black people, but both colors, using them.

01:10:53.620 And they liked them.

01:10:55.080 They didn't feel that it was eugenic.

01:10:56.540 They liked having the opportunity to take advantage of this technology.

01:11:00.380 There are two studies that I know of that show that.

01:11:02.460 I'm not trying to be a eugenicist.

01:11:03.760 I just want family planning to be easier for people who already have enough things to think

01:11:08.200 about.

01:11:08.620 Those four things enacted would create a whole new black America in one generation.

01:11:13.900 And nobody would have to read Robin DiAngelo.

01:11:16.660 We wouldn't have to pretend that anti-racism and, what is it, non-racism, whatever these

01:11:23.660 oppositions are that we need this whole revolution in what we think of as political science and

01:11:29.000 sociology, none of that word magic, frankly.

01:11:31.960 We don't need it.

01:11:32.480 It's not necessary.

01:11:34.120 We need to get down on the ground and make policy changes.

01:11:37.700 And the vast majority of black people, especially outside of the academy and the media, would

01:11:41.960 be quite happy with where black America got on the basis of those things.

01:11:46.040 And I am quite sure that civil rights leaders of about 50 years ago, if they're listening

01:11:50.060 to this, agree completely.

01:11:51.780 And what they hear in me is not a right-wing conservative.

01:11:54.160 I'm not, this is not Rush Limbaugh talking.

01:11:56.200 I sound like a liberal in 1960, and I'm proud of it.

01:12:01.300 I love all of that.

01:12:02.620 And by the way, I have, I too have been struggling with what to call these people, like the elect.

01:12:06.480 I don't know.

01:12:06.800 I was saying to my team yesterday, I'm like, that makes them sound too highbrow, like too

01:12:09.860 smart, too elevated.

01:12:11.340 I don't like it.

01:12:12.960 Woke is kind of confused.

01:12:13.880 I've been saying wokerati, I reject my own term.

01:12:16.280 That makes them sound kind of glamorous, you know, like glitterati.

01:12:19.140 And then I was like, what about like wokerazzi, like paparazzi?

01:12:22.020 That's bad.

01:12:22.560 You don't want to be called, plus it's got the Nazi feel, but then you shouldn't refer

01:12:25.320 to Nazis.

01:12:25.940 And so I'm really struggling.

01:12:27.120 I'm like, we got to keep working on it.

01:12:28.860 You know, it's hard.

01:12:29.520 And you know, the elect is not, it's not perfect.

01:12:31.580 Joseph Bottom, who's a brilliant man.

01:12:33.520 He came up with the elect and I'm stealing it from him, but I know it's not perfect.

01:12:37.960 It's a little sterile.

01:12:39.080 It does put a kind of a crown on their head.

01:12:41.880 I'm still sometimes working on it.

01:12:44.060 Although I think I'm going to use it for my upcoming, my upcoming work.

01:12:47.920 But yeah, important though, to realize not just the woke, there are plenty of woke people

01:12:51.920 who are woking just fine.

01:12:53.800 It's woke people who are okay with being mean.

01:12:56.840 That's the elect.

01:12:57.460 Woke meanies.

01:12:58.520 I love it.

01:12:59.140 Woke supremacists.

01:13:00.640 Woke meanies.

01:13:01.880 That all works for me.

01:13:03.320 Let me ask you a follow-up question on the phonics because I think that's so interesting.

01:13:06.560 I assume what you're saying is it improves the ability of young children, young black

01:13:11.380 children, wherever we do this, right?

01:13:13.400 Young poor children, whoever, to read.

01:13:16.140 And going back to that stat of the best way to wind up in prison is not to graduate from

01:13:21.560 high school, right?

01:13:22.760 And we've seen so many of these studies saying that you, and all these schools that are underfunded

01:13:26.540 or in bad areas, you know, high crime rates, that the kids are in eighth grade, but they

01:13:30.660 only have a second grade reading ability.

01:13:32.020 I mean, I assume that's what you're getting at here.

01:13:34.480 Yeah.

01:13:35.000 And I should say, if you don't get in the reading well, all the rest of it is hard.

01:13:39.180 If you can't read, then you're not going to do well in math and you're just on your

01:13:42.160 way.

