TRIGGERnometry - Glenn Loury：＂We're Playing With Fire＂ - BLM, Race & Policing

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson.

00:00:09.400 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:15.120 Our brilliant guest today is a professor at Brown University who became the first black

00:00:19.660 tenured professor at Harvard at the age of 33. Glenn Lowry, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:24.560 Oh, thank you, Constantine.

00:00:26.200 It's great to have you on the show.

00:00:27.960 Listen, our American fans will be very well aware of who you are,

00:00:31.360 but for anyone elsewhere in the world who watches our show,

00:00:34.120 who is not familiar with your career and your story,

00:00:36.860 tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are,

00:00:39.660 what has been the journey that leads you to here sitting with us,

00:00:42.960 chatting about some of the things we'll be talking about?

00:00:45.400 I could go on about that for a long time, and I know that's something you have in mind.

00:00:50.260 Well, first of all, let me correct you.

00:00:52.220 I was the first Black-tenured professor of economics at Harvard University.

00:00:57.160 Yes.

00:00:57.760 I was born in Chicago in 1948, grew up in a working-class family, went to public schools,

00:01:05.400 became a father very young at the age of 18, dropped out of college and went to work.

00:01:12.560 Eventually found my way back to the university, part-time at first and then full-time with a full-time job, long story.

00:01:19.480 But 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.

00:01:32.880 I 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.

00:01:45.640 I was naturally drawn to those questions.

00:01:48.600 I 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.

00:02:09.240 I'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.

00:02:24.740 But think of myself as a centrist, not as a particularly partisan political actor. So that's me.

00:02:34.960 Yeah, and it's great to have you on the show because that's basically where Francis and I both are as well.

00:02:39.660 We'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.

00:02:48.440 But let me ask you a question.

00:02:50.340 We don't pretend to be experts on the show, which is why we invite people like you on.

00:02:54.780 But the question that a lot of ordinary people around the world might be asking about America now, I think,

00:02:59.900 is just over 12 years ago, America elected and inaugurated its first black president

00:03:07.100 with overwhelming support to huge enthusiasm.

00:03:11.040 Of course, there were people who were against it, but the overwhelming support was definitely there.

00:03:15.340 It was something that reverberated around the world.

00:03:17.940 I remember where I was when Barack Obama was elected, where he was when he was inaugurated,

00:03:22.040 even though I didn't particularly have much of an interest in politics at the time.

00:03:27.220 What has happened since that America now finds itself in the place that it finds itself now?

00:03:34.020 Well, that's a very good question.

00:03:38.360 One way of responding is that we've been seized by a mass hysteria,

00:03:42.100 completely disconnected from reality that has a life of its own,

00:03:45.300 driven by the interests of particular political actors,

00:03:48.860 maybe the Democratic Party in seeking votes from black people,

00:03:52.040 maybe various kinds of activists who are able to pursue their own political interests on the back

00:03:57.980 of this narrative about systemic racism and white supremacy. That would be one way

00:04:03.720 of responding. I think there's some truth to it. These incidents, the killing of Trayvon Martin

00:04:12.320 in Sanford, Florida in 2012, if I'm not mistaken, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson,

00:04:20.920 in Missouri in 2013 or 14. Again, I may get the date not quite right. These incidents, Eric Garner

00:04:29.460 selling cigarettes out in front of a cafe, a convenience store in Staten Island, New York City,

00:04:36.720 choked to death by a police officer, and I could go on with these incidents,

00:04:43.220 have catalyzed a movement, Black Lives Matter for short, which has seized the imagination of many

00:04:50.920 and has fomented this change in the conversation about race here in the United States.

00:05:00.940 Then most recently, of course, George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, choked to death,

00:05:07.720 a famously inflammatory and infuriating incident, has galvanized people in this movement,

00:05:19.340 This movement which spilled over into street protests and demonstrations, demonstrations which on occasion spilled over into rioting and arson and violence.

00:05:30.220 A lot of angry rhetoric coming out of it.

00:05:34.420 I'm not going to pretend to have the answer to your question, what's going on.

00:05:39.180 But 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.

00:05:56.660 And 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.

00:06:09.180 This is not the same country that we were in 1920 or 1950 or even 1980.

00:06:16.220 The very fact that the anti-racist advocacy attracts as much support as it does from mainstream political interests,

00:06:24.540 from corporate America, from the common opinion of the editorial pages of major organs and so on,

00:06:31.500 that books like Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me or Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist

00:06:38.700 have as much cachet as they have, that the cultural awards coming from places like the

00:06:45.340 Pulitzer Prize Award Foundation or the MacArthur Genius Awards Foundation or whatever it might be

00:06:52.220 have celebrated African-American assertion of African-American interests, have gotten behind

00:06:59.720 the woke narrative about race. Those facts, it seems to me, give the lie to the claim

00:07:04.800 that the society is intrinsically racist or that people who advocate on behalf of the interests of

00:07:10.600 african americans are powerless uh quite the opposite it seems to me is the case so i don't 0.60

00:07:17.400 know i could ramble on but uh you've asked me how in the face of barack obama's ascendancy could

00:07:24.620 the tenor of the complaint about race in america be such as it is intrinsically white supremacist

00:07:31.700 anti-black and so on my answer is mass hysteria has seized us here and common sense you know

00:07:40.480 recitation of actual facts on the ground has been displaced by the emotional fervor into which

00:07:49.140 people can be whipped by self-interested advocates who have their own agendas and you say that they

00:07:56.840 have their own agendas Glenn if I could push back just a little bit surely though these

00:08:01.080 arguments must have a kernel of truth to them. Otherwise, they'd be easy to dismiss and they

00:08:07.420 wouldn't rear their head again. Well, yeah, they have a kernel. I mean, George Floyd is dead. I

00:08:12.860 mean, everybody saw the video. The guy sat, Derek Chauvin, the police officer, with his knee on the

00:08:17.260 man's neck for as long as he sat with his knee on his neck. That happened. There's not any doubt 0.96

00:08:21.140 about that. Moreover, the relationships between police and members of the community in many

00:08:29.160 cities across this country, members of the African-American community in many cities across

00:08:32.780 this country are fraught. They're fraught because there are bad acting police. There's not any doubt

00:08:38.160 about that. There are incidents that happen. More than incidents happening, there are institutionalized

00:08:43.060 forces that impinge upon the quality of life for African-Americans in ways that are objectionable.

