00:00:57.760I was born in Chicago in 1948, grew up in a working-class family, went to public schools,
00:01:05.400became a father very young at the age of 18, dropped out of college and went to work.
00:01:12.560Eventually found my way back to the university, part-time at first and then full-time with a full-time job, long story.
00:01:19.480But I graduated Northwestern University in 1972 with a degree in mathematics and studied economics at MIT in the early 1970s, where I took my Ph.D. in 1976.
00:01:32.880I started my career as a technical economist writing math papers, but evolved into a politically oriented and social critic type economist writing about race and inequality.
00:01:45.640I was naturally drawn to those questions.
00:01:48.600I became a Reagan conservative in the 1980s, became a born again Christian in the late 1980s, dealt with a sex scandal and a serious drug problem, got those things behind me, regrounded my career, left Harvard, went to Boston University in the 90s.
00:02:09.240I've been here at Brown since 2005. I have of late become notorious as a center-right critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, about which I assume we'll talk more in due course.
00:02:24.740But think of myself as a centrist, not as a particularly partisan political actor. So that's me.
00:02:34.960Yeah, and it's great to have you on the show because that's basically where Francis and I both are as well.
00:02:39.660We're just trying to make our way in the world, understand what different people say on different sides without taking any particular party line at all.
00:03:38.360One way of responding is that we've been seized by a mass hysteria,
00:03:42.100completely disconnected from reality that has a life of its own,
00:03:45.300driven by the interests of particular political actors,
00:03:48.860maybe the Democratic Party in seeking votes from black people,
00:03:52.040maybe various kinds of activists who are able to pursue their own political interests on the back
00:03:57.980of this narrative about systemic racism and white supremacy. That would be one way
00:04:03.720of responding. I think there's some truth to it. These incidents, the killing of Trayvon Martin
00:04:12.320in Sanford, Florida in 2012, if I'm not mistaken, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
00:04:20.920in Missouri in 2013 or 14. Again, I may get the date not quite right. These incidents, Eric Garner
00:04:29.460selling cigarettes out in front of a cafe, a convenience store in Staten Island, New York City,
00:04:36.720choked to death by a police officer, and I could go on with these incidents,
00:04:43.220have catalyzed a movement, Black Lives Matter for short, which has seized the imagination of many
00:04:50.920and has fomented this change in the conversation about race here in the United States.
00:05:00.940Then most recently, of course, George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, choked to death,
00:05:07.720a famously inflammatory and infuriating incident, has galvanized people in this movement,
00:05:19.340This movement which spilled over into street protests and demonstrations, demonstrations which on occasion spilled over into rioting and arson and violence.
00:05:30.220A lot of angry rhetoric coming out of it.
00:05:34.420I'm not going to pretend to have the answer to your question, what's going on.
00:05:39.180But the race conversation, in my opinion, has definitely become less productive, more volatile, angrier, less capable of being resolved from the parties on various sides.
00:05:56.660And in my opinion, I think, to some degree, disconnected from the reality which the election and successful eight-year term of Barack Hussein Obama reflects.
00:06:09.180This is not the same country that we were in 1920 or 1950 or even 1980.
00:06:16.220The very fact that the anti-racist advocacy attracts as much support as it does from mainstream political interests,
00:06:24.540from corporate America, from the common opinion of the editorial pages of major organs and so on,
00:06:31.500that books like Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me or Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist
00:06:38.700have as much cachet as they have, that the cultural awards coming from places like the
00:06:45.340Pulitzer Prize Award Foundation or the MacArthur Genius Awards Foundation or whatever it might be
00:06:52.220have celebrated African-American assertion of African-American interests, have gotten behind
00:06:59.720the woke narrative about race. Those facts, it seems to me, give the lie to the claim
00:07:04.800that the society is intrinsically racist or that people who advocate on behalf of the interests of
00:07:10.600african americans are powerless uh quite the opposite it seems to me is the case so i don't
00:07:17.400know i could ramble on but uh you've asked me how in the face of barack obama's ascendancy could
00:07:24.620the tenor of the complaint about race in america be such as it is intrinsically white supremacist
00:07:31.700anti-black and so on my answer is mass hysteria has seized us here and common sense you know
00:07:40.480recitation of actual facts on the ground has been displaced by the emotional fervor into which
00:07:49.140people can be whipped by self-interested advocates who have their own agendas and you say that they
00:07:56.840have their own agendas Glenn if I could push back just a little bit surely though these
00:08:01.080arguments must have a kernel of truth to them. Otherwise, they'd be easy to dismiss and they
00:08:07.420wouldn't rear their head again. Well, yeah, they have a kernel. I mean, George Floyd is dead. I
00:08:12.860mean, everybody saw the video. The guy sat, Derek Chauvin, the police officer, with his knee on the
00:08:17.260man's neck for as long as he sat with his knee on his neck. That happened. There's not any doubt
00:08:21.140about that. Moreover, the relationships between police and members of the community in many
00:08:29.160cities across this country, members of the African-American community in many cities across
00:08:32.780this country are fraught. They're fraught because there are bad acting police. There's not any doubt
00:08:38.160about that. There are incidents that happen. More than incidents happening, there are institutionalized
00:08:43.060forces that impinge upon the quality of life for African-Americans in ways that are objectionable.
