The Megyn Kelly Show - Thomas Chatterton Williams on the Authoritarian Left, the Illusion of Racial Identity, and Victimhood in America

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00:01:01.380 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:03.280 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:01:06.800 Hey, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:15.780 Today, we've got Thomas Chatterton Williams.

00:01:19.700 This guy is bold.

00:01:21.480 He is bold, man.

00:01:22.520 He tells it like it is, and he takes a lot of slings and arrows, but stands tall.

00:01:27.020 He has such a fun resume.

00:01:29.220 He's an author, and he's a cultural critic.

00:01:31.500 He writes for Harper's Magazine.

00:01:34.020 He writes for New York Times Magazine.

00:01:36.740 And he's a fellow at AEI, American Enterprise Institute, which I was saying on our last show,

00:01:42.520 and I was teasing this, that it's a conservative think tank.

00:01:45.300 So think about that, right?

00:01:46.360 He's not blinded by ideology or partisanship.

00:01:49.940 And his views, they cover the board.

00:01:52.360 He's the guy who got that now famous Harper's letter going, where mostly people on the center

00:01:57.340 left were gathered together to speak out to the left on free speech, saying, calm down and

00:02:03.980 remember what America is supposed to be about and stop being so illiberal, right?

00:02:08.420 So he's a doer, and he's a thinker.

00:02:11.060 And his most recent book is called Self-Portrait in Black and White, Unlearning Race.

00:02:17.780 His dad was black, his mom's white, and he has been thinking about race in an interesting

00:02:24.560 way for his entire life.

00:02:26.460 And I think you're going to listen to him and think, why aren't more people going the

00:02:31.500 Thomas Chatterton Williams way as opposed to the Robin DiAngelo way?

00:02:34.780 Why aren't we listening to this man of color as opposed to this white woman who's trying

00:02:39.840 to lecture everybody, including him, on how they need to think about their skin color?

00:02:43.900 So anyway, he's a great thinker.

00:02:45.400 He's a great guy.

00:02:46.500 And he's coming up in one second.

00:02:48.780 But before we get to him, there's this.

00:02:54.560 Thomas, how are you?

00:02:59.440 I'm well.

00:02:59.980 How are you?

00:03:01.120 I'm great.

00:03:01.960 It's such a pleasure to be speaking with you.

00:03:04.300 Likewise.

00:03:04.820 Thanks so much for inviting me.

00:03:06.860 Let's talk about the need to balance the playing field right now when it comes to speech, when

00:03:12.460 it comes to civil rights, when it comes to things that, you know, the left, the liberal

00:03:17.200 left used to fight for in this country and no longer seems to want to.

00:03:21.280 I feel like there are coalitions forming right now with what traditionally would have been

00:03:25.780 seen as liberals and conservatives to try to take over that role that the ACLU has totally

00:03:31.900 abandoned of just a fighting for free speech, of fighting for actual civil rights.

00:03:36.880 I mean, how important is that effort to you?

00:03:39.260 I think it's really important.

00:03:40.840 Free speech, the freedom to express your beliefs without fear of sanction, without fear of reputational

00:03:49.940 destruction, those are bedrock freedoms that make our civil society work.

00:03:57.460 You know, the ACLU is an organization that had such radical beliefs in freedom of speech

00:04:03.640 that they filed lawsuits on behalf of the right of neo-Nazis to march, you know, and now you

00:04:10.600 have an organization that's changed into something quite different from that, that files lawsuits

00:04:15.740 on behalf of non-white students at Smith College paying $78,000 a year to go to school, filing

00:04:23.840 lawsuits for them to have the right to live in segregated dormitories.

00:04:26.760 I mean, it's really, it's not the same organization that it once was.

00:04:30.940 The thing at Smith College is so insane.

00:04:33.060 I mean, there's a couple of things going on there.

00:04:34.300 Jody Shaw and her resignation after being bullied there to talk about race at every turn

00:04:40.200 and see everything at Smith through the lens of race.

00:04:42.240 But then the other story that the Times reported now, not long ago, about the young woman who

00:04:48.780 claimed she was the victim of racists there, a racist janitor, a racist cafeteria worker

00:04:54.420 who she thought threw out of there just because she was sitting or eating while black.

00:05:00.420 But it turns out she was in the wrong place.

00:05:01.760 She wasn't allowed there.

00:05:02.620 Instead of standing behind the cafeteria worker and the janitor, the school threw them under the

00:05:08.440 bus.

00:05:09.500 And you had a great tweet about this, about what you would do if your kids sort of ever

00:05:18.060 treated a cafeteria worker or a janitor this way.

00:05:20.680 Can you just sum up what you were trying to say?

00:05:23.400 Well, yeah, I was saying that I would be really mortified if it turned out that my child,

00:05:30.220 whether she or he believed that they had been targeted or not.

00:05:36.040 When the facts came to light and it turned out that my child had gotten someone who is

00:05:42.100 legitimately economically marginalized.

00:05:44.760 And it turns out that the cafeteria worker is dealing with lupus or some chronic autoimmune

00:05:49.460 disorder and hasn't been able to find work since in almost a year.

00:05:53.820 If I found out that that had happened, I wouldn't be able to sleep until this situation had been

00:06:00.520 rectified.

00:06:02.240 What's really disturbing to me, though, is that I don't think it's just that this student

00:06:07.100 acted maliciously.

00:06:09.060 I think that we're raising generations of people now to see themselves only through hyper-subjective

00:06:18.880 lenses of victimization that really are immune to factual refutation, if that makes sense.

00:06:26.700 This person's whole worldview has told them that there cannot be a situation in which she

00:06:32.440 interacts with white people, even though she is actually objectively in the position of being

00:06:38.420 in the elite.

00:06:40.460 And they are in the position of what used to be called the proletariat.

00:06:43.800 She cannot perceive herself as being the person with the upper hand in the encounter,

00:06:49.520 even after their lives become destroyed from clashing with her.

00:06:54.040 You were saying that this is a girl paying $78,000 a year at this school, pulling social rank on a

00:07:00.200 janitor and a chronically sick kitchen worker, right?

00:07:03.620 Yeah.

00:07:04.760 And these people's lives really have been ruined.

00:07:06.360 The cafeteria worker came out publicly and said she did nothing.

00:07:10.440 All she did was wave at this young woman as the woman walked into the facility.

00:07:14.800 That's it.

00:07:15.740 And the woman just accused, suspected her of calling security.

00:07:19.460 Meanwhile, it was the janitor who called security, as he had been instructed to do by

00:07:23.200 Smith if they saw anybody in this dorm over the summer where they weren't supposed to be.

00:07:27.340 So the cafeteria worker winds up furloughed, looking for another job.

00:07:30.880 And the restaurant she applied to says, aren't you that racist?

00:07:36.020 Where do you go to get your reputation back?

00:07:38.600 You can't.

00:07:39.420 And this is what, you know, I've been pretty vocally outspoken about what is being called

00:07:46.980 cancel culture since the summer, since some other writers and I published a letter in

00:07:53.620 Harper's Magazine warning of these dangers.

00:07:55.960 And we caught a lot of flack from people saying that it's just a bunch of elites.

00:08:00.500 It's just billionaires like J.K.

00:08:02.440 Rowling complaining that they can't criticize with impunity anymore.

00:08:06.680 Real people don't actually ever get canceled.

00:08:08.820 And this, to me, crystallizes the fact that this is not a conversation just about elites.

00:08:14.320 This woman is the definition of somebody who's had their life ruined through a cancellation.

00:08:19.780 The student made the issue spark on Facebook with a post that drew many, many strangers to

00:08:28.620 target this woman and even harass her by snail mail and in her own physical community to the

00:08:33.920 point where she could not go and get another job.

00:08:36.540 She had been tarred as a racist.

00:08:39.160 And there's nothing that you can do in that situation to untar yourself.

00:08:43.140 You're just at the mercy of this kind of stigma attached to you.

00:08:46.800 And it's devastating.

00:08:48.840 The line that really struck me in this article by Michael Powell in the New York Times that

00:08:53.140 you're referring to about Smith College was the fact that this woman and others had said

00:08:58.700 that they're afraid of even enforcing the rules because you don't want to get into a conflict

00:09:04.100 with students, even when you're simply doing your job or what you've been hired to do.

00:09:09.940 You just try to avoid confrontation because you can't win.

00:09:13.840 Hmm.

00:09:14.860 I find that very that's very problematic on a number of levels, including.

00:09:21.100 Let's look forward to something like hiring.

00:09:23.440 Right.

00:09:23.940 I worry about this with women in in the wake of how sort of nutty the Me Too movement got,

00:09:29.680 you know, after it started with, I think, nobility and it crossed over to a place where

00:09:34.380 it felt very witch hunty.

00:09:35.440 But I worry about my fellow women actually making it into the C-suite of these companies

00:09:40.160 because the truth is, while these male executives who still control America are going to say

00:09:44.160 publicly, of course, equal rights, you know, to borrow a term from the White House, you

00:09:49.040 know, women's rights are human rights.

00:09:50.540 They say trans rights are human rights with behind closed doors when they actually have

00:09:54.920 to make the hiring decision between you and a guy who they know cannot ruin their career

00:09:59.460 with one allegation.

00:10:00.500 Right.

00:10:01.000 After 30 years of service, they're probably going to choose the guy.

00:10:04.980 And I worry about this for my my black friends, too.

00:10:08.580 I don't want to see them not chosen because of women like this girl at Smith College who basically

00:10:15.620 ruined a couple of people's lives just by making what turned out to be a totally baseless

00:10:19.280 allegation.

00:10:21.220 Yeah, I mean, that's a valid concern.

00:10:24.020 In all of these movements, you have an initial kind of response to what is a correct perception

00:10:31.140 that there have been many injustices in the history of this country and at our institutions.

00:10:35.720 And the Me Too movement is a good example.

00:10:37.920 You know, that was a response to real problems in the workplace and elsewhere.

00:10:44.560 But you always have to make sure that you don't allow the correction to become an overcorrection

00:10:51.780 that's actually worse than the problem or in some cases is creating new victims out of

00:10:57.780 out of, you know, collateral damage.

00:10:59.760 You don't want to be in these situations.

00:11:01.780 And so I know I worry quite a lot that we're in a moment where there is an extraordinary

00:11:08.660 overcorrection and many of us have become blind to real people's lives getting devoured

00:11:15.080 in the process of trying to fight for kind of abstract ideals of what we've been led to

00:11:21.180 believe amounts to social justice without really knowing who is a victim or an oppressor

00:11:29.680 in these altercations.

00:11:31.780 The after the Smith thing happened and, you know, that article published about what had

00:11:36.180 been done to the custodian and the cafeteria worker.

00:11:39.640 I tweeted out the following.

00:11:41.120 I'm quoting my tweet.

00:11:42.040 It reads, we are brainwashing kids into believing they're being victimized every minute, then

00:11:48.020 punishing people who did nothing wrong because we are so terrified of pushing back on any allegation

00:11:53.320 of racism, no matter how invented fake claims diminish real ones.

00:11:58.300 We're ruining lives and ourselves.

00:12:01.600 You know, we've just become so obsessed with racial identity that now, even when one raises

00:12:09.760 a baseless claim that hurts other people, they're not held to account because of it might have

00:12:16.640 been consistent with that person's other, quote, lived experience.

00:12:21.160 And so victims can fall left and right without any consequences, right?

00:12:27.120 Because of that other lived experience, which only is going to encourage more, more of this

00:12:32.600 obsession with identity.

00:12:34.060 Don't you think?

00:12:35.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:12:36.160 Yeah, that was a good tweet.

00:12:38.040 You can't.

00:12:39.040 Lived experience can never be the basis by which we go about deciding all of these matters because

00:12:45.360 it's by definition irrefutable.

00:12:47.680 That's why memoir is such a powerful genre of writing.

00:12:50.040 You can't argue with someone's experience.

00:12:52.000 You can only try to interpret it.

00:12:53.780 We have to actually have values that are universally accessible that we can, through which we can

00:13:02.080 interpret these situations.

00:13:03.920 And we have to be able to, you know, to depend on reason.

00:13:08.000 I think that we're really entering into dangerous terrain.

00:13:10.880 One of the worst aspects of the Smith College situation was that even after the college

00:13:17.640 president was made aware that a gross misjustice had been carried out, she still wouldn't actually

00:13:23.740 go so far as to fully distance herself from the student's fallacious claims.

00:13:30.560 And even the ACLU lawyer said, well, just because no evidence of any racism had been found, you

00:13:38.860 know, you can't conclude that the kid was wrong because these things are really difficult to

00:13:43.540 actually prove.

00:13:44.820 So in any event, it doesn't matter whether the report finds racism or doesn't find racism.

00:13:49.660 The answer is still racism.

00:13:51.640 And so, you know, it's not that the society has no racism in it.

00:13:55.180 It's that we have to have objective standards that can be met.

00:13:58.380 Otherwise, we're in a terrain where we're just going to be in a perpetual kind of identity

00:14:05.200 battle, as you've pointed out already.

00:14:07.700 Well, I think about, you know, the law, right?

00:14:10.380 That's my background is as a lawyer.

00:14:12.340 You can't get up on the witness stand and say, well, that's my lived experience.

00:14:15.300 You'd be laughed right out of court.

00:14:17.100 Not yet.

00:14:18.060 Right.

00:14:18.660 Right.

00:14:19.100 Exactly.

00:14:19.540 Not yet.

00:14:19.940 You need to present facts and then the judge or the jury will determine what the lived

00:14:25.080 experience actually was, right?

00:14:26.960 Like no one cares about your subjective feeling.

00:14:29.440 They care about what happened.

00:14:31.560 You saw somebody as you walked in.

00:14:33.200 Were you aware that you weren't supposed to be there?

00:14:35.380 Did they say anything to you?

00:14:36.600 Did they look at you and like, what are the facts?

00:14:39.620 And then we draw conclusions because the problem with lived experiences and I had this

00:14:42.600 argument with a friend of mine who was saying his lived experience is that all police are

00:14:48.480 brutal.

00:14:49.040 Now, this is a black man.

00:14:50.500 And I said, I understand that.

00:14:52.020 And that's how you grew up.

00:14:53.440 And those are your experiences in interacting with police.

00:14:55.900 And I obviously have a different experience as a white woman, but I do have a different

00:15:00.860 lived experience with police that shows me not all police are brutal.

00:15:05.740 Right.

00:15:06.180 I like I can testify to that firsthand.

00:15:09.000 Now, you can qualify it further.

00:15:10.540 Like he could have said, all police are brutal towards black people that I can't speak to.

00:15:14.440 I don't think it's true based on my conversations with people.

00:15:18.260 But, you know, everybody has a different lived experience and it doesn't amount to evidence

00:15:21.880 of anything.

00:15:23.420 That's right.

00:15:23.740 And also, you know.

00:15:25.800 His lived experience can't be that all police that he's interacted with are brutal because

00:15:30.000 he wouldn't be able to be there sitting talking with you.

00:15:33.260 Clearly, he's it's a kind of hyperbole to make a point.

00:15:37.460 And it's rooted in fact.

00:15:38.520 I mean, it is rooted in fact that different identities have different experiences, different

00:15:46.200 stories that they tell themselves and each other about their about their reality in America.

00:15:53.720 And we do have to understand, you know, what belief means, what psychological aspects of

00:16:00.380 one's, I guess, system of reality, what that what that makes someone's experience of shared

00:16:08.200 spaces be.

00:16:09.520 But that can't be the basis by which everything is decided now.

00:16:13.020 And so I'm just really I'm really worried that we're in a space where where we don't

00:16:18.160 have any longer a kind of.