00:08:51.100 That'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.

00:09:09.500 It's simply false because there are 40 million African-Americans here in a country of 330 million people.

00:09:18.180 There 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.

00:09:37.200 is a country of 330 million people. There are tens of thousands of encounters between police

00:09:42.340 officers and citizens on a daily basis here. There are hundreds of thousands of arrests

00:09:47.960 of people for suspicion of criminal offense per year in this country. So these incidents,

00:09:55.900 which are real, are not emblematic of the experience of people in the country. They are

00:10:03.040 not representative of what's happening on a daily basis. They're only a part of the narrative.

00:10:09.240 I mean, I feel obliged to observe that some 8,000 Black people were murdered

00:10:16.940 in the year 2020. That's 8,000 compared to maybe 300 who were killed by police officers

00:10:25.680 and maybe 50 or 60 of those 300 who were killed under circumstances where you would not

00:10:31.940 immediately say the police officer was justified in using force so it's a question of what's the

00:10:37.480 actual experience of people and then what's the narrative that gets affixed to that experience

00:10:44.040 the actual experience is much more benign i i will use that word much more benign than the narrative

00:10:52.260 of police hunting down black people at every turn and that narrative narrative leaves out the fact

00:10:57.680 that the police are out there encountering people who are committing crimes, mostly against other 0.98

00:11:05.480 Black people. This is not an easy job. This is a difficult job. Now, I'm making no brief 0.80

00:11:10.020 for racist police officers who exist. I'm just saying, if we put the circumstances into some

00:11:16.760 kind of realistic proportionality, the narrative, I think, would be much more different. The

00:11:22.820 narrative about threats to the integrity of the black body about black lives mattering would be

00:11:29.500 very much different because the actual threat to the integrity of the black body the actual

00:11:35.580 extirpation of black life is being carried out not by police officers under cover of law 0.84

00:11:42.240 but rather by common criminals uh who behave viciously and who have to be dealt with i i say

00:11:48.120 that with trepidation. I don't take any pleasure saying it, but if you go and ask people who live

00:11:53.700 in these neighborhoods, they're going to tell you that they're worried about having a carjacker put

00:11:58.580 a pistol in their faces at one o'clock in the morning when they're trying to fill their tank,

00:12:03.380 that they're worried about sending their child out for a carton of milk at the store on the corner

00:12:07.700 because sometimes the child doesn't come back, that they hear gunfire at night before they put

00:12:13.040 their children to bed and they cower in fear of what that might entail. So the painting of the

00:12:21.400 circumstances of African Americans as susceptible to rogue, vicious, violent intervention in their

00:12:29.520 lives by agents of the state is false. It's not true. And Glenn, where would you stand on the fact

00:12:38.940 the argument that American police disproportionately target black people, in particular young black

00:12:46.360 men, and that's the reason why they're overrepresented when it comes to the prison 0.69

00:12:51.080 system in America? I wouldn't say with the same degree of finality that that is false because

00:12:56.840 there is some evidence, especially with the use of force short of lethal force, that race plays

00:13:03.780 a role in that the police officers are more aggressive, more likely to put on hands, more

00:13:07.820 likely to use handcuffs, more likely to use a baton, more likely to rough up a suspect if the 0.72

00:13:12.860 suspect is Black. And there are police departments in which the culture of cowboy vigilante kind of 0.74

00:13:22.720 violence, you know, we're the good guys, they're the Black guys, we've got to go out and get our

00:13:26.200 quota today, is operative. So there is an issue in policing. Of course, there's another side to

00:13:35.900 that story, there are many police departments in which innovative community relations initiatives

00:13:41.560 have been undertaken, people working cooperating with police and so on to try to solve the problem

00:13:46.860 of securing public safety for people. I wouldn't poo-poo the issue of policing. I would say reform

00:13:55.600 is an appropriate item on the agenda. It's just the relative weighting of the various different

00:14:04.820 Now, 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.

00:14:23.940 So 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.

00:14:39.600 I 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.

00:15:01.600 So 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.

00:15:13.560 Now, 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.

00:15:22.340 They 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.

00:15:40.240 But 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.

00:16:01.060 whether or not they are black or they are white, whether or not they are dressed with business

00:16:06.780 suits on carrying an attaché case, or they have a hoodie on and they have their hands in their

00:16:12.320 pocket, we are, as social animals, conditioned to take that kind of information on board. So are

00:16:18.360 police officers going to be socially conditioned. Their training should work to counteract that,

00:16:24.340 but to expect that they would be completely oblivious to that, I think, is a request that's

00:16:28.420 going to be very difficult to enforce well we're having the conversation that we've had with

00:16:34.900 coleman hughes and with others uh very much going through similar themes what i wonder though if

00:16:41.060 maybe we can take it in the new direction would be what does a healthy conversation about this

00:16:46.720 issue look like because uh you know at the moment it's all very much one side says everything is

00:16:52.880 white supremacy everything is systemic everything needs to be defunded overthrown and the other

00:16:58.340 side is saying well actually this is because this group of people commits more crime and actually

00:17:04.160 police officers are just doing a good job and yet people are some a small number of people are being

00:17:09.860 killed as you said yourself there is some evidence that black suspects are treated differently to

00:17:14.400 white suspects uh etc so how do we talk about this issue in a healthy way as opposed to having this 0.64

00:17:21.580 uh tension and culture war over it well you're gonna say i'm a pollyanna for saying this i think

00:17:28.640 we need to de-racialize the conversation that we need to talk about policing about citizens

00:17:34.700 about the rights of people about about the responsibilities of public agents as they

00:17:40.640 interact with their uh with their charges not about blacks and whites and asians and so on

00:17:47.320 That's what I think we need. I think all lives matter. I think that should be the mantra. All lives matter.