00:08:51.100That's certainly a part of the story. But the idea that there's a kind of systemic, violent terrorizing of African-Americans by police officers is simply false.
00:09:09.500It's simply false because there are 40 million African-Americans here in a country of 330 million people.
00:09:18.180There are about 1,200 police killings of Americans in a year, of which maybe about 300 are African-Americans, of which maybe about 50 or 60, I'll make the number up, we could check it, are unarmed African-Americans killed by police officers.
00:09:37.200is a country of 330 million people. There are tens of thousands of encounters between police
00:09:42.340officers and citizens on a daily basis here. There are hundreds of thousands of arrests
00:09:47.960of people for suspicion of criminal offense per year in this country. So these incidents,
00:09:55.900which are real, are not emblematic of the experience of people in the country. They are
00:10:03.040not representative of what's happening on a daily basis. They're only a part of the narrative.
00:10:09.240I mean, I feel obliged to observe that some 8,000 Black people were murdered
00:10:16.940in the year 2020. That's 8,000 compared to maybe 300 who were killed by police officers
00:10:25.680and maybe 50 or 60 of those 300 who were killed under circumstances where you would not
00:10:31.940immediately say the police officer was justified in using force so it's a question of what's the
00:10:37.480actual experience of people and then what's the narrative that gets affixed to that experience
00:10:44.040the actual experience is much more benign i i will use that word much more benign than the narrative
00:10:52.260of police hunting down black people at every turn and that narrative narrative leaves out the fact
00:10:57.680that the police are out there encountering people who are committing crimes, mostly against other
00:11:05.480Black people. This is not an easy job. This is a difficult job. Now, I'm making no brief
00:11:10.020for racist police officers who exist. I'm just saying, if we put the circumstances into some
00:11:16.760kind of realistic proportionality, the narrative, I think, would be much more different. The
00:11:22.820narrative about threats to the integrity of the black body about black lives mattering would be
00:11:29.500very much different because the actual threat to the integrity of the black body the actual
00:11:35.580extirpation of black life is being carried out not by police officers under cover of law
00:11:42.240but rather by common criminals uh who behave viciously and who have to be dealt with i i say
00:11:48.120that with trepidation. I don't take any pleasure saying it, but if you go and ask people who live
00:11:53.700in these neighborhoods, they're going to tell you that they're worried about having a carjacker put
00:11:58.580a pistol in their faces at one o'clock in the morning when they're trying to fill their tank,
00:12:03.380that they're worried about sending their child out for a carton of milk at the store on the corner
00:12:07.700because sometimes the child doesn't come back, that they hear gunfire at night before they put
00:12:13.040their children to bed and they cower in fear of what that might entail. So the painting of the
00:12:21.400circumstances of African Americans as susceptible to rogue, vicious, violent intervention in their
00:12:29.520lives by agents of the state is false. It's not true. And Glenn, where would you stand on the fact
00:12:38.940the argument that American police disproportionately target black people, in particular young black
00:12:46.360men, and that's the reason why they're overrepresented when it comes to the prison
00:12:51.080system in America? I wouldn't say with the same degree of finality that that is false because
00:12:56.840there is some evidence, especially with the use of force short of lethal force, that race plays
00:13:03.780a role in that the police officers are more aggressive, more likely to put on hands, more
00:13:07.820likely to use handcuffs, more likely to use a baton, more likely to rough up a suspect if the
00:13:12.860suspect is Black. And there are police departments in which the culture of cowboy vigilante kind of
00:13:22.720violence, you know, we're the good guys, they're the Black guys, we've got to go out and get our
00:13:26.200quota today, is operative. So there is an issue in policing. Of course, there's another side to
00:13:35.900that story, there are many police departments in which innovative community relations initiatives
00:13:41.560have been undertaken, people working cooperating with police and so on to try to solve the problem
00:13:46.860of securing public safety for people. I wouldn't poo-poo the issue of policing. I would say reform
00:13:55.600is an appropriate item on the agenda. It's just the relative weighting of the various different
00:14:04.820Now, the other thing that I would say here is there's an unavoidable problem here, which is that if you have high rates of offending in a racially identifiable community, it's going to be very hard for law enforcement to ignore that fact.
00:14:23.940So even if the proportion of offenders is a small proportion of the total population, which is certainly true, the fraction of young black men in any city who have a gun tucked in their belt, who are prepared to pull it out and use it on a police officer, it's got to be a low number.
00:14:39.600I mean, I don't know the number, but it's got to be a small, small percentage. Still, if it's a large percentage who are black of those who are prepared to behave in this way, a police officer at two o'clock in the morning pulling someone over because they're driving erratically, noticing that it's a young black man in the front seat of the vehicle.
00:15:01.600So it's hard to ask that person not to be mindful of the fact that there's a risk involved in that situation, not to have his sense of that risk heightened by observing that the person is black.
00:15:13.560Now, this is an officer of the state. This is someone who is a servant of the people. This is someone who has been through many, many, many hours of training.
00:15:22.340They should be so instructed that their responsibilities require them to suppress whatever their visceral reactions might be and to conduct their encounter with a citizen regardless of race, courteously, respectfully, et cetera, et cetera.