01:13:42.420 And for example, remember, it's 25 years ago now that the Oakland School Board very innocently

01:13:47.800 was arguing that black kids are having trouble in school.

01:13:51.320 And maybe the reason is because they have trouble translating between black English dialect

01:13:56.400 and the standard English dialect that they're expected to master in school.

01:14:00.140 Now, they had reasons for thinking that that was the problem, but that wasn't the problem.

01:14:03.840 The problem was that we've known how to teach poor black kids how to read since the 1960s,

01:14:08.820 when this sort of work was first done by, among others, Siegfried Engelman.

01:14:13.340 What those kids needed was to be taught to read by a k, a, t.

01:14:18.180 Until you have that method of teaching, you have too many kids who are in danger of not

01:14:23.460 learning to read well.

01:14:24.360 You know, they're not going to be illiterate, but they're going to be the kind of people

01:14:27.220 where, you know, you go to a diner and you have one of those long New York style menus

01:14:32.180 for all these things like Romanian steak that nobody eats and you're trying to get through

01:14:36.180 it because all you want is a corned beef sandwich.

01:14:38.280 The kind of person who finds that menu and they're moving their lips as they go through

01:14:42.760 it, that is a person who very often had trouble with school.

01:14:46.460 They weren't taught to read right.

01:14:47.500 There's nothing wrong with them.

01:14:48.320 And so phonics is really important for depressed areas, schools.

01:14:53.480 And yet there's a whole education school orthodoxy that doesn't like phonics or thinks that it

01:14:58.340 needs to be mixed in with this other very middle class whole word method.

01:15:02.380 When all of the science says that phonics works faster and better, especially when there's

01:15:07.660 no reinforcement from home.

01:15:09.360 So, yeah, I have a hobby horse about that.

01:15:11.220 That's not linguist to me.

01:15:12.320 That is me who's interested in how you get past poverty and noticing that that linguists

01:15:18.500 aren't trained in reading science.

01:15:20.360 That's a whole different thing.

01:15:21.140 It's psychologists.

01:15:21.980 But that kind of reading is what helps poor black kids have better lives.

01:15:27.100 I know that I don't want to take off all your day.

01:15:29.720 I think your comments and some of the appearances I've referenced on police are really interesting

01:15:35.520 and you've been defensive.

01:15:37.440 Yeah, I know you say they're definitely meaner to black people, but they're not.

01:15:40.660 But for every case of like a George Floyd, you can find them doing something just like

01:15:45.900 that to a white person.

01:15:46.880 The Coleman Hughes has been saying that, too.

01:15:48.840 That's considered very controversial now, right?

01:15:51.120 Like even in my child's school, they stood up the other day and said there's a massive

01:15:53.780 problem in America with cops killing black men, unarmed black men.

01:15:57.920 And it's like, you know, there's no nuance.

01:16:00.440 There's no numbers.

01:16:01.300 There's no data.

01:16:02.000 There's no comparison.

01:16:02.700 It's like I'm so tired of sort of going over it because at this point, I just don't know

01:16:08.880 if the other side want to hear any of the actual numbers.

01:16:11.620 I just think they want to go with it.

01:16:14.580 It's that on that particular issue.

01:16:16.920 There's a part of me that almost gives up because the feelings just run so high that

01:16:21.360 a great many people, including reasonable people, not the elect aren't.

01:16:27.440 But in some ways, the elect are not reasonable.

01:16:28.840 But even non-elect people just can't hear you.

01:16:32.700 But yeah, the cops are meaner.

01:16:34.100 That's been documented.

01:16:35.480 And it's funny, somebody, you catch the occasional tweet that sticks with you.

01:16:40.080 And somebody wrote, well, you say, McWhorter, that the cops are meaner.

01:16:42.960 Just why do you think that is?

01:16:44.360 And it's interesting.

01:16:45.660 That was so illuminating.

01:16:47.460 Yes, the reason for the meanness is racism.

01:16:50.100 It's not that racism doesn't exist.

01:16:51.940 So yes.

01:16:52.680 But that doesn't mean that the racism makes the cops kill black men.

01:16:57.260 So the idea is, well, they're racist, so they must kill more people.

