A Conversation with John McWhorter | Viewpoint Diversity among Black Intellectuals

[Music] welcome to a conversation with john mcquarter a heterodox academy virtual event my name is amne and i'm the john stewart mill faculty fellow at heterodox academy as i'm sure many of you know heterodox academy is a non-partisan non-profit group dedicated to improving the quality of research and teaching through promoting open inquiry viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement our tagline we believe that great minds don't always think alike in my role as faculty fellow i think a lot about how to do this work how can we galvanize disagreements and differences to foster productive conversations that further open inquiry and critical thinking and tonight i'm delighted to be hosting this conversation with john mcquarter one of the most heterodox thinkers of our time john professor of linguistics first at cornell van berkley and now columbia university is a leading public intellectual who frankly needs no introduction we have over 1500 people registered for this event today and that in itself speaks volumes about his influence he's authored over 20 books someone language and some on race issues most recently he authored the creole debate and talking back talking black his forthcoming book is called nine nasty words english in the gutter and that'll be coming out in may this year and as we speak he is releasing his book the elect chapter by chapter on sub stack and we'll be talking more about that this evening finally john is the winner of heterodox academy's 2020 open inquiry award for leadership in recognition of his exemplary work promoting open inquiry viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement now before i turn to john i just want to give you a quick rundown of our plan for this evening we'll start with a conversation that john and i will have um we'll talk for about 55 minutes and meanwhile you can submit questions by typing them into the question answers box at the bottom of your screen your questions will be elevated by our behind the scenes team and then i'll be able to ask them naturally we won't be able to get to all of them um and we invite you to to disagree tonight feel free to ask questions that are challenging as long as they're asked respectfully and in good faith so now without further ado let's get the conversation started john welcome thank you amna good to be here so as you know it's black history month and i'd really like to start by asking about the range of viewpoints among black intellectuals now there are these famous examples of differences um between black thinkers and leaders you've got malcolm x and king washington and dubois but with the exception of some of these high-profile disagreements there really isn't much conversation about ideological diversity among black thinkers so i'd like to begin today by asking you to speak a little about the diversity of viewpoints among black thinkers and intellectuals on the question of race today well i think that the main issue that we need is there is a task sense and it's these tacit senses that are the hardest to deal with because nobody's thinking about them explicitly but there's a tacit sense that the most significant the most responsible way of being a black thinking person is to be dedicated to revealing the operations of racism in the past and the operations of racism today with a basic message that black america can't succeed significantly so okay barack obama and a few thousand other people but we can't really succeed that we can't get past race until there's a vast overturning of social procedure of the very psychological nature of being an american person that until those seismic things happen then to be a black american person is to be circumscribed by a racism to a certain degree that is a watch cry that's rarely expressed directly but it is what underlies a great many people's sense of what it is to be a proper black thinking person now that wasn't true before roughly the late 1960s but that was a long time ago and we live in our own time so there is diversity among black people and their thoughts about what it is to be black and what race should mean and what the significance of racism is but the fact is that there's a guiding idea that those who are not devoted to smoking out the operations of racism are doing something i might say different i might say heterodox you're a contrarian you're doing something where you've got some explaining to do and quite possibly there's something sinister about you there must be an agenda you must be broken psychologically somehow you must have secret sinister supporters all of these are very understandable feelings because we know what we live in and what we've lived in for the past several generations is the idea that the black intellectual is somebody who is devoted to revealing racist obstacles it's very limiting and what the problem is is not simply that it's limited because if it were appropriate then the fact that it was limiting would just be an unfortunate disadvantage but actually it holds the race back because the truth is there is no reason why people descended from african slaves for some reason starting at about the end of the 20th century were unable to succeed until conditions were something close to perfect and of course no one puts it that way but that is the assumption that we need to turn everything upside down before anything can happen no one even black expected that before roughly 1966 and it's getting to the point where it's hard for people to even imagine that to be properly black is to think any other way so there are people like me who are trying to think beyond that but we have to always be on our guard we have to constantly be we are constantly attacked we are constantly asked very very probing and very suspicious questions were thought of as different i'm hoping we can get past that because i would like there to be a time when thought on racism extended from the hard left to the hard right and the person on the hard right wasn't made to feel like some sort of freakazoid and the people like me who are in the middle would not be chased around and thought of as brave etc it should really be that there's a wide range of opinion instead of this very narrow and frankly unimaginative and even harmful idea that the proper watch cry of black america is yes we can't that what your job is is to get out and tell a story of why we can't that's not the way any group has ever gotten ahead in the history of humankind and there is nothing different about now that justifies it or excuses it that's um that's really well put let's so let me ask you something else in in the last few years i think you've become a lot more vocal and your voice has become um you know watching you on twitter and speaking more publicly a lot more sharp and um uh assertive if you will um and i'm wondering if you could say you know why is your voice as a public intellectual and perhaps especially as a black public intellectual and important one in our times it's funny you ask that i'm not um this is gonna sound like humble bragging so to speak i don't blow my own horn much you know there's a reason i don't have a website i don't think of myself from the outside as a voice in etc but i know what you're talking about and really the answer is rather mundane i've gotten older i've been doing this for over 20 years and when i started i was in my early 30s and when i was in my early 30s i was processed by some as a whippersnapper and there's also within the black community something that one must internalize which is that you don't sass your elders and so i learned very quickly i barely needed to learn it i can't be 33 and express myself forcefully even if somebody 55 jumps down my throat i have to just sit there and take it there are recordings of me doing it during some of my first talks a few years ago i started to realize i'm over 50 i'm middle aged and you can't tell me that i'm a kid anymore people used to say wait