00:16:22.460 We're getting into unbridgeable territory where we're essentially going to be segregating

00:16:27.980 ourselves out of interacting with each other.

00:16:29.800 I mean, the saddest part of the story is that there is a fight for spaces where, you know,

00:16:35.880 my dad grew up in the segregated South.

00:16:38.400 My dad's old enough to be my grandfather.

00:16:40.640 He grew up under real segregation until he was in his late 20s.

00:16:44.800 The idea that in his son's lifetime, we'd be moving back to arguments that people should

00:16:50.520 be physically segregated from each other by choice now.

00:16:54.620 I mean, it's incredibly heartbreaking.

00:16:56.380 It seems like the worst kind of measure of regress possible.

00:17:02.420 And, you know, just as a second point, my own experience with police, for whatever it's

00:17:08.220 worth, has been mixed like like a lot of people's.

00:17:12.800 But I mean, even a white person, even a white woman with blonde hair like me doesn't have

00:17:16.920 all positive police experiences.

00:17:18.280 Now, I have a brother who's a police officer who's an honorable, decent, lovely man who's

00:17:23.500 really helped a lot of inner city communities.

00:17:25.260 But in my own experience, you know, as a woman, I can tell you I've been I've been bullied

00:17:29.940 by police officers who have been real brutes.

00:17:32.780 I've been sexually harassed by police officers back in my college years, like pretty blatantly

00:17:38.900 in areas in ways in which I easily could have gotten these guys fired, but didn't.

00:17:43.000 I'm just saying it's not like like any group of humans.

00:17:45.380 You got some good ones and you got some bad ones.

00:17:48.100 And so in my ever defending police on data and facts, it doesn't mean I think they're

00:17:52.480 all great.

00:17:53.040 It just means I don't think they're all bad either.

00:17:55.860 Of course, because life is too complicated for anything to be either or.

00:18:01.380 I mean, you can talk about the ways in which black and brown people who tend to be in poorer

00:18:09.180 neighborhoods and in certain areas interact with the police in different ways or have

00:18:14.000 more interactions with the police because of certain structural realities.

00:18:18.440 That's certainly possible.

00:18:19.940 And, you know, in my own experience and my own lived reality, you know, I've interacted

00:18:24.700 with with cops who have been extremely mean and a few have let me off in in ways that

00:18:31.260 I couldn't believe when I probably deserved a ticket or things like that.

00:18:36.440 You know, it's it's there's no one single conclusion I can draw from my own personal

00:18:41.060 interactions with police officers.

00:18:45.160 So I don't I mean, I don't know.

00:18:47.840 That's pretty generous of you, but that's pretty generous of you because I did.

00:18:50.840 I understand that your brother was beaten up pretty badly by cops.

00:18:55.100 Yeah, he was.

00:18:56.520 And that was in my first book.

00:18:58.700 I wrote about the fact that, you know, my brother and I and my parents, we lived.

00:19:04.160 We were one of the few families on on what was essentially the white side of a town that

00:19:08.820 was informally still segregated in New Jersey.

00:19:11.780 And, you know, we were these were cops that my brother had interacted with before.

00:19:16.860 And he had a outstanding ticket and he had hadn't paid it in time, according to their

00:19:24.800 records.

00:19:25.540 And they were waiting for him to come home with a warrant for his arrest.

00:19:29.660 And he said that he had paperwork to show them inside that would show that he had sent

00:19:33.440 the payment in.

00:19:34.160 And as he tried to get to the door, they both physically started to restrain him.

00:19:39.440 And he tried he got scared and he tried to run into the house.

00:19:42.060 And my father tells me that he came down into the garage and, you know, my brother was in

00:19:46.440 the process of being beaten pretty bad.

00:19:48.020 You know, his teeth were knocked out and they they drew one of them drew a firearm on my father.

00:19:53.140 And which is which is extraordinary because he's a 60 at the time he was a 65 year old man.

00:19:59.680 You know, he's got a Ph.D.

00:20:03.100 He's standing in his own home.

00:20:04.460 It's an extraordinary situation.

00:20:05.720 And the only thing that stopped it was when my mother, who's white, came downstairs on the

00:20:11.340 phone with with the lawyer.

00:20:13.240 Um, this is this is something that is very difficult for me to make sense of.

00:20:18.220 I wasn't there.

00:20:18.960 I believe that it was racially inflected.

00:20:21.260 Absolutely.

00:20:22.240 I also believe that, you know, it does not.

00:20:26.320 It doesn't define my brother's life.

00:20:28.520 He doesn't believe it defines his life.

00:20:30.140 He's had other interactions.

00:20:32.140 You know, I've I've also talked sometimes about the fact that, you know, I've been in the

00:20:37.060 car with my brother when he's been speeding and a white cop pulls us over and and says it's

00:20:42.700 late at night.

00:20:43.020 I want you to get home safe.

00:20:44.760 Um, if I let you go, will you just get home safe?

00:20:47.880 That's happened, too.

00:20:49.040 So experiences are varied and I can't draw a single conclusion about all police from that.

00:20:54.100 But I would also just say, you know, I think that one of the main problems that we have

00:20:59.680 is that we do live segregated lives and many people don't interact or know well people from

00:21:06.320 other, uh, identities.

00:21:08.800 And so I think that there's a kind of feeling that non-white people can have that white life

00:21:17.180 is is always easy and perfect.

00:21:19.420 And, you know, when you actually live around white people and know white people, uh, white

00:21:25.260 people don't all treat each other well and nicely.

00:21:28.240 Uh, in my experience, I've seen, um, cops, white cops be awful to, to white neighbors,

00:21:35.640 to other white people.

00:21:37.240 I've, um, been in the car with, to white family members.

00:21:40.380 Uh, it's not as though outside of their interactions with, with, with, with so-called people of color,

00:21:45.720 everybody gets along all the time.

00:21:47.420 So it's very difficult to make these enormous conclusions from individual interactions.

00:21:53.580 Well, I heard you and Coleman Hughes, um, who I love having a really interesting conversation

00:21:59.060 about, you're talking about the SATs and sort of how there's a, there's a separate assessment

00:22:05.320 of one's privilege now, like, and they look at more than just race.

00:22:08.820 They look at background and, you know, what's their advantages and disadvantages you may have

00:22:13.440 had in your life.

00:22:14.080 And I was thinking, okay, I, I like that.

00:22:16.780 I think about somebody like JD Vance, you know, who grew up in Appalachia and had a

00:22:20.440 mother who was addicted to drugs and nobody in the family had ever been to college.

00:22:23.500 And, you know, he wound up at Yale law school and this guy's brilliant and he's exactly somebody

00:22:29.460 who should get extra consideration, you know, in applying to schools, um, and shouldn't be

00:22:35.600 ignored just because he has white skin.

00:22:38.100 But you, you were raising interesting points about how, what, what is privilege, right?

00:22:43.760 And like, can you assume somebody's got it just because they're rich?

00:22:47.560 Yeah.

00:22:47.840 Well, you know, I think it's very difficult to standardize, um, concepts like privilege

00:22:54.180 to standardize, uh, highly subjective, um, ideas like struggle, adversity.

00:23:01.400 How do you make an index that scores that in a way that, um, you know, I, I've, I've had

00:23:08.040 these debates with some of my friends, you know, and it's that you can't argue experience.

00:23:12.500 I have one friend in particular, I'm thinking of who's a beautiful human being, you know,

00:23:17.800 a six foot four inch, uh, you know, college basketball player who went to two Ivy league

00:23:23.780 schools for undergrad and his MBA worked on wall street, made really good money, dated every

00:23:28.940 beautiful girl of any race that you would wish to date.

00:23:32.660 And, you know, fundamentally believes that, um, that he's a victim and that he's constantly

00:23:40.220 suffering in his life because of his race, um, his back.

00:23:44.500 And there's nothing that you can kind of do to, to tell him that on, you know, on every

00:23:49.820 other measure, he's extremely privileged and extremely fortunate and lucky.

00:23:54.380 And I'm not sure that many white people I know would actually, um, would not want to

00:24:00.660 trade places with him.

00:24:01.920 So it's, it's, how do you measure these, all of these factors?

00:24:04.640 I think that, you know, when you go to elite schools, you end up meeting, uh, quite a lot

00:24:10.600 of non-white people who are there, um, to build diversity.

00:24:14.520 But in fact, uh, they're not bringing an enormous amount of socioeconomic diversity.

00:24:19.080 Um, I worry that, you know, we're, we're kind of saying that, you know, there needs to

00:24:24.700 be, um, a certain amount of diversity within the billionaire class that reflects the population

00:24:29.940 at large.

00:24:30.460 There needs to be, you know, 13% of CEOs should, should be X, Y, Z, um, as opposed to actually

00:24:37.100 looking for ways in which we could do something that would even come close to leveling the field

00:24:42.060 between people of any background who are really shut out of understanding how, um, how social

00:24:48.900 networks work and how to get ahead and how to get into these spaces in the first place.

00:24:52.660 If that makes sense, you know, I think that being poor is something that is not represented

00:24:57.880 at Columbia, at Harvard, et cetera.

00:25:00.580 And it's not being represented necessarily by, by the people who superficially bring a

00:25:05.000 different identity category either.

00:25:06.400 This is one of the biggest, um, things that shocked me when I got to Georgetown, uh, you

00:25:11.460 know, 22 years ago, whenever I started college, um, every, every black and Latino person

00:25:17.160 that I met was, was, was well to do by my standards.

00:25:20.100 So I had never met this many wealthy, so I didn't understand what the diversity was in

00:25:25.660 some ways, uh, you know?

00:25:27.900 Yeah.

00:25:28.440 No, being poor is not represented in, and now there's being Republican, right?

00:25:32.320 Like there are no poor people and there are no conservatives.

00:25:35.920 Viewpoint diversity is a, is a completely different, um, aspect of, of, of making a truly diverse

00:25:42.980 space that's, that's really neglected in these conversations now.

00:25:46.940 So I mean, um, I do think there's probably a desire if you said to the admissions board

00:25:51.660 at Harvard, would you like to get more people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged into

00:25:55.560 the school?

00:25:56.060 They'd say yes.

00:25:57.140 If they were honest and you asked, do you want more Republicans?

00:26:00.020 They'd say, what kind?

00:26:03.260 Like a, like the Mitt Romney kind?

00:26:05.600 They definitely want the Mitt Romney kind.

00:26:07.780 I would bet they do want the Mitt Romney kind.

00:26:09.980 But I think your point about segregation is really interesting and distressing.

00:26:15.560 There's a couple of things I want to talk to you about that.

00:26:17.600 So you're right that part of the problem we have, like I was talking to Glenn Lowry and

00:26:22.400 he was saying one of the ways forward, we have this long, great discussion.

00:26:25.480 It's one of my favorite shows.

00:26:26.360 He and Coleman came on.

00:26:27.080 One of mine too.

00:26:27.780 Yeah.

00:26:27.920 I really liked that show.

00:26:29.280 Oh, thank you.

00:26:29.980 And, and he was, I was like, what's the solution?

00:26:31.900 And it ended with, you know, he didn't have it all summed up, but one of his recommendations

00:26:35.680 was we need more interracial marriages, right?

00:26:39.220 We need, we need more race blending.

00:26:41.420 So we're just not otherizing people all the time.

00:26:44.100 And we, we kind of, as you say, get past this obsession with race.

00:26:50.000 And I do think part of the problem, and I live in the city, I live in New York city.

00:26:53.860 So it's, it's very mixed, the race, you know, the ethnicities, all of it.

00:26:58.340 But it isn't that easy to find new friends of other colors unless you make a point of it.

00:27:05.740 Do you know what I mean?

00:27:06.280 Like, yeah, you would have to say, I want to affirmatively go out and increase the number

00:27:11.680 of black friends I have in my circle.

00:27:13.140 I have thought that to myself.

00:27:14.560 And then I think, is that racist?

00:27:17.360 Like, just like, hello, you over there with the brown skin.

00:27:21.020 Will you be my friend?

00:27:24.120 So I'm not sure how exactly one handles that.

00:27:27.060 And I'm sure we got a lot of listeners out there who are living in communities that are

00:27:29.580 predominantly white, who would love to make a black friend, but don't totally understand

00:27:34.280 how to go about doing it.

00:27:36.860 I mean, that's an interesting point.

00:27:38.520 And it's one that really speaks to my own lived experience, if we should come back to

00:27:43.980 that.

00:27:44.260 But, you know, I'm a product of an interracial marriage that began just a few years after

00:27:52.020 that was made legal nationwide.

00:27:54.040 After Loving v.

00:27:54.920 Virginia, my parents got together in the early 70s.

00:27:57.360 Yeah.

00:27:57.460 I mean, it's crazy.

00:27:59.380 When I was growing up, I really didn't know many, many people that were from mixed marriages.

00:28:04.480 But, you know, something did really change in the culture.

00:28:07.540 It's an exploding demographic.

00:28:09.420 And now in my own mixed marriage, which is both racially mixed and, you know, we're of

00:28:16.980 different nationalities, you know, kind of being different is something that's become

00:28:21.780 very normal in my family.

00:28:22.960 My brother has a daughter with a Russian woman.

00:28:26.960 So there's lots of different identities in my family.

00:28:30.120 And I think that's really helped me understand some of these things from a variety of viewpoints.

00:28:36.960 And one of the first things that became clear to me was that when you have people in your

00:28:42.180 family, when you have children in a mixed marriage, this is what my mother knew that I

00:28:47.820 didn't realize until I became a parent.

00:28:49.520 You're not a different race than your children.

00:28:51.460 You can think, I thought I have a black dad and a white mom, but once I had children that

00:28:56.040 looked different than me, the categories fell apart in my own way of understanding myself

00:29:04.260 and then eventually in my way of understanding our entire society.

00:29:07.920 These categories aren't real.

00:29:09.060 I'm not a different race than my daughter.

00:29:10.900 The best thing that we could do is actually live intimately with each other.

00:29:15.220 I mean, in terms of friendship and in terms of, you know, mixing would actually help.

00:29:20.380 It's kind of been dismissed as a naive kind of panacea.

00:29:23.740 You know, Norman Podhoretz wrote about that, you know, decades ago is the only way he saw

00:29:27.980 we get out of the racial dilemma is when we become a beige society.

00:29:31.320 There's lots of reasons why that's not going to happen anytime soon.

00:29:35.060 And there would still probably be a very poor and darker skinned underclass.

00:29:39.280 Many demographers have predicted the way that, you know, you have in Latin America or something.

00:29:43.760 But there's no doubt in my mind that if we actually knew each other and how each other

00:29:48.620 lived and were related to each other, you'd have some of the breakthroughs that you had,

00:29:52.680 for example, with the evolving understanding of gay rights.

00:29:56.860 When people started realizing 10 years ago, oh, Uncle Dave, he's gay, actually, you know?

00:30:04.920 And then the whole issue starts to open up in a different way because you love Uncle Dave

00:30:09.120 and you actually know him and you know he's a good guy.

00:30:11.980 So I think that there is something about, you know, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this extraordinarily

00:30:17.260 bestselling memoir, Between the World and Me, that kind of changed the American conversation

00:30:24.100 around race and in many ways led us to where we are now.

00:30:27.180 You know, he became the authority on the black experience.

00:30:29.640 One of the things he says and is quite honest about him is that he never knew white people,

00:30:33.540 never really knew any white people until he started working at the Atlantic.

00:30:37.100 This is nuts.

00:30:39.880 You know, he only knew white people from TV.

00:30:43.160 And I think that a lot of white people only know black people from what they see on TV.

