John McWhorter is an associate professor at Columbia University and author of Woke Racism, a book that is making a lot of waves at the moment. In this episode, we talk to John about his journey to becoming a linguist, why he decided to write a book about race, and what it means to be woke.
00:02:48.560another thing where words are very important and how you phrase things is very important
00:02:52.240and one of the reasons i've been concerned about you know we can talk about wokeness which we're
00:02:57.380moving away from talking about quite so much but this overall trend there has been something quite
00:03:02.260pernicious happening in terms of the language that is used around all of this stuff have you
00:03:07.140note is that one of the ways you kind of got into you started or no it was purely the the race thing
00:03:12.440I don't make that much sense. No, definitely. There are linguistic aspects to this, but the link between linguist me and race me is very thin. So yeah, obviously there are language issues and people say, well, you know, John, as a linguist, what do you think of the evolution of the term woke, etc.?
00:03:31.840And what I'm quietly thinking is it has nothing to do with my linguistics training. I would think the same thing if I were an architect. And so, no, it's not that I was dismayed by the language people use talking about race. I was dismayed by what people say about race and what it means for society. And that was quite distinct from me thinking about adverbs and suffixes and things like that. Really very little relationship between the two things.
00:03:56.960And John, what was a moment for you where you felt compelled to write this book and before that compelled to make your voice heard?
00:04:04.560Well, it was a gradual story. And, you know, it's at the point I'm 56.
00:04:09.220And so the story is too long to be told because, you know, nobody cares but me.
00:04:13.940But in the early 90s, when I was in my 20s, my general feeling was that black America had come a very, very long way since the mid 60s,
00:04:24.160the large civil rights victories that happened then. I thought, there are still things that
00:04:28.980need to be done, but miracles have happened over the past 25 years, and you should be thankful for
00:04:33.980it. Gradually, I realized that that was not what the educated Black person was supposed to think,
00:04:39.880and I noticed that many people were nauseated by my sense that there was any cause for celebration,
00:04:46.160that I didn't think of myself as living in the same America as 1960, except that maybe manners
00:04:52.320had changed. I didn't like that. I didn't understand why I was having so many unpleasant
00:04:57.760conversations. And if anything differentiated me from some others in that situation, and I was
00:05:04.400hardly alone, it's that I thought what really gets me is that the people who refuse to admit
00:05:10.180that there's been real progress, and to feel it, and to live it, and to stop talking as if it's
00:05:15.2601960. The people like this are intelligent, and they're sane, and they're nice. I wasn't inclined
00:05:22.760to think these people are crazy. I wasn't inclined to think these people are trying to line their
00:05:27.940pockets or manipulate white people. I thought, no, they're normal. And I thought, and so am I.
00:05:32.080What is creating the difference in view here? And so I just started analyzing it analytically,
00:05:36.940maybe in the same way as I was trained as a linguist to analyze language analytically. But
00:05:41.180it wasn't the way people were talking about race. It was what they were saying about it and how they
00:05:45.700felt. And so one thing led to another, and a lot of it was serendipity, but I wound up writing a
00:05:52.400book called Losing the Race in 2000 that started with a piece that I wrote for a kind of proto-blog
00:06:00.880site, which I only wrote because I happened to be working in linguistics on my first language
00:06:06.960books for the public with a publisher that happened to have that blog site. All of it just,
00:06:11.220you know, one thing leads to another and you just have to basically show up. But that book,
00:06:15.520Losing the Race, was a minor bestseller and it put me on the map as the contrarian, one of the
00:06:21.880contrarians to go to about race. And much to my surprise, over the past 21 years, people are still
00:06:27.280asking me my views about those things. And so I end up having two jobs and I've kept up with
00:06:32.920the linguistics, but, you know, Constantine, as you'll understand, that is not something the
00:06:36.980general public is usually as interested in as hot button issues like race. And so I do the
00:06:41.500linguistics sort of in private, and then the race stuff gets out there more. So it was a random
00:06:48.200story based on my just not liking disorder. Linguistics is about problem solving. For me,
00:06:55.260race is about problem solving. And for me, the idea that I was supposed to think that I'm living
00:07:00.580in 1960, when it was 1991, was a problem to be solved. And John, you say it was a problem to be
00:07:08.480solved. Dare I say it, that the problem has got significantly worse since 1991. Yeah, it has. And
00:07:16.460I really regret that. When Barack Obama was elected, I thought that it was an indication that
00:07:23.640yes, racism exists, but something is really significant when a black man can be elected
00:07:29.520president and twice. It didn't have the effect that it should have because around the same time,
00:07:34.860social media became default. And social media whips people up into extremist and tribalist
00:07:40.880views. And that's both on the right and on the left. And part of that was calling attention to
00:07:47.180the relationship between Black people and the cops, which is important, but it was brought
00:07:52.420to attention in a rather distorted way with this new social media. And as a result, here we are in
00:07:58.780a situation where, again, intelligent people are frankly pretending that we still live in an
00:08:06.500America that's defined by the stain of racism in a way that if our grandparents could hear us
00:08:11.780talking, they would be appalled that we would compare ourselves with them. And social media
00:08:16.380does not help. The pandemic has certainly brought people inside of themselves and whipped groups up
00:08:22.180together because everybody was lonely. So yeah, it hasn't changed that much. I'm sad to think that
00:08:28.260I know. I don't even have to wonder. There are 22, 23-year-old middle-class educated Black people now who are in college wondering why they're having unpleasant conversations with people who refuse to admit anything has changed.