till he goes out to the world that he'll get his butt kicked by racism well i've been out in the world haven't had this butt kicked yet and i'm thinking it's at the point where i can express myself and whatever anybody's going to say and they're going to keep saying it they can't say that i'm disrespectful because back then if i really express myself too much it looked like i didn't respect my elders and therefore i had no interest in being part of black culture and it looked like i didn't like black people now there are some people today who still think i don't like black people but they're wrong and deep down they know it there's no evidence of that i'm old enough to speak my mind and so i figure at this particular point when i was 33 i was too young to speak my mind without being seen as impolite when i'm 73 it's going to be well he's an old man he's not connected to today now i'm right in the middle i'm not that old yet but i'm old enough that if somebody comes after me i can say exactly what i feel and i've always been a very sharp tongue person and so these days i've decided i'm gonna say it i held off doing it on twitter for a very long time because with twitter all you can do is tweet i cannot believe how many people spend their entire days tweeting back and forth as if you can exchange real ideas and information you know with basically to me it's like you've got these big giant cotton mittens on you you can't say anything but i've realized that at this point if you're not participating on twitter you're not alive and so i've been trying to master that format and pay a little bit more attention to what's going on on the twitter but twitter is dangerous because i i started noticing people spending their entire lives and i mean brilliant people spending their whole lives on twitter about 10 years ago and i thought anybody who does that doesn't read books anymore and i'm exaggerating but if you're doing that you're having a hard time getting through a nonfiction book you're not finishing books and i can feel it's at the point where i'm reading a little bit less than i used to because i'm always looking at that twitter but it's at the point where that's where the action is if you're not doing it you don't matter and i've got to be in the world so yeah that's why i've been getting more forceful because i'm 55 and i can get away with it right i'm going to shift the conversation a little bit and get your views on something that's happening across campuses in the us um you know since the murder of george floyd we have this moment um an an indeed a pressing moment for um racial reckoning and what we find is that a lot of students who've who felt marginalized on campus and who felt like they couldn't fully participate in campus life um have have have got a voice have spoken out and there's been a move to to cater to those students to make them part of campus life uh and and the typical move is really that universities and colleges are instituting anti-racist and um diversity equity and inclusion initiatives um and i'd love to hear your thoughts on what you make of such initiatives and you know they obviously come from a good place with the intention to to to make a big difference and to talk about race um an issue perhaps that hasn't been discussed as openly before but what are your thoughts on how these trainings are unfolding um there's an awful lot of mendacity involved and racism can be a subtle thing racism is not only somebody calling you a dirty name it's not only over discrimination but i think most people looking on at these initiatives going on on college campuses are thinking are college campuses really such racist places in any sense usually you keep it to yourself because you know that you could get mauled saying that out loud in some places so you just keep it to yourself but the question everybody's asking is correct and the answer is no they're not college campuses are some of the least racist by any standard places on the entire planet in the whole 300 000 year history of the species and everybody knows it including the people living on the campuses so could a campus improve things in certain ways sure there will be those things and you have to always watch out for bias but the idea that because of what happened to george floyd which was unjustifiable that we now have to pretend that these campuses are racist sinkholes and that that's the way that a certain kind of student ends up feeling significant to the point that these schools are called on to become anti-racism academies rather than universities no i think that that's inappropriate it's not what i call progress on race i think that black students and their allies as we say these days are being catered to because people are afraid people are afraid if they tell those students no they're going to get called racists on twitter and that scares a lot of people to their socks and i can put myself in their heads and imagine how it would feel but it's at the point where as i've written we have to temper the demands of these manifestos like that as a way of dignifying the students to pretend that these campuses are bastions of racism in the way that so many campuses are being asked to now is to condescend because everybody knows if it's true and so what people are doing is patting bright young black students on the head and saying yeah this is a terrible racist place and we're going to attest to it and we're going to act like this is ole miss 50 years ago it's a it's acting it's it's histrionics it's a dance it's kabuki and it's demeaning to the students and the students themselves will understand it most of them in about 10 years when they look back i've seen that over the decades after protests of this kind and so i'm just hoping that we can see the pendulum shift to the middle that's not to say that princeton might not have some things it might do to address very subtle racism in the background sure but the princeton letter where it sounds like princeton is what yale was in 1914 there's a word for it and i'm not going to use a polite word because sometimes the impolite word really is precise it's everybody knows i could say malarkey i could say poppy cop but i don't mean those words it's everybody knows it and so we have to get the bravery to call these things out it has to be white people it has to be black people so that this fashion because that's what it is it's a fashion this fashion passes there are things we can do about the cops there are things we can do about various issues having to do with racism but making princeton a non-racist campus you know changing the racism roiling on princeton's campus it's and i mean princeton as a stand-in for any school that's being accused of that right now it's absurd and we need to start saying it straight so i hear you over here echoing um randall kennedy and his critique of what was going on at princeton or that letter that went out um as well and again again to black thinkers who are thinking in ways that would be considered heteroducts in our times because of the ways in which we think of black thought as monolithic um this helps me get into you know let's segue into your new book the elect so let me first ask a question why did you choose to release it in the format that you're releasing it um once again more mundane than than people think it's just that i had already written a book um according to usual schedule standards called nine nasty words yes folks i'd like you to buy that one because i enjoyed writing it's about profanity and yes the word isn't it and the idea was for that book to come out in may well you have contracts for these things and naturally your publisher doesn't want you to release some other book right around that same time the elect jumped out of me in about 10 seconds last summer i just got extremely fed up in july and i just found myself sitting down and writing this book that i didn't even know was going to be a book and finally i told my agent some i'm emitting something and it's i'm not going to