00:15:40.240But they're also human beings. If as private citizens, we're coming home from a party after a few drinks at one o'clock in the morning on a dark street and we observe two or three people walking toward us on the other side of the street, you can't tell me that our reaction in that situation is not going to be conditioned by whether or not those are old ladies or young men.
00:16:01.060whether or not they are black or they are white, whether or not they are dressed with business
00:16:12.320pocket, we are, as social animals, conditioned to take that kind of information on board. So are
00:16:18.360police officers going to be socially conditioned. Their training should work to counteract that,
00:16:24.340but to expect that they would be completely oblivious to that, I think, is a request that's
00:16:28.420going to be very difficult to enforce well we're having the conversation that we've had with
00:16:34.900coleman hughes and with others uh very much going through similar themes what i wonder though if
00:16:41.060maybe we can take it in the new direction would be what does a healthy conversation about this
00:16:46.720issue look like because uh you know at the moment it's all very much one side says everything is
00:16:52.880white supremacy everything is systemic everything needs to be defunded overthrown and the other
00:16:58.340side is saying well actually this is because this group of people commits more crime and actually
00:17:04.160police officers are just doing a good job and yet people are some a small number of people are being
00:17:09.860killed as you said yourself there is some evidence that black suspects are treated differently to
00:17:14.400white suspects uh etc so how do we talk about this issue in a healthy way as opposed to having this
00:17:21.580uh tension and culture war over it well you're gonna say i'm a pollyanna for saying this i think
00:17:28.640we need to de-racialize the conversation that we need to talk about policing about citizens
00:17:34.700about the rights of people about about the responsibilities of public agents as they
00:17:40.640interact with their uh with their charges not about blacks and whites and asians and so on
00:17:47.320That's what I think we need. I think all lives matter. I think that should be the mantra. All lives matter.
00:17:52.940Now, in saying that, and I laugh because it has we have gotten to the point where if I say all lives matter, it's almost as if I'm saying blue lives matter.
00:18:02.340If you get what I mean, if I say all lives matter, it's almost as if I've taken a side against black interest by saying that all lives matter.
00:18:10.300i have not done so i think um i was at a conference once and i tried to make this uh move that i'm
00:18:16.760making with you right now and i got my head handed to me by the audience who called me uncle tom and
00:18:21.300said that i had my head in the stand and i was ignoring reality but here's my argument my argument
00:18:26.580is yeah there is a disproportion in the way in which police use force against citizen based upon
00:18:31.780race and that needs to be dealt with yes there is and yes there are these incidents like george
00:18:36.120Floyd and so on that happened, which cannot be ignored, and the people responsible for them
00:18:41.820should be held accountable. I grant that. I grant all of that. But if we racialize the discussion
00:18:48.740of crime, punishment, and policing in America, we are playing with fire. On the one hand,
00:18:57.700there is the claim that advocates of Black interests will make. Police are racist. Black
00:19:03.820Lives Matter, we must focus on their excesses. On the other hand, there is the unspoken conversation
00:19:10.920that goes on sub-Rosa, that goes on beneath the access to the TV camera and the microphone,
00:19:17.420which is that there's a tremendous amount of Black crime in this country, and I'm sick of it.
00:19:23.820That's another kind of conversation. Ferguson, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis,
00:19:29.500has a horrific, not just Ferguson, but the entire St. Louis metropolitan area, has a horrific
00:19:35.140profile in terms of criminal victimization, in terms of homicide, in terms of assault,
00:19:40.680in terms of robbery and burglary and car theft and so on. Those people living in that community,
00:19:48.600I'm talking about the white people, are aware that most of the offenders are Black.
00:19:53.320That's the last thing that we want to reiterate in their consciousness. The offenders are Americans
00:19:59.200who are breaking the law and who have to be dealt with. That they are disproportionately Black is
00:20:03.480something that should not be brought to the forefront of the consciousness of people. It's
00:20:08.620something that we should attempt to tamp down. We shouldn't feed the reflex to see it in that way.
00:20:14.740The progressive advocates of Black interests make an error when they think that they can play only
00:20:20.480one side of this card and get away with it. They can play it on MSNBC or CNN or the CBS News or
00:20:28.800the New York Times on one side, because those organs will never give voice to a commonly held
00:20:35.020sentiment, which is that in many, many cities in America, it's way too dangerous to step outside
00:20:40.720of your home. And the unspoken subtext there is, the reason it's way too dangerous is because
00:20:47.300there are too many Black criminals roaming the streets of these cities. That's what people may
00:20:53.560be inclined more frequently to think if we frame the police violence problem in racial terms.
00:21:01.240Way more white people than black people are killed by police in America every year. For every
00:21:08.440incidence of a Tamir Rice, that's the young boy, 12 years old, shot when he had a toy gun in a park
00:21:14.560in Cleveland, who has become a cause to the left, rightly, because he should not have lost his life
00:21:18.940under those circumstances. That was terrible policing. He happened to have been a black kid.
00:21:22.440There are white kids who have been killed that way. I can't remember the name of the gentleman, an African-American in a Walmart who had a gun that he was trying to buy and got killed by store security officers because they thought that he was a threat.