00:08:42.100My friend and colleague, Coleman Hughes, who is not yet 30 and has the same feelings I do, had that experience. He basically had the same experience that I had where he understands that things are so different now that we need to ask a whole different set of questions and was told by a great many people that he was a moral pervert for thinking so. He's having the same experience I had when I was his age. So, no, it hasn't changed the way I wish it had.
00:09:07.440Yeah, and John, we've had the Coleman Hughes, your friend Glenn Lowry, Larry Elder, we've had all the people here in the UK, we've spoken to former England footballer John Barnes. We've talked about this issue a lot, because we're genuinely curious, and we're trying to understand. But I suppose there comes a point, and I feel that certainly Francis and I have reached it, where we kind of know where we stand, and the information is out there if you want to.
00:09:55.420So what the hell do we, other than smashing Twitter to pieces, which I think we'd all
00:10:01.020happily do at this point, what else do we do?
00:10:03.540Well, it's at the point where if you sense that somebody is exaggerating, you have to stop. I don't mean you two personally, but one has to stop thinking that there must be something wrong with you.
00:10:16.000And if somebody is exaggerating about race, chances are that that is true. And socially, maybe you have to pretend to agree. Socially, maybe you can step around that person. But that person who's talking about white privilege and white supremacy as if it was 100 years ago and refuses to budge, that kind of person, we have to step around them. And that's a lot of what woke racism is about.
00:10:38.580You can't engage somebody on that because they've built their whole identity around it. The white ones and the black ones. Step around them. You can't let them run the show. You have to get used to telling them no when they want to turn an institution upside down.
00:10:50.960And I think we need to focus on the things that black people actually need, which I'm afraid are less charismatic to talk about than talking about something as abstract as eliminating white supremacy.
00:11:03.740But that's why in the book I write about ending the war on drugs, on promoting vocational education in a new way, on making sure that poor black kids are actually taught to read properly, which is more important than it sounds.
00:11:15.980Those are the things that will turn things around down on the ground in the real world, which is really different from this prayer circle pseudo Marxist routine that we're being taught has to happen before anything real goes on.
00:11:30.640Many people insist, and this is people from ordinary people who just watch a lot of TV to people who read too many books and everything in between. People think we must have this conversation where white people acknowledge before anything can happen. No, that's not true. That's something that we're told, but that's hardly a settled question.
00:11:50.960how much do people need to realize that's not how civil rights activism has ever worked in the past
00:11:56.060basically what white people need to know they know it's at the point where now it's time to
00:12:00.980go out in the world and do the hard stuff that isn't as much fun as wagging fingers in people's
00:12:06.020faces and that's what i'm trying to get at in woke racism but this is a problem isn't it john
00:12:12.240this idea that you know that you can these people what they do is they go on social media and they
00:12:20.240preach and they say about, you know, how we need to reach this new utopia. But nobody wants to do
00:12:26.160the hard work. Very few people want to go into a classroom in the inner city where it's, and
00:12:31.600having done it myself, where it's really tough to teach and you don't get a lot of money for it.