stop until i'm done so all of a sudden in september i have this new book there's no way to release that right away when i've got nine nasty words coming up and that's nobody's fault that's just the way it went i didn't know what was going to happen in june when i finished nine nasty words before it and so what all of that means is that i can't release the elect as a physical object for a while i imagine it would be at least six months after may that's too long because i wrote the book about now so i decided to use modern channels and release it on substance because that way people can read it without me getting in the way of nine nasty words and interfering with my contract on that so it's not um the story is not that i couldn't get anybody to touch it like if you're gonna make a movie about my life it's gonna be that i shopped it around all the publishers and they said we can't publish this because we're too woke no frankly i'm not gonna have a hard time getting a publisher for it but we can't do it now and i wanted it to get out now so that's why i'm using this unusual strategy the only good thing about it is that putting it out now getting the feedback you know some of it praise some of it not that's going to make the physical object better because i can anticipate the criticisms which for me is 60 of the font i like to i like to argue and now i can because i'm 55. so i'm going to get to make the book better but no nobody will hold it in their hands until probably sometime in 2022 just because i have the cussing book coming out which is humorous and it's going to be a tonic as the pandemic opens up i recommend it then get the elect later great so the elect you clearly state is not an academic book and you're writing it for a very particular audience you're very clear about who you're not writing it for and why you're writing it who should read it um you talk about third wave anti-racism a religion that secular religion that is overtaking the conversation more broadly right now and is dictating how people interact and this is not just in terms of the conversations that are taking place on campuses but more broadly in our kind of cultural milieu um tell us a little bit about what your argument is and why are you calling it a religion um i'm calling it a religion because i honestly believe that it is one it's not a rhetorical faint when i say it's a religion i don't mean like a religion i literally feel the way a roman would have watching this weird sect of people who became what we call christians emerging and some of them may have thought a religion is emerging among us i feel like within my lifetime i saw a new one come and it was this this elect religion it's people who are under the sway of a way of thinking that requires that you subscribe to certain tenets even if empirical fact doesn't actually correspond to them to an extent and the parallels between the way a certain kind of person and i don't just mean the left i'm not talking about the woke left roughly i'm talking about people on the woke left who are comfortable being really me it's a certain fringe of the woke left those people have a way of looking at things that parallels fundamentalist christianity to a degree that you almost couldn't write better and my issue is not that it's happening on college campuses that's a very 2016 discussion this is now just everywhere it's at the point where especially educated people are under an impression that they might need to subscribe to this religion they might need to take in these tenets in order to be good people it's a very easy impression to fall under given the messages that are being put out there by especially the chattering classes as it used to be called and so i'm really worried about this and the reason i'm worried about it is not just because it isn't pretty to see people not making sense if that's all it was then well there you go the elect religion hurts black people it leaves black people in the lurch it evidences a lack of genuine concern for the actual fate of black people all in the name of something very narrow which is showing that you're not racist with the elect it isn't about showing that you have faith in god it's showing that you're not racist so if you're showing that you're not racist you're doing the right thing but the problem is that very often this showing is something different from actually helping people of the race in question and so this is something that came out of me by accident once and i'm going to use it because it actually it's it's a nice way of putting it we've gone from this martin luther king to just martin luther it's really just about showing your faith except this time it's about showing that you're not a racist and so just very quickly here in new york city it you have to take a certain test it's a rather brutal test to get into the very top competitive public schools if you don't do well on the test you don't get in for the past generation only then there have been very low numbers of black students getting in black students used to get in in decent numbers but you know we all live in our time and so that's being forgotten but nowadays the black kids tend who apply the black ones who apply tend not to do well enough on the test to get into a school like status for many people the idea is we must show that we're not racist by saying that we're going to just get rid of the test if the black kids aren't doing well on it there's something racist about the test because it's all about results if the result doesn't go well for black kids there's something wrong with the test it's all about the results everybody knows that that right there doesn't make any sense but you're supposed to just hold back and be anti-empirical this is what i mean about having the faith and so you say get rid of the test and that means that you have a school where black kids are not taught how to take that test and they're going to run into tests like that in the very near future and not be as good at them as they could be because they weren't getting the practice that they would have gotten in learning to take them to get into schools like stuyvesant not to mention that the whole caliber of the school will change if that test has nothing to do with the kids to get in now if you mention you know black kids used to take that test and get in back in the 90s and a lot of the change here has to do with the elimination of gift programs well people kind of look at you you know just like you might say how would somebody actually walk on water because wouldn't it break the surface tension if jesus had tried and people said ah yes but you know you're not supposed to delve same way with things like this so the elect hurts black people in many ways there's a whole list of these things in one chapter in the book and it worries me because i think that we're tending to forget what being an anti-racist is supposed to be right so your argument then is that anti-racism and the rhetoric of anti-racism is actually being used to infantilize and to um undermine the dignity of black people now this reminds me of my experience back in south africa when i was teaching over there at a university and this was this is quite a while ago this is over a decade ago and there was this conversation about having more black students um in at the university and there was an economic history program that they were thinking about introducing but the week the program was being conceived of it was supposed to be done without any kind of quantitative skills and the idea was that no this is going to be a different program and we're going to have graduates who will graduate without quantitative skills because you know black students are not that's a very imperialist way of thinking or a white way of thinking about knowledge and economic history which i find terribly troubling thinking these are students who are going to go out be economic historians or and not be able to speak to some of the skills that they'll be required to speak to so it's interesting