00:21:35.720But there have been white people killed under those circumstances. There have been white people choked to death by police officers kneeling on their necks after they've had difficulty arresting the suspect.
00:21:47.780These problems need not be primarily seen through a racial lens.
00:21:52.680In my view, progress would consist in moving the conversation from one about generic claims
00:22:00.700of racial domination to one about the responsibilities of public officers and their interactions
00:22:12.260If you if you incline to think of the crime in racial terms, if you want to racialize the conversation about law enforcement, policing, punishment and prisons in this country,
00:22:21.820there is a dark subtext there that we would do well to be mindful of and not to encourage that to come into light.
00:22:31.580Excuse me, Constantine. They're going to they think they're winning the argument because they can call the people who are afraid of black crime and are prepared to say so racist.
00:22:43.880Those people don't care that you're calling them racist.
00:22:46.320They know that it's not racist to be afraid of carjackers.
00:22:51.640And if most of them are black, it's not racist to be afraid of the black guy who pulls up next to you at one o'clock in the morning at the gas station where you're trying to fill your car.
00:23:00.320If you smell marijuana coming out of the front window and you see that it's a black 19-year-old, you're not crazy to think that that person might harm you.
00:23:11.680And that's not the kind of thing that we want to feed into.
00:33:03.800And I think that's a big part of this conversation.
00:33:07.320Do you think that a lot of these problems
00:33:09.620in talking about these issues, honestly,
00:33:11.680come from the fact that we've essentially abandoned
00:33:14.720what used to be called the class analysis,
00:33:17.060The idea that people really struggle in life, first and foremost, because they grow up in poverty in areas where there's substandard housing, there's a lot of crime, the education is not good, they're not surrounded by inspiring examples of attainment and success.
00:33:36.560And that is something that is much more universal across all these different racial groups who are struggling in certain areas than their skin color or whatever else it might be.
00:33:48.260The thing that really holds people down is being poor, growing up in poverty, etc.
00:33:54.100Do you think that's the abandonment of that viewpoint is why everything has now become so racialized?
00:34:01.800I am not a leftist, but I think I was trained in the conventional sort of neoliberal economic school at MIT back in the 1970s and have, as I have already confessed, you know, flirted with the right wing of American politics in terms of economic policy and so on.
00:34:22.740I'm not a Marxist. I'm not a socialist.
00:34:24.920On the other hand, I think there is a profound truth in the argument I associated with Adolph Reed, the political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania here in the United States, but there are many, many others who are very concerned about race and racial inequality.
00:34:41.660there's not any doubt that they're concerned about the interest of african americans
00:34:46.800but who understand the problem mainly through a class lens it's the disproportionate representation
00:34:52.160of blacks at the bottom of the class hierarchy that's the problem now i'm not about to nationalize
00:35:00.720industries and declare 20 an hour minimum wages and all of that that's not how i would approach
00:35:05.580it as a policy matter but having as the goal improving the quality of life for people at the
00:35:11.540bottom, expanding their access to developmental resources, giving them greater opportunities
00:35:16.180for themselves and their children, ensuring that they have adequate health care, that they have
00:35:20.540access to good education, that their housing is decent, and so on. Their food security concerns
00:35:28.780are ameliorated. This kind of thing, that should be the goal. Now, I say that both for the reasons
00:35:37.660that I've already intimated, which is I think we overdo the racialization. But I also say it from
00:35:42.660a kind of pragmatic political perspective. You want to get something done in a democracy,
00:35:48.600you need 50% of the people to get behind it. If you're a racial minority group, by definition,
00:35:53.580you're not 50% of the people. If you claim, frame your politics entirely in terms of your racial
00:35:58.840identity, you might be able to cobble together a coalition of the LGBT and of the brown and of the
00:36:05.940black and so on, but you'd be much more effective if you drew on some of that 60 or 70 percent of
00:36:12.380the population who are white, the working class of that segment of the population, on behalf of
00:36:18.100a program of politics that tries to expand opportunity for people at the bottom of the
00:36:23.500society. If you did that, you'd have a greatest chance of being successful politically, and you
00:36:29.000target your intervention in a way that it was most likely to help those in the minority group who are
00:36:34.920the ones most in need. But those people, the poor people in the minority group, the poor Black people
00:36:42.480in the urban ghettos of America, don't give news conferences. They don't write speeches for
00:36:49.160politicians. They don't write op-ed pieces. They are not on the faculty of the universities.
00:36:55.860The people who speak for the minority group are largely themselves not members of the class
00:37:01.080within the minority group who most desperately need attention. They're interested in whether
00:37:07.560or not they're going to get a job at the university and whether or not the cabinet
00:37:11.140of Joseph Biden is ethnically or racially diverse and whether or not the Fortune 500 company that
00:37:16.740they work for hires a consultant to come in and do diversity training and whether or not the
00:37:22.400university has affirmative action. They have a class interest. It's a middle and upper middle
00:37:28.900class professional interests. They racialize their offensive, ethically offensive class
00:37:37.020interests. They're already privileged people. They now just want a better job and a higher
00:37:41.140income and more attention to their concerns. They racialize that undercover of acting on behalf of
00:37:47.520the poor, when in fact, the most effective way of acting on behalf of the poor would be to
00:37:53.200de-emphasize race and emphasize their class differentiation. That would be my analysis.