00:30:46.940 And a lot of our problems come from that, too.

00:30:50.940 Up next with Thomas, the difference between anti-racism and anti-race.

00:30:56.660 He's the latter.

00:30:58.140 He's a proponent of the latter, as, of course, his book title tells us, a learning race and

00:31:03.540 why he thinks that's so important.

00:31:05.760 That's coming up in one minute.

00:31:07.100 I used to laugh because I grew up in upstate New York, Syracuse, and then Albany.

00:31:15.080 And we had one black kid in our class and both of his parents were doctors.

00:31:20.820 And I was just thinking, like, this might not be totally representative of, you know,

00:31:24.840 the normal black experience in America.

00:31:26.640 I'm not sure how much I should be extrapolating from Aussie to, you know, the general black community.

00:31:31.500 But then, you know, I got out there, right?

00:31:33.080 I went to schools in those same cities.

00:31:36.040 But then after that, I moved to Chicago, moved to New York, moved to D.C.

00:31:38.500 And you sort of you expand your horizons.

00:31:40.760 A lot of people don't.

00:31:42.260 And so it's not that they have prejudice in their heart or racism against other, right?

00:31:47.140 It's just they haven't been exposed there.

00:31:49.400 I think in general, there is a I don't want to say fear of other, but maybe just like distance from other or reticence to understand.

00:31:58.600 I'm not sure.

00:31:59.040 My friend Ellen, she's married to Stossel.

00:32:00.800 John Stossel, she's a psychiatrist.

00:32:02.680 She's like human beings have a fear of other.

00:32:04.520 And so then to get over the fear when you don't have any people in your community who are of a different skin color than you, it doesn't work to just watch Cosby.

00:32:13.860 You know, like, I don't know what the answer is, but we got to find it.

00:32:18.420 We do have to find it.

00:32:19.740 You know, in my experience also, you know, a lot of these problems are solved when people can meet each other as equals.

00:32:26.120 A lot of problems are that, you know, there still is a great amount of economic inequality.

00:32:33.240 I've really come to see that since I wrote my second book, you know, my book is an argument for why we can't just be anti-racist as is the fashion now by kind of digging deeper into our racial identities.

00:32:49.280 But we actually have to be anti-race and try to try to transcend these divisions.

00:32:56.900 But I'm aware that, you know, this is not going to happen without without getting people into situations where they meet each other as equals, where people have opportunities for education, where people are, you know, able to have some sense of reparation for the housing inequality that's happened over the decades.

00:33:15.780 We have to think seriously in terms of material terms and also in terms of, you know, the way we perceive ourselves in each other.

00:33:23.400 And the two have to go together.

00:33:24.760 It's a really, really difficult situation.

00:33:27.220 But one of the reasons we don't meet each other is because of economic inequality.

00:33:30.960 And I don't think that so long as so long as yeah, as long as class is overwhelmingly raced, then these these problems are going to persist.

00:33:42.940 So the book that you're referring to, your second book is called Unlearning Race.

00:33:48.500 That's the book you're referring to.

00:33:49.400 Self-fortune of black and white, Unlearning Race.

00:33:50.900 Yeah.

00:33:51.680 Yeah.

00:33:51.900 And in that, you do make the point that we need to de-emphasize race to progress as a culture that that racism creates race, not the other way around.

00:34:04.740 Have I put it correctly?

00:34:06.260 That's right.

00:34:06.840 Yeah.

00:34:07.980 So explain that.

00:34:08.660 Yeah, that's I mean, that's a point that's made very powerfully in a book from 2012 called Racecraft, the Soul of Inequality in American Life by two sisters, Barbara and Karen Fields.

00:34:21.860 One's a historian at Columbia and the other is a sociologist, I believe, at Duke.

00:34:26.940 And they argue that, you know, race is a construction that comes out of the collision of Europe and Africa in the new world through the through the fundamental economic exploitation of the slave trade.

00:34:40.940 And that, you know, in a new democracy that's based on the universal rights of man and liberty, you have to have an ideology that justifies why very obviously some men are not free and some men are slaves.

00:34:56.500 And that ideology became a racial ideology.

00:35:01.140 The racism, the exploiting of the otherness became a way of dividing people based on these immutable characteristics.

00:35:10.200 You know, prior to this, it's not that people never looked different before.

00:35:12.960 But if you read, you know, I'm a fan of Terence's famous quote from from Roman times, you know, I'm a human being.

00:35:23.440 Nothing human is alien to me.

00:35:24.680 You know, people were different from each other in prior times, but they didn't organize the world into four or five distinct color categories that comes out of the Enlightenment.

00:35:33.740 That's four or five hundred years old. And I have to believe that anything that's been created could be potentially uncreated or unlearned, no matter how difficult that's going to be.

00:35:45.260 So that's why I argue in the book that these categories are irredeemable.

00:35:51.540 I don't think that, you know, the fashionable anti-racism that gets close to making blackness a distinct identity from whiteness in the same way that actual racists do.

00:36:04.140 I don't think that that will ever get us where we want to go, because the hierarchies and the exploitation is implied in the color categories.

00:36:11.060 That's right. That's that's what seems so wrong about it to me.

00:36:13.640 I like when I read Robin DiAngelo telling me to walk into the room, if you and I were in person together, I would have to start by saying, Thomas, I'm sorry.

00:36:20.880 I apologize on behalf of myself, my race and my country.

00:36:24.620 And I promise to you, I will spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you.

00:36:28.540 Meanwhile, it's like you are better read than I am.

00:36:31.140 You're better educated than I have.

00:36:32.720 You live a glamorous, awesome life in Paris.

00:36:35.360 Like it's so pejorative.

00:36:37.560 It's so it's so condescending.

00:36:39.940 I would hope you'd laugh in my face if I said that to you.

00:36:42.740 Well, I never did take the LSAT.

00:36:45.100 So you might you might be much better educated than me.

00:36:48.040 I wouldn't bet on it.

00:36:49.340 But but I would say that, you know, it would actually be something that I really wouldn't want you to do, because even though you could be doing it from a well-meaning place, Megan, you would actually be reaffirming that you're superior to me.

00:37:02.060 And it's really not what I want.

00:37:03.480 There is something so condescending in a white person taking Robin DiAngelo's advice and thinking that I'm so broken and wounded because of things that are in my ancestry that she has to kind of make herself smaller for me to feel fully myself.

00:37:25.480 Or she can't you know, you're not supposed to cry in front of me either, Megan, because, you know, white women's tears would trigger me.

00:37:32.320 And there's a long history of that.

00:37:33.580 But this is so paternalistic and so condescending, actually.

00:37:37.360 It's a way of actually reaffirming, reaffirming my inferiority by other means.

00:37:44.240 And so the thing is to treat each other the way you want to be treated, even if that means, you know, treating people bluntly or rudely or just being.

00:37:56.420 Not trying to change the world to make it softer for for people you perceive as being as being victims.

00:38:07.260 I get it.

00:38:08.620 That's how I feel.

00:38:09.380 Honestly, somebody said to me once I was having some sort of a Twitter spat with.

00:38:14.220 Well, it started off with.

00:38:17.800 With Colin Kaepernick, he was ripping on the Soleimani strike as racist when we took out the Iranian general.

00:38:23.780 And I was like, oh, of course.

00:38:26.280 I'm like, everything, everything has to be seen through a racial prison.

00:38:29.400 Right.

00:38:29.720 Like we wouldn't have bombed him if he had white skin and had been killing American soldiers.

00:38:33.840 And then.

00:38:36.120 God, what's her name?

00:38:37.300 The director, the black director, Ava DuVernay.

00:38:40.020 Ava DuVernay.

00:38:40.900 She got on me and I gave it right back to her.

00:38:44.920 A-list pile on.

00:38:46.400 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:46.800 So we were punching each other rhetorically.

00:38:49.020 And somebody on Twitter was like, you know, you might think about not attacking black people on Twitter all the time.

00:38:54.380 And I was like, so first of all, it's not all the time.

00:38:56.040 But second of all, how I feel like for me to say I'm not going to respond to this attack Ava launched on me or this stupid thing Colin Kaepernick said because they're black.

00:39:05.060 That's racist.

00:39:05.940 They're going to get it just as good as I'd give it to some white person, which I also do.

00:39:09.860 And that's really actually treating them as though they're not your equal.

00:39:15.620 I mean, it's funny to me that that's not apparent to people on its face, that if you have to hold yourself back and be quiet around black people, it's because you believe that you're stronger than they are.

00:39:25.080 It's really that obvious.

00:39:26.940 It's also just crazy to think of, you know, to internationalize.

00:39:31.720 I actually am very concerned with this in my own work these days.

00:39:34.720 I live in Paris.

00:39:36.420 The internationalization of highly specific American ways of thinking about identity.

00:39:42.060 You know, we saw this with Alison, the Alison Roman scandal that happened, you know, last summer when she was accused of, you know, of diminishing women of color.

00:39:55.920 Chrissy Teigen.

00:39:56.940 Yes.

00:39:57.360 Right.

00:39:57.680 She was the critic at the Times, the food critic, and she ripped on Chrissy Teigen and one other person.

00:40:03.360 And I'm sorry, it's the woman who organizes, the Japanese woman who organizes spaces.

00:40:07.840 Oh, yeah.

00:40:08.740 That Marie, what's her name?

00:40:11.300 Marie Kondo.

00:40:11.800 Marie Kondo.

00:40:12.640 Yeah.

00:40:12.940 So she ripped on them in a very mild way, by the way.

00:40:15.680 It wasn't like particularly harsh.

00:40:17.640 And she was called a racist.

00:40:19.160 Because these are considered to be people of color.

00:40:21.340 But, you know, Japanese people don't walk around identifying themselves in Japan as people of color.

00:40:25.600 Iranians don't think of themselves as people of color in Iran the way that we make people people of color in America through our discourse on white supremacy.

00:40:36.280 Even though on the census, Persians and Arabs are considered Caucasian.

00:40:39.960 But no one even, you know, we don't actually get it.

00:40:42.280 We just throw around these labels as though the entire world is organized based on our racial discourse.

00:40:48.980 And it really actually dissolves complexity.

00:40:53.240 And it's a problem.

00:40:54.640 We're importing these debates into Europe at the moment.

00:40:57.860 And I don't see any good coming out of this.

00:40:59.800 In fact, there's a very kind of intense debate going on in France where at the level of the president, Macron is saying that he doesn't, France can't import American style identity politics.

00:41:11.920 It has a different value system, a different way of making its multicultural society work.

00:41:17.340 And this has been something that American journalists have been ripping into him for having, you know, the gall to say.

00:41:24.360 It's really quite something.

00:41:26.100 I miss that Twitter spat, though.

00:41:29.120 Well, it was a while ago.

00:41:30.560 I think it was January of 20 when he was making it was right after Soleimani got bombed.

00:41:37.040 And so on that subject, let me ask you, you're raised in Newark, New Jersey.

00:41:41.000 You move over to Paris.

00:41:42.780 You marry a French woman, right?

00:41:45.220 She's French.

00:41:46.540 Yeah.

00:41:47.440 And what so what is that like now?

00:41:50.100 Because I've heard you say something to the effect of when you're in when you're in Paris, when you're in France, you're perceived first as an American man, not not as a black man.

00:42:01.320 That's right.

00:42:01.900 I mean, that's kind of an insight that has been often a recurring theme in the literature of black American expat writers like James Baldwin or Richard Wright, Chester Himes.

00:42:17.640 You know, the the realization that race is often tied to localities and that, you know, your racial identity is something that's made in the society in which you grew up.

00:42:33.960 When I came to to Paris, it's not that I stopped being black or anything like that, but it wasn't the most important aspect of who I was.

00:42:41.620 First and foremost, I was an American.

00:42:43.000 I was certainly not a European.

00:42:44.140 And you learn very quickly, as Baldwin wrote, that you have more in common with a white American in Paris and he has more in common with you than either of you have with the European or the African that you'll meet there.

00:42:56.420 And me, the way that I look when I was first in France, living in neighborhoods that were highly mixed with with with with North Africans, with Arabs, I was often mistaken for Algerian.

00:43:09.200 And my physical characteristics were not necessarily read in the society in the exact same way that they were read in the society I had left.

00:43:16.260 So all of this was kind of it was it was it was revelatory to me in the sense that I felt like I had freed myself from the kind of American obsession with with race as a binary between black and white.

00:43:30.040 And I had, you know, I had started to experience what it means to be an American, which is actually which is actually itself quite a privilege in a global context.

00:43:44.440 Wow, that's so interesting.

00:43:47.660 And like that you would have to go overseas to get away with this from this obsession on race.

00:43:52.440 And you went before this year.

00:43:55.480 I mean, we weren't quite as bad when you went over there as we are now.

00:43:59.360 We're going in the wrong direction.

00:44:00.920 People have thrown your book out in favor of even X.

00:44:03.600 Kendi's.

00:44:03.900 And it's exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.

00:44:06.200 They're coming for you now in France with his ideas.

00:44:08.940 Yeah, they are, although the French are less the French are still putting up a different kind of a fight.

00:44:18.920 Not that the French are without flaws and there's no racism in the society.

00:44:22.920 But a lot of people in France of a variety of ethnic backgrounds really do believe in a kind of universalism and still want that.

00:44:32.100 You want to have a society in which you're first and foremost a citizen and your ethnic or religious identity is something private.

00:44:39.800 They want that in a way that Americans don't seem to want that anymore.

00:44:43.660 So actually, my book just came out in France and it's been received entirely differently here than it was in the United States, which has been an eye opening experience, actually.

00:44:52.380 Good.

00:44:52.860 I mean, everyone should read it.

00:44:54.340 It's the it's the solution.

00:44:57.100 And yet we really are embracing we just not long ago, we played an ad that's playing on some kids channel now where the little characters are saying we really should see color.

00:45:08.020 It's important to see color, you know, in the little black child.

00:45:10.760 I think it really is important that my skin's black and your skin's white.

00:45:14.800 And I've actually thought of you.

00:45:16.340 You've been trying to say exactly the opposite.

00:45:18.460 Is it your dad, who is a black man raised in America and the segregationist South, raised you to not obsess over this?

00:45:25.800 Like, I love the story of when your daughter was born, who looks white.

00:45:29.600 And he was like, none of this matters.

00:45:32.500 And he's been saying that to your whole like this stuff doesn't matter.

00:45:35.260 And he also said, you know, and it's also not new.

00:45:37.500 He said, you know, on the on the in the segregated part of Texas where I grew up, there was there was a child who is colored like your daughter was.

00:45:46.640 And she was and she was on on the black side of town.

00:45:49.640 You know, he said there's all that we have never been as as unmixed as people would like you to believe.

00:45:56.800 And that really did put me at ease.

00:45:58.620 But, you know, I am very worried about the thing that you that you that you brought up, which is the idea that kids are now being taught to see and focus on color and to see and focus on what's called racial difference.

00:46:14.220 You know, that's where you actually have, you know, the French have a saying extremes meet.

00:46:18.760 That's where you have the anti-racist left coming full circle and actually using the same way of seeing the world in the same way of the same prism of race to filter all of reality as actual racists do.

00:46:33.960 Racists see color, too.

00:46:35.860 And they want their kids to grow up seeing differences that they call racial differences and believing that those are the things that cannot be transcended or overcome.

00:46:44.480 I mean, it's it's it reinforces the very thing that that that these people claim to want to counteract.

00:46:50.460 I can't understand why it's so difficult to get people who who claim to be anti-racist to see this.

00:46:57.400 But I have to also admit that, you know, you've mentioned Kendi and there are many others, D'Angelo, but there are many others.