to me that this is the kind of conversation that has happened over a decade ago and we've seen um the kind of dead end that it leads to in other parts of the world yet in the u.s we are having that conversation just now it's almost as if we are um in a silo and we're not looking um across to any other place to learn how to have these conversations any thoughts on that about the force of racism and anti-racism in the united states and how completely detached it seems to be from the global context well you know we definitely tend to look inward in this um great sized and in many ways great nation and we are not terribly inclined to learn lessons from other places it's interesting thomas soule the conservative black economist and and god is somebody who wrote a whole book about affirmative action around the world it's not even long you can curl up with it and take care of it in about three sessions and it really explains how the affirmative action programs that we're taught to think of as just morality incarnate have gone in various places over the 20th century and the things that we need to be careful about that book has had very little influence and even if it were assigned to many people in positions of power about these sorts of issues i get the feeling it would be largely ignored in favor of prescriptions by other people who are fashionable to listen to today and yeah one of the strangest things that we're getting especially lately is this gruesome recapitulation of the idea that it's alien to black people to be precise and exact in thinking these various calls that stem needs to be changed to be made more welcoming to black people and you know what else is that supposed to mean then that the hard math and the very close reasoning that are necessary to qualifying in the field is going to change you know what what exactly would the black close reasoning and heavy math be by process of elimination you know that what it means is that we're supposed to allow black people in to do things that are more spiritual more impressionistic and frankly easier and of course the retort is supposed to be how do you decide what's easier and if you're going to compare the math that's involved in doing physics to sitting around talking about your impressions i'm not even going to pretend that one of those things is not harder than the other and yet you have white people sitting and nodding as people sit and talk about you've got to open this field up to us everybody just says that's okay somebody i'm not going to name and i'm really not going to name has a very very widely read book out where this person actually writes with a straight face that we should eliminate standardized testing because black kids often have a problem on them and that instead we should evaluate students on for example their desire to know what the hell does that mean their desire to know first how would you measure it and let's face it you might very much want to know about trigonometry and find yourself handicapped by not being very good at it and needing help that could happen to anybody desire to know and yet this person is never asked real questions by anybody in a position of influence and on top of that when this person is asked real questions by some people who dare to do it then this person waves the questions away as probably signifying racism the reason being that this person hasn't been minted in an environment where they would have picked up that to be a public person taken seriously is to be able to answer sometimes challenging questions and not take personal offense and you know it's not this person's fault because they've been minted in a climate where it's considered okay for a large institution to treat a certain segment of brown-skinned students as if they were not as intelligent as others and to let it pass and so you don't foster people's intelligence and their abilities all of this is like something out of 1873 so much of it sounds like don't teach don't teach your slave to read or black people can only come so far a lot of the people who think they're being quote unquote anti-racist are being neo-racist in a way out of their sense that a black person's job is to be soulful and intuitive we just feel it we've got a rhythm we have mammy we have a history we came over on a ship we're sub-alterns looking at everything from down below with a special message of prophecy and all of that might be true but it has nothing to do with physics it has nothing to do with reasoning closely about the complexities of history you're never going to be a good biologist working from intuitions of those kinds and yet to say so is to be a heterodox person that should change so john i'm going to push you a little bit over here and ask you you know you you say very clearly and the the kind of rationale that you're giving um is the one that the third wave anti-feminist uh anti-racists give um that was a freudian slip uh third wave anti uh racists give and my my question is there they are you talk about how they they say these things and they're all these white people and these administrators at universities nodding their head and just taking it and not really challenging them and not really making the move to have discourse with them and make them think about what they're saying yet in your book you say you are not writing and you are not interested in speaking to these people um and that they are beyond uh being convinced and beyond being persuaded so in some ways your one could draw an analogy between the posture you're striking over there and the ones that we are um or that you are saying administrators and white people are striking when these kinds of arguments are put forward so how would you respond to that yeah i i have been unclear on that i consider the kind of person who i'm calling elect unreachable they'll be the occasional exception but you cannot talk somebody out of that kind of view any more than you could talk somebody who's deeply religious out of certain fundamental tenets it's so unlikely that it isn't worth it but the people i want to reach are the ones sitting on the fence to be honest now i'm gonna be accused of stereotyping but for me it's just my sense of who i'm writing this book for is a white woman of about 47 who has a couple of kids and lives in a zip code probably like mine and is drinking a glass of chardonnay at some gathering and reads the atlantic and reads the new york times and listens to npr and is probably on her school board and is beginning to take this sort of thing in is beginning to tell people there are certain books that they should read is beginning to think that she needs to examine her inner racism that that somehow helps black people be less poor and she's thinking that not because she's a bad person but because we're all thinking about about a thousand things and there's this whole new dialogue on the race thing that expressed that's expressed so articulately and so furiously and you watch this man who's choked to death on the ground and they're all these people on the street and you start thinking okay i need to change how i think okay i need to give black people a break and that's being anti-racist and therefore i won't require them to actually make sense because i don't know how they feel i can't put myself in their shoes it's that teetering person that i see and what i sense you talk about black people being spiritual and intuitive well here's some of my black intuition what i sense out there from social media from conversations with that woman who's not a real person but that woman etc is that everybody is open to reason not the elect themselves but that person if made to sit down and listen to what these messages really are might understand that she might want to go back to the way she was thinking about race 10 years ago and understand i'm not saying she shouldn't think about racism just go back to what you were thinking about 2011 that was good enough you don't need this psychological revolution and you don't need to think that