00:17:52.940 Now, 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. 0.92

00:18:02.340 If 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. 1.00

00:18:10.300 i have not done so i think um i was at a conference once and i tried to make this uh move that i'm

00:18:16.760 making with you right now and i got my head handed to me by the audience who called me uncle tom and

00:18:21.300 said that i had my head in the stand and i was ignoring reality but here's my argument my argument

00:18:26.580 is yeah there is a disproportion in the way in which police use force against citizen based upon

00:18:31.780 race and that needs to be dealt with yes there is and yes there are these incidents like george

00:18:36.120 Floyd and so on that happened, which cannot be ignored, and the people responsible for them

00:18:41.820 should be held accountable. I grant that. I grant all of that. But if we racialize the discussion

00:18:48.740 of crime, punishment, and policing in America, we are playing with fire. On the one hand,

00:18:57.700 there is the claim that advocates of Black interests will make. Police are racist. Black 0.97

00:19:03.820 Lives Matter, we must focus on their excesses. On the other hand, there is the unspoken conversation

00:19:10.920 that goes on sub-Rosa, that goes on beneath the access to the TV camera and the microphone, 0.98

00:19:17.420 which is that there's a tremendous amount of Black crime in this country, and I'm sick of it. 1.00

00:19:23.820 That's another kind of conversation. Ferguson, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis, 0.94

00:19:29.500 has a horrific, not just Ferguson, but the entire St. Louis metropolitan area, has a horrific

00:19:35.140 profile in terms of criminal victimization, in terms of homicide, in terms of assault,

00:19:40.680 in terms of robbery and burglary and car theft and so on. Those people living in that community,

00:19:48.600 I'm talking about the white people, are aware that most of the offenders are Black. 0.96

00:19:53.320 That's the last thing that we want to reiterate in their consciousness. The offenders are Americans 1.00

00:19:59.200 who are breaking the law and who have to be dealt with. That they are disproportionately Black is 1.00

00:20:03.480 something that should not be brought to the forefront of the consciousness of people. It's 0.64

00:20:08.620 something that we should attempt to tamp down. We shouldn't feed the reflex to see it in that way.

00:20:14.740 The progressive advocates of Black interests make an error when they think that they can play only 0.96

00:20:20.480 one side of this card and get away with it. They can play it on MSNBC or CNN or the CBS News or

00:20:28.800 the New York Times on one side, because those organs will never give voice to a commonly held

00:20:35.020 sentiment, which is that in many, many cities in America, it's way too dangerous to step outside

00:20:40.720 of your home. And the unspoken subtext there is, the reason it's way too dangerous is because

00:20:47.300 there are too many Black criminals roaming the streets of these cities. That's what people may 1.00

00:20:53.560 be inclined more frequently to think if we frame the police violence problem in racial terms.

00:21:01.240 Way more white people than black people are killed by police in America every year. For every

00:21:08.440 incidence of a Tamir Rice, that's the young boy, 12 years old, shot when he had a toy gun in a park

00:21:14.560 in Cleveland, who has become a cause to the left, rightly, because he should not have lost his life

00:21:18.940 under those circumstances. That was terrible policing. He happened to have been a black kid. 0.98

00:21:22.440 There 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.

00:21:35.720 But 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.

00:21:47.780 These problems need not be primarily seen through a racial lens.

00:21:52.680 In my view, progress would consist in moving the conversation from one about generic claims

00:22:00.700 of racial domination to one about the responsibilities of public officers and their interactions

00:22:05.680 with citizens of all races. 0.97

00:22:07.240 And one of the reasons that I think that is because there's a lot of black crime, a lot 1.00

00:22:12.000 of it.

00:22:12.260 If 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,

00:22:21.820 there is a dark subtext there that we would do well to be mindful of and not to encourage that to come into light.

00:22:31.580 Excuse 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.

00:22:41.580 They're not winning that argument.

00:22:43.880 Those people don't care that you're calling them racist.

00:22:46.320 They know that it's not racist to be afraid of carjackers.

00:22:51.640 And 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. 0.77

00:23:00.320 If 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. 0.73

00:23:11.680 And that's not the kind of thing that we want to feed into.

00:23:15.000 This is what I'm saying.

00:23:15.700 Forgive me for interrupting you, Constance.

00:23:17.560 I mean, these conversations are very, very difficult to have on both sides.

00:23:23.580 And I take your point about we need to stop racializing this conversation.

00:23:29.660 But isn't that impossible, Glenn, in a world where we racialize literally everything now?

00:23:35.420 Everything now has become racialized to a degree.

00:23:37.980 well I grew up in a multicultural part of South London amongst black people white people Asian

00:23:43.420 people Latino people whatever and I went to school and it wasn't as much as an issue it feels like as

00:23:49.800 it is now it feels we've gone backwards yeah I agree with that and I don't know quite what to

00:23:55.740 say about it your point is well taken I could be just spitting in the wind I could be just

00:24:01.160 tilting out a windmill here uh arguing for a move away from the racialization of a discourse which

00:24:07.720 has become progressively more focused on race you know i don't know how to turn the clock back

00:24:13.720 i only know to say what it is that i think is right and hope that people will listen

00:24:17.940 but that's not a strategy and and i frankly do not have a strategy uh that i think could actually

00:24:24.060 work here in terms of i mean there's some people who are talking about we have to change the

00:24:29.120 language and whatnot there are you know uh they there there are rumblings of a kind of counter

00:24:36.180 movement uh in in the fringes uh but but i don't see it i mean the the um the center of the discourse

00:24:45.540 has definitely shifted uh in a direction that i don't think is entirely healthy so um i'm sorry

00:24:50.660 i i can't give you an affirmative response that says oh no no no don't worry things are going to

00:24:56.500 get better i'm rather pessimistic but i think i know how we should be reacting here and that's

00:25:03.360 what i'm trying to give voice to well yeah and i hear you i think you know you talk about the

00:25:08.400 impact of racializing everything and it's becoming quite obvious i think now to anyone who is an

00:25:13.160 independent observer that if you racialize these different conversations you inevitably end up

00:25:19.180 creating racism against groups which for one reason or another do better in certain circumstances

00:25:24.760 suddenly people are sudden again you know as a jew for example people are going oh why are the jews

00:25:30.380 so successful? Why are the Asian Americans so successful? Why do Chinese kids do better at 1.00

00:25:35.540 school? In our country, in the UK here, why is it the white working class boys don't do so well 1.00