00:47:04.680 There's there's there's quite a lot to get out of exploiting racial divides.

00:47:09.260 It's not that they're doing this in futility.

00:47:12.520 It's it's it's a way money, money, power.

00:47:17.480 It's a way of ending debates, silencing dissents.

00:47:21.880 You know, it's people are using racial difference in a way that works for them.

00:47:27.580 So telling telling telling telling anybody to stop doing something that works for them is going to fall on deaf ears nine times out of 10.

00:47:34.720 So that's that's when I start to feel a bit pessimistic.

00:47:38.780 Like, you know, you're in New York City. I believe you've been focused on stuff with schools because your kids were in schools there.

00:47:45.880 You know, I'm alarmed by what I read about what's going on there.

00:47:48.140 If you look at Fieldston or something, you know, they're sorting kids as young as the third grade into racial affinity groups.

00:47:54.860 And every group talks about what they're proud about in in their racial identity, except that the white group was supposed to just meditate on, you know, on their privilege and to listen and be silent.

00:48:09.340 But and, you know, the reporting on this was extraordinary.

00:48:12.700 There were several articles in The Times and New York magazine within a few weeks, the third grade white racial affinity group that's supposed to think about how guilty it is becomes a white pride group.

00:48:21.880 Of course it does, because the more identity, the sword of identity can be picked up and used by anybody.

00:48:28.900 The more that one group focuses on its racial identity, the more that that incentivizes every other group to focus on its racial identity.

00:48:35.100 This doesn't lead anywhere. Good. It's so maddening, because I will tell you here in New York.

00:48:40.780 My son, his two best friends, one was black, one was brown.

00:48:45.440 My daughter's best friend has been a brown, a mixed race girl from the time she was two.

00:48:50.460 They they do not like they see color. They have eyes. They see it the way they see hair color.

00:48:54.880 But they have zero idea that there is some something that should be dividing them or making one of them feel like they belong to the oppressor race and one to the oppressed race.

00:49:04.580 And I resent the schools making them see it in a way that creates a wedge between them.

00:49:12.260 I resent I know they need to learn about history. I want that.

00:49:15.600 I know they need to learn about anti-bullying and the fact that there are racists in this country.

00:49:20.220 I want that, too. I just don't want such a such a divisive message being wedged between them to where you take beautiful, perfectly healthy friendships and change them in a way I think is unhealthy.

00:49:33.720 Absolutely. And you actually you actually damage, you know, real friendships that were evidence of the actual world already that people say they want to get to real interracial friendships that were working, you know, that are that are then that problems are introduced into those friendships and made to not work.

00:49:53.560 When the whole point is to transcend these differences and get to the space they were already at.

00:49:58.060 I've even seen accounts of people, you know, since since since unfortunately George Floyd died in May and the kind of racial reckoning the country has been going through ever since.

00:50:08.840 I've seen unbelievable accounts of people happily married for years and decades suddenly realizing that, you know, that they were uncomfortable being married to a white person because of systemic racism and reassessing their own wife.

00:50:25.540 There have been reports of this. It's been unbelievable.

00:50:27.760 You know, people reevaluating friendships. There have been op-eds. I'm I'm not sure I can allow my kids to be to be friends across race anymore.

00:50:36.520 It's too traumatizing. But they were already friends across race. Why?

00:50:40.400 You know, it's one of the things that my wife pointed out to me when I was finishing my book.

00:50:44.980 There's a scene at the end of my book where, you know, we're at her grandmother's house in Normandy.

00:50:52.180 Her grandmother is a lovely woman who's always treated, you know, me really well and really, you know, likes my dad.

00:51:00.920 And, you know, she's a woman of her time. She's 90 years old and she has, you know, there's a porcelain head that she has in her in her place in Normandy.

00:51:11.660 That is like a black woman's head. And it just it's it's a crazy looking thing to me.

00:51:18.300 My wife and her cousins are like mortified. They try to hide it.

00:51:22.540 Her grandmother's not even she's not aware that it's something that she would never understand if I tried to explain to her, you know, why it's racist.

00:51:30.940 But I write about, you know, my own like wrestling with staring at this thing sometimes when when we visit it.

00:51:36.740 And the thing my wife told me was, you know, like. We are already living in a mixed multiracial family that loves each other.

00:51:47.260 It's already working, you know, and I could sit her 90 year old grandmother down and try to get her woke and try to explain to her how that was a microaggression.

00:51:58.100 But as I think it through, it didn't actually hurt me. I'm already living the way that I want to live.

00:52:05.640 And, you know, I'm strong enough to to get through it.

00:52:11.080 And when my daughter is old enough to understand it, I'm going to teach her exactly what's what I think is wrong about it.

00:52:16.060 And we're going to continue to be in this family that loves each other and works.

00:52:19.020 And to me, that seems like the win win situation, you know, as opposed to fetishizing the wound and and wallowing it and never getting past it.

00:52:29.920 And then, you know, and then trying to reeducate all of the world to see things the way that we see things now.

00:52:37.760 You know, it just seems to me like not only a Sisyphean task, but it seems to me that it would miss the fact that this woman actually is not intending to harm me.

00:52:49.840 And that's something that's getting lost in the conversation now.

00:52:53.120 Exactly right. I mean, like my 100 year old Nana, she said something like I was dating a Jewish guy and and she said, is she Jewish?

00:53:02.040 I said, yeah, she goes, they're very good to their women. OK, I'm not even going to try.

00:53:08.340 Right. There's no reason to. Some are good. Some are bad, like everybody else.

00:53:14.320 But, you know, you're dealing with somebody who is 100 years old. I mean, really, what's the point?

00:53:18.640 But I see your point. And I like what you said, fetishizing the wound.

00:53:22.240 That's what we've become about, whether it's race, you know, your your your gender, sexism, being trans, whatever it is, if there's any perceived transgression and often there's none.

00:53:37.540 It's imagined you fetishize your wound because that's so in vogue.

00:53:41.500 Because your wound is who you are. I think that's the real danger is that you your identity becomes whatever kind of oppression is associated with the category that you belong to.

00:53:53.960 You said something really good about this on Bill Maher. You said that you have had things happen to you, but you are not a victim.

00:53:59.920 And that really resonated with me. There's a difference between going through experiences and overcoming them and dealing with them and allowing those experiences to become yourself, to be confused with who you are, actually.

00:54:18.640 Exactly. I mean, I was saying I'll consider myself somebody's target, somebody who hurt me, somebody who got me.

00:54:24.280 I was targeted. That's fine. But it removes this cloud from it of poor me, you know, poor me, even when you could say poor me.

00:54:35.220 That's the point I keep trying to make, because I understand so many people when you talk about race and the history of race in America, they make great points.

00:54:41.280 And I know you've been the victim of racism. I was reading about some of the words you were called when you were little, really upsetting, disgusting things.

00:54:48.480 And you could make a choice to obsess over it, to wallow over it, and then to see the rest of society through that lens, same as I could have on certain issues.

00:54:57.700 But that only hurts you. And you can be an activist for change. You can find ways of being realistic about our foibles without condemning the entire society in which we live,

00:55:10.540 you live yourself to a life of pessimism and wound fetishization. And that's what brings happiness.

00:55:18.260 I can't imagine these people who are so focused on how victimized they are and how violent the speech is are happy people.

00:55:27.060 I mean, yeah, outside of the kind of sense of community that you might get by, you know, by finding other people to wage battles with you.

00:55:36.160 But, you know, Zadie Smith wrote something that I find very insightful, which was that bitter struggles deform people, even the people who are on the right side of them.

00:55:50.240 You know, you can't allow yourself to be deformed by even a righteous struggle.

00:55:56.680 I think you have to actually see it the way that you said you have to say that, you know, things that there have been you've been targeted,

00:56:02.980 you've experienced certain things, but you're not allowing that to devour you.

00:56:08.760 And I think that right now we have a situation that really is something like a kind of a moral panic where we're whipped up in a frenzy.

00:56:17.220 And I think you can't probably maybe we have to be a bit optimistic and patient and see this as something that's inextricably linked to the fact that we're going through a pandemic

00:56:27.480 and everybody's just sitting around and to online and losing their minds.

00:56:32.940 And maybe some of this is going to resolve itself when we actually get back into the world and are around each other in real and meaningful ways,

00:56:41.100 physically, as opposed to just, you know, hate scrolling Twitter.

00:56:44.860 Up next, we're talking about someone I really don't like.

00:56:48.440 I mean, I hate to be bringing all these people I don't like onto the show by soundbite or otherwise,

00:56:52.740 but we need to fight back against these judgmental leftists who are trying to lecture everybody on how to be a perfect person

00:56:57.900 when clearly they are not and they don't have their facts.

00:57:00.320 And one of those people for a long time has been Kirsten Powers.

00:57:03.820 Well, she picked a fight with the wrong person on Twitter, and that was Thomas.

00:57:09.380 And he won.

00:57:10.940 It was so good.

00:57:12.140 Okay, that's that's coming up next.

00:57:13.680 But before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we call Real Talk here at The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:57:18.820 And today's is kind of weird, but important.

00:57:21.400 I was saying to Abby, my assistant, I really want to talk about this.

00:57:23.820 And she was like, you should do it.

00:57:24.720 It's important.

00:57:25.760 Weirdly, that the topic is dry eye.

00:57:29.060 I know, right?

00:57:30.160 It's medical.

00:57:30.860 But I want to tell you about an experience I've had, and I hope it can spare you similar aggravation.

00:57:37.500 So the past couple of years, I went from having eyes that were totally normal to having dry eye.

00:57:43.680 And I knew people who had dry eye.

00:57:45.100 I thought I was too young.

00:57:45.960 I didn't think it was going to be a thing for me.

00:57:47.380 But then, you know, you go every year to your ophthalmologist.

00:57:49.720 They do that tear test.

00:57:51.180 And I was making like no tears, like none.

00:57:54.740 And my eyes, they felt fine, actually.

00:57:57.140 They just felt a little tired.

00:57:58.560 I was thinking, why am I so tired all the time?

00:58:00.200 But it wasn't fatigue.

00:58:01.200 It was tired eyes, which is confusing sometimes.

00:58:06.900 So I went two more years to my ophthalmologist who was saying, okay, start on this medication.

00:58:13.160 It's just eye drops at night and in the morning, and they'll see if it gets any better.

00:58:16.840 And I did that for two years religiously, and it wasn't getting any better.

00:58:20.420 And then I asked my primary care physician, like, what should I be doing?

00:58:24.620 And he said, why don't I send you to a dry eye specialist?

00:58:28.140 And there's such a thing here in New York and maybe where you live.

00:58:31.200 Well, she took a hard look at the insides of my eyes, and in particular, the glands that

00:58:36.700 are like, if you pull your lower eyelid down and look kind of on the top of your lower eyelid

00:58:43.600 and just inside your lower eyelid, you'll see they look like little fingers, like little

00:58:50.280 glands they are that line the lid.

00:58:54.420 And you have them on your upper lids, too.

00:58:56.540 And these are, I guess they're called sebaceous glands.

00:58:58.740 And they funnel, like, the liquid, the oil into your eye and keep your eye wet.

00:59:05.140 And they have a machine that can photograph these on you, and you can see what kind of

00:59:10.040 condition yours are in.

00:59:11.240 And it's supposed to be, like, nice, long, spidery fingers, like my actual hands have.

00:59:15.420 But if you're missing a couple fingers, or if you've got fingers that are like, you know,

00:59:20.040 they look like a mobster's fingers where they're missing the top couple of knuckles, that's bad.

00:59:24.560 And once they're gone, you can't get them back.

00:59:28.680 There's no regenerating them.

00:59:30.720 So you need to stay ahead of this problem.

00:59:35.020 And because they can't fix it, they can't get you back.

00:59:38.760 They can only prevent further erosion.

00:59:41.880 So I may have gotten to them a little late, but not too late.

00:59:44.900 But I wish I had gone three years earlier, you know, before the very first sign of any of

00:59:49.340 this.

00:59:49.940 So now I had all the stuff, like, now my eye doctor's like, I have you on 40,000 medications

00:59:54.840 for one month just to see if we can make a big burst in improvement in month one, and

01:00:00.180 then we'll calm down.

01:00:01.900 And there really are things that you can do.

01:00:04.060 But I think most people don't know about this.

01:00:06.680 And I asked her, like, why do you think my eyes have gotten so bad in this department so

01:00:11.660 quickly?

01:00:11.900 It doesn't affect your vision or anything.

01:00:13.260 It's just your eyes are tired and they're dry a lot.

01:00:14.920 And you know what she thought, she said, it's a common, it happens to everybody.

01:00:19.980 Like she says, so many people have this.

01:00:21.560 So it happens for a number of reasons.

01:00:23.340 But one thing I did when I was younger that may have contributed was I took Accutane.

01:00:28.960 I was young.

01:00:30.120 I was getting into television.

01:00:31.460 I was 32.

01:00:32.840 And I still, you know, my adult acne.

01:00:34.640 I had it and I didn't want to have it on television.

01:00:38.480 So I went on Accutane.

01:00:39.680 It was actually a low dose and a short course.

01:00:42.700 But you know what Accutane dries up?

01:00:44.740 Your sebaceous glands in your face that produce acne.

01:00:48.980 But maybe this is related, right?

01:00:50.860 So look, Accutane's done a lot of good for a lot of people.

01:00:53.500 I know it's a controversial drug, but it was legal and it helped me.

01:00:55.960 And it did, it did really help me cure, not totally, but a large amount of my acne.

01:01:02.400 And now I'm dealing with this other issue.

01:01:04.780 Listen, I still would have taken the Accutane.

01:01:07.020 I just want to say that.

01:01:07.720 Having bad skin, especially when you're on national television, is very hard.

01:01:11.760 It's emotionally tough.

01:01:12.660 I don't mean, I feel like Kendall Jenner right now.

01:01:15.400 Google it.

01:01:17.220 But anyway, the point is, stay on top of your eyes.

01:01:19.440 Go to your ophthalmologist once a year.

01:01:21.560 And if you hear the term dry eye, make sure you're being as aggressive as you can right

01:01:25.760 from the get-go.

01:01:27.040 Because with all the screen time we have now, which is another contributing factor, looking

01:01:30.360 down, staring without blinking for long periods of time, it can really mess up your eyes.

01:01:34.740 And there's no getting around the screen time, given the way we all live in 2021.

01:01:37.720 All right.

01:01:38.360 This has been a public service announcement brought to you by Restasis.

01:01:42.220 No, but I am on that now, among 40 other things.

01:01:46.540 So there you go.

01:01:47.780 Dr. Kelly is in and now out and back to Thomas in one second.

01:01:52.300 You're a force for good on Twitter.

01:02:00.960 You and Chloe, I've noticed the same thing.

01:02:02.480 When you talk about race in a way that can be uplifting but sound, it's one of the reasons

01:02:06.440 I fell in love with your Twitter feed.

01:02:08.440 It was like, who is this brilliant man who, you know, has...

01:02:11.080 It's not like you're constantly defending racists.

01:02:14.180 It's not like at all that you...

01:02:15.360 That's not your messaging.

01:02:16.340 You're just so sound in your analysis of these issues.

01:02:20.000 And I'll give the...

01:02:20.800 I want to give the listeners one example, because I'm going to make a confession to you, Thomas.

01:02:24.820 I can't stand Kirsten Powers.

01:02:26.780 I do not like this woman one bit.

01:02:30.760 And I saw you get into a Twitter battle with her, although sadly, I saw it too late.

01:02:36.080 So I would have been retweeting.