treating black people like children is somehow an advance even though you wouldn't think of it that way with your own children or people of any other extraction that you know so the elect themselves it's not a book about how to get through to people how to have a dialogue sometimes there's no dialogue possible the idea is to coexist with the elect graciously but what about those people sitting on the fence who think that it's their job to read robin d'angelo and pretend that it makes sense it's those people who i'm trying to reach with this book because honestly if a white person writes it the white person is a racist if a black person writes it and they're 35 they don't know how much racism there is in the world they're going to go out and get their butt kicked if the black person writes it and they're 55 well you can call them self-hating but you don't mean it i think anybody who knows even a little bit about my work knows that i don't exactly not like myself and if you read a little bit more of my work you see that i am not ashamed of being black i am very interested in blackness in many ways so you know you can call me all the self-hating and the uncle tom and i'm in bed with white supremacists nobody means it any sensible person can see that it's ridiculous and so then they might listen and they might learn a little something and that's all i want to do let me ask you a little more about um this the elect not not the book but the group um and ask you about you know they're very keen to police language and uh and there's a proliferation of new terms what are the right terms to talk about these issues so we have words like people of color emerging and now we have a new term bipark and um so as a linguist and a cultural critic you know we're seeing a complete shift in how people can and can't talk about things um why is language so important to this particular brand of anti-racism and why do we have this new vocabulary proliferating well you know there are people who are thinking about the very real fact that um language to an extent shapes thought to an extent not as much as many people are led to think but the idea is that if you say things in a certain way it can help keep you in mind of things that we might like to have kept in mind and so i think a lot of people think that the elect are changing language all the time because they're enjoying their sense of power no i think all of them genuinely think that this is part of making society think in a way that will create justice for oppressed people and you know the effect of things like this is slight the new term almost always wears out in a generation it has to be replaced by something else but you know i'm not going to die on that hill you you choose your battles by poc i find aesthetically ugly but it's fine with me capitalizing black isn't going to change a damn thing but if that's what people want to do okay i give it my official stamp of approval and pretty soon i'm going to start doing it i like um enslaved person instead of slave and slave person because if you say enslaved person it does make you think about the fact that it was a person who was in this condition of being enslaved rather than slave being some inherent kind of human being a la aristotle i i get that i get what people are going for i also know that in 15 years enslaved person is going to feel exactly the way slave felt 10 minutes ago but still i i get it but i'm much more interested in working on changes for real people on the ground in their real lives in ways that the grand old civil rights leaders would have recognized as anti-racism there is too much focus on one internal psychological cleansing which is just a kind of self-gratification and two issues of language and fashion and the cleveland on the family guy is now voiced by a black man instead of a white man okay i get it you know you can get rich doing cleveland maybe a black person should be making the money doing cleveland oh that's fine but i thought being an anti-racist was about grass roots political activism and i can't help noticing that grassroots political activism can be awfully monotonous and only approximately rewarding on a year-to-year basis where a lot of this other stuff hits your endorphin buttons but we deal with what we deal with so the language stuff sure okay good i'll take on as much of it as i can and i have not you know kicked about any of it in print except where it's gotten a little too silly some of the spraying of the word master has gone a little too far master bedroom is not an offensive term although there are uses of master but can be offensive but you know i always just think if we eliminated the war on drugs tonight black america will be a different place in about 15 years and you know we could talk about bipox and white fragility and all the rest of it all we want what we really need to do is change lives and we've lost sense of that it'd be so interesting somebody i wish i were an artist somebody should make a movie where a civil rights worker 1967 is brought into today and tries to talk to the sorts of people that he thinks are his comrades and listens to these abstract conversations about things that don't genuinely matter expressed with urgent hostility and watching people being witch-hunted for saying the wrong thing or implying something and this poor person is standing there with a sign and wondering when are you going to start knocking on doors when are you going to start lobbying congressman when's the last time you actually went and tried to talk to somebody in power about doing something that might have to do with things like zoning laws things that aren't viscerally exciting like creating a term like bipod that person would be mystified somebody out there you're not already writing that book don't write a book make a movie and put it on netflix because we need to see we need to see that in some ways the past was better and it's funny people say you know black conservatives as if i am one what are you waiting to conserve and no i'm not saying 1967 was better but those people did have a better sense of what it is to try to forge change so this is interesting i'm going to stick with this issue of terminology and language and um you know at one level you have a proliferation of all these words and terms that must be used at another level there's something very interesting happening in terms of how capacious some of these terms are and how um there's a lot of conflation and slippage happening so today you know if you don't agree with a way of doing things you are a white supremacist now what what does that mean or if you don't believe in a particular kind of ideology you a particular kind of anti-racist ideology the third wave anti-racist then you are racist so it's a very binary way of thinking about things and it almost kind of eliminates um the the issue of intent how is someone why is someone saying what they're saying or what is their intention in saying it so what i find is happening is that we're becoming incredibly literal minded in our times um what does that stem from in your reading what that stems from is this this is another one of those things where it's the emperor with no clothes it's not the intent that matters it's the impact it's how i feel any person with an iq over 25 knows that the next question though is suppose the person took it the wrong way supposed what the person intended is not something that any reasonable person would think would have that impact human interaction is is nuanced human interaction is complex anybody knows that by the time they're about five but we're trained not to ask any questions about that and just say okay only the impact matters the reason that a certain kind of black person cherishes that that little trick is because too many of us fall under the impression that the most significant thing about being black is to be somebody who suffers so the idea is that oppression is an identity it's a badge of purpose it's a badge of significance it gives you a sense of