00:12:37.300Or, you know, you go and work on things like initiatives like knife crime. You go and become
00:12:42.540a youth worker. These are difficult things to do. It's far easier to go on social media and just say
00:12:49.200what a great person you are and how you want a rainbow in every classroom yeah i mean i think
00:12:55.020a lot of people's view on this is that it'll be easier to teach those kids in the classroom
00:13:00.700if you eliminate white supremacy by white people learning their complicity in the way things are
00:13:07.320now and and notice there's an ellipsis there most people would be hard pressed to say and what
00:13:13.080what after this realization comes what are you saying they're going to do and are you talking
00:13:17.740about something that would take a hundred years because that's remarkably unimaginative. And
00:13:21.960that's the problem. So yes, people like to go on Twitter and strike poses showing that they're
00:13:28.180good people, but that's different from actually facing and dealing with what conditions are
00:13:35.320actually like out there. And let's say that those conditions are there because of something you can
00:13:38.780call systemic racism, but often undoing what's going on is not going to be a matter of changing
00:13:45.780something called racism, which I think a lot of people would enjoy because it feels like you're
00:13:50.980slapping a bigot in the face. Really, society is more complicated than that. And that's the
00:13:56.160problem. The Twitter version of all of this can't acknowledge those complexities.
00:14:01.320And speaking of complexities, you just mentioned the term systemic racism there.
00:14:05.600Does it exist? Do you think there are areas of society, particularly in the United States,
00:14:12.160where there are systemic structures that treat different races differently?
00:14:17.480Yeah, there are things that it's harder to do if you are black
00:14:23.020because of certain things that are baked into the system.
00:14:26.960A lot of it is based on racism in the past as opposed to the present.
00:14:30.660And then there are some things that you might even trace to bias today.
00:14:35.960You might say that in health care there does seem to be a sense
00:14:39.460that Black people don't suffer as much pain, and yet that's real. I accept those studies.
00:14:45.340All those things fall under the heading of systemic racism. But most of the things that
00:14:49.860are systemic racism, I don't like the term, but the phenomena definitely exist, racial inequities.
00:14:55.400A lot of those things can't be solved by doing something called eliminating racism. So it's not
00:15:01.800that I don't think those things exist. It's interesting. Many people seem to think that
00:15:06.460I'm saying, there's no problem. That's not it. The issue is what you do about the problem. So for
00:15:12.240example, I'm guessing, this is just my guess because I don't know Larry Elder that well
00:15:17.420anymore, but my guess is that Larry Elder would say, let's just stop talking about systemic
00:15:21.520racism. These things aren't real. Just fuck up and get out there and deal. That's not what I'm
00:15:25.520saying. That's expecting too much of people, if you ask me. That's not how human beings operate.
00:15:30.840If you don't know how to deal, if you've never been around anybody who dealt, you've got to be
00:15:35.400taught how to deal. The occasional person teaches themselves how to deal, and they become Larry
00:15:40.260Elder. But most people can't do that. But the thing is, going out and undoing the racism
00:15:46.300is not going to solve, say, for example, the attitude that many Black kids have towards school
00:15:51.620because of racism 50 and 60 years ago. You can't undo the racism. You have to undo how the Black
00:15:57.400kids feel. And it's not about changing white teachers' attitudes. For a lot of people,
00:16:02.440If it's not going to be about changing white teachers' attitudes by giving conference papers and doing Twitter posts about white teachers' subtle racism, well, that's no fun because that's not undoing the racism.
00:16:13.780What that means is that the kids stay exactly where they are.
00:16:19.520Well, and in particular on the teaching point, I mean, it strikes me that the last thing you'd want to do if you want to help kids of white teachers is make the white teachers super concerned about the way they use words and all of that, instead of giving them the robust support they need to teach the kids what the kids need to learn, right?
00:16:40.160Yeah, they should teach the kids what the kids need to learn.