01:02:37.280 But anyway, so this happened on February 23rd.

01:02:41.080 So she was tweeting about some guy at Slate.

01:02:44.660 As I understand the story, he's a white guy at Slate who, on an internal Slack channel,

01:02:48.880 was talking about whether it would ever be okay for a white person to actually say the

01:02:52.620 N-word.

01:02:53.200 Not say N-word, but say the actual word.

01:02:55.040 This is in the context of discussing Donald McNeil, who got fired from the New York Times

01:02:58.460 for having said it in the context of repeating what somebody else said.

01:03:02.480 So now we're triple hearsay into the story.

01:03:04.780 Okay, so Slate, Peska, he's discussing Donald McNeil, and Peska's basically saying internally,

01:03:11.080 and I think there could be some circumstances where a white person could actually utter the

01:03:14.300 word that wouldn't be hideous.

01:03:17.120 That could be okay.

01:03:18.700 Yada, yada, yada.

01:03:20.300 He came under it.

01:03:21.540 I think he got suspended.

01:03:23.420 Indefinitely.

01:03:23.980 Yeah, his employment is very much in jeopardy.

01:03:27.360 So Kirsten Powers, everyone's moralizer.

01:03:30.160 I mean, the only reason I don't tell the stories I know about Kirsten Powers is because I'm a

01:03:33.860 nice person, and I'm a Catholic, and my mom wouldn't like it.

01:03:37.940 But she tweets out, okay, about Peska.

01:03:44.200 Another day, another news story, quoting white men, saying they can say the N-word because

01:03:49.260 context, and that nothing should be beyond debate.

01:03:52.500 What is so hard about this, she writes?

01:03:54.120 What is so hard about listening to black people and respecting their view?

01:03:58.020 And then you respond, saying, I mean, Joel Anderson has used that term in reference to

01:04:03.980 me on this website.

01:04:06.160 And she responds, what's your point?

01:04:08.700 Does that mean white people should be saying it?

01:04:10.400 And you responded, I think a white person mentioning it, not derogatorily, is not as

01:04:16.720 bad as a black person using it derogatorily.

01:04:20.960 And she responds, okay, not sure why you are trying to change the subject.

01:04:25.800 Feels like whataboutism, which I don't entertain.

01:04:29.020 My tweet was about white people who argue with black people about when it's okay to use

01:04:34.140 the N-word.

01:04:34.980 And here was the hammer drop, you.

01:04:36.460 I hate to break this to you, but right at this very moment, a white person, you, is

01:04:42.320 arguing with a black person, me, about when it's okay to use that term.

01:04:47.880 That's unbelievable.

01:04:48.980 You know, this is one of those things where, you know, how can this possibly happen?

01:04:53.940 You know, she's so into her kind of script of being on the right side of this issue that

01:05:01.040 she can't stand complexity of any sort.

01:05:03.900 She can't understand that there is not one black view.

01:05:07.660 She can't believe that this guy, Joel Anderson, that she's holding up as the definitive black

01:05:11.540 view has called me that word in a way that I hate and I'm a descendant of slaves and I

01:05:17.080 don't know why I'm calling me that.

01:05:18.700 And it bothered me a lot more than using the term descriptively, even if someone doesn't

01:05:22.620 happen to be black.

01:05:23.680 And then she explained to me what was wrong about me thinking differently than her.

01:05:28.740 You know, this, it gets into this thing that I've really become hyper aware of, which

01:05:33.120 is listen to POC, listen to black voices, uh, except when they disagree with me, then

01:05:39.000 disregard, you know, and that's, that's where we are.

01:05:42.960 She wrote me privately actually to, to apologize, but I don't have the impression that she ever

01:05:47.880 fully understood why she was apologizing to me because she realized that I was black and

01:05:52.720 because she got piled on, but I don't believe she ever fully understood why, um, uh, my point

01:05:59.200 of view might be something that she should take into account.

01:06:01.680 She believes that she knew, she knew you were black when she argued with, with you because

01:06:05.920 she, she, you were saying someone's called me that word, right?

01:06:10.020 Like she, she was well aware.

01:06:14.200 She apologized because she didn't want a black man attacking her and beat to be there on the

01:06:17.960 wrong side of a black man who could potentially say she did something racist.

01:06:21.460 She has to have a perfect record on her alleged anti-racism.

01:06:25.020 And, and there was some follow-up on Twitter after this where somebody, so another person

01:06:28.960 tweeted, um, according to neo-racism, which is really, you know, this sort of quote anti-racism,

01:06:34.000 which is, it's not anti-racism at all.

01:06:37.160 So he's according to neo-racism, she is now a bigot regardless of intent, right?

01:06:41.600 That's what the New York Times said when he fired Donna Deale.

01:06:44.360 And then you said, actually, you said, I believe according to new rules, she would subscribe

01:06:48.860 to, she's not a bigot because my views de-racinate, is that how you say it?

01:06:54.380 De-racinate, absolutely.

01:06:56.020 Okay.

01:06:56.480 De-racinate me, multicultural whiteness.

01:06:59.740 And she is, quote, an ally.

01:07:02.580 She's more black than you are.

01:07:04.420 Yeah.

01:07:04.720 That's the thing that's really been, um, kind of the most frustrating, uh, aspect of all this

01:07:11.040 for me is that, um, we can't disagree.

01:07:14.000 We can't have different perspectives.

01:07:15.420 It's that certain perspectives actually, um, make you, uh, in, in, in, in the neo-racism,

01:07:22.460 anti-racism, uh, you know, mainstream, make you no longer black.

01:07:27.800 This is what Ayanna Pressley means when she says, we're no longer interested in black voices,

01:07:32.960 in black faces that won't speak with black voices.

01:07:35.700 That means that your race is dictated by your views.

01:07:40.660 This is what people say when they say, let's no longer talk about Latinos, uh, the way that

01:07:44.620 Latinos voted, uh, I'm not sure Latinos can be POC anymore.

01:07:48.080 This is really something it's, it's, it's catching on.

01:07:51.560 And, you know, there was an op-ed recently about multicultural whiteness because the cognitive

01:07:56.760 dissonance of dealing with the fact that the leader of the Proud Boys is a very, uh,

01:08:01.620 brown-skinned Afro-Latino, physically black presenting man, it does, it clashes with what

01:08:07.680 we're all supposed to be told about how this all works.

01:08:10.580 So instead of applying Occam's razor, we have to actually just come up with new terms that

01:08:15.200 make sense of the fact that, you know, Donald Trump doubled his support among every single

01:08:19.440 demographic except for white males after, after being, you know, after we were told for

01:08:24.540 four years that, you know, he's a white supremacist.

01:08:26.920 We can't make sense of how people don't think in the way that they're supposed to think

01:08:30.600 based on their, uh, on their identity grouping.

01:08:33.260 So, you know, this is-

01:08:34.400 It reminds me of, um, we had on Daniel Cameron, you know, the AG in Kentucky who pursued the

01:08:39.540 Breonna Taylor case, but didn't think charges should follow against the officers.

01:08:42.640 And there was a former LAPD sergeant, um, who, who said he's skin folk, but not kin folk.

01:08:48.940 Yeah, I get that too.

01:08:50.080 You know, this is the way of, um, enforcing consensus, you know, it's a way of controlling,

01:08:55.180 you know, we talk about diversity and viewpoint diversity, um, and, and being sensitive to

01:09:02.600 minorities, but there's no lonelier position than being the minority within the minority.

01:09:06.420 You know, the-

01:09:06.840 Totally.

01:09:07.420 The, the Muslim who, uh, is actually concerned about, uh, Islamist extremism.

01:09:14.520 The, the, the, the woman in media who, um, is concerned about, you know, uh, innocent people

01:09:23.260 losing their jobs in the exorcism of Me Too.

01:09:26.180 Um, you know, the black scholar who's, who's, who's very worried about, uh, an anti-racism

01:09:31.780 that reinforces the very same, um, stereotypes and assumptions that racism, uh, is based on,

01:09:37.800 you know, the, the, the, the black kids can't be expected to learn math.

01:09:40.840 You know, that, that minority that pushes back on, on, on this stuff, that's the loneliest

01:09:45.500 place you can be arguing from.

01:09:47.600 Yes.

01:09:48.200 Well, I, I see you there.

01:09:49.560 Hi, I'm there too.

01:09:53.100 But there, there's also, it's, there's something empowering about it.

01:09:55.940 I mean, there's like, I like being a person who has, you know, in a way, you know, had a,

01:10:02.640 had a pretty significant role in the Me Too movement who is at the top of the mountain

01:10:06.560 screaming for due process for men who get accused.

01:10:08.960 I, you, you can attack me on a lot of things, but my credentials and standing up for women

01:10:14.340 is not on the list, but that doesn't mean I'm anti-man, right?

01:10:18.620 We don't, we don't have to go so far that we hate the other or want to disempower the

01:10:23.840 other.

01:10:24.100 And I think on some women's issues, I've heard it said, and I don't totally disagree that

01:10:28.500 the solution to our problem may be parents of boys and girls, right?

01:10:33.280 Like you, you have an equal concern for both, or like, you know, a dad who has daughters,

01:10:38.480 like whatever, you can sort of see it from both perspectives.

01:10:40.660 And I think on race issues is probably, probably pretty helpful to have someone like you who

01:10:45.880 has a white mom and a black dad.

01:10:48.520 You're, you know, you look like a black man, you look like a man, you know, a person of

01:10:53.440 color.

01:10:53.960 And yet you have daughters, you have kids who appear white, right?

01:10:57.300 So it's like, it's, I think it's helpful to, to be able to see it from multiple perspectives

01:11:01.340 that you love and are dear to you.

01:11:03.280 Yeah.

01:11:03.920 I mean, I think one of the greatest gifts that I've had is that I was always loved by

01:11:08.240 and loved both black and white people.

01:11:12.040 I was loved by my, by my mother, by her sister, by my grandmother, and, and I loved them.

01:11:17.820 And I, and I was loved by my black father and I love him and I was, and I loved the, the

01:11:23.160 black friends that I had growing up.

01:11:25.740 And so I never felt that, you know, one of these groups that the evils that's attributed to

01:11:31.380 either one of these groups that I was always skeptical about that.

01:11:35.500 I knew my mother wasn't a racist.

01:11:36.660 So I knew that all white people couldn't be racist if she's, and if she wasn't racist,

01:11:40.380 I knew there must be some others that weren't too.

01:11:42.340 So the totalizing kind of way of, you know, all white people have racism in them.

01:11:47.300 And it just allowed me to see through that crap or the, the idea that, um, the, the,

01:11:52.460 the terribly racist ideas that people, you know, put on black people, it, it never made

01:11:57.480 sense to me because I was living with my father.

01:11:59.220 I have a question for you about your dad.

01:12:00.940 I saw an interview and, and your, your first book was, you know, about what's the, what's

01:12:05.240 the title?

01:12:05.640 I like, I love the title about the hip hop.

01:12:07.060 Losing my cool.

01:12:07.760 15,000.

01:12:08.540 Yeah.

01:12:09.060 And it's, yeah, it's a, it's a testament to my, my father's, um, pretty extraordinary

01:12:12.900 library.

01:12:13.600 He accumulated about 15,000 books that filled every spare inch of, of our kind of small

01:12:19.000 house in New Jersey growing up.

01:12:20.620 So how did your dad, I saw an interview with the two of you, which was pretty adorable.

01:12:24.880 I have to say, he's obviously intellectually huge.

01:12:27.760 I mean, it was clear, he's read everything.

01:12:29.560 And I was like, Oh, this explains a lot.

01:12:31.340 This explains a lot about Thomas.

01:12:32.780 Um, but having grown up as he did in, in Texas, right?

01:12:38.700 During segregation, I couldn't help but ask myself.

01:12:41.580 I heard you tell a story about something like he found, um, something like Pluto's writings

01:12:46.100 and, and like went into a closet and started reading them.

01:12:48.700 I think that's how it went, but Pluto's dialogues.

01:12:51.320 How did your dad first get that spark of like, I want more and I'm going to see race differently.

01:12:57.700 That's extraordinary to the place where he could deliver us.

01:13:01.060 Thomas Chatterton Williams, this guy who was so involved on these issues, man.

01:13:05.220 I mean, my dad is a really remarkable guy and that's somebody, you know, I don't, some,

01:13:10.680 some people that criticize me, uh, you know, I just want to say, I don't, um, discount, uh,

01:13:16.200 racism in this country's history because my father is somebody who, who has been harmed

01:13:22.980 in his, in his 83 years, um, you know, by being designated black in a society that was,

01:13:30.020 that was racist, you know, and, you know, he comes, he's, it's hard to put this in context

01:13:35.400 for my children, but my father is 83.

01:13:38.400 His grandmother was married to a much older man who was born during slavery.

01:13:44.080 My dad is in his own family, two generations removed from, from, uh, from a grandfather

01:13:50.820 that was born in 1865, the last year of slavery there.

01:13:54.500 Um, so it's not that far away from him.

01:13:57.200 His dad born in what?

01:13:58.740 38, 37.

01:14:00.440 Yeah.

01:14:01.080 37.

01:14:01.440 So that's just so people understand when he grew up.

01:14:04.080 Yeah.

01:14:04.980 And he grew up in the, in the house without plumbing.

01:14:07.580 I mean, he, he came from an environment where he learned somehow very early on that the only

01:14:14.140 way he was going to transcend his circumstances was going to be, uh, with his mind.

01:14:18.400 And it was going to be through the books that he saw, um, contained glimpses of, of, of a

01:14:25.060 world beyond where he was.

01:14:26.480 His family was terrified by him reading books because, you know, not without reason, they

01:14:31.760 said that you're going to get up above yourself and that's how you can get into trouble.

01:14:35.540 You can get, you know, out of your station and you can get beat up or whatever.

01:14:40.480 So he hid in the closet and he read, um, Plato's dialogues, which he happened to stumble upon

01:14:45.840 in a neighbor at a neighbor's garage sale.

01:14:47.860 And the man gave him the book.

01:14:49.600 Um, you know, it's, it's, it's something that he didn't understand when he was a kid,

01:14:52.940 but he understood that it linked him to something larger than himself.

01:14:55.820 And he had this profound desire to get out.

01:14:58.900 And, you know, when he was 18, he left town for college and he moved west eventually,

01:15:02.620 and he never went back to the South.

01:15:03.980 Um, he has a kind of, you know, like many people do, uh, he has a childhood that he doesn't

01:15:08.980 like to talk about.

01:15:10.420 Um, and he raised his kids very deliberately, um, with the sense that they wouldn't go through

01:15:16.460 what he went through.

01:15:17.200 They wouldn't, what they would have to do would be to, to read and to study, but they wouldn't

01:15:22.040 have to fight for the, for the chance to do it.

01:15:24.060 The only thing that really appalled him was laziness or was not engaging with the books that he killed

01:15:29.740 himself to put around us.

01:15:31.640 Um, and so, you know, the, the, the, in some ways, the best thing I could ever do to show

01:15:36.760 my dad that, um, that all of that work that he put in, uh, wasn't in vain was to, was to

01:15:45.480 go into writing, to reading and writing for a living.

01:15:47.880 And, you know, uh, you know, people say lots of stuff about me that I would never want

01:15:52.240 my dad to read or to see.

01:15:54.540 Thankfully he's not on Twitter, but I know that I'm doing the right thing because I know

01:15:58.440 that he, I have his approval and, you know, and, and, and I don't mean I have his approval

01:16:02.640 as a father likes his son.

01:16:04.220 I mean that, um, I am honoring the kind of, the, the, the struggle that he went through.