fellowship with other people this is something that any human being might seek if you're a black person one way that you seek those things if you feel them lacking is based on the idea that you are an eternal sufferer of racist abuse and therefore the idea becomes it wasn't your intent if i took it as racist then it was and you therefore are a racist and i'm suffering under your depredations the reason a certain kind of person finds that kind of interchange attractive is because it's suiting it gives a kind of comfort and so i can be impatient with that kind of person sometimes i have all of my life but i've always tried to think where that's coming from is not somebody being manipulative it's not somebody who is trying to accrue resources to themselves they're not which is what i think a lot of people think and asphalt is a very specific word they're not they are seeking warmth they are seeking significance they are seeking comfort and don't we all it's just that there's one way you can do that as a black person not because of your black genes i can hear a certain person pretending to think that's what i mean not because of your black genes but because of how we have been taught to think about race in this country in the configuration that there is the dance that whites and blacks in particular do that shelby steele so artfully described because of that dance a black person can fall into taking advantage of that victimhood complex as a way of feeling okay you can't hate somebody who's trying to feel okay that's what all of those people are doing however they're doing it on the basis of something that creates a great deal of mendacity in society and with the current mood lives are being destroyed on the basis of things that are rooted in what begins as the fact that an awful lot of black people especially after our history have needed artificial ways of feeling good about themselves this goes back to the late 60s that's when this starts and it's completely understandable but there are times when we have to start getting honest as gently but firmly as possible that time has come something happened in june of 2020 where that dance stops just being an interesting fashion that you might walk by and cluck your tongue that dance has become something that is destroying lies that is threatening to distort the psychology of children that is making us into just a lesser society of persons than we could be and somebody has to start standing a thwart this and yelling stop and it has to be more than one somebody and i think it's starting to happen so i really like this and in your book as well you you know you extend a lot of moral charity to third wave um anti-racists who say sincere they're sincere they believe what they're doing and they believe it is for the greater good and they're um they're not evil they're not manipulative so i wonder you know at heterodox academy we are about intellectual humility intellectual charity and i wonder if some of the frameworks that this kind of ideology is based on and now i'm referring to critical race theory and you know concepts like intersectionality and maybe even um standpoint epistemology like the do you think there is anything at all redeeming about these frameworks um that you know that they've illuminated perhaps things that we didn't see before or do you think they're absolutely total rubbish um and can have nothing positive to yield to us oh no no the critical race theory i remember encountering it about 25 years ago and thinking huh that's neat like it's it's mind expanding this particular very leftist view of everything as being based on power relations with a real gimlet eye upon pretty much everything that's ever gone on between human beings since the dawn of modernity i thought yeah i get that that's one view that should be at the table the problem with critical race theory is when people partly because critical race theory is emotionally gratifying and frankly a little bit easy because of that some people decide that it should be the foundation of all intellectual and moral engagement so you get anti-racist academy where all of literature is seen through those eyes now we're being taught that music theory has to be seen through those eyes not to mention physics these are people who genuinely believe with shining eyes and open hearts that this is progress they are not mean some of them are pretty damn mean actually but most of them are not mean they're not manipulative they're not seeking power they think of themselves as speaking truth to power the elect are not people who are seeking power they don't feel powerful but in this case i frankly think they're wrong and that's the rather simplistic way of looking at how intellectual history goes but i don't think that they're making a valid case when they imply that critical race theory should be the way we view everything i'm not sure what they really want to replace what we used to call intellectual life and artistic life with or it would just be very very narrow i remember um seeing somebody applying this this is this quarter century ago applying critical race theory to my fair lady and she's talking about henry higgins you know what he's doing to eliza and i never thought about that because i like the songs and the story and i thought yeah actually i thought actually if you think of it that way that she doesn't talk as much as him etc the whole thing smells like yeah okay yeah but then on the other hand what i don't get is if you're gonna take that and pretend that the music isn't beautiful that there isn't anything funny about the script that shaw wasn't brilliant at putting a story together and commenting about society the idea that my i'm just picking my fair lady at random my fair lady is utterly dismissible and instead we're gonna cherish something that somebody from nigeria writes under the strictures of critical race theory no i think we can have both that nigerian story and my fair lady we can know there's some major problems with my fair lady but we can also know that things change over time and that progress happens that's another problem that we probably don't have time to get into that the elects like to pretend that everything takes place at one point in time and deserves the same judgments you know thomas jefferson is a bad man you know as if he was living two weeks ago and so yeah my critical race theory i say the idea is not to chase the elect out of the room i don't think so i want them to just sit back down all of us were sitting together 10 years ago there were people like that that elect person and often they had views that were worth thinking about this new business of classics um don l peralta who thinks that the whole you know classics is just white supremacy 101. i doubt it but it's an interesting point i would want him at the table classics does need to be rethought in many ways and a lot of people who do classics have agreed with that for 30 40 years sure but the idea that classics should really just be abandoned completely no i don't think that that's the that's the slam dunk that many people are going to pretend that it is so i just say sit down folks because lately and especially since june 2020 the idea has been that the elect person can stand up and call a few people white supremacists and they can have anything they want no no they just don't have that much going on they don't understand that they are no better in that way than people under stalin people under mal just like stalin and mal they think this time we got it right they think we're different we really have it right no they don't and in their case it's pretty transparent much too narrow much too punitive much too unplanned so we just need to be brave a lot of people are really afraid of being called a white supremacist on twitter i can guarantee you folks you'll live more people need to stand up because the only reason that this stuff is getting so influential it's a climate of fear it's not that society is gradually coalescing upon a sense of what's wise