00:16:42.280and there's this fashionable idea that we're supposed to look away from that and think of
00:16:47.180new ways that are sensitized to the conditions that the kids come from but isn't it interesting
00:16:52.900that back in the day no one thought of that and in many circumstances the education of even poor
00:16:58.320black kids was better it's treated as a settled question that teaching must be infused with a
00:17:04.360very subtle and very thorough awareness that a poor black kid isn't the same as a middle-class
00:17:10.380white kid and it's always just verging on saying that poor black kids can't learn as well but no
00:17:16.400that hasn't been proven it's just that it feels good to think that way if your central goal is
00:17:21.540showing that you know racism exists which is different from actually making life better for
00:17:26.640somebody who was of a race this to me john and i'm sure you you might agree with this is the
00:17:32.680bigotry of low expectations when i was a teacher you know consultants would come in and they would
00:17:39.040say to me, see, the thing is, Mr. Foster, with your boys, you can't expect them to do
00:17:44.400what girls do when it comes to reading, when it comes to sitting still, when it comes to
00:17:48.840concentration. And I just remember thinking to myself, well, once you have that attitude
00:17:53.600to a certain section of society, they're doomed. They're absolutely doomed because
00:17:58.980then they will play up to that. And you're offering kids an easy way out because once
00:18:05.000child has an easy way out, the vast majority of them are going to take it. So to me, they're
00:18:09.860crippling these children before they have a chance to even walk. And you know, the thing is,
00:18:15.520that's absolutely true. And the person who tells you that cannot point to any studies or even any
00:18:22.800logic that shows that things are better when you don't require people to sit still, when you don't
00:18:29.340require people to do their best. Where are the studies that show that people learn more and do
00:18:34.400better when less is expected of them because they come from less than perfect homes nowhere
00:18:38.880it would never occur to anybody that they would have to prove it it's just a matter of what it
00:18:42.920feels good to say that won't do and john one of the things that strikes me about this because i'm
00:18:53.060i was born in the soviet union i'm originally from russia i'm sort of white but i'm also not
00:18:58.740exactly. I was not born here. My ancestors didn't own slaves. In fact, my ancestors were slaves
00:19:04.860in the Russian empire and in Nazi Germany, et cetera, et cetera. So to me, I have this visceral
00:19:12.360instinctive reaction when people start telling me that I'm guilty of stuff or I need to acknowledge
00:19:17.620stuff or I need to apologize for stuff. It seems counterproductive to me. It doesn't strike me as
00:19:22.400the way to bring people along. And I worry about it for myself because I don't want that to
00:19:27.940radicalize me into opposing things that actually need to be done. And I feel like that maybe has
00:19:33.760happened over the last couple of years, because this way of approaching it does push people into
00:19:38.360corners. So how do we avoid that while still having the conversation that we need to have?
00:19:44.960Well, there needs to be, and I haven't thought deeply about this yet. I haven't thought deeply
00:19:49.820about a lot of things, but there needs to be a reassessment of this notion of complicitness.
00:19:53.840Because, yeah, the standard issue answer to you is that, yes, you arrived here from somewhere else, but you are now participating in and benefiting from a system, and therefore you are abstractly complicit in the oppression of people by systemic racism, even if you have a history somewhere else.
00:20:12.640And we all know that that argument is forced. There are people who are going to enjoy and embrace that argument because they have other imperatives, but most people never will. That's never going to work. That is never going to compel a critical mass of society.
00:20:26.920And we need to just start facing it and realizing that if we're going to move ahead, we need to try something else. That complicitness argument really jumped the rails in the United States starting in the teens. And it's an interesting idea, but to push it too far, especially with as many immigrant people as we have in this country, including children of immigrants, not to mention immigrants themselves, it will never compel a critical mass of people.
00:20:51.300And it's not because the people are racist. It's because life is complex and we all have our individual identities and stories.
00:20:58.620A lot of the race debate that we have now is predicated as if it were 1960, when it was highly oversimplified to say it even then.
00:21:07.640But there were white people and there were black people. In some places, there were some Latinos.
00:21:12.800There was a handful of Asians, except in a few places in the country. And God knows what else there was.
00:21:17.800There was the idea that immigrants from, say, the Czech Republic, etc., well, Czechoslovakia at the time, they assimilated quickly. So nobody thought of them as a foreign element beyond their first generation. So you had white people and black people. That's not true now. There are Latinos getting to be more of them than black people. Since the Immigration Act of 1965, so very many people in this country come from very different places.
00:21:42.280Black people are just a sliver at this point. And the conversation that we're having is basically becoming, what do we owe that sliver of the American population who were descendants of African slaves a very long time ago? That's going to have ever less purchase upon, say, the Korean grandmother. It isn't going to work.
00:22:00.400and that is so true but the problem is with that conversation the more you talk about it the more
00:22:08.660you realize there is no solution to it and the more we just go around in circles and the less
00:22:14.840it is able to be done the less we're able to move forward yeah it worries me because there needs to
00:22:20.820be a proactive agenda and instead for example you think about the current administration in this
00:22:27.400country. And I have no damning complaints about the Biden administration so far. I think it's too
00:22:33.620early to prognosticate, especially given that we're still dealing with the pandemic. But I think that
00:22:39.040if Biden and Kamala Harris wanted to do something about race, I'm afraid that in terms of what's
00:22:44.480considered the proper optics, what they would do is invite, you know, Ibram Kendi to the White House
00:22:50.680to say some things. And whatever he said would make sense to him, but wouldn't have much to do
00:22:55.580with what would actually change lives on the ground in terms of people who are informed about
00:23:01.280policy, people who are informed about politics and the like. So there'll be these pictures taken
00:23:06.060of writers who have a certain clout. Nicole Hannah-Jones will be one of them. And the thing
00:23:11.760is, nothing would happen is the problem. And I haven't the slightest desire to be asked to the
00:23:17.240White House. It's not me. It's that it would be people who were more interested in doing real
00:23:22.240things on the ground, such as elected officials who actually are showing interesting results in
00:23:28.200their cities. Those are the people who should be asked about what Black America needs. But instead,
00:23:33.340it's going to be people who have a message that America must be made aware that it needs to,
00:23:38.520you know, stand up to its ideals. America needs to understand that all Black problems are due
00:23:43.640to racism in some fashion, none of which changes anything. That's, yeah, that does worry me very
00:23:49.020much. Because that's the problem, isn't it? That we platform people, or I hate that term,
00:23:55.300but we turn these people into celebrities without actually analyzing the quality of their ideas.