00:37:58.900You know, it's a very accurate analysis, I would say, because you do see, you know, people quote and, you know, always talk about AOC.
00:38:05.480You know, she's a Latino woman. You know, she's Puerto Rican. She's on the left. That's what Latinos are.
00:38:11.300And, you know, like my mum is Venezuelan. Again, everybody drinks. She's pro-Trump.
00:38:16.120You know, she's on the right, as are a lot of Cubans, you know, because they've experienced, you know, socialism, et cetera, et cetera.
00:38:22.460Yet these are not deemed to be the correct views for a Latin American to hold.
00:38:27.680and i wonder why a latin american person would be pro-trump um what what what the and i'll bet you
00:38:35.900to some degree they thought perhaps incorrectly but nevertheless they thought trump was giving
00:38:41.240voice to some of their class-based concerns uh you know there was something else you alluded to
00:38:48.440which uh i'm not a conspiratorially minded person at all uh glenn a posture that has been rather
00:38:54.920challenged by the events of the last year, I must say. But I do wonder whether making everything
00:39:02.920about race is a really great way of avoiding actually having to do anything for ordinary
00:39:09.400people and their concerns. It seems like a great way to get people to fight amongst themselves
00:39:15.980while elites continue to benefit and prosper. Do you think there's some truth to that as well?
00:39:22.460yeah if my wife lawan were here my lovely wife and she and i argue this point all the time she
00:39:30.080was a bernie sanders supporter in the last election cycle here in the united states
00:39:34.100uh she'd be saying right on right on yes i do uh when uh joseph biden basically secured the
00:39:42.440democratic nomination in the south carolina primary uh with the help of james clyburn the
00:39:47.560member of Congress from South Carolina, the Democratic Party in South Carolina, South
00:39:52.240Carolina, a conservative state, but the Democratic Party, a very black and relatively liberal
00:39:56.400congregation, saved Joseph Biden from an ignominious humiliation by coming out and
00:40:04.340having him win that primary. And he then went on to the nomination. I mean, her concern was precisely
00:40:09.940this. It was, you know, they're just trying to avoid the issue here. They're just, it's a
00:40:13.620corporate Democrat who's going to come in and say that something that's not all that much different
00:40:17.400from what a corporate Republican was going to say.
00:40:19.820Meanwhile, the gut-level issues about working people,
00:41:15.640You do want to have a robust safety net. So you want to take care of people who are displaced, let's say by trade or whatever. I don't like the minimum wage. I would subsidize people's wages. The reason I don't like the minimum wage as an economist is that I think it's a very inefficient way of helping people who are poor.
00:41:31.540I think it basically prices out of the labor market individuals who have a few skills.
00:41:36.940And I worry that it encourages employers toward automation tendencies that, you know, they try to minimize their dependence on labor that's becoming more expensive.
00:41:45.020That will have a long term detrimental effect for the well-being of poor people.
00:41:50.160If you want them to have money, give them money. Don't force the employer to pay them more than the employer thinks.
00:41:55.400That's the kind of thing that I would be inclined to say.
00:41:57.620Sure. So. So, you know, the differences are more about how to get something done than they are about what needs doing.
00:42:06.860Glenn, and what would you say to the idea that your position is great and it's very, very utopian, but the problem is not capitalism, it's crony capitalism.
00:42:15.620The system is rigged. There's lots of evidence to say that. And really, these people at the bottom have little to no chance of making their way up.
00:42:25.680I'd say I understand why you're saying that. I think there's some more than a little bit of truth to it.
00:42:33.680I think there's welfare, you know, money for poor people, money for people who can't pay their rent, who can't buy the food that the kids need and so forth.
00:42:41.660And then there's corporate welfare, which is an act of Congress that protects an industry from competitive pressures and ends up putting billions of dollars.
00:42:53.060Or there's a hedge fund capitalism where the rules of the financial marketplace are configured in such a way as to protect people.
00:43:03.480Or there's tax cuts for the rich, quote unquote, tax cuts for the rich.
00:43:07.820I don't think all of the tax cut initiatives undertaken under Trump were bad.
00:43:13.220I talk about it at my podcast with my economist friend, Larry Kotlikoff, who's a tax expert.
00:43:17.380There were some things that needed doing in the tax code that got done in that legislation, which promote efficient allocation of resources, et cetera, et cetera.
00:43:26.520But there was also a lot of, you know, fat cats getting paid, of rules getting configured so as to make it easier to make money and keep the money that you make if you're a well-off person.
00:43:40.760It is a threat to the political integrity as well as the economic efficiency of the American political economy.
00:43:49.980Every bit as much or more than the welfare state kind of handouts to poor people and so on.
00:43:56.240It deserves a much greater degree of attention. And both parties are guilty to it.
00:44:01.800I mean, I would just tell you, I didn't vote for Bernie Sanders while he wasn't on the ballot.
00:44:06.260um and i probably wouldn't have voted for him if he had been on the ballot like i can say i'm not
00:44:11.400a socialist i'm i'm a little bit worried about that but but uh of everybody who was speaking
00:44:19.380during the 2020 election cycle he's the one who actually made me sit up on the edge of my chair
00:44:25.080and pay attention to what he was saying he was actually talking about the things that need to
00:44:29.560be talked about it's an interesting point brett our friend brett weinstein when we had him on the
00:44:35.220I mean, this is, I'm sure you'll be aware, something he talks about, the fact that the two-party system is designed to reflect the interests of the people who are in those parties at the very top, not of people.