that's how things are supposed to happen it happens slowly and it happens with argument well what's going on here is that they're people who are carrying canals there are people who have these baseball bats and what they do is they say you're a white supremacist and everybody backs up and says okay we'll just do what you want is that the way we're supposed to be running things here i thought this was a post-enlightenment society and post post enlightenment it's just it's unpretty it's fake it's unconstructive and it's holding up saving black america because what's really going on is a whole lot of virtue signaling virtue signaling isn't what helps poor black people become less poor we need to get back to understanding that i take your point about how we all need to be braver but the fact of the matter is you know when you're an adjunct and um you barely making ends meet uh working let's say all kinds of hours to teach an exceptionally high um teaching load speaking your mind carries with it or engenders risks being brave engenders risks which are as you know their material risks their um real risks and so we are in a particular moment that they're those that are the majority of faculty uh on campuses now who are adjunct who who feel they cannot speak and then you've also got a whole host of administrators who feel that if they do not cater to these demands um which is what they really are about like having these kinds of trainings or changing systems then they immediately get labeled as racist um and the trouble is compounded uh if the administrators um and the presidents of colleges are are white um because they definitely cannot speak up at this moment so i i like your idea of how we all have to be brave but frankly like where is that going to come from and and on the basis of what can we ask people to stand up right now um any thoughts on that and and as you think about it i'm going to follow it up with another question which is okay so this is not you say this is not the way we want to be talking about race this is a fashion a fad it needs to pass tell us how can we have meaningful conversations about it what are good ways to address these things that could be seen as making a difference and at the same time be acceptable to all i'm glad that you asked the first question because listen to me you know attempting some sort of rhetoric but no everybody can't be brave you're right that adjunct simply cannot be brave unless they want to stop eating and so some people are in a better position um to try bravery than others however it doesn't have to be only people at the tippy to be top especially administrators i think a lot of administrators are lacking imagination and one of the things that i'm doing in the election i'm collecting examples of people who stood up to this sort of thing and lived to tell about it and you know the list gets longer every week the administrator often a white administrator or frankly the black ones are just as bad who listen to these demands and decide that they have to tolerate this stuff and pretend that it makes sense a lot of them would find that not only would they keep their jobs but an awful lot of people would praise them a lot of alums would give more money and not just the republican ones who don't like black people there is a hunger in the society for making sense about being a liberal or left person as opposed to being a punitive menacing scold so some people are in a better position than others it helps to have had your job for a long time people with more money are in more of a position to just let it go but frankly there are people even very recently who have let students run over their campuses with things like this where i think to myself that person could have just said no and that person would still have their job i'm thinking in particular right now of kim cassidy at bryn mawr she should have stuck to her guns she would have been fine i can understand why she didn't know it at the time but people like that need to be models for what goes on in the future and as far as the conversation i'm not i don't mean to sound [Music] anti-intellectual myself but i'm not sure that conversation is as important here as refocusing people on what the black community actually needs in order for its main problems to go away and as i say in the book i have a very tart short chapter six where i say okay so what do i want if i don't want people running around on college campuses and claiming to be being discriminated against what is it end the war on drugs make long-term reversible contraceptives available to all women for free this one is the one that everybody thinks is so boring but it will make a difference teach reading via phonics and not via the whole word method where you just tell people see that word little or you see that word brought well that one's just just don't read it just look at it and talk it that is not the way to teach anybody to read who isn't from a book lined home like the one that i'm in phonics kids who are not taught by phonics where there are no books at home often end up not going to college it's a major issue and four we need to talk about conversation we need to get past this this limp idea that you're not a real person unless you've gone to four years of college we need to stress the benefits of solid vocational education and the solid middle class and sometimes more than middle class life you can have doing things that don't require spending four years pretending to like shakespeare we have got to get past that notion vocational school is very important for probably most people in this world and we've lost sight of that with those four things if all those four things could happen tomorrow 20 years from now kids would start growing up not quite understanding why there had ever been a race problem and for the first time they'd be right it would be something that old people talked about the only way we're going to get there is to get back to doing real stuff the conversations not to dismiss what we're doing at paradox academy but the conversations that we're having often are a matter of engaging people in the idea that sitting around and talking and showing each other what we're like this is not what heterodox academy does but engaging in those conversations is about that rather than getting out on the ground and changing the world you're sounding like a marxist ron this is i mean i could go all night and keep talking and have so many more questions but i am mindful of the time and i we have so many audience questions some were sent earlier before the event even began so i do want to get to some of those and one question okay this is a little more breaking the the kind of conversation about ideas and turning more to your own life um has your relationship with students changed over the past few years as the tenant racial conversation has changed um how do you engage students who challenge your non-orthodox opinions on race no no you you have it wrong that's the movie of my life where i'm a teacher of sociology or something and i'm assigning them readings from my books that would be interesting but no linguistics has largely nothing to do with any of this so when i go to work i'm teaching a subject dear to my geeky heart that has nothing to do with what somebody called me on twitter that morning or something like that and so frankly it doesn't come up very much as the years have gone by especially over about the past five i used to keep that sort of thing completely to myself but it's gotten to the point where the students know that there's this other me that's online and i think i should say that the ones who talk to me tend to not think that i'm crazy i know anecdotally from some of them that there are other students who think i'm a terrible person and take the class anyway and sit with gritted teeth or i've heard of some who don't take my classes because i just can't stand my politics but to tell you the truth they're not inclined to come get up in my face very very very rare as