00:24:03.160Because once you listen to the quality of these ideas, as someone who comes from Venezuela and
00:24:08.040has seen what's happened when you abolish capitalism, I'm here to tell you they're not
00:24:11.400very fucking good, excuse my language. Yeah. And of course, the idea is it wasn't
00:24:17.400tried properly. You know, that's, that's always the idea. All of these people are interested in
00:24:22.260flavors. They're interested in postures. They're interested in a kind of performance because they
00:24:27.540think it's a necessary prelude to change. That is not a settled question. Change happens without
00:24:33.160those things. And yeah, we need a whole different set of people who are embraced as celebrities in
00:24:39.200that way. And I say, again, no one will believe me, but I have to say my truth. My real self
00:24:45.620is somebody who reads books like this.
00:24:52.180This is a book about Russian profanity
00:26:11.120Given how institutionalized all of these ideas have now become, you talk about someone going to the White House. Well, I would put it to you that it wouldn't really make any difference who went to the White House because at the end of the day, the Democratic Party, the institutions of the media and other organizations that deal with all of this, they are so now they all of this stuff is so embedded.
00:26:32.940I don't even know that anyone speaking sense as you do, for example, if you were in a nightmare of yours to be invited to the White House and have to answer some of these questions, you would make any difference because it's so institutionalized.
00:27:01.860And I think that's one of the advantages of social media. And so, for example, I don't feel muzzled. I don't feel like I'm not heard. If I want to say something, I can say it and it's out there. I feel that people are listening. And so there's contention. But I don't feel like the other view of black issues is somehow suppressed.
00:27:23.000You know, Coleman Hughes made, you know, Forbes magazine's category of, you know, people to watch under 30.
00:27:29.560That wouldn't have happened 10 years ago.
00:27:31.860And so things are things are not what they could be, but it's going to be a slow business of changing what people think of as the norm.
00:27:39.640It's changing the Overton window, so to speak.
00:27:42.080Well, let me just push back a little bit, because I would say to your argument, at least for devil's advocate purposes, that Coleman Hughes is the Larry Elder example that you gave me before.
00:27:53.400He's an outstandingly intelligent, charismatic, good looking young man who has a very soft way with these words.
00:28:01.120But we get the same in comedy, which is our world, right?
00:28:03.860famous comedians, the Ricky Gervais, the Bill Burrs, others might say, there is no problem
00:28:09.160with free speech and comedy. I can say what I want to my theater or to my stadium full of people.
00:28:15.120And that is true. If you're Ricky Gervais and if you're Bill Burr, you can. But if you're a newer
00:28:20.440comic coming up the ranks, the entire thing looks different because you have a lot less power. And
00:28:25.480I would argue, yes, a tenured professor or a standout young man like Coleman Hughes, sure,
00:28:32.280they're not muzzled. There are a lot, awful lot of people, I would put it to you, John, that A,
00:28:36.840are muzzled and B, are self-muzzling. Well, oh, there's no doubt about that. And so,
00:28:42.240for example, in academia, which of course I know best, I know that muzzling is the default. Most
00:28:48.320people don't think the way you'd think academics think in terms of the typical op-ed, in terms of
00:28:54.380what you see on social media, but nobody wants to be called a white supremacist on Twitter. That's
00:28:59.520the students that's the professors that is many journalists i would say that daily often several
00:29:06.460times daily but at least once daily i hear from somebody who is within some body of of people
00:29:13.640who says that they agree with the sorts of things i say and they're usually not conservatives they're
00:29:18.120not right-wingers say i get it thank you for speaking for me but i could not dare to say
00:29:23.100these things to the people that i work with that is that is normal without a doubt but
00:29:28.040on the other hand, I think that people like Coleman, people like me, had less purchase
00:29:34.980upon the media, say, 10 years ago. I think it's slowly getting better. Now, the question is,
00:29:42.480what would, you know, the iceberg breaks off, what would be the metric that shows that something had
00:29:48.160really happened? And it's not going to be somebody writing something in the sky. But I think that
00:29:54.160the conversation is such let's try this the conversation is such that i sense that the
00:29:59.420people on the hard hard left sometimes feel like they're on the ropes they feel like the other
00:30:04.120people are irritants at this point whereas 10 years ago they often pretended that people like
00:30:09.220me didn't exist i like to see signs of that so you think the direction of travel is positive
00:30:15.860slowly my worry is john is i don't know how that is is still a good thing if you see what i mean
00:30:27.240when i look around at everything everything has been politicized everything has been racialized
00:30:33.200do we not do you not think that it's too little too late at this point well to tell you the truth
00:30:38.980It depends on what organs we're thinking about.