00:25:40.860 in education? And suddenly everything is about race. And suddenly you're going, why is that

00:25:45.580 group doing better than that group? And inevitably everybody finds themselves in a position where

00:25:50.960 they are either the oppressor or they're oppressed one way or another. And we were just stuck

00:25:56.540 in this crazy way and i think maybe maybe that awareness that suddenly every group is being

00:26:02.720 looked at as a potential victim or a potential victimizer might make some people wake up to this

00:26:07.840 do you think that that's a possibility i don't know um here's what i think um i think there's

00:26:16.940 a contradiction at the heart of uh the identitarian uh argument for group equality

00:26:25.140 the identitarian argument for group equality is we have these different groups we have jews we

00:26:30.460 have south asians we have east asians we have blacks we have latinos whatever um and they have

00:26:37.520 identities and they the identities deserve to be respected someone tells me i identify as an

00:26:43.240 african-american and that's a part of their personhood and it wants to be respected taken

00:26:49.920 on board, given credence. So groups matter in the identitarian view of the world. It's not a matter

00:26:57.080 of indifference. It's not like we're all a part of the human family. We are in these various little

00:27:02.160 boxes. Groups matter. Groupness matters. My Black culture and heritage matters to me. The music

00:27:09.220 that I listen to, the food that I eat, the literature that I read, the stories I tell my

00:27:13.760 children. That's important. Groups matter. There's groupness. On the other hand, we think there's

00:27:19.440 supposed to be equality of groups across every human enterprise. But how can that be? Because

00:27:25.800 if groups matter, some people are going to bounce a basketball 100,000 times a month, and other

00:27:31.140 people are going to bounce it 10,000 times a month. Some people are going to be drawn to the book

00:27:36.960 as a way of experiencing human culture, and other people are going to be more verbal or more

00:27:42.680 spontaneous or whatever it might be. There are differences between groups. Groups matter,

00:27:46.360 after all. They're not all the same. They don't read the same things. They don't believe the same

00:27:50.080 things. They don't do the same things with their time. So now I've got population groups that

00:27:55.560 matter. Groups are different. Groups have their own integrity. They express it in the way in which

00:28:00.740 they live their lives. That's going to result in a different representation of group members across

00:28:06.240 various human activities. They're not all going to be in the academy to the same extent. They're

00:28:11.680 not all going to be in sports to the same extent. They're not all going to do the same occupations.

00:28:16.940 They're not all going to have the same professional profile. Now, I look out at society and I see a

00:28:22.720 difference between groups and the proportion who are, I don't know, members of the National Academy

00:28:27.940 of Sciences, tenured faculty members at Harvard University, tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley,

00:28:35.560 hedge fund managers, traders on the floor of the stock exchange, et cetera. I see differences

00:28:41.460 and the proportion who are getting PhDs

00:28:43.380 in American or British English literature, et cetera.

00:28:47.720 Groups mattered after all.

00:28:49.600 The groupness, the Jewishness, the blackness 1.00

00:28:52.460 reflected itself to some degree

00:28:54.560 in how people spent their time

00:28:56.620 and therefore in what it is that they're doing.

00:28:59.460 And yet I insist that the society is unfair

00:29:01.820 unless I get an equal proportionate representation

00:29:04.600 of these groups in every human enterprise.

00:29:07.520 That's a contradiction.

00:29:09.200 And it's a contradiction that's only gonna lead

00:29:11.200 to tyranny and racism. You would make a progressive person or progressive-minded person

00:29:17.320 so incredibly uncomfortable by what you're saying right now, because what I think at the heart of

00:29:23.140 what you're saying is equality between groups is never going to be possible. That is what I'm

00:29:29.040 saying if we think groups matter and we respect the differences between them. Now, we can blend

00:29:33.180 it all together. We can say you can't teach your kid like that. You can't send them to the private

00:29:37.100 school over here. You can't spend more time on this. Everybody has to be the same. We can flatten

00:29:42.100 all of the cultural and behavioral distinctions that are the actual substance of groupness

00:29:48.160 and put everybody into one social milieu and then imagine that we're going to have equality.

00:29:56.040 But that would be tyrannical. That would be overriding people's autonomy as individual

00:30:00.780 human beings to associate with each other and to believe what they please. We're going to end up

00:30:05.820 with the question, how come there are so many Jews who are getting PhDs in electrical engineering?

00:30:10.860 How come there's so many Asians who are doing this or doing that? That's ultimately where 1.00

00:30:16.160 the question leads. The presumption of group equality in the face of group distinctions of

00:30:23.760 social organization and culture leads either to the tyrannical imposition of standards which

00:30:30.760 attempt to tamp down the authentic expression of groupness, or to a finger-pointing suspicion,

00:30:37.040 every time we see somebody pop their head up above the level zone, it's wondering if the

00:30:42.840 Blacks are underrepresented and the Jews are overrepresented, well, why is that? There must 1.00

00:30:46.280 be some intrinsic unfairness that's built into the system. And that is a problem.

00:30:54.840 And isn't it also part of the problem here that, so I'm going to talk about it from a British 0.98

00:30:58.920 perspective. So I'm a former teacher. Everybody who watches the show will have a drink now.

00:31:04.240 But people would say, oh, the black kids aren't doing well. And I'm like, well, that's actually 1.00

00:31:10.020 not true. West African girls in the UK education system are one of the highest achieving subgroups

00:31:15.680 in the whole of education. And then when I used to teach in London, people go, oh, this is a

00:31:23.200 black school. Well, there's a fundamental difference between Caribbean kids or British 0.99

00:31:28.060 caribbean british african first generation african different attitudes different cultures

00:31:33.120 so just to refer to one group of people as black or another group as latino when someone can be

00:31:38.440 venezuelan and honduran it's just completely reductive different cultures agree 0.99

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00:32:56.380 No, it's a good point that Francis makes.

00:32:58.620 I want to talk about economics a little bit

00:33:00.660 because that's your forte.

00:33:03.800 And I think that's a big part of this conversation.

00:33:07.320 Do you think that a lot of these problems

00:33:09.620 in talking about these issues, honestly,

00:33:11.680 come from the fact that we've essentially abandoned

00:33:14.720 what used to be called the class analysis,

00:33:17.060 The 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.