00:44:47.400And what you do about that is obviously a very difficult question.
00:44:50.220But you alluded to, or you referred rather to Joseph Biden a few times.
00:44:54.900I wanted to get your take on the early days of the Biden administration, some of the executive orders we've seen.
00:45:02.900certainly, you know, the conversation we were having a few minutes ago about race and not
00:45:08.580making everything about race. I'm not sure it's seen quite in the same way in the Biden White
00:45:12.860House. What do you make of him so far and of what his administration is likely to do, in your
00:45:18.300opinion? I'm concerned. I mean, it's early yet and I want to give the benefit of the doubt and
00:45:24.260things are going to shake out and we'll see. I think there's a demonstration effect. You know,
00:45:29.600the first hundred days. I want to do a certain set of things. I'm going to sign this executive
00:45:33.420order on day one. He did get elected with a constituency. And those who speak on behalf
00:45:40.220of that constituency, and I'm talking about racial minorities as an important part of that
00:45:44.220constituency, have at the top of their list certain things. So Trump has a kind of anti-critical race
00:45:50.740theory initiative that he says the government employment services will not rely on training
00:45:57.500public employees according to the doctrines of what he regards Trump as a more radical,
00:46:04.680critical race theory. Biden comes in, the first thing he does, one of the first things he does
00:46:08.700is to rescind that. He wants to make it clear that he's moving in a different direction on
00:46:15.280the race-related issues than was Donald Trump. After all, Joseph Robinette Biden has informed
00:46:21.540American people that the reason that he ran for president, the thing that was the straw that
00:46:27.760broke the camel's back, that decided it for him, was the support that Trump purportedly gave to
00:46:34.260white supremacists at the Charlottesville after the Charlottesville incident. Of course, Trump
00:46:40.280didn't support white supremacists. His words were quite explicit in not supporting, but never mind,
00:46:46.020Never mind. Biden has to some degree define himself as vice president, Kamala Harris, an African-American woman, et cetera.
00:46:54.900And so he has to come out of the box demonstrating his commitment and signaling that he's on a very different side of the question than was the previous administration.
00:47:05.460So, therefore, some of these things. I'm not all that happy about his posturing on behalf of critical race theory.
00:47:14.820I would have, you know, and you can infer from what I've already said here, many doubts about that. I'm happy that an African-American has ascended to the position of secretary of defense, assuming he's confirmed by the United States Senate. That's a good thing, I suppose. I mean, I'm not against it. You know, it's a symbolically significant thing and so forth and so on.
00:47:37.600But, you know, it hardly scratches the surface of what actually needs to be done. It is symbolic, after all, not really substantive move in the direction of justice and equality for African-Americans.
00:47:51.680But I'm not going to be a curmudgeon poo-pooing something that seems to be on the whole a reasonable thing to do.
00:48:00.120So I'm keeping my powder dry. I'm not going to jump around and start castigating Biden for doing things that, out of political necessity, probably have to be done. Let me see what the larger picture comes to look like after a few months, and I'll have more to say about that.
00:48:21.140And do you think, from what you've seen, that the Biden administration is actually going to target some of the issues that we've talked about,
00:48:28.440the fact that the lower classes in America are struggling financially, there's going to be more support for them?
00:48:34.480Or do you think there's going to be more focus on the critical race theory and amping up the culture war?
00:48:39.740I don't know. I certainly hope the former and not the latter.
00:48:43.340um i i think some of this culture war stuff as i say it's just built into the cake because
00:48:50.200you had um you know the electoral outcome uh the the left quote-unquote have won they've been in
00:48:58.660the wilderness uh they've had to endure donald trump uh they they want to see some changes how
00:49:03.420deeply that runs i don't know i want to know who's going to be in the justice department in
00:49:07.920charge of the civil rights division i want to know who's going to be at the education department
00:49:12.740in terms of what they do about equity and inclusion stuff.