01:16:10.400 And that's the struggle to think for yourself and to define your own life and your own values

01:16:15.040 and not to be, um, not to have your life dictated by, by others.

01:16:19.980 Uh, you know, first and foremost, my dad believes in freedom.

01:16:22.960 And, and so I try to fight for the things that he raised me to believe in.

01:16:27.560 And, and, and, and I don't know, I, it's just so, it's, it's so disappointing to think

01:16:33.000 that, you know, we're in, we're in some, in so many ways we're, we're moving away from

01:16:37.820 the kind of world that he thought he was working towards.

01:16:40.400 I know we were making real progress, you know, just the sight of, as I said earlier,

01:16:45.900 my, my son and my daughter, you know, in their class.

01:16:49.500 And it's, if these are beautiful friendships that are going to last the test of time, it's

01:16:53.420 like, stay out of it, stop ruining it, you know?

01:16:56.760 And then of course you say that as a white woman, you're like, that's your privilege

01:16:59.380 speaking.

01:16:59.940 Okay, whatever.

01:17:00.520 So your dad, cause I want to spend a little bit more time on him if you don't mind, cause

01:17:03.800 I'm kind of in love with him.

01:17:05.520 So he, he exposes you to James Baldwin, to WB Dubois and, but also.

01:17:10.400 Aesop's fables and chess.

01:17:13.180 And this was a man determined to round out your intellectual knowledge, but the way your

01:17:19.160 brain works too.

01:17:21.520 Yeah.

01:17:22.160 Um, my dad, the primary way that we interacted with each other for many years, um, once I

01:17:30.400 was old enough to play competitively with him around 12 years old or something was chess.

01:17:34.660 We spent so much time together.

01:17:37.320 You know, my dad is, he's a pretty serious guy.

01:17:40.280 Um, he doesn't just do chit chat all the time, but we could spend hours, um, really being

01:17:45.920 together across, uh, the chess board.

01:17:48.720 And he didn't believe it was a game.

01:17:50.520 He believed it was a way of, um, it was a strategy for a living.

01:17:54.000 It was a way of assessing risk.

01:17:56.360 It was a way of, um, understanding opportunities.

01:17:59.360 You know, it was, it was, it was a way of seeing space.

01:18:03.000 So he, he, he tried to teach us to see, um, chess as a metaphor for life.

01:18:07.820 Uh, you, you know, you can mess up everything with one bad move after doing a lot of things

01:18:13.560 right.

01:18:14.140 Uh, this was all what he was teaching us through the chess board.

01:18:18.520 Um, he also did sports with us too, but he was an older father.

01:18:21.540 So by the time I was in high school, we, we fundamentally spent time together over the

01:18:25.580 chess board.

01:18:26.240 And yeah, what he was trying to do was he was trying to give his children a chance to

01:18:30.440 have full lives.

01:18:31.540 I think in many ways, my father felt, um, you know, that he had to do so much just to

01:18:37.080 get to where he was able to give his kids an opportunity, um, that he didn't feel that

01:18:41.280 he had an entirely full life in many ways.

01:18:43.960 Um, and you know, it's just one of those stories.

01:18:46.780 My dad was kind of like, the way he raised us was similar to the way that I've been

01:18:51.540 since, um, understood, uh, friends of mine, whose parents were immigrants raised them.

01:18:55.620 You know, he, he raised his children as people who were going to go on and have life experiences

01:19:01.860 that he knew were not going to be his own.

01:19:04.680 Hmm.

01:19:05.600 Right.

01:19:06.480 And to get, and to give you the tools needed.

01:19:09.080 Yeah.

01:19:09.340 And one of the things he did was tell me that France, I mean, I can't separate my living

01:19:13.280 in France now from his kind of always telling me that France was, you know, this wonderful

01:19:18.380 place to be that, you know, James Baldwin had lived there and he just painted these pictures,

01:19:23.520 you know, where, where, where books mattered.

01:19:25.600 And, you know, it was, of course, it was a glorified, uh, situation that doesn't really

01:19:30.940 capture my experience on a, on a rainy Sunday and in the crappy supermarket, just, you know,

01:19:36.640 wondering why I live in Paris.

01:19:37.780 But, you know, he painted this picture for me that the world was bigger than the town I

01:19:41.640 grew up in.

01:19:42.320 We grew up in, in, you know, in suburban New Jersey.

01:19:46.180 Okay.

01:19:46.940 Where, whereabouts?

01:19:48.580 It's a, I grew up in a town called Fanwood, Fanwood, Scotch Plains off of route 22, uh,

01:19:53.580 Union County.

01:19:55.240 And, you know, it was just, it's the type of place where when I go back to see my parents,

01:19:58.200 you know, I can go into TGI Fridays and I can see, uh, people from my neighborhood or

01:20:02.960 people I went to high school with who are, who have never left a neighborhood.

01:20:05.520 It's one of those places.

01:20:07.180 Um, and I'm not saying that that's, that you can't be happy living that life, but my parents

01:20:11.580 always raised us to believe that, you know, we could go where we wanted to and we

01:20:15.880 didn't have to limit ourselves.

01:20:17.000 And I think that was an enormous, it was just an enormous gift.

01:20:20.400 Oh, it's, there's something very romantic about the way you've chosen to live your life.

01:20:23.900 And that's how it feels from over here.

01:20:25.640 Just, you went over to Paris and you married a French woman.

01:20:29.160 And whenever I read your tweets, I'm like, ah, when can we travel?

01:20:32.800 When can we travel?

01:20:33.660 We gotta get out of here, you know?

01:20:35.480 But I do think it used like the, I don't want to skip over.

01:20:37.960 Cause you did have an interesting, and your first book was about this, your home life and

01:20:41.880 your social life diverged.

01:20:43.600 So your dad's raising this sort of bookish kid, this young intellectual.

01:20:48.400 And, um, you know, you were, you, you described being like his captive in home student.

01:20:52.680 Um, and yet, and yet you, you got attached to quote the secular religion of hip hop and,

01:21:00.800 um, of which you've become very critical.

01:21:02.460 But what is, what, what did that look like?

01:21:04.760 Probably like a lot of teenagers, but in my own specific way, I was, I was leading a kind

01:21:08.920 of doubled existence.

01:21:09.740 You know, there was no debating with my father that at nighttime after school on the weekends

01:21:16.640 and all through the summers, um, my brother and I, we studied with him.

01:21:20.780 Um, it was like a second school.

01:21:22.820 And in fact, it was the school that got me into, into a decent college.

01:21:26.340 I wasn't going to the type of high school that would just do that for me.

01:21:29.740 Um, we studied for the SATs starting very early, like second grade.

01:21:34.400 Uh, we did, I mean, we did tons of vocabulary building exercises.

01:21:38.660 We did spatial reasoning.

01:21:40.060 He had us reading Aesop's fables all the time, but also literature, philosophy.

01:21:45.580 Um, it was just really something that I had to do.

01:21:49.280 Um, and I accepted that that was my own home life, but outside of the home, you know, I

01:21:55.040 was performing a kind of, um, I guess, uh, stereotypical black masculinity that certainly

01:22:01.140 contradicted, um, my father's masculinity, but that, uh, I felt it was necessary to, to

01:22:08.080 make it in my social milieu.

01:22:09.360 Um, so I was, you know, I was, I was pretending to be a thug, pretending to be not interested

01:22:15.460 in, um, the pursuits of the mind that were very important to my father.

01:22:19.400 And mostly I was defining myself as a kind of athlete, as a basketball player, um, and,

01:22:24.920 and, and hiding this more studious side of myself.

01:22:28.420 Uh, it's kind of tragic in retrospect.

01:22:30.400 And I, and I wonder how many of my friends were also kind of playing down their natural

01:22:35.200 curiosity and intelligence and trying to, to, to attain a kind of, uh, uh, glorification

01:22:44.040 of street culture that was sold to us.

01:22:46.620 That was, it's impossible to separate this from the fact that, you know, these images were

01:22:50.560 sold to us as, as, as a kind of racial authenticity.

01:22:53.340 And, you know, it becomes very clear to you once you're 20, 25, 30, that, um, that you

01:23:01.200 were, that you were, you were, you were, you were hoodwinked, but when you're 15, it's not

01:23:05.480 so apparent.

01:23:06.100 And, you know, I'm very clear on this.

01:23:08.880 It was my father who pushed me through that and got me out of that and into, into a good

01:23:13.520 school.

01:23:13.740 And I'm not sure I would have ended up there on my own.

01:23:16.120 Uh, it ended very badly for the girl that I was dating at the time who my father also tried

01:23:21.460 to teach, uh, but she rejected it.

01:23:23.680 Uh, it actually, my father, the book centers on my friendship with another boy who was half

01:23:29.580 black and half Puerto Rican and came from a family where no one had been to college really.

01:23:33.960 And he, my father found that our friendship was strong, that my buddy was, was smart and

01:23:40.000 was, um, able to intuit that there was something in my father's house and all the books that he

01:23:45.460 wanted to, to be around, but he didn't know how to ask.

01:23:47.960 So my father essentially adopted him after school and he began to be, you know, my study

01:23:53.920 buddy.

01:23:54.500 And I ended up going to, um, to Georgetown after graduation and my buddy went to Syracuse

01:24:00.820 and then he ended up.

01:24:03.080 Go orange.

01:24:04.220 Yeah.

01:24:04.600 And then he studied abroad at Oxford, went to Harvard law and ended up.

01:24:09.180 I went to Albany law.

01:24:10.720 That's where we diverge, I guess.

01:24:12.860 But it was just, you know, we were the only two, it was just in retrospect, I look back

01:24:19.020 at it.

01:24:19.200 We were the only two, uh, the two who were studying with my dad, everybody else in, in

01:24:25.560 our group, they didn't, they didn't leave.

01:24:27.180 They didn't.

01:24:27.580 And some of them ended up in jail.

01:24:28.720 But can you explain why?

01:24:30.120 Like I know in Jason Riley's book, he talks about how he grew up in Buffalo where by the

01:24:35.300 way, right now there's a push in the public education schools and the public schools to start

01:24:39.460 indoctrinating, they're open about it, children as young as four into critical race theory

01:24:44.760 and BLM, um, you know, beliefs about life.

01:24:48.840 And then at six years old in the public schools in Buffalo, they are showing children videotape

01:24:54.200 of young black children who have supposedly in this tale died.

01:25:01.500 They've been killed by racist police officers coming back from the dead to talk about their

01:25:06.920 murders.

01:25:07.420 Now, can you imagine, can you imagine how fast you'd pull your kids from a school that

01:25:11.500 was doing that to your six year old fictional, fictional tale used to teach kids about structural

01:25:16.360 racism.

01:25:16.580 That's where, yeah, they're showing them videos where these little children acting as, as

01:25:21.540 deceased.

01:25:21.780 That's actually traumatizing.

01:25:23.340 Oh my God.

01:25:24.460 I know it's insane.

01:25:25.620 So he, so Jason grew up in, in Buffalo and he, as a black man, he talks about how he was

01:25:31.040 very smart and he was academically inclined, but he never wanted to show it because it was

01:25:35.360 considered, considered, quote, acting white.

01:25:37.940 You know, there's been a lot of debate about this and a lot of research and Roland Fryer,

01:25:43.220 uh, who was at Harvard.

01:25:44.800 Um, I believe he's no longer there, um, published, I think pretty definitive study that showed that

01:25:50.660 if you're one of a handful of black kids at Dalton or somewhere like that, uh, at a, at a mostly

01:25:58.000 white school, there's no, uh, penalty for being studious.

01:26:01.680 And if you're a studious black kid at a predominantly black, uh, school, there's not a penalty for

01:26:08.620 acting white.

01:26:09.520 But if you're at a place like I was, uh, and maybe Jason was at a place like this too, that's,

01:26:15.060 that's pretty mixed that has, um, a sizable white population, but also a sizable enough,

01:26:20.400 uh, black and Latino population.

01:26:21.940 Then there becomes a kind of oppositional culture, uh, where being too studious can exact a social

01:26:28.660 penalty.

01:26:29.180 And I found myself very much navigating this, you know, Barack Obama has spoken on this.

01:26:33.600 This is something that, uh, people like to dismiss as a fantasy, but I can tell you from

01:26:39.080 my own lived experience that you did not want to, to, to be seen as, um, being in AP classes

01:26:47.580 and things like that, where I was going to school.

01:26:49.200 You did not want to be seen as caring too much about the SAT.

01:26:52.000 My high school girlfriend, she didn't even take the SAT.

01:26:55.020 It was that, I mean, it was, it was insane to her that I was spending, you know, my weekends,

01:27:01.460 um, stressing over this test.

01:27:04.680 The test wasn't even real to her.

01:27:06.600 Uh, these are, these are serious conversations that we can have, but only if we're able to

01:27:10.160 be honest.

01:27:10.740 But now I found that the conversation has changed so much from where it used to be, even in

01:27:15.240 the past 10, 15 years, even in the past 10 years, uh, since my book came out,

01:27:19.200 that you can no longer really, this is something that's considered blaming the victim.

01:27:22.560 And you're not going to get a fair hearing if you even try to say that this was a real

01:27:26.460 aspect of your own childhood growing up.

01:27:29.640 But it absolutely was for me.

01:27:31.640 I mean, my father raised us with concepts that, you know, you're not allowed to say

01:27:35.300 anymore.

01:27:35.660 He said, he said, look, life's not fair.

01:27:38.200 You're going to have to work twice as hard.

01:27:39.780 Like that's something now that you're, you're, you're, you're told by Ta-Nehisi Coates and

01:27:44.380 all these people that that's, that's a form of, that's a form of racism.

01:27:47.320 And, you know, it's just, what bothers me so much about it is that, is not that I think

01:27:53.660 that all black people should have to work twice as hard or believe that they have to

01:27:57.360 work twice as hard, but it's just that, how do you want to succeed?

01:28:01.380 You, I think going into any situation and believing that you're going to have to work as hard as

01:28:04.980 possible is, is a, is a net benefit, no matter who you are, you know, it's just, why is that

01:28:12.160 such a bad thing to teach a kid, as opposed to teaching a kid that the world is structurally

01:28:15.820 against you based on your identity and you're a powerless victim.

01:28:18.660 And you have to then, as Glenn Lowry always points out, you have to then go and appeal to

01:28:23.040 the people that you say are inherently racist and oppressive, uh, and, and hope that they'll

01:28:28.280 then, you'll appeal to their goodwill and they'll help you out, but you're powerless and

01:28:32.580 you have no agency in the matter.

01:28:33.920 I'd much rather go with my honest way of saying, just work twice as hard.

01:28:37.940 Hard work is the golden keys.

01:28:40.660 You know, that's, that's what gets you out.

01:28:42.660 I felt it as somebody, I was middle-class, but I was never that academically inclined and

01:28:47.200 I never really thought of myself as all that smart.

01:28:49.860 And, but I knew that I was a hard worker and that that could make up for what I felt were

01:28:55.640 some of my intellectual deficiencies.

01:28:57.640 I didn't think I had the super brain that some of the people around me had, but I knew if

01:29:01.700 I just busted my tail, I could do it.

01:29:04.100 And, and working hard slowly, but surely started to prove me right.

01:29:09.960 You know, then you get good results.

01:29:10.940 Yeah.

01:29:11.060 And then it reinforces itself.

01:29:12.120 Oh my God, it's working.

01:29:12.920 Exactly.

01:29:14.120 What better, what better advice could you give a kid than, than you have control over yourself

01:29:18.900 and, and your effort will pay off.

01:29:21.120 I mean, we're, we're, we're creating an extraordinary world right now.