00:33:36.560 And 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.

00:33:48.260 The thing that really holds people down is being poor, growing up in poverty, etc.

00:33:54.100 Do you think that's the abandonment of that viewpoint is why everything has now become so racialized?

00:34:00.480 Yes, I agree with that.

00:34:01.800 I 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.

00:34:22.740 I'm not a Marxist. I'm not a socialist.

00:34:24.920 On 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.

00:34:41.660 there's not any doubt that they're concerned about the interest of african americans

00:34:46.800 but who understand the problem mainly through a class lens it's the disproportionate representation

00:34:52.160 of blacks at the bottom of the class hierarchy that's the problem now i'm not about to nationalize 1.00

00:35:00.720 industries and declare 20 an hour minimum wages and all of that that's not how i would approach

00:35:05.580 it as a policy matter but having as the goal improving the quality of life for people at the

00:35:11.540 bottom, expanding their access to developmental resources, giving them greater opportunities

00:35:16.180 for themselves and their children, ensuring that they have adequate health care, that they have

00:35:20.540 access to good education, that their housing is decent, and so on. Their food security concerns

00:35:28.780 are ameliorated. This kind of thing, that should be the goal. Now, I say that both for the reasons

00:35:37.660 that I've already intimated, which is I think we overdo the racialization. But I also say it from

00:35:42.660 a kind of pragmatic political perspective. You want to get something done in a democracy,

00:35:48.600 you need 50% of the people to get behind it. If you're a racial minority group, by definition, 0.81

00:35:53.580 you're not 50% of the people. If you claim, frame your politics entirely in terms of your racial

00:35:58.840 identity, you might be able to cobble together a coalition of the LGBT and of the brown and of the

00:36:05.940 black and so on, but you'd be much more effective if you drew on some of that 60 or 70 percent of

00:36:12.380 the population who are white, the working class of that segment of the population, on behalf of

00:36:18.100 a program of politics that tries to expand opportunity for people at the bottom of the

00:36:23.500 society. If you did that, you'd have a greatest chance of being successful politically, and you

00:36:29.000 target your intervention in a way that it was most likely to help those in the minority group who are

00:36:34.920 the ones most in need. But those people, the poor people in the minority group, the poor Black people 0.99

00:36:42.480 in the urban ghettos of America, don't give news conferences. They don't write speeches for 0.98

00:36:49.160 politicians. They don't write op-ed pieces. They are not on the faculty of the universities.

00:36:55.860 The people who speak for the minority group are largely themselves not members of the class

00:37:01.080 within the minority group who most desperately need attention. They're interested in whether

00:37:07.560 or not they're going to get a job at the university and whether or not the cabinet

00:37:11.140 of Joseph Biden is ethnically or racially diverse and whether or not the Fortune 500 company that

00:37:16.740 they work for hires a consultant to come in and do diversity training and whether or not the

00:37:22.400 university has affirmative action. They have a class interest. It's a middle and upper middle

00:37:28.900 class professional interests. They racialize their offensive, ethically offensive class

00:37:37.020 interests. They're already privileged people. They now just want a better job and a higher

00:37:41.140 income and more attention to their concerns. They racialize that undercover of acting on behalf of

00:37:47.520 the poor, when in fact, the most effective way of acting on behalf of the poor would be to

00:37:53.200 de-emphasize race and emphasize their class differentiation. That would be my analysis.

00:37:58.900 You 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.

00:38:05.480 You know, she's a Latino woman. You know, she's Puerto Rican. She's on the left. That's what Latinos are. 1.00

00:38:11.300 And, you know, like my mum is Venezuelan. Again, everybody drinks. She's pro-Trump. 0.87

00:38:16.120 You 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.

00:38:22.460 Yet these are not deemed to be the correct views for a Latin American to hold.

00:38:27.680 and i wonder why a latin american person would be pro-trump um what what what the and i'll bet you

00:38:35.900 to some degree they thought perhaps incorrectly but nevertheless they thought trump was giving

00:38:41.240 voice to some of their class-based concerns uh you know there was something else you alluded to

00:38:48.440 which uh i'm not a conspiratorially minded person at all uh glenn a posture that has been rather

00:38:54.920 challenged by the events of the last year, I must say. But I do wonder whether making everything

00:39:02.920 about race is a really great way of avoiding actually having to do anything for ordinary

00:39:09.400 people and their concerns. It seems like a great way to get people to fight amongst themselves

00:39:15.980 while elites continue to benefit and prosper. Do you think there's some truth to that as well?

00:39:22.460 yeah if my wife lawan were here my lovely wife and she and i argue this point all the time she 1.00

00:39:30.080 was a bernie sanders supporter in the last election cycle here in the united states

00:39:34.100 uh she'd be saying right on right on yes i do uh when uh joseph biden basically secured the

00:39:42.440 democratic nomination in the south carolina primary uh with the help of james clyburn the

00:39:47.560 member of Congress from South Carolina, the Democratic Party in South Carolina, South

00:39:52.240 Carolina, a conservative state, but the Democratic Party, a very black and relatively liberal

00:39:56.400 congregation, saved Joseph Biden from an ignominious humiliation by coming out and

00:40:04.340 having him win that primary. And he then went on to the nomination. I mean, her concern was precisely

00:40:09.940 this. It was, you know, they're just trying to avoid the issue here. They're just, it's a

00:40:13.620 corporate Democrat who's going to come in and say that something that's not all that much different

00:40:17.400 from what a corporate Republican was going to say.

00:40:19.820 Meanwhile, the gut-level issues about working people,

00:40:22.860 about money in American politics,

00:40:24.600 about how the fat cats always get protected,

00:40:27.700 about Wall Street end up getting ignored.

00:40:31.320 You know, they're feeding them, you know, a pablum.

00:40:34.600 They're just playing with them.

00:40:36.420 They're exploiting them by appealing

00:40:39.460 to their racial sensibility

00:40:41.920 rather than going for the jugular in American politics,

00:40:45.760 which would be going after the guys with the money.

00:40:48.740 That's my wife. 1.00

00:40:49.880 That's not me.

00:40:50.560 But I do have to listen to it every day.