00:49:41.000On the other hand, there's an opportunity
00:49:42.660here for the president to not simply react, but to foster a coherent, positive vision for what it
00:49:52.660is that we should be doing. I would hope that that vision would take cognizance of the fact
00:49:57.920that Trump actually did get 70 plus million votes, that there are a lot of working class people who
00:50:04.040were attracted to his anti-establishmentarianism, that many, many Americans of all colors feel
00:50:11.120that the two parties have not fostered their interests and that that is not mainly a racial
00:50:18.420issue. There's reason to hope that that kind of wisdom would be reflected in the new administration
00:50:26.800and certainly I would advocate that. Yeah well one of the things that I think a lot of people are
00:50:32.520massively sleeping on is if it hadn't been for COVID-19 it's almost certain that Donald Trump
00:50:37.900would have been reelected. And so the idea that Trumpism has been defeated, I think, is way of
00:50:44.840over-optimistic. What seems to me to have happened is COVID came along, it discredited him quite a
00:50:51.180bit. Obviously, he was an off-putting character to a lot of moderate people as well. Put those
00:50:56.180two things together, but it doesn't change the reality. I mean, every way you look now, whether
00:51:00.920it's this GameStop thing, ordinary people are not happy with the elite and they're trying to do
00:51:07.580something about it and they're increasingly aware that they have people power through technology and
00:51:12.920that that is a battle i've been saying is going to play out over over the next period of time
00:51:17.740hopefully your optimism about the biden administration is is right but you you
00:51:22.920mentioned critical race theory maybe that's something we can wrap up the interview with
00:51:27.300can you just explain to ordinary people who who keep hearing this this these terms critical race
00:51:33.640theory. What are they talking about? What is it, simply put? I think what they're saying,
00:51:40.820this goes back a long way. This goes back to the 1980s, the literature in the Legal Academy about
00:51:47.460race and inequality. And I think they're arguing that one view of racial discrimination is this
00:51:57.480kind of one-off, unfair treatment of individual persons based upon race. But there is a deeper
00:52:03.580structural foundation for racial inequality, and it has to do with things that are not so much the
00:52:10.260treatment of individuals, but the way in which we organize economic activity, the way in which
00:52:15.140physical space in the cities is organized, the way in which the laws are promulgated.
00:52:19.920So I give an example to be concrete, mass incarceration. Mass incarceration on the
00:52:24.880critical race theoretic sensibility is not just that the police are catching people based upon
00:52:33.560their race and more likely to accost or to detain an African-American because they're racially
00:52:39.240discriminatory. It's that the constituencies that enact the laws which are being enforced by the
00:52:45.000police are indifferent to the consequences of those enactments for communities of color because
00:52:50.280there's a devaluation of the worth or the personhood of the people who are in the communities
00:52:56.860of color. The systemic reach of racial unfairness, it insinuates itself into every nook and cranny
00:53:05.920of the society's operation. So the commercial advertising program of a sneaker company
00:53:12.100would be fair game in terms of thinking about racial oppression. So the way in which educational
00:53:19.720services organized and delivered in the cities would be fair game. Now, I may not be doing
00:53:24.220justice to this because I am not a critical race theory devotee. They would say things like
00:53:30.440intersectionality. They would say, well, you've got a variety of different groups, and we have
00:53:35.280to think about how the hegemonic domination of the white male cis-normative hetero
00:53:43.480people who are running the system, oppresses the Native population in this way, oppresses women in
00:53:51.360that way, oppresses gays in this way, oppresses trans in that way, oppresses immigrants in this
00:53:56.460way, oppresses Black people in that way. And therefore, we have to see all of these various
00:54:02.960tentacles of oppression through a centralized lens in which we
00:54:09.180understand how they interact and support one another. Again, forgive me if I don't make a
00:54:15.800lot of sense here because this is not my story, but it's how I understand their story. Moving from
00:54:22.660the rights of individual persons not to be infringed upon because of their race or their
00:54:28.380sexuality to an understanding of structures within a system of economy and polity and
00:54:36.440administrative law and practice and commercial activity and all the rest that work together
00:54:42.860so as to affect a suppression of the interest and of the well-being of communities of color.
00:54:51.560Something like that. I don't know. Did that make any sense? Did that make any sense?
00:54:55.700It makes complete sense, Glenn. But what's wrong with that? What's wrong with it? What's wrong
00:55:01.840about you know thinking that we need equal representation what what's the what's the
00:55:06.960problem with this well uh okay uh you you catch me a little bit off guard here but i'll try
00:55:15.300okay um it essentializes and reifies dimensions of our uh humanity uh to uh an excessive extent
00:55:29.260And it doesn't, it's illiberal. It is not taking the individual person seriously at some level. And it's also not accurate as a social scientific, so there's a normative argument, which I just made.
00:55:49.460It's the individual that should be the focus of any theory of justice that we elaborate, not groups. It's the individual. But there's also a question of if we see disparities or we see social problems, to what extent are they actually the result of the forces invoked by the critical race theory?
00:56:07.280to what extent does identity really determine destiny in the society and so on? And I think
00:56:13.220we talked about the police violence question specifically, and I've given my view,
00:56:18.740but I think if you talked about educational attainment, if you talked about the achievement
00:56:22.820of economic security, if you talked about wealth disparities and so on, if you talked about
00:56:30.180underrepresentation and certain lines of business enterprise and all of that, that the systemic
00:56:35.040racism, white hegemonic domination, critical race theoretic framework doesn't actually
00:56:42.420give an account of the data. I mean, you gave reference just a moment ago to differences
00:56:48.840amongst various African-descended immigrant populations in the UK in terms of what's
00:56:54.900actually happening. Their race is not what's distinguishing between Caribbean origin and
00:57:02.320West African origin, UK, second-generation immigrant populations. It's not their race
00:57:08.520that's the issue. It's their culture, I'm inclined to think. That's not within the orbit
00:57:14.760of the critical race theoretic reflections. And there's a lot of stuff that's like that.