00:30:43.300I'm afraid that academia, at least in America, is lost because this kind of person is getting to the point where they're going to be making all of the hiring decisions.
00:30:52.840I'm watching my own field, for example, where people under 40 are being led by people who think this way.
00:31:00.600And I'm not sure that anything can be done about it.
00:31:03.180I have literally realized that I'm going to age out of a field that is nothing like the one that I joined in terms of its political commitments.
00:31:12.040And I'm sure people are feeling that way in sociology and musicology and history.
00:31:16.780And from what I hear, although I hope this is alarmist in some STEM subjects, in terms of what you get in journalism, what kind of discussion that you get, it depends on what you call journalism.
00:31:30.000But, for example, I hate to have it be about me, but notice that the New York Times is letting me publish things twice a week.
00:31:38.660Nobody would have thought that that would have happened, say, even a year ago.
00:31:42.640I never thought that I would write for the Times.
00:31:46.520I wrote for the Times in one way or another probably once or twice a year.
00:31:50.320But a regular gig I would never have dreamed.
00:31:53.160And it's because of, I think, a general pushback against the excesses of what you might call wokeness these days.
00:32:00.000And I don't think that that is an isolated instance in terms of whose voices are out there and whether or not they're listened to. So, for example, another one, because I live in my own head and so I only know me. Masterclass. You can learn how to cook. You can learn Hungarian, etc. There's a masterclass that is about race issues.
00:32:21.380Now, they've got Nicole Hannah-Jones, they've got Cornel West, they've got, you know, the usual suspects doing their thing very well.
00:32:30.100Now, I'm kind of the odd one out, but they invited me.
00:32:33.200That master class two years ago would have been only Cornel West and Nicole Hannah-Jones and the usual.
00:32:38.060There's a message getting out there that to not think like Nicole Hannah-Jones, I hate bringing her up too much, does not make you a moral pervert.
00:32:48.420and so I'm seeing a pushback against what happened in June 2020 and I hope that it can push things
00:32:54.440back at least to the way they were in 2019 but maybe it shows you what a desperate situation
00:32:58.900we're in that I'm now nostalgic for 2019. I think we're all nostalgic for 2019 John.
00:33:05.620I think that's the real problem. Barely, barely the world has changed a lot since. It's been like 10 years.
00:33:12.780John it's a refreshing conversation can I can ask you something that is curious to me because
00:33:17.280neither francis or i are on the right uh or frankly on the left at this point where somewhere
00:33:22.900sort of ambiguously in the middle trying to work what we think out issue by issue
00:33:27.000why is this race conversation such a right versus left thing
00:33:33.940it isn't if you ask me the day of the black conservative for real
00:33:44.740passed about 15 years ago. The list of people that you used to see then, most of those people
00:33:53.320we don't hear from that much anymore. And this is not a diss, but Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams,
00:34:00.600until recently, frankly, Larry Elder. I mean, now he's acquiring a new prominence and all power to
00:34:05.780him. But for a while, he was somebody you thought more about in 04 than now. And I only mentioned
00:34:11.580that to say that the people who are actual card-carrying Black conservatives, the media
00:34:16.180definitely stop paying attention to them in the mid-aughts. It's not that they're not there, but
00:34:22.180Jason Riley, these are great people, but they end up talking mostly to themselves often. Glenn
00:34:28.720Lowry is a very good friend of mine and one of the smartest people I know, but also kind of
00:34:34.340an eccentric as a Black conservative. Really, he's just Glenn, essentially. I think really what we're
00:34:40.180talking about is the center, such as me, and the hard left. And the fight is over whether the hard
00:34:47.180left is somehow the heart of Black issues because of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining. I think
00:34:53.860the real question is, why can't there be a centrist way of looking at Black issues that
00:34:58.580isn't seen as some sort of right-wing adjacent fantasy? And I'm seeing that conversation
00:35:05.100as one that is progressing more constructively than I would have expected.