00:40:52.420 And some of it started to get through.

00:40:54.740 Let's get your wife on the show. 1.00

00:40:56.000 She sounds like a great lady, Glenn.

00:40:57.920 So you don't agree, I take it.

00:40:59.960 Then what is your refutation of that analysis

00:41:02.440 now that you're safe from your wife's punishment

00:41:04.840 for actually expressing it?

00:41:07.480 Well, you know, I mean, I think markets and capitalism

00:41:10.820 are actually the way to go.

00:41:12.080 I mean, I think you don't want to shut stuff down.

00:41:14.620 You want to open stuff up.

00:41:15.640 You 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.

00:41:31.540 I think it basically prices out of the labor market individuals who have a few skills.

00:41:36.940 And 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.

00:41:45.020 That will have a long term detrimental effect for the well-being of poor people.

00:41:50.160 If you want them to have money, give them money. Don't force the employer to pay them more than the employer thinks.

00:41:55.400 That's the kind of thing that I would be inclined to say.

00:41:57.620 Sure. So. So, you know, the differences are more about how to get something done than they are about what needs doing.

00:42:06.860 Glenn, 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.

00:42:15.620 The 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.

00:42:25.680 I'd say I understand why you're saying that. I think there's some more than a little bit of truth to it.

00:42:33.680 I 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.

00:42:41.660 And 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.

00:42:53.060 Or there's a hedge fund capitalism where the rules of the financial marketplace are configured in such a way as to protect people.

00:43:03.480 Or there's tax cuts for the rich, quote unquote, tax cuts for the rich.

00:43:07.820 I don't think all of the tax cut initiatives undertaken under Trump were bad.

00:43:13.220 I talk about it at my podcast with my economist friend, Larry Kotlikoff, who's a tax expert.

00:43:17.380 There 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.

00:43:26.520 But 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.

00:43:37.900 So crony capitalism is a real thing.

00:43:40.760 It is a threat to the political integrity as well as the economic efficiency of the American political economy.

00:43:49.980 Every bit as much or more than the welfare state kind of handouts to poor people and so on.

00:43:56.240 It deserves a much greater degree of attention. And both parties are guilty to it.

00:44:01.800 I mean, I would just tell you, I didn't vote for Bernie Sanders while he wasn't on the ballot.

00:44:06.260 um and i probably wouldn't have voted for him if he had been on the ballot like i can say i'm not

00:44:11.400 a socialist i'm i'm a little bit worried about that but but uh of everybody who was speaking

00:44:19.380 during the 2020 election cycle he's the one who actually made me sit up on the edge of my chair

00:44:25.080 and pay attention to what he was saying he was actually talking about the things that need to

00:44:29.560 be talked about it's an interesting point brett our friend brett weinstein when we had him on the

00:44:35.220 I 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.

00:44:47.400 And what you do about that is obviously a very difficult question.

00:44:50.220 But you alluded to, or you referred rather to Joseph Biden a few times.

00:44:54.900 I wanted to get your take on the early days of the Biden administration, some of the executive orders we've seen.

00:45:02.900 certainly, you know, the conversation we were having a few minutes ago about race and not

00:45:08.580 making everything about race. I'm not sure it's seen quite in the same way in the Biden White

00:45:12.860 House. What do you make of him so far and of what his administration is likely to do, in your

00:45:18.300 opinion? I'm concerned. I mean, it's early yet and I want to give the benefit of the doubt and

00:45:24.260 things are going to shake out and we'll see. I think there's a demonstration effect. You know,

00:45:29.600 the first hundred days. I want to do a certain set of things. I'm going to sign this executive

00:45:33.420 order on day one. He did get elected with a constituency. And those who speak on behalf

00:45:40.220 of that constituency, and I'm talking about racial minorities as an important part of that

00:45:44.220 constituency, have at the top of their list certain things. So Trump has a kind of anti-critical race

00:45:50.740 theory initiative that he says the government employment services will not rely on training

00:45:57.500 public employees according to the doctrines of what he regards Trump as a more radical,

00:46:04.680 critical race theory. Biden comes in, the first thing he does, one of the first things he does

00:46:08.700 is to rescind that. He wants to make it clear that he's moving in a different direction on

00:46:15.280 the race-related issues than was Donald Trump. After all, Joseph Robinette Biden has informed

00:46:21.540 American people that the reason that he ran for president, the thing that was the straw that

00:46:27.760 broke the camel's back, that decided it for him, was the support that Trump purportedly gave to

00:46:34.260 white supremacists at the Charlottesville after the Charlottesville incident. Of course, Trump

00:46:40.280 didn't support white supremacists. His words were quite explicit in not supporting, but never mind,

00:46:46.020 Never mind. Biden has to some degree define himself as vice president, Kamala Harris, an African-American woman, et cetera.

00:46:54.900 And 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.

00:47:05.460 So, therefore, some of these things. I'm not all that happy about his posturing on behalf of critical race theory.

00:47:14.820 I 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.

00:47:37.600 But, 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.

00:47:51.680 But I'm not going to be a curmudgeon poo-pooing something that seems to be on the whole a reasonable thing to do.

00:48:00.120 So 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.

00:48:21.140 And 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,

00:48:28.440 the fact that the lower classes in America are struggling financially, there's going to be more support for them?

00:48:34.480 Or do you think there's going to be more focus on the critical race theory and amping up the culture war?

00:48:39.740 I don't know. I certainly hope the former and not the latter.

00:48:43.340 um i i think some of this culture war stuff as i say it's just built into the cake because

00:48:50.200 you had um you know the electoral outcome uh the the left quote-unquote have won they've been in

00:48:58.660 the wilderness uh they've had to endure donald trump uh they they want to see some changes how

00:49:03.420 deeply that runs i don't know i want to know who's going to be in the justice department in

00:49:07.920 charge of the civil rights division i want to know who's going to be at the education department

00:49:12.740 in terms of what they do about equity and inclusion stuff.

00:49:18.100 I want to hear some of the speeches

00:49:19.820 that are going to be given by the new president

00:49:23.140 as he tries to point the nation forward

00:49:26.220 and see what he places his emphasis on.