01:16:59.940 You'd think that.

01:17:00.560 That's intuitive, but the data simply doesn't support it.

01:17:04.620 And for every one of these cases that you hear, these horrible, gut-wrenching cases of

01:17:09.940 a black kid or a black teenager or a black 20-something or a black anybody who gets killed,

01:17:15.300 sometimes for no reason whatsoever, sometimes because there was something going on, but

01:17:19.200 things went wrong and they lost their life indefensively.

01:17:22.100 Whenever you see that, they're white cases, too, that the national media simply doesn't

01:17:26.720 report.

01:17:27.160 And that makes you sound a little, that sounds a little crankish.

01:17:31.020 That sounds like something Rush Limbaugh would have said, not to keep on talking about that

01:17:35.240 one person.

01:17:36.160 But no, this is not right-wing boilerplate.

01:17:39.060 It's fact.

01:17:39.940 It's at the point where these days, every time one of those cases makes it into the news,

01:17:43.520 I think, okay, who was the white one?

01:17:45.120 And all you have to do is look into databases and you find that that exact same thing happened

01:17:48.920 to somebody white, sometimes just months before.

01:17:51.900 And then there's the whole issue of disproportion.

01:17:54.800 And so black people are still killed two and a half times, twice and a half more times than

01:18:00.660 you would expect based on our representation in the population.

01:18:03.560 And the idea is, well, that means that it must be racist.

01:18:06.440 That's clever.

01:18:07.200 That's genuinely clever to identify that.

01:18:09.820 But then black people are two and a half times more likely to be poor, too.

01:18:13.520 And poverty brings you into contact with the police more, which is incontestable.

01:18:18.740 Those two figures don't match up so precisely for nothing.

01:18:21.360 And so the idea that white cops pull the trigger and kill black people more easily out of subtle

01:18:28.980 racism, that's intuitive.

01:18:30.480 I get it.

01:18:31.060 I believed it until 2016 when I was thrown the facts and had to take a deep swallow and

01:18:36.040 accept them.

01:18:36.960 But the fact is, no, what it looks like is something thoroughly plausible.

01:18:41.320 White cops are meaner to black people.

01:18:43.100 White cops do pull black people over more.

01:18:45.260 Yes, the reason for that is racism.

01:18:46.580 But when it comes to having a gun in your hand and pulling a trigger and taking somebody out

01:18:51.040 of this world, that bias doesn't go that far.

01:18:55.420 That's perfectly plausible psychologically.

01:18:57.800 It's not that bad.

01:18:59.940 So yank somebody out of the car, call them things, not be as patient with them as you

01:19:04.960 would with white people.

01:19:05.840 Sure.

01:19:06.200 That's called racism.

01:19:07.720 Pull a trigger and fire it into their heart just because you got a little bit scared,

01:19:11.420 whereas if it was a white person, you would have given them the benefit of the doubt.

01:19:14.700 No.

01:19:15.600 And the reason that I'm saying no is because the data makes it so painfully clear that

01:19:19.420 that's the way it is.

01:19:20.840 And so I never thought I'd be saying it five years ago, but I can see why the cops are so

01:19:24.700 offended by the idea that they kill out of racism.

01:19:28.160 I'll bet with a lot of them, you'd have to kind of futz around and make them admit that

01:19:30.900 they're not as nice to black people.

01:19:32.300 But they're not so anti-black that they kill with abandon.

01:19:37.720 So this whole rhetoric about black bodies being unsafe with the cops, it's great theater.

01:19:42.600 And I get it because I believed it too until 2016.

01:19:46.140 But it's just not true.

01:19:47.700 There was a white George Floyd.

01:19:49.240 There will be others.

01:19:50.440 It's just one of these things.

01:19:51.780 But that one, the cops, is so central to this debate that you have to do it carefully

01:19:57.820 because people really don't want to hear you because they're afraid that if they listen,

01:20:01.100 then on some level, they're racist, you know, because why should they take it from you until

01:20:05.920 they've done a real study?

01:20:06.960 And most of us don't have time to do a real study.

01:20:08.960 And so they figure, I've got groceries to buy.

01:20:11.980 I've got my own career.