00:35:10.680But yeah, right-left doesn't quite make sense.
00:35:13.020We're not talking about Cornel West versus Shelby Steele.
00:35:16.680Frankly, Shelby Steele, who was my hero, but Shelby Steele lost that battle.
00:35:21.680The media just stopped paying attention.
00:35:24.180But now it's about center and left, I think.
00:35:26.360Well, let me follow up on that because there's something you keep talking about,
00:35:29.960which I find very interesting, which is black America.
00:35:32.380And that used to be a phrase you used to hear a lot.
00:35:35.100then you heard a bit less. And I think maybe now you're starting to hear it more. And I am someone
00:35:40.220who always thought from as an outsider perspective, and this is probably extremely idealistic and
00:35:46.320naive, which I am prone to sometimes, but the American dream, the American idea was that in
00:35:52.540the words of Barack Obama, there is no black America. There is no white America. You are an
00:35:57.440American. And that is the thing that defines you. And as long as you subscribe to the American
00:36:01.680values, you are that. But you are quite, I think, insistent on using that term and addressing that
00:36:08.980audience. So are you someone who thinks that a little bit of identity politics in that way
00:36:14.480is necessary, is a good thing, is a way to reach people, just matches your belief? What is your
00:36:20.140take on all of that, John? Constantine, you're catching me in something that is a bit of a pose.
00:36:28.540you're right what you what you suspect is correct i'm saying black america and i'm saying it because
00:36:37.560to reach most black people who are interested in this sort of thing one should say that um especially
00:36:45.240because there is a sense which i do not agree with but that i figure you can't cut through
00:36:52.560immediately and you have to choose your battles all of black america is united in having an
00:36:57.440antagonistic relationship to the cops. The idea is that the cops kill black men. And so whatever
00:37:03.720conditions you're in, that is supposed to be something that you deal with whenever you leave
00:37:08.440your house. I honestly think that is vastly exaggerated. I think the statistics do not
00:37:14.420support the idea that the cops disproportionately murder black men for reasons I've written about
00:37:19.400often. The cops murder too many men in general. It's not just a black thing. Nevertheless,
00:37:25.780Nevertheless, that position is so fiercely held. What I found in the 90s when I thought, why are so many people exaggerating? The main reason was the cops. I found, oh, this is what's on people's minds. You have to pick your battles carefully. You have to do things in sequence.
00:39:31.720So, yeah, you've caught me out there. What I'm really thinking about is what used to be called the ghetto. But I call this black America as a rhetorical convenience. I feel like I have to. But you're right.
00:39:44.760The reason I bring it up, sorry, Francis, I just want to finish this.
00:39:47.180The reason I bring it up is I am skeptical that we can ever come together as people of different ethnicities if we don't buy into the ideal that I naively perhaps believe in.
00:40:02.600um and i wonder whether in the process of attempting to reach people and playing to those
00:40:11.940concerns we maybe sometimes forget that we can't live together as one people if we're so focused
00:40:19.680on our ethnic identities that's a concern for me what do you think about that you are correct
00:40:26.620but you have to slow walk that because there are people who simply can't hear it yes and notice
00:40:35.400what happens to thomas chatterton williams who we haven't talked about yet but thomas understands
00:40:40.440that we've got to get past this race idea because you know the way we think about race is as if we
00:40:44.820were strom thurman it really is absolutely ridiculous a smart child can figure out how
00:40:50.140silly this is we've got to get beyond this idea of race balkanizing in that way race as an identity
00:40:56.120but wow and yeah i don't now i'm gonna sound like i'm essentializing if you grow up black
00:41:02.980you realize that for an awful lot of black people to question that issue of whether you're black or
00:41:10.040not especially if you've grown up fortunate as it used to be called and you talk like this it is
00:41:16.120very hard for people like that not to hear you as saying that you think you're better than them
00:41:21.020and once again you have to pick your battles and so i want to talk first about what will help
00:41:32.600then we can get into, must you think of your color as defining you, when really most of us
00:41:38.360can afford to think we're just Americans eating our fried shrimp and spending too much money.