00:49:28.740 If I feel that those speeches are being written

00:49:30.600 by the usual suspects of racial chauvinism

00:49:37.000 and race-based advocacy, I'll object.

00:49:41.000 On the other hand, there's an opportunity

00:49:42.660 here for the president to not simply react, but to foster a coherent, positive vision for what it

00:49:52.660 is that we should be doing. I would hope that that vision would take cognizance of the fact

00:49:57.920 that Trump actually did get 70 plus million votes, that there are a lot of working class people who

00:50:04.040 were attracted to his anti-establishmentarianism, that many, many Americans of all colors feel

00:50:11.120 that the two parties have not fostered their interests and that that is not mainly a racial

00:50:18.420 issue. There's reason to hope that that kind of wisdom would be reflected in the new administration

00:50:26.800 and certainly I would advocate that. Yeah well one of the things that I think a lot of people are

00:50:32.520 massively sleeping on is if it hadn't been for COVID-19 it's almost certain that Donald Trump

00:50:37.900 would have been reelected. And so the idea that Trumpism has been defeated, I think, is way of

00:50:44.840 over-optimistic. What seems to me to have happened is COVID came along, it discredited him quite a

00:50:51.180 bit. Obviously, he was an off-putting character to a lot of moderate people as well. Put those

00:50:56.180 two things together, but it doesn't change the reality. I mean, every way you look now, whether

00:51:00.920 it's this GameStop thing, ordinary people are not happy with the elite and they're trying to do

00:51:07.580 something about it and they're increasingly aware that they have people power through technology and

00:51:12.920 that that is a battle i've been saying is going to play out over over the next period of time

00:51:17.740 hopefully your optimism about the biden administration is is right but you you

00:51:22.920 mentioned critical race theory maybe that's something we can wrap up the interview with

00:51:27.300 can you just explain to ordinary people who who keep hearing this this these terms critical race

00:51:33.640 theory. What are they talking about? What is it, simply put? I think what they're saying,

00:51:40.820 this goes back a long way. This goes back to the 1980s, the literature in the Legal Academy about

00:51:47.460 race and inequality. And I think they're arguing that one view of racial discrimination is this

00:51:57.480 kind of one-off, unfair treatment of individual persons based upon race. But there is a deeper

00:52:03.580 structural foundation for racial inequality, and it has to do with things that are not so much the

00:52:10.260 treatment of individuals, but the way in which we organize economic activity, the way in which

00:52:15.140 physical space in the cities is organized, the way in which the laws are promulgated.

00:52:19.920 So I give an example to be concrete, mass incarceration. Mass incarceration on the

00:52:24.880 critical race theoretic sensibility is not just that the police are catching people based upon

00:52:33.560 their race and more likely to accost or to detain an African-American because they're racially

00:52:39.240 discriminatory. It's that the constituencies that enact the laws which are being enforced by the

00:52:45.000 police are indifferent to the consequences of those enactments for communities of color because

00:52:50.280 there's a devaluation of the worth or the personhood of the people who are in the communities

00:52:56.860 of color. The systemic reach of racial unfairness, it insinuates itself into every nook and cranny

00:53:05.920 of the society's operation. So the commercial advertising program of a sneaker company

00:53:12.100 would be fair game in terms of thinking about racial oppression. So the way in which educational

00:53:19.720 services organized and delivered in the cities would be fair game. Now, I may not be doing

00:53:24.220 justice to this because I am not a critical race theory devotee. They would say things like

00:53:30.440 intersectionality. They would say, well, you've got a variety of different groups, and we have

00:53:35.280 to think about how the hegemonic domination of the white male cis-normative hetero

00:53:43.480 people who are running the system, oppresses the Native population in this way, oppresses women in 0.97

00:53:51.360 that way, oppresses gays in this way, oppresses trans in that way, oppresses immigrants in this 0.85

00:53:56.460 way, oppresses Black people in that way. And therefore, we have to see all of these various 0.97

00:54:02.960 tentacles of oppression through a centralized lens in which we

00:54:09.180 understand how they interact and support one another. Again, forgive me if I don't make a

00:54:15.800 lot of sense here because this is not my story, but it's how I understand their story. Moving from

00:54:22.660 the rights of individual persons not to be infringed upon because of their race or their

00:54:28.380 sexuality to an understanding of structures within a system of economy and polity and

00:54:36.440 administrative law and practice and commercial activity and all the rest that work together

00:54:42.860 so as to affect a suppression of the interest and of the well-being of communities of color.

00:54:51.560 Something like that. I don't know. Did that make any sense? Did that make any sense?

00:54:55.700 It makes complete sense, Glenn. But what's wrong with that? What's wrong with it? What's wrong

00:55:01.840 about you know thinking that we need equal representation what what's the what's the

00:55:06.960 problem with this well uh okay uh you you catch me a little bit off guard here but i'll try

00:55:15.300 okay um it essentializes and reifies dimensions of our uh humanity uh to uh an excessive extent

00:55:29.260 And 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.

00:55:49.460 It'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?

00:56:07.280 to what extent does identity really determine destiny in the society and so on? And I think

00:56:13.220 we talked about the police violence question specifically, and I've given my view,

00:56:18.740 but I think if you talked about educational attainment, if you talked about the achievement

00:56:22.820 of economic security, if you talked about wealth disparities and so on, if you talked about

00:56:30.180 underrepresentation and certain lines of business enterprise and all of that, that the systemic

00:56:35.040 racism, white hegemonic domination, critical race theoretic framework doesn't actually

00:56:42.420 give an account of the data. I mean, you gave reference just a moment ago to differences

00:56:48.840 amongst various African-descended immigrant populations in the UK in terms of what's

00:56:54.900 actually happening. Their race is not what's distinguishing between Caribbean origin and

00:57:02.320 West African origin, UK, second-generation immigrant populations. It's not their race 1.00

00:57:08.520 that's the issue. It's their culture, I'm inclined to think. That's not within the orbit

00:57:14.760 of the critical race theoretic reflections. And there's a lot of stuff that's like that.