01:20:13.800 You know, whoever's saying this might be right, but I can't take the risk of that because

01:20:17.460 of the way George Floyd died.

01:20:18.800 I understand that.

01:20:19.460 But it means that it's very hard to have a real conversation about it.

01:20:23.300 Eberhardt says in her in her same book, she's talking about the number of shootings of

01:20:28.280 black men.

01:20:28.700 And she says this from the book, when police kill unarmed black suspects, those deaths are

01:20:33.180 associated with a significant dip in the mental health of blacks across the entire state where

01:20:38.920 those killings occurred.

01:20:40.120 And my first thought was that is the media's fault, because as a member of the media, I

01:20:46.820 can tell you they're totally irresponsible with it.

01:20:50.280 Yes, we should we should report these stories, but you don't put the tape on loop and lead

01:20:56.860 the audience to believe that it really is an epidemic, that there are thousands of George

01:21:02.440 Floyd's happening a year because it isn't true.

01:21:05.040 And there's no there's no responsibility being taken by the media for creating that fear,

01:21:10.520 it for stirring it, for creating, adding to what is now a very incredibly toxic atmosphere

01:21:17.620 for police who are out there.

01:21:19.580 And it's getting more dangerous and disrespectful by the day toward them, which doesn't help

01:21:23.980 in terms of recruiting good cops.

01:21:25.740 Right.

01:21:26.040 Which is what we need, keeping them in communities where black women and men want them right

01:21:33.720 according to the polls.

01:21:34.800 And the and the example that comes to mind is it just came out this week.

01:21:38.460 It hit the hit the news this week, but it happened last month in April of California.

01:21:41.780 We actually have a short soundbite of this where this woman, the woman is black.

01:21:47.040 The police officer.

01:21:48.120 I think he might be Latino.

01:21:51.840 I'm not 100 percent sure.

01:21:53.600 But listen to how polite this is.

01:21:55.540 Just listen to a little bit of this tape.

01:21:56.960 Listen to how polite he is.

01:21:58.140 Yeah, he's Latino.

01:21:59.040 And listen to the way she's talking to him, what she's calling him.

01:22:02.540 Take a listen.

01:22:03.180 I have a right to record the police when they're harassing me.

01:22:07.180 By all means.

01:22:08.040 But you can't do it while you're driving.

01:22:09.900 I was I can.

01:22:10.780 I wasn't texting or none of that.

01:22:14.100 Do you have that picture?

01:22:15.080 And you scared me and made me think you were going to murder me.

01:22:17.000 OK, well, I'm sorry you feel that way.

01:22:18.740 Well, that's not just a feeling.

01:22:20.540 You're a murderer.

01:22:21.300 OK, can you zoom in on that for me?

01:22:23.420 Sure.

01:22:24.100 Thank you.

01:22:24.620 And I'm perfectly legal and I'm a teacher.

01:22:28.260 So there.

01:22:29.020 Congratulations.

01:22:30.380 You're a murderer.

01:22:31.940 What's your last name?

01:22:32.760 I can't see that there.

01:22:33.640 Well, here you go, murderer.

01:22:34.600 Stop shaking.

01:22:36.640 Zoom in on that for me.

01:22:37.520 No, because you're scaring me.

01:22:39.320 You're threatening to kill me and my son.

01:22:41.460 He's only citing you for using your cell phone while you're driving.

01:22:43.980 That's it.

01:22:44.540 There you go, ma'am.

01:22:45.120 Signing inside the red box right there.

01:22:46.260 For him being a Mexican racist.

01:22:48.260 What is that name?

01:22:49.860 Gaso.

01:22:50.180 It's on the citation, ma'am.

01:22:51.360 Here you go, Mexican racist.

01:22:53.760 You're always going to be a Mexican.

01:22:55.460 You'll never be white.

01:22:56.380 You know that, right?

01:22:57.720 You'll never be white, which is what you really want to be.

01:23:00.680 OMG.

01:23:01.040 Now that person, that's a type, you know, I mean, there are types of all races.

01:23:08.680 She's a, she's a performer and I don't mean literally, but she's a kind of a performance

01:23:14.140 artist.

01:23:14.580 But the trope that she's touching on there is something that a lot of black people genuinely

01:23:19.800 feel.