00:41:44.140We're all doing the same thing. That's going to have to happen slowly. And you know what I mean
00:41:49.160by slowly another generation 30 years it's not going to work now it just makes people too upset
00:41:56.560is my thought you know something john when in 2019 i wouldn't really describe myself as a
00:42:03.120conspiracy theorist the more i've gone through this pandemic the more i've seen things that
00:42:07.800haven't really made sense and dictates that my government have given which are completely
00:42:14.220nonsensical is there a part of you that looks at all this stuff and go this is just glorified
00:42:19.760divide and conquer no we're bees everybody is a bee we're doing what we need to do they're doing
00:42:30.460what they need to do there are aggregate effects that nobody intended i don't know how you would
00:42:37.160identify a divide and conquer mentality as anything deliberate nobody says it or at least
00:42:43.960They don't write it down. I'm not inclined to think that they're discussing it in private spaces.
00:42:48.900It's the way it ends up looking because there are such shallow but powerful emotional benefits to tribalism and shallow emotional benefits to being white and encouraging that tribalism out of a sense not of divide and conquer, but of showing that you're not a bad person.
00:43:06.100It's a religion. So, yeah, that's I'm not inclined to think of conspiracy theories.
00:43:10.200and we always say it's it's a religion what why do you think that particularly
00:43:16.220oh because a religious framework is the only way that a lot of this stuff makes sense you
00:43:23.120have a stray white cop who kills the occasional person almost always in indefensible ways
00:43:30.580the same person who got killed that way was often in much more danger of being killed
00:43:36.400by a black man in his own community in much much much more danger and yet the national discourse
00:43:44.000is much more upset about the white cop than about what that black guy is in more danger of dying of
00:43:52.280that makes no sense whatsoever unless you see a commitment to showing that you know racism exists
00:43:59.840that is so furious, so much a part of identity, that it resists facts and logic. That, to me,
00:44:09.020is religious thought. It's part of many religions to let logic go. And then the chasing heretics,
00:44:17.440the white privilege as original sin, the fact that you're not supposed to ask too many questions,
00:44:22.360all of that falls out naturally from it. But I honestly believe, and I'm taking a certain amount
00:44:27.940of heat, the idea being that my religious analogy is simplistic or that I should just call it an
00:44:33.120ideology. But no, the religious analysis works. I fully think that a naive anthropologist who
00:44:40.760didn't know of language and the labels that we use would see the way the wokesters have been
00:44:46.320behaving since two years ago as indistinguishable from Pentecostalism. I don't think they'd see any
00:44:51.720difference. They would apply the same words. And it also helps understand why a person can be so
00:44:57.240confoundingly mean when you question their beliefs about these things you're questioning
00:45:01.900them you're questioning their basic ethical commitment you're questioning their religion
00:45:06.780that's when somebody gets that upset it's like saying jesus doesn't love you that's going to
00:45:11.340make somebody angry same thing here so yeah it really does it helps me make sense of what
00:45:17.420otherwise can make you mad and i don't want to be mad and are there positives to this religion john
00:45:23.360no not the religious degree of it no i mean when it gets to be a religion it ends up hurting black
00:45:33.140people because you're more concerned with showing things than actually helping someone it'd be nice
00:45:40.040if people were deeply committed to helping black people in a religious sort of way that would be a
00:45:47.000that would be an offshoot religion to this one. So yeah, the one that we have, no, I would like
00:45:54.100to see it gone, but it won't go away. So we just have to work around the people who think that way.
00:45:59.160John, that makes perfect sense. Listen, I know you've got to go in about five minutes. So we
00:46:03.260will ask you the last question of the main interview and then do a couple of questions
00:46:06.760for our supporters only. So the last question we always ask on the show, and you actually haven't
00:46:11.260been warned of this. So I'm curious to see what he says. And this doesn't have to be related to
00:46:16.280anything we've been talking about is what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society
00:46:21.840that we really should be my answer to that is really mundane well it's not that we're not
00:46:35.940talking about it i don't think we talk about climate change enough i feel like in 10 years
00:46:42.700it's going to be at the point where we're wondering why we were talking about woke racism
00:46:47.360etc when the planet was about to burn up I really worry about that but you want something more
00:46:53.060underground than that um I mean to be fair with you John in this country we talk about climate
00:46:59.200change an awful lot I promise you that yeah I mean it's not that it's not talked about I
00:47:05.460sometimes worry that we're all going to think we should have talked about it even more
00:47:09.640But what do we not talk about? I wish that science were more interested in finding a cure for clinical obesity, because I feel like it wouldn't be that hard, given what can now happen.
00:47:28.600It's not considered as important as some other things, and I guess I understand why, but I watch people who have that condition, and often it's not because they eat too much, or sometimes it is, but you can't stop eating too much.
00:47:42.760And I think to myself, wow, I would hate to be that person.