00:57:20.720Glenn, we've got to wrap up in a moment, but there's one question that's just occurred to me
00:57:24.820that I want to ask you about. If we take the economic analysis that a lot of the problems
00:57:31.040in inner cities, in black neighborhoods in America, are the product of the economic
00:57:38.120circumstance in which those people find themselves. Would it not be then reasonable to
00:57:43.040argue that that is the product of the various discriminatory laws that were in place in the
00:57:50.000United States, the genuine widespread racism that existed in the United States in the previous
00:57:57.560century, particularly, and obviously the consequences of slavery. Now, if I posit to
00:58:03.940you that that is a reasonable argument to make, is it not then quite logical to suggest that
00:58:09.860some form of reparations be made to address that and to help those communities up so that they can
00:58:16.580operate on a level playing field with everybody else? It's not illogical. It's just mistaken,
00:58:22.780in my view. Let me explain why I think it's mistaken. I think it's a political misstep.
00:58:29.580I think it's the wrong way to frame the problem. I'm responding to you now by acknowledging,
00:58:34.720by stipulating that history casts a long shadow and that the history of racial oppression and
00:58:39.960exclusion in America is partly implicated in the disparities that we see today. I don't dispute
00:58:45.060that. And therefore, it is natural and logical to think that the right way to respond to that
00:58:50.360history is to monetize it in some sense and to make transfers to people based upon how they
00:58:56.820might be imagined to have been affected by that history. Here's why I think that that's a mistake.
00:59:01.480I don't think that there is a sum of money large enough to indemnify disadvantaged person,
00:59:08.000a person who didn't complete high school, who has very little skills, who has drug addiction
00:59:12.980problems, who has three or four kids and no husband, who is basically on the outs of society.
00:59:19.480I don't think there's a cash payment big enough to indemnify them from the consequences in their lives and their children's lives of what history has bequeathed to them.
00:59:32.000They've been dealt a very bad hand by history.
00:59:35.540I worry that reparations advocacy, should it succeed, should it succeed in bringing about $50,000 per head of cash transfers to African Americans?
00:59:47.580I know that there are many arguments about how reparations might be implemented. I just say that for the sake of concreteness, that it would guarantee that five years, 10 years, 30 years, 50 years from now, there would not still be jails overflowing with young black men.
01:00:02.060there would not still be 70% of children born to a Black woman in this country born to a woman
01:00:07.800without a husband. There might still be 16-year-olds reading at the Blacks, reading on
01:00:14.740average at the same level of proficiency as 12-year-old whites. That's the case today.
01:00:21.120I don't know that reparations would cause that situation to be different in 10, 20, or 50 years
01:00:27.600from now. However, what it would do is commodify the claim that African Americans have on the
01:00:34.780general public for attention to the problems that beset our communities. It would commodify it,
01:00:41.900and it would enact a transaction in which we will have been paid in compensation for what history
01:00:48.800has wrought. That is, I think, not a good situation to be in, to discharge the obligation.
01:00:56.580I would credit that there is a communal obligation to be especially attentive to the disadvantage suffered by African-Americans. I would advocate for programs of intervention aimed at reducing the most deleterious effects of that sort.
01:01:14.080But I would object to sitting across a bargaining table with the rest of America. We have our moral capital on one side. They have their money on the other side. We push our moral capital into the middle of the table. They push these chips over to us on the other side. And then we're done.
01:01:31.380The ability to command the society's attention to the ongoing, certain to be ongoing social maladies afflicting Black America will have been significantly diminished.
01:01:42.760better, far better, in my opinion, more moral and also more politically effective,
01:01:49.900is to take our moral capital, combine it with the influence of others on behalf of the creation of
01:01:56.360a decent social contract for all Americans, and get that implemented. If that's implemented,
01:02:03.880bad schools in Black neighborhoods will get attention. Jails overflowing with Black people
01:02:38.740which is, what is the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?
01:02:44.300Inter-marriage. You want to talk about race? Know that race is not something that falls from the
01:02:51.100sky. Race is the consequence of what we do. In other words, the reason that we have all these
01:02:56.160different groups is because we reproduce those differences through our social behavior over time.
01:03:02.800Breaking down the barriers between racial groups means breaking down the barriers between
01:03:08.140intimacy amongst individual persons. The real solution here is a solution in which we don't
01:03:16.180allow our futures to be dictated by our past. We don't understand ourselves. I mean, after all,
01:03:21.360to call myself Black, I have to willfully trim huge branches off of my family tree,
01:03:27.640because I have got ancestors who are European. You can tell that just by looking at me.
01:03:32.500I am Black, but I have many things besides that. Blackness today in America does not have to be
01:03:37.880what blackness is in 50 years or what blackness is in 100 years. It will sound like I'm advocating
01:03:43.700intermarriage, and maybe I am to some degree, but at least what I'm advocating is talking about it.
01:03:50.460It's a very good point. Glenn, thank you so much. I mentioned, of course, at the beginning that
01:03:55.540you're a professor, but you also put a lot of stuff on YouTube. You have a podcast. You write
01:04:01.660stuff. Tell everybody where they can connect more with the things that you're putting out there.
01:04:06.160Well, my newsletter is at GlennLowry.Substack.com. And my podcast, The Glenn Show, can be supported and can be seen at Patreon.com forward slash Glenn Show. Two Ns, one word. So that's my podcast. And that's my Substack newsletter. And I'm out there trying to, you know, hold up the flag in the spirit that you've heard me exemplify here today.