01:23:20.500 A lot of black people have been led to think by the media that they are in danger of being

01:23:26.300 mauled and killed by cops in a way that white people aren't.

01:23:30.940 And you know what?

01:23:32.760 The most God blessed joy is that that's not true.

01:23:36.460 It's good that that's not true.

01:23:38.320 But a lot of people don't want to hear that good news because the idea is that to admit

01:23:43.680 that good news is to not be sufficiently aware of how racism works and that therefore it puts

01:23:50.500 you in bed with white supremacy to allow that things have gotten better.

01:23:55.160 And, you know, that's the weird moment that we're in.

01:23:58.420 But yeah, a lot of black people genuinely think this because it's what you see in the

01:24:02.260 news.

01:24:02.780 Why wouldn't you think that black men get killed and then white people just get off with a

01:24:07.360 pat on the hand?

01:24:08.120 It's because you haven't seen what happens to the white equivalents of these multiple

01:24:12.340 white equivalents killed in the exact same ways.

01:24:15.420 There is a white version of every famous case that we know of that, um, that is something

01:24:20.980 that happens to a black man.

01:24:22.040 All the people pulled over, shot in the back while running away, shot in front of a convenience

01:24:26.360 store, playing with a toy gun, playing with a BB gun in a Walmart, every one of these

01:24:32.120 things, there's a white equivalent.

01:24:34.280 And yet you don't know.

01:24:35.920 So of course, black people feel that, that we live under this burden from the cops.

01:24:40.100 And of course, good thinking white people think the same thing and think they're doing

01:24:43.340 us a favor by patting us on the head and telling us, and they don't think they're patting

01:24:47.020 us on the head.

01:24:47.460 They think they are supporting us in what is a very genuine danger to us walking around

01:24:52.860 in society.

01:24:53.880 And isn't it the saddest thing?

01:24:55.260 Although frankly, ultimately it's a good thing, I think, but isn't it the saddest thing

01:24:58.360 that it's based on a lie?

01:24:59.480 I'm glad it's not that way, but unfortunately I can't share it with people without being

01:25:03.520 told that I'm a jackass.

01:25:05.460 Well, just to follow up on something, because what she said reminded me of something I read

01:25:09.480 that you said.

01:25:09.920 And I'm not sure it's true that he can never be white.

01:25:13.940 You had written something about this, about like the Irish and the Italians.

01:25:19.760 Now there was discrimination against them.

01:25:21.640 What?

01:25:21.860 Like, that was kind of an interesting point.

01:25:23.420 I'm not sure actually what, what did I write?

01:25:25.520 What is this one?

01:25:26.980 You were saying that there are a lot of groups that have been discriminated against over time

01:25:31.980 and that, you know, the Irish didn't used to have it so great in this country and the

01:25:35.760 Italians didn't used to have it so great in this country.

01:25:38.040 Oh, actually, this is from the same Sam Harris podcast.

01:25:41.640 And you said they became white and they did it without there being any grand psychosocial

01:25:47.960 revolution in society.

01:25:50.160 I would have said that.

01:25:51.120 Yes.

01:25:51.680 Right.

01:25:51.860 So what does that mean?

01:25:52.820 I mean, you're obviously not literally, but like you're talking about getting past being

01:25:56.220 somebody who's otherized, right?

01:25:57.840 I mean, I'm guessing that's your meaning.

01:26:00.160 Yeah.

01:26:00.600 Yeah.

01:26:00.800 I mean, it's an eccentric use of the word white, but we can definitely get past.

01:26:08.040 That can happen.

01:26:09.680 And frankly, that woman in the car wouldn't quite know what to do with things if we did

01:26:15.720 get past it.

01:26:16.660 That's a problem.

01:26:18.280 She's clearly staked her whole sense of her significance or her place or reason for being

01:26:22.840 on being a member of this victimized group.

01:26:26.300 It's clearly where she gets her sense of comfort.

01:26:28.860 And that's not rare.

01:26:30.400 There are degrees of that in an awful lot of us these days.

01:26:35.000 And nevertheless, the truth is that we could get past this.

01:26:38.480 There's a fashion to say, nope, because, you know, brown skin is processed.

01:26:42.540 It's just so different.