01:29:24.720 I don't know if you've seen, um, the scandal at the, at the Smithsonian Museum of African

01:29:29.520 American History when they briefly had Robin DiAngelo's, um, points about white supremacy

01:29:35.000 culture.

01:29:35.520 And, you know, there were things like punctuality is white supremacy culture, literacy, you know,

01:29:39.940 objectivity.

01:29:40.500 Linear thinking.

01:29:41.760 Linear thinking.

01:29:42.720 These are the, this, this is like a, a, a, a, a real racist dream come true that you

01:29:49.140 tell, that you tell, uh, young black kids and Latino kids, uh, and other non-white kids

01:29:54.100 that, that white people own punctuality, you know, it's just, it's how that's a fantasy

01:30:01.060 come true for a racist as far as.

01:30:02.380 And they never say, okay, so, so what do black people own when the implication is it's all bad

01:30:06.660 things.

01:30:07.400 Pain.

01:30:07.680 I don't, you know, so, yeah.

01:30:12.260 Well, so, so let's go back to, to you and the hip hop culture, because I saw another panel

01:30:17.680 you did, and this was, I can't remember where it was, but it was, um, it was a mostly black

01:30:22.020 panel.

01:30:22.480 It was a black interviewer.

01:30:23.360 And she was kind of giving you some jazz for saying, um, that you think hip hop these

01:30:28.820 days has quote sunk to new lows.

01:30:31.400 And you were saying, I think it glorifies damaging things.

01:30:34.180 And that if you tried to live your life the way Jay-Z tells you to, it will end disastrously.

01:30:40.260 And, and it wasn't clear whether the audience was with you on that.

01:30:43.460 She was kind of like, what, you know, like hip hop is a sort of a form of urban street

01:30:47.400 poetry and this is people's experience.

01:30:49.440 And what's your take on it now?

01:30:51.540 Cause it's in the news sometimes, you know, you see sort of some of these lyrics and of

01:30:55.520 course the N word is everywhere.

01:30:56.680 And I, I think I know exactly the, the talk you're, you're describing.

01:31:01.460 It was at the Harlem book festival in 2010.

01:31:04.600 Um, it was a mostly black crowd.

01:31:07.780 Um, and in fact, the crowd was very much on, it's on YouTube.

01:31:11.280 The crowd was very much on my side when I, um, responded to her, because this is something

01:31:17.480 that Coleman Hughes, uh, cites pretty regularly too.

01:31:20.720 The majority of black people, if you actually talk to black people, not extremely online

01:31:25.340 activists on Twitter, but the majority of real black people who live real lives outside

01:31:31.260 of the discourse, uh, will say that they will have critical views of hip hop culture and

01:31:37.100 its effect on, uh, on black identity.

01:31:39.180 The crowd was, um, was, was really receptive to the message.

01:31:42.840 And I would also say that, you know, 10 years ago, I think the culture was in a worse place

01:31:46.780 than it is now.

01:31:47.620 Um, and there was an enormous amount of like, um, what was called like cocaine wreck and

01:31:52.200 drug cocaine rap and drug dealing rap.

01:31:54.620 Uh, and I was specifically saying that if you follow, um, the kind of route that Jay-Z laid

01:32:00.780 out of being a drug dealer, glorifying that as a way to becoming a, a business mogul as

01:32:06.580 he did, then you'd better be one of the most talented, uh, you know, people in music in your

01:32:12.420 generation, because that's how he got where he is.

01:32:14.480 And he also got it through being extremely smart and working hard, but it's not going to

01:32:17.360 work out for you.

01:32:18.620 Um, the crowd erupted in, in applause.

01:32:21.720 And after that, uh, Fab Five Freddy, who was this iconic host of UMTV raps in the nineties

01:32:27.720 and, you know, a friend of Andy Warhol and just a, an icon of, of, of, of hip hop culture

01:32:33.300 came up to me afterwards and said, you know, your point about Jay-Z, I agree with you.

01:32:36.960 If you just listen to his raps and think that your life's going to end up that way, it's not

01:32:40.840 going to, you'd be better off working and trying to go to Yale.

01:32:43.240 That, you know, the thing that I try to say to people is that, you know, the stuff that

01:32:48.560 John McWhorter is saying, the stuff that Coleman is saying, a lot of the stuff that Glenn Lowry

01:32:52.680 is saying, and I, uh, and I happen to know a lot of the stuff that I'm saying is not as

01:32:56.940 controversial.

01:32:57.520 If you step into any number of barbershops or other places where you actually talk to

01:33:01.560 people candidly, you'll hear those things all the time.

01:33:04.640 I just did a talk, um, with Glenn Lowry and even, uh, and Ian Rowe to the, um, African-American

01:33:12.940 Alumni Association of Harvard Business School.

01:33:16.420 Um, and on the topic of reparation, you know, I said something that I said earlier to you that

01:33:21.200 I just don't see how we get to a full reckoning if there's not some form, uh, of material reparation

01:33:27.960 for things like, you know, being excluded from, from redlined neighborhoods, you know,

01:33:33.120 in the sixties, uh, these are things that can be measured and can be repaired.

01:33:36.960 Glenn Lowry disagreed.

01:33:38.220 I'm not sure what Ian thought, but my parents were watching via zoom.

01:33:41.600 Um, and after I was texting with my mom and she was like, it's always great to see you,

01:33:45.880 um, talking and your father was really interested.

01:33:48.420 And I said, what did he, what did he think?

01:33:50.560 And she said, well, he disagreed with you about reparation.

01:33:53.440 You know, there's no uniform black point of view.

01:33:56.760 And that's what, and, and, and thank God there's not, we don't think as a monolith as no other

01:34:03.080 group does, you know, there's, there's, there's diversity of viewpoints.

01:34:06.580 My dad's own life experience and own, and, and beyond his life experience, his own,

01:34:11.600 research and reading and his, his scholarly conclusions are that he, he reached a different,

01:34:17.460 um, conclusion than I did on, uh, on, on the issue of reparation.

01:34:23.280 And we're going to talk today after I get up with you and he's going to explain to me

01:34:26.760 what he thinks.

01:34:27.860 Um, but the idea that all black people think the same way about reparations or anything

01:34:31.700 like that is nonsense.

01:34:33.700 Yeah, that, well, that's right.

01:34:34.960 But as you know, the only views that wind up getting criticized usually by the press or

01:34:39.280 sort of the mainstream are the so-called heterodox views, many of which you hold when it comes

01:34:44.700 to race, certainly Glenn.

01:34:46.220 I mean, he's just, he's so hard to argue against.

01:34:49.760 He's so powerful.

01:34:50.720 I pity you for having been in that position.

01:34:52.540 I'm sure it went fine, but he's tough because he's so smart and he's got, he's willing to

01:34:56.840 give you your side of the argument.

01:34:57.960 He's, he's a clever arguer because right.

01:35:00.540 He'll get, he'll give you all the points that are really yours.

01:35:02.800 And then he'll up it to a level where you're like, oh shit.

01:35:06.160 Yeah.

01:35:06.700 I mean, I, I always tease him about this.

01:35:09.080 Glenn is like actually able to make the, the, the, the other side's position better than

01:35:16.100 they are.

01:35:16.660 I've gone to Brown university to record a podcast with Glenn at the Watson Institute.

01:35:23.220 And I know that he agrees with me.

01:35:25.560 And then he ends up saying like, let me just play Ta-Nehisi Coates' point of view or even

01:35:29.580 Kendi's and, and he's just killing me with their point of view in a way that I wasn't

01:35:34.240 expecting because it's better than they've published their own views.

01:35:39.100 I know those two guys, they should be so lucky, right.

01:35:41.560 To, as to have him doing that since they've refused to debate anybody.

01:35:44.560 Colvin's all over Twitter, like, Hey, Ibram X.

01:35:46.960 Kendi, come debate me.

01:35:48.600 I'd love to talk about your book.

01:35:50.880 It would really be beneficial if there could be some debates, uh, that would be, you know,

01:35:56.340 moderated fairly and in good faith and in neutral, you know, settings.

01:36:00.900 Uh, I think we could all learn quite a lot because it's not as though one side possesses

01:36:04.980 all of the truth.

01:36:05.840 I'm, I'm sure that we could learn quite a lot by opposing these views, um, in good faith

01:36:10.660 ways, but you know, there's a disincentive to have yourself challenged, especially when

01:36:16.500 it's working the way it's working.

01:36:17.520 These are, these are writers who essentially come down with the Moses tablets and they tell

01:36:23.240 you how it is, but they're not interested in feedback.

01:36:25.420 The one time I've interacted with Ibram Kendi, I was a fellow at Bard in 2019 and he came

01:36:32.020 to speak and he was talking about how all, um, discrepancies between groups, there's only

01:36:38.220 two reasons for discrepancies between groups.

01:36:41.400 It has to be that, um, there is a fundamental, um, inferiority in one of the groups, or it

01:36:48.580 has to be that it's a policy difference that, uh, unfairly targets one of the groups, but

01:36:53.560 that's the only way that you can explain real differences.

01:36:56.620 So I said, just take black people out of the situation.

01:36:59.080 And why do, you know, Asians in New York, why did they so dominate whites in New York on

01:37:04.360 entry exams to Stuyvesant and all these, you know, elite public high schools?

01:37:10.040 He just refused to answer the question.

01:37:11.860 It was one of the most disappointing, you know, he just, he wouldn't step out of his framework

01:37:16.320 and really engage with what I was trying to understand.

01:37:18.340 How do we explain what is the policy that would be favoring Asians?

01:37:22.460 Many of them are, you know, English and second language students who are absolutely dominating

01:37:26.840 standardized testing.

01:37:28.360 And he said something about, you know, it's too small a group to really get into, or,

01:37:32.440 you know, all immigrants start out with a different level of desire, but he wouldn't

01:37:36.420 get into why immigrant cultures, uh, inculcate these desires or these beliefs or these.

01:37:41.080 That's very telling, you know, this is reminding me of something Tulsi Gabbard was on the program

01:37:45.960 and she was saying the reason there's such a knee-jerked instinct right now to shut down

01:37:50.220 speech that you don't like is not just you dislike the other side.

01:37:54.580 It's fear that the message will resonate.

01:37:57.940 And I think that's probably, all right, that's probably one of the reasons why

01:38:01.020 Kendi doesn't want to debate and D'Angelo doesn't want to debate and Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn't

01:38:06.300 want to debate because there is fear that you'll get the better of them or Coleman will or

01:38:10.720 Glenn.

01:38:12.220 And I mean, I, this brings me to the Harper's letter because you have been, you tried to

01:38:18.100 lead the way this summer on just pushing back on some of this cancel culture and saying

01:38:21.820 like, we gotta, we gotta be able to talk to each other.

01:38:24.740 You know, you, there's a quote from the letter, the free exchange of information and ideas,

01:38:28.400 the lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted.

01:38:34.340 And you say, censoriousness is spreading more widely in our culture and intolerance of opposing

01:38:39.240 views of Vogue for public shaming and ostracism.

01:38:43.620 That's hard to say ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding

01:38:50.760 moral certainty.

01:38:52.740 Exactly right.

01:38:53.600 There's tendency to dissolve complex policy issues into a blinding moral, of course, right?

01:38:59.360 I mean, my audience knows I'm constantly quoting my, my therapist who always says like every,

01:39:03.840 I can boil down his entire therapy.

01:39:05.320 I don't know why I'm paying $700, um, it would tip to the following people are complicated.

01:39:11.200 They're complicated.

01:39:12.600 And we've lost all sight of that.

01:39:15.220 So you, you decided to put together a group of luminaries, mostly I would say center left,

01:39:19.700 um, to say, please stop.

01:39:23.000 And do you think it did any good?

01:39:25.740 Well, that's a, that's a complicated question itself.

01:39:28.340 Um, it certainly got the issue, um, uh, quite a lot of attention and it's been debated, um,

01:39:39.140 now steadily, um, since July.

01:39:41.740 So, you know, there's sustained debates.

01:39:44.420 I'm constantly talking about it in France.

01:39:46.520 Uh, you know, I did 60 minutes in Australia.

01:39:49.040 Um, there's been a sustained debate in the UK and Spain.

01:39:52.580 Um, so, and in the United States, certainly, so it's, it resonated, um, it got an extraordinary

01:39:59.580 amount of pushback.

01:40:00.820 And I think that, uh, Tulsi Gabbard is correct to tell you that, uh, a good amount of that

01:40:05.580 pushback would have been because people don't want, um, uh, our critique to resonate.

01:40:10.060 They want to preclude people from, from thinking in the way that the letter is asking them to.

01:40:14.580 And so they want to nip it in the bud.

01:40:16.680 And one of the ways that you do that is by not attacking the argument, which is very difficult

01:40:21.240 to refute that we should, we should, we should tolerate opposing views that, you know, that

01:40:25.220 the, the, the, the solution to bad speech is more and better speech that, you know, minorities

01:40:31.200 do best in environments that are maximally free, you know, you know, as opposed to debating

01:40:36.580 those points, they, they say the people that wrote that because they allowed this person

01:40:41.840 to sign that means they're transformed because they allowed this person to sign that means

01:40:45.440 that they're racist X, Y, Z, just the argument is to the man it's ad hominem as opposed to

01:40:51.120 dealing with what we're actually saying.

01:40:52.820 But, you know, I think that the, the interest in the letter, the extraordinary amount of

01:40:57.800 debate that it sparked is a testament to the fact that it's talking about something very

01:41:02.000 real.

01:41:02.540 It's resonating with people.

01:41:03.880 I still get mail as Barry Weiss.

01:41:06.720 And a lot of people will say John McWhorter, anyone associated with that letter still gets tons

01:41:11.440 of mail every day from people, many of whom are not public figures who say, thank you

01:41:17.460 for saying that because I'm, I've never expressed once what I actually think in my, in my workplace

01:41:22.360 because I'm terrified of doing that.

01:41:24.600 But it makes me feel a little bit safer if, you know, Malcolm Gladwell is saying that this

01:41:30.960 is a problem.

01:41:31.820 Maybe that will make it a little bit safer for me.

01:41:34.220 You know, you can't get that much of a conversation going if you're talking about something that's

01:41:39.840 completely made up as our critics like to say it is.

01:41:42.860 Well, and here's the, they sort of your critics who, I mean, there were some names on there.

01:41:48.680 I laughed out loud at like that.

01:41:50.120 The worst person at this small little media site that we in the media read called media.

01:41:54.280 I, this guy, Tommy Christopher, who's an insane leftist.

01:41:56.620 He's a lunatic.

01:41:57.340 This guy, he signed it.

01:41:58.640 I'm like, okay, this isn't exactly Thomas Chatterton Williams, but okay.

01:42:02.500 And the response was, and I quote, their words reflect a stubbornness to let go of the elitism

01:42:09.100 that still pervades the media industry and unwillingness to dismantle systems, that code

01:42:14.740 word, that keep people like them in and the rest of us out, right?

01:42:21.060 It's like, even what you're saying is, can we talk about it?

01:42:25.020 Can we not cancel people who make mistakes as a knee jerk reaction?

01:42:28.100 Can we encourage debate and the open exchange of ideas rather than your words are violence,

01:42:34.060 right?

01:42:34.360 Like, and of course the response is that's your elitism talking as you try to keep me out

01:42:40.040 and yourself in power.

01:42:42.100 And the argument, that's one of the most disingenuous criticisms that it was 150 elites signing

01:42:50.320 a letter because what they're implying is that it would have been better if we had a bunch

01:42:55.000 of people signed who you've never heard of, then that would have gotten no attention.