00:57:20.720 Glenn, we've got to wrap up in a moment, but there's one question that's just occurred to me

00:57:24.820 that I want to ask you about. If we take the economic analysis that a lot of the problems

00:57:31.040 in inner cities, in black neighborhoods in America, are the product of the economic

00:57:38.120 circumstance in which those people find themselves. Would it not be then reasonable to

00:57:43.040 argue that that is the product of the various discriminatory laws that were in place in the

00:57:50.000 United States, the genuine widespread racism that existed in the United States in the previous

00:57:57.560 century, particularly, and obviously the consequences of slavery. Now, if I posit to

00:58:03.940 you that that is a reasonable argument to make, is it not then quite logical to suggest that

00:58:09.860 some form of reparations be made to address that and to help those communities up so that they can

00:58:16.580 operate on a level playing field with everybody else? It's not illogical. It's just mistaken,

00:58:22.780 in my view. Let me explain why I think it's mistaken. I think it's a political misstep.

00:58:29.580 I think it's the wrong way to frame the problem. I'm responding to you now by acknowledging,

00:58:34.720 by stipulating that history casts a long shadow and that the history of racial oppression and

00:58:39.960 exclusion in America is partly implicated in the disparities that we see today. I don't dispute 0.51

00:58:45.060 that. And therefore, it is natural and logical to think that the right way to respond to that

00:58:50.360 history is to monetize it in some sense and to make transfers to people based upon how they

00:58:56.820 might be imagined to have been affected by that history. Here's why I think that that's a mistake.

00:59:01.480 I don't think that there is a sum of money large enough to indemnify disadvantaged person,

00:59:08.000 a person who didn't complete high school, who has very little skills, who has drug addiction

00:59:12.980 problems, who has three or four kids and no husband, who is basically on the outs of society. 0.91

00:59:19.480 I 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.

00:59:32.000 They've been dealt a very bad hand by history.

00:59:35.540 I worry that reparations advocacy, should it succeed, should it succeed in bringing about $50,000 per head of cash transfers to African Americans?

00:59:47.580 I 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. 0.99

01:00:02.060 there would not still be 70% of children born to a Black woman in this country born to a woman 1.00

01:00:07.800 without a husband. There might still be 16-year-olds reading at the Blacks, reading on

01:00:14.740 average at the same level of proficiency as 12-year-old whites. That's the case today. 0.94

01:00:21.120 I don't know that reparations would cause that situation to be different in 10, 20, or 50 years

01:00:27.600 from now. However, what it would do is commodify the claim that African Americans have on the

01:00:34.780 general public for attention to the problems that beset our communities. It would commodify it,

01:00:41.900 and it would enact a transaction in which we will have been paid in compensation for what history

01:00:48.800 has wrought. That is, I think, not a good situation to be in, to discharge the obligation.

01:00:56.580 I 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. 1.00

01:01:14.080 But 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.

01:01:31.380 The ability to command the society's attention to the ongoing, certain to be ongoing social maladies afflicting Black America will have been significantly diminished.

01:01:42.760 better, far better, in my opinion, more moral and also more politically effective,

01:01:49.900 is to take our moral capital, combine it with the influence of others on behalf of the creation of

01:01:56.360 a decent social contract for all Americans, and get that implemented. If that's implemented,

01:02:03.880 bad schools in Black neighborhoods will get attention. Jails overflowing with Black people 1.00

01:02:08.900 will come to be a big social issue. 0.95

01:02:11.600 The needs of families, et cetera,

01:02:13.780 employment issues, et cetera,

01:02:15.640 will be attended to.

01:02:16.840 They'll be attended to for all Americans

01:02:18.580 and therefore they will be attended to 0.81

01:02:20.240 for black Americans. 0.97

01:02:21.760 Don't try to cut a separate deal with America 0.99

01:02:24.320 is my message to black people. 0.99

01:02:26.420 That is a mistake. 0.98

01:02:29.580 Well said.

01:02:30.740 A very, very powerful note

01:02:32.380 to end the conversation on.

01:02:33.700 Glenn, thank you so much

01:02:34.820 for coming on the show.

01:02:35.960 The last question we always ask

01:02:37.800 is always the same one.

01:02:38.740 which is, what is the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?

01:02:44.300 Inter-marriage. You want to talk about race? Know that race is not something that falls from the

01:02:51.100 sky. Race is the consequence of what we do. In other words, the reason that we have all these 0.93

01:02:56.160 different groups is because we reproduce those differences through our social behavior over time.

01:03:02.800 Breaking down the barriers between racial groups means breaking down the barriers between

01:03:08.140 intimacy amongst individual persons. The real solution here is a solution in which we don't

01:03:16.180 allow our futures to be dictated by our past. We don't understand ourselves. I mean, after all,

01:03:21.360 to call myself Black, I have to willfully trim huge branches off of my family tree,

01:03:27.640 because I have got ancestors who are European. You can tell that just by looking at me.

01:03:32.500 I am Black, but I have many things besides that. Blackness today in America does not have to be

01:03:37.880 what blackness is in 50 years or what blackness is in 100 years. It will sound like I'm advocating 1.00

01:03:43.700 intermarriage, and maybe I am to some degree, but at least what I'm advocating is talking about it.

01:03:50.460 It's a very good point. Glenn, thank you so much. I mentioned, of course, at the beginning that

01:03:55.540 you're a professor, but you also put a lot of stuff on YouTube. You have a podcast. You write

01:04:01.660 stuff. Tell everybody where they can connect more with the things that you're putting out there.

01:04:06.160 Well, 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.

01:04:33.880 so thanks for having me on

01:04:35.120 Constantine and Francis

01:04:36.280 thank you very much

01:04:37.060 thank you Glenn

01:04:38.480 we really appreciate you

01:04:40.240 taking the time to speak to us

01:04:41.520 our fans will as well

01:04:42.760 and we thank them for watching

01:04:44.620 and we'll see you very soon

01:04:46.260 with another episode like this one

01:04:47.740 or a live stream

01:04:48.520 all of them going out at 7pm

01:04:50.000 take care and see you soon guys

01:05:03.880 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - February 14, 2021

Glenn Loury：＂We're Playing With Fire＂ - BLM, Race & Policing

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

TRIGGERnometry - February 14, 2021

Glenn Loury： ＂We're Playing With Fire＂ - BLM, Race & Policing

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Glenn Loury：＂We're Playing With Fire＂ - BLM, Race & Policing