01:26:43.420 And there's this history in Africa, et cetera, et cetera.

01:26:45.500 But I don't know that those people are basing that on fact as opposed to sentiment.

01:26:49.880 And I think if we did the four things that I talked about and let some time go by and

01:26:53.860 it would not be anything like 100 years, I think it would be actually a couple of generations,

01:26:58.220 then there would be differing conceptions.

01:27:01.180 You can already tell how differently younger generations are processing all sorts of things.

01:27:07.000 There's more flexibility than we like to think.

01:27:10.180 But yeah, we have to start thinking about real change on the ground as opposed to thought

01:27:16.540 training that gives no sign of working in any significant way.

01:27:20.080 A lot of people are thinking that the thought training is working because people will mouth

01:27:23.240 the platitudes, but that's not how you really change minds.

01:27:27.560 All of this is thinking that you've changed minds when really you've just made people afraid.

01:27:32.820 You don't extinguish people's religious convictions or their intellectual convictions or their essence

01:27:38.020 as people by making them scared and making them mouth slogans.

01:27:41.880 You just make them slightly broken people who have learned how to tell a lot of lies and then

01:27:47.040 pass that on to their kids.

01:27:48.320 What a great way to be an American.

01:27:49.460 I want to give you the last word on this.

01:27:51.380 Tim Scott got attacked last week for saying America is not a racist country.

01:27:55.620 Maxine Waters came out and said, every day we see this nation get more racist than anybody

01:27:58.900 ever thought it could be.

01:28:00.900 Your thoughts as the cranky liberal Democrat, the black man, your thoughts on America and

01:28:09.780 on those sentiments.

01:28:11.720 Maxine Waters is well-intentioned, but there's a bit of the performer in her.

01:28:15.480 And she's also been around a while.

01:28:18.200 And so her sense of how race works in America was formed in a time when her kind of rhetoric

01:28:23.340 made more sense.

01:28:24.540 I have respect for that.

01:28:26.420 All of us freeze in time to an extent.

01:28:28.920 I can guarantee that I will.

01:28:30.620 And so that's her.

01:28:32.200 Tim Scott was talking about degree, but we're encouraged to pretend that when it comes to

01:28:36.140 race, it's all about simple opposition.

01:28:38.140 So if there's any racism, then we are a racist country.

01:28:41.820 That's a lexicographical kind of sleight of hand that people engage in.

01:28:46.700 There is racism, but is this a racist country?

01:28:49.480 A lot of people who say that wouldn't last for a week in, frankly, most other countries

01:28:53.000 of the world.

01:28:54.780 And so we just need to be able to speak realistically.

01:28:57.120 And the whole idea that if you even ask a question about racism, you're injuring people

01:29:03.680 because that's the issue.

01:29:04.540 The idea is that you can't ask, let's have a conversation, because for you to even ask

01:29:09.260 certain questions hurts Black people.

01:29:11.880 And the idea is, well, I shouldn't even have to explain.

01:29:16.080 The problem with that is, once again, a performed fragility.

01:29:19.820 It hurts me to be asked these questions.

01:29:21.980 And therefore, the whole cycle continues.

01:29:25.240 I was asked a question this person didn't understand.

01:29:28.120 This systemically racist nation didn't make this person understand.

01:29:31.060 And when, oh, when, oh, when will it stop?

01:29:32.820 As opposed to, why in the world do you need to be so exquisitely well understood?

01:29:37.540 Why is it that the descendants of slaves at the end of the 20th century in something called

01:29:42.860 the United States of America need to be exquisitely well understood?

01:29:46.420 Our oppression has to be acknowledged by every citizen in the same way as everybody was responsible

01:29:51.740 for just getting a vaccine.

01:29:53.000 Everybody needs to be able to put their hand up and recite about a good 20 minutes on Black

01:29:58.580 history.

01:29:59.040 Why?

01:29:59.740 No other people in the history of species have ever requested this.

01:30:04.120 Why us?

01:30:05.060 Why are we so weak?

01:30:06.840 Why are we so delicate?

01:30:08.400 And how in the world can you present that as some kind of cognitive normality, some kind

01:30:14.020 of human strength?

01:30:15.380 It makes no sense.