01:42:58.660 Then the people who are actually vulnerable that these elites are speaking up on behalf

01:43:02.640 of wouldn't have advocates because no one would care.

01:43:05.420 So it's, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

01:43:08.120 No one's going to read a letter.

01:43:10.400 And the other thing they say is, oh, all these people have platforms.

01:43:14.220 What are they complaining about?

01:43:15.020 It's like, so it's possible they're arguing on behalf of others beyond themselves.

01:43:19.300 Exactly, exactly.

01:43:20.580 Like Malcolm Gladwell stepping up and signing that letter, it's not for himself.

01:43:24.680 He already wrote Blink.

01:43:25.940 He's doing that for the kid who's got a, you know, a tenuous work situation who's afraid

01:43:31.940 to say what he actually thinks, who's embracing views that he doesn't believe in as a way of

01:43:38.000 going along to get along.

01:43:39.480 He's sticking up for the academic who's about to be fired, for the cafeteria worker who's

01:43:44.300 about to get piled on.

01:43:45.640 Margaret Atwood isn't doing that for herself.

01:43:47.960 I mean, the idea that Margaret Atwood is worried about herself getting canceled is ludicrous.

01:43:52.660 It's self-evident that these are people with enormous platforms using their platform for

01:43:57.900 good.

01:43:58.300 But there are also people on there, and I count myself in the latter category, there are people

01:44:02.620 on there who could get canceled tomorrow and would actually, it would be a problem.

01:44:07.740 I have not written Blink yet.

01:44:09.140 I have not earned my life's salary already.

01:44:14.560 You know, I'm taking a risk by saying this, but I'm doing that because I actually believe

01:44:19.880 that to stay silent on issues that I think are really important would be a kind of, it

01:44:26.980 would be another kind of death.

01:44:28.540 And that's not what I got into writing to do.

01:44:30.860 So I think that people like Chloe, people like me, people like Coleman who signed it, that's

01:44:37.420 that's different.

01:44:39.580 That's a good point.

01:44:41.000 I have 40 more years, hopefully, to be working.

01:44:45.100 So I'm-

01:44:45.500 God willing.

01:44:46.760 Yeah.

01:44:47.580 So there are people that did risk something to sign that.

01:44:51.840 And so the idea that we're all like J.K.

01:44:54.120 Rowling is really disingenuous.

01:44:55.740 And it doesn't engage with what the letter is actually saying.

01:45:00.860 I liked it because I thought, you know, having grown up at Fox and I'm more center-right,

01:45:06.700 my side agrees with those points.

01:45:09.700 You know what I mean?

01:45:10.120 Like people who are my fans and people who watch Fox News, they agreed with all that stuff.

01:45:15.700 They're, I don't think, except for like the hardcore, you know, hardcore sort of Trump

01:45:21.780 people who do want to cancel anybody who rips on him, right?

01:45:24.800 There's a faction there on the right that has a little too pro-cancellation.

01:45:29.400 I think for the most part, they're with you.

01:45:31.900 But it's the left.

01:45:32.960 It's like this weird, I'm stopping myself from saying far left because I do think like

01:45:39.240 Crystal Ball is kind of far left, but she's not a lunatic.

01:45:42.440 She's not one of these wokesters who wants to cancel.

01:45:44.480 Well, also like Noam Chomsky is very far left and he signed it because he's very pro-freedom,

01:45:49.500 you know?

01:45:50.160 Exactly.

01:45:50.520 So I don't even know how to describe them, but we're up against this sort of woke cabal

01:45:54.000 that is dangerous to our country and what we stand for.

01:45:56.960 And they need to hear from people like you.

01:46:01.020 Yeah.

01:46:01.380 These are people who are illiberal.

01:46:02.960 They don't get to claim the term liberal.

01:46:05.400 They're actually anti-liberal in many ways.

01:46:07.920 They're restrictive and punitive.

01:46:11.720 Yeah.

01:46:12.040 I don't know.

01:46:12.580 What's the term for them though?

01:46:13.900 Is that fascism?

01:46:15.540 What is that?

01:46:16.140 I think the term that I try to settle on is illiberal.

01:46:23.200 I would also say there's an authoritarian tendency there too.

01:46:27.580 I'm going to go with that.

01:46:28.560 I feel like I always think about my imaginary listener.

01:46:31.620 Yes.

01:46:32.020 My imaginary listener, Madge in Iowa, does not know what illiberal means.

01:46:36.020 She doesn't get it.

01:46:36.700 I barely understand.

01:46:38.380 So if I don't get it, she doesn't get it either because she's with me.

01:46:40.900 So authoritarian, I think that works.

01:46:43.060 That you get.

01:46:43.900 They're just like, they're over you and they want to put their thumb on you and they don't

01:46:46.560 want you to behave or speak or think any way other than they approve.

01:46:50.740 Yeah.

01:46:51.080 And it's a real problem.

01:46:53.200 And one of the things that people with power or people building power do is they deny that

01:46:59.540 they have any power.

01:47:00.320 And so we're in this kind of endless cycle of people displaying authoritarian behaviors,

01:47:06.860 but denying that they have any ability to inflict harm and saying that they're the only people

01:47:10.980 that are in actual danger.

01:47:13.740 And so what we tried to do with the letter, you know, it was signed by most of the people

01:47:16.860 signing were left of center, but, you know, Francis Fukuyama signed it.

01:47:20.440 David Frum signed it.

01:47:21.620 David French signed it.

01:47:22.600 You know, real principles.

01:47:25.000 I stand by my original statement.

01:47:26.920 In any event, you know, we, we, we, we criticize, you know, on the one hand, you know, you've

01:47:36.040 got Donald Trump is doing some real authoritarian things that we object to.

01:47:42.900 On the other hand, the institutions that are supposed to defend liberal values and the post

01:47:47.580 authoritarianism are flirting to this other kind of authoritarianism and censoriousness and

01:47:53.800 engaging in public humiliation and shaming to, to, to crush dissent.

01:47:59.500 And this is also really a problem.

01:48:01.400 And it might be even more of a problem because they tend to control the spaces that form opinion

01:48:08.220 that matters, you know?

01:48:09.860 Yep.

01:48:10.520 So we end as we began, which is now what, like, what do we do to fight back against that?

01:48:17.780 Yeah.

01:48:17.980 So I'm very serious about this.

01:48:20.180 One of the things that I've been doing, I'm, I'm someone who defines himself as a liberal.

01:48:24.540 I won't let people take that from me.

01:48:26.820 You know, I feel like I've stayed basically in the same place my whole adult life and the

01:48:32.080 left has moved away from me, but I'm a liberal and I'm interested in bridging the divide and

01:48:40.680 making common cause with other liberals, people in the center left and center right.

01:48:46.340 Basically.

01:48:47.520 I think that we need new alliances.

01:48:49.620 We need new institutions and we need new dialogue partners who will oppose authoritarianism

01:48:55.560 wherever crops up, whether it's on the right or the left.

01:48:59.440 And so, you know, I just started, I'm a non-resident fellow at AEI now.

01:49:04.320 I'm working with Yuval Levin.

01:49:06.700 Yeah.

01:49:07.100 Who's someone I really respect.

01:49:08.360 He's to the right of me, but I, but I see that we have opportunities to, to find common

01:49:14.040 cause and I think hopefully to improve our society together because it doesn't really

01:49:19.040 matter who's destroying the society, whether on the left or the right, we need to, we need

01:49:23.220 to build something that can oppose it wherever the threat is coming from.

01:49:26.960 Well, that's one great thing about the letter is you have a group of people who, whose names

01:49:31.140 I recognize, but with whom it's not like I have dinner all the time.

01:49:34.660 And I know more of the people on the right who feel that way.

01:49:37.300 And so it's sort of good to just publicly identify allies in this way because I do feel

01:49:41.240 our army of reason is growing and getting bolder and getting more organized.

01:49:47.780 And this is the beginning of the solution.

01:49:50.860 I hope so.

01:49:51.560 I hope so.

01:49:52.260 And your podcast is a good place to start.

01:49:53.960 You've been having wonderful conversations.

01:49:56.260 Oh, thank you.

01:49:57.280 Well, listen, I, it appears that I have more work to do at home because my children are

01:50:00.360 not reading any of the books that your father had.

01:50:02.660 You read, they're reading Captain Underpants, Thomas.

01:50:04.420 My kids are reading Peppa Pig.

01:50:07.520 Don't worry.

01:50:08.520 Okay, good.

01:50:09.660 All right, good.

01:50:10.420 So wait, when I'll let you go before you hang up, can you do me a favor where I'm unofficially

01:50:15.200 starting my little Kelly college where we ask very smart people to give us a book to recommend

01:50:18.980 for our viewers to read, to get smarter, you know, something that they might not have read,

01:50:23.280 you know, like something by James Baldwin or whatever it is.

01:50:25.800 So give, give that some thought.

01:50:27.340 It doesn't actually have to be on this podcast, but if you have a thought, I'm going to put you

01:50:30.880 into Kelly college.

01:50:31.560 And, and in the meantime, um, can I ask you one last question just to close it out, which

01:50:37.600 is absolutely.

01:50:38.540 Yes.

01:50:39.620 I, sometimes I'd like to ask people this just to close it out.

01:50:41.920 And that is in this age in which we hear so many negative things about our country and

01:50:46.560 ourselves and our history.

01:50:48.940 What do you love about America?

01:50:50.420 Oh yeah.

01:50:51.760 I mean, plenty of things.

01:50:53.460 I, I'm, I'm not, uh, you know, I'm not Panglossian.

01:50:56.640 I'm not, uh, deluded about America, but, uh, you know, I've lived in different parts of the

01:51:01.620 world now.

01:51:02.200 I'm almost 40 years old.

01:51:03.880 I've spent a quarter of my life in France.

01:51:06.900 Um, America is a place where you can really transcend the circumstances you start in.

01:51:15.200 And that is extraordinary.

01:51:17.300 I don't think people understand how difficult that can be in other parts of the world.

01:51:21.020 I live in Paris.

01:51:22.560 I live around, you know, educated, you know, uh, urban, uh, bourgeois bohemian types.

01:51:31.460 Uh, and if you go to these people's homes, you realize that they're, uh, basically reproducing

01:51:36.200 the same social class over and over and over again, as far back as the 1700s.

01:51:41.260 Sometimes, you know, people are not transcending their station.

01:51:44.080 They're not going to, they're not first generation to go to a good school.

01:51:47.680 They're not first generation to, to, to buy a new apartment.

01:51:53.280 Uh, they're inheriting apartments.

01:51:54.880 What I mean by this is that my dad, uh, transcended his situation.

01:51:59.680 He made it possible for me to transcend my situation.

01:52:02.160 I see the black struggle in America as one that has transcended immense adversity.

01:52:07.440 And it's one to be proud of.

01:52:08.680 It's not something to, to think about in, in a way that's, um, that's, that's negative.

01:52:14.520 It's one to think of these, these are, these are stories that make me optimistic about the

01:52:20.160 future.

01:52:20.740 You know, I think that, uh, our country corrects itself when it goes wrong.

01:52:25.860 Um, I was very, very, very dismayed.

01:52:29.480 I'll be honest.

01:52:29.940 I was extremely dismayed that we went from a country that elected Barack Obama to a country

01:52:34.920 that put Donald Trump in office directly after him.

01:52:37.760 That was something that made me think quite a lot about the society.

01:52:42.220 Um, and one of the things that I, that I realized is that, uh, we can't get complacent,

01:52:47.800 but that the best of America always ends up coming through.

01:52:50.760 And so I think that this is a moment that we're stuck in where we're, we're, we're caught

01:52:54.980 up in a kind of moral panic, um, where America is somehow now the, the singular source of

01:53:01.560 evil in the world and, and, and behind everything wrong.

01:53:05.040 Um, I have to be optimistic.

01:53:06.460 I think that coming from the African-American experience, um, you don't have the choice to

01:53:11.360 be, to be pessimistic.

01:53:12.820 I'm fundamentally an optimist about the future of America.

01:53:15.880 I'm sorry.

01:53:16.240 That was a kind of long and meandering answer.

01:53:17.940 If it's edited down, maybe there'll be something in it.

01:53:20.760 I loved it.

01:53:21.440 It was perfectly well said.

01:53:23.160 Listen, thank you for all the thoughtful commentary and the time.

01:53:25.980 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:53:27.860 Hey, it was really nice to talk to you, Megan.

01:53:29.380 Thank you for reaching out and getting in touch.

01:53:31.620 And I, I wish you success.

01:53:33.280 I'm really inspired by, um, you and Barry and the, and the people who are in the forefront

01:53:38.560 of, uh, of, you know, of, of trying new forms and making new platforms for yourself and

01:53:45.080 not being dependent on, um, on the institutions you've left.

01:53:48.740 You're, you're kind of pioneering new ways to, to do this.

01:53:51.960 And I think it's really important.

01:53:53.420 Uh, are you enjoying the podcast as much as you were enjoying being on TV?

01:53:57.800 A hundred percent more because you can have more thoughtful conversations.

01:54:01.060 And I was never somebody who needed to see herself on television.

01:54:04.240 I just was looking to do like a meaningful job.

01:54:07.000 And so this has just taken it next level, even on Bill Maher, you know, I had 13 minutes

01:54:11.360 and it was just he and I, but if I was saying to Doug, it was so much less fulfilling than

01:54:15.140 the conversations that I can have on this show where you can really get into nuance and

01:54:19.500 back and forth and you can tell a story with a, you know, a climax and like, you can build

01:54:25.380 it up.

01:54:25.660 It's just, it's such a more meaningful conversation.

01:54:28.700 And I, I feel like I was born to be here.

01:54:31.920 Yeah.

01:54:32.100 You're really good at it.

01:54:36.060 Coming up on Friday, we're going to have a guest unlike any other here on the Megan Kelly

01:54:39.840 show, any other so far, and that's a Hollywood star.

01:54:43.580 Here, Justine Bateman is here.

01:54:45.840 Now you may know her from her child star years or teenage star years as Mallory on Family

01:54:51.600 Ties, but she just wrote, directed and produced a film called Violet that's about to come out

01:54:57.660 starring Olivia Munn and Justin Theroux.

01:55:00.160 And she's here because she's written two really thoughtful books.

01:55:02.900 I had her on my NBC show and I really loved her.

01:55:05.340 And I'm like, I'd love to have her back.

01:55:07.380 She just wrote a second book.

01:55:08.420 The first one was about fame and losing it.

01:55:11.080 And the second one is about your face and losing it in a different kind of way.

01:55:19.060 And the pressures on women in particular, nevermind Hollywood woman in aging.

01:55:25.240 And if you, if you Google Justine Bateman, you will see she is aging naturally.

01:55:30.260 She's not doing any of the needles or the fillers or the knives and people have been so

01:55:35.760 cruel to her just because she chose not to do any of that nonsense.

01:55:39.520 And now she's written a really thoughtful book and I think you're going to enjoy this.

01:55:43.180 So tune in next episode.

01:55:45.640 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

01:55:47.780 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:55:52.200 The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

01:55:56.560 The Megyn Kelly Show.

01:56:10.180 The Megyn Kelly Show is a sustainable strategy.

01:56:11.780 Oh, yeah.

01:56:12.300 Until next episode.

01:56:13.060 The Megyn Kelly Show is a deuil at the start.

01:56:14.160 The Megyn Kelly Show is a tip of the Prime Minister's production in cooperation with Red Seat Ventures.

The Megyn Kelly Show - March 24, 2021

Thomas Chatterton Williams on the Authoritarian Left, the Illusion of Racial Identity, and Victimhood in America ｜ Ep. 80

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