01:30:18.320 And I think that all of us, white, Black, Asian, Latino, and everything else, need to start

01:30:23.520 being more honest, not only with Black people, but with ourselves.

01:30:27.780 We need to have a more honest conversation about these things and treat Black people with

01:30:32.060 the dignity that we deserve.

01:30:33.620 And that means that sometimes we're wrong, sometimes we're exaggerating, and we don't

01:30:38.260 need exquisite sensitivity.

01:30:41.640 The very thought of it insults me.

01:30:43.120 I don't need that any more than anybody else does.

01:30:45.500 We have to start allowing our race perspectives to make sense.

01:30:48.740 And folks, if a perspective on race that you're hearing doesn't seem to make sense, don't

01:30:53.300 decide that you're a racist or that you have internalized racism if you're a Black person.

01:30:57.960 Allow yourself to make your own kind of sense and realize that in the real world, some people,

01:31:02.720 even with good intentions, are going to call you names, but that you will survive and that

01:31:07.840 a real conversation can only take place if we all realize that.

01:31:12.700 Oh, I love that.

01:31:14.100 We don't need exquisite sensitivity.

01:31:17.000 That's so well said.

01:31:18.240 We do, however, need to wangle the equipoise.

01:31:21.500 I love it.

01:31:23.420 I'm using it.

01:31:24.860 And I hope so much you'll come back and we can continue this conversation.

01:31:28.860 I'd love to, Megan.

01:31:29.940 You're amazing.

01:31:31.080 Thank you.

01:31:35.780 Well, that was a fun time.

01:31:37.320 I love John McWhorter.

01:31:38.620 Wow.

01:31:39.120 Aren't we lucky to have minds like these to enlighten us?

01:31:42.160 Like, he's done so much work.

01:31:43.480 He's so bright, so brilliant.

01:31:45.400 And, you know, they help us.

01:31:47.040 They help people like me from the public school to understand the big words and the big ideas,

01:31:52.260 right?

01:31:52.500 Think of the number of hours and years that it's taken to accumulate that much wisdom.

01:31:57.500 I just feel so blessed, truly blessed to have access to these guys and be able to ask them my

01:32:01.960 questions.

01:32:02.340 Anyway, and blessed to have you guys come along for the ride.

01:32:05.260 Really appreciate doing this with you and learning with you.

01:32:07.800 And we'll keep it up on Wednesday when we're going to have a show about whether trans athletes should

01:32:14.280 be able to compete against cis girls, right?

01:32:17.960 That's really the issue.

01:32:19.040 It never really goes the other way.

01:32:20.460 But should a trans girl, you know, born a boy, be able to transition from, let's say, 12 to 13 or 13

01:32:29.680 to 14 and that very year compete against biological girls.

01:32:34.540 You know, this is an issue.

01:32:36.160 Connecticut has been sort of the center of this because there there were three girls who brought

01:32:40.840 a lawsuit because they had been number one on the track team and suddenly fell to number three

01:32:45.740 after two trans girls joined the squad, joined the team.

01:32:49.180 And they're coming up.

01:32:51.660 So you're going to hear directly from the girls who have lost this battle.

01:32:55.720 They had a setback in court.

01:32:57.420 We'll hear from them.

01:32:58.780 And we'll also hear from her attorney about where this goes from here.

01:33:01.840 We're going to also talk to some medical professionals on what's real, like what's real,

01:33:06.660 because the advocates will tell you, you can sort of get rid of all the natural physical

01:33:11.760 advantages that a biological boy would have such that it's fair.

01:33:15.980 And then we'll have somebody else that challenges that.

01:33:18.380 So you're going to hear both sides.

01:33:19.700 It's going to be a great discussion.

01:33:20.800 I've been looking forward to this for months now.

01:33:23.080 It's Wednesday.

01:33:23.880 We'll see you then.

01:33:26.040 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

01:33:28.200 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:33:33.020 The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

01:33:48.380 It's Friday.

01:33:49.280 Thank you.

01:33:49.980 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

01:33:51.500 You

The Megyn Kelly Show - May 10, 2021

John McWhorter on MLK's Message, Fixing Our Culture's Focus on Race, and Nasty Words ｜ Ep. 100

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