in so far at columbia never it happened at berkeley when i first came out so to speak because i was the whipper snapper the idea was he's this little boy he's 32 years old we're gonna talk some sense into him sometimes a 20 year old would feel that way that's less likely now and so no now you know what i think it might be about to change because i've kind of i've turned things up lately and i'm louder on social media but i wouldn't know now because we're in a pandemic and so we're never all on campus together so yeah they're students who are thinking it but um it doesn't come to me much because my classes are about verbs so yeah it's not like in the movie that'd be an interesting movie though yeah don't you sass me young woman but no we haven't we haven't had any of that great okay um here's another one um it seems the college presidents and other administrators are leading the fashionable anti-racist rhetoric on campuses pandering to students rather than challenging them how would you characterize your relationship with the administrative leadership at your institution oh i wish i had a story on that um i'm not on campus much these days and so it's hard to say i have been told by the people in question over the past five or six years or so that they value a plurality of opinions i know that i'm safe to that extent i don't know how the people in question feel about me since roughly june 2020 but it's all been kind of abstract because we all just sit in our houses on zoom and so i don't know and watch watch this not be true i get the feeling the columbia people are okay with me and if they are i salute them for that there are columbia faculty who aren't but then once again they're not going to come running into my office and you know throwing throwing the confetti around or something like that they just ignore me so you know my day-to-day life is just that i'm doing what i'm doing but i should say this this is this is worth putting on record i went to columbus i first started teaching at columbia in 2008 so now it's been 13 years in all of that time no black faculty or black faculty organization has ever invited me to guest speak in a class and there's some race topics that you might think i might have something to say about such as creole languages my specialty in linguistics never been asked to serve on a panel never been asked to be part of any kind of committee never been invited to any kind of gathering with a few tiny exceptions i can think of like two and a half people who like will say hello to me dead and complete silence it's articulate black faculty and associated people at columbia clearly think of me as someone to steer clear of they want nothing whatsoever to do with me they may partly think that it's because i don't want anything to do with them but no they they started it their their vision is clear but in terms of the administrators haven't experienced anything yet watch it happen tomorrow but so far i don't have that story to tell if i do have that story to tell i'm gonna tell it but so far no not not really okay so now here is a question it's like you know recently there have been a number of high-profile cases both on and off campus of individuals being punished for using the n-word or something heard as the n-word um in situations again this goes back to the thing we were talking about the literal-mindedness of our times in situations where their intent was not to call someone a bad name and as a historian this is something that really does concern me you know is what are the words that are becoming unusable and what are the implications for us when we teach primary texts that use them um and so there is a it's again that conflation between use and endorse and you're not using it to endorse it but to actually dig deeper into a text or to get into the historical moment that you're working on um so both as a black intellectual and linguist what is your take on these situations how do you teach your students the difference between use and mention it's not something that i have reason to teach in the classes that i happen to teach usually but my feeling about it is that the the hypersensitivity that we've noticed lately where someone says something that sounds like it or someone refers to it and gets fired from the new york times that sort of thing once again everybody has to understand the people who do that do that because it feels good to pretend that you're hurt by hearing the word referred to or by hearing a chinese word that sounds kind of like it it looks so absurd from the outside it looks manipulative it isn't that person is seeking the cloak of victimhood because it gives them a sense of significance and a sense of group membership nevertheless it's gotten to the point where we really do need to temper the excess because it's going to mean for example that you can't do twain that you can't read huckleberry finn because certain students are pretending to be unable to read the word on the page despite the fact that the book was written a very long time ago and by somebody who was writing and in some ways very sympathetic and full-blooded character the idea that and i'm not going to say that a student needs to be protected because that implies that the student actually is hurt all of that is an act all of that is a kind of performance are that young black people are encouraged to participate in nobody reading twain's use of that word is hurt how does he know because we're all cognitively normal human beings who understand what the passage of time is and more to the point i'm a human being who was alive 20 years ago when we weren't treating the word that way and 20 years ago we were living at the end of time just like we feel like now it was modern times digital photographs that was coming in people were texting it was modern we were modern and in 2002 it wasn't like this why is it different now it's because of a fashion not because anybody is genuinely hurt by hearing somebody say that the way you hesitate in mandarin is to say naga naganaga that didn't hurt those people they're lying but they're doing it out of a quest for something all of us seek which is membership and belonging and a reason to be alive we've just got to teach them that they need to find another way to do that well perhaps that and also in addition to membership uh a kind of sense of having struck a blow for social justice that somehow is equivalent in the discursive realm if you strike a blow it's the equivalent of uh in the actual realm real world so we have jonathan height who is tuning in and he's sent a question so he said john thank you for so many brilliant ideas tonight as you say the religion of the elect has flooded out from universities and is now everywhere it has taken over expensive prep schools and left-leaning industries such as journalism media and tech i have spoken to many leaders in those schools and industries you're right many of them know that they're spouting because they're afraid but they feel they have to do something to foster diversity and inclusion so many of them turn to d'angelo and kendy what should they do instead what would actually work to improve the racial climate and widespread feelings of inclusion well you know something jonathan to be honest wow what a it's such a cruel thing to say not to you jonathan or to anybody else but i'm sorry i believe this i don't think that a significant body of those students genuinely felt extremely disincluded before about 15 minutes ago i think that that is a kind of performance arc and amna as you say it's also you say that you feel that way because you feel like you're participating in creating social justice you're part of the movement you can feel almost guilty you're at this selective university there are people who are really suffering one way to signal your allegiance and to signal that you understand that you're still black as it's good is to fashion a feeling like that but i also think that in order to have a diverse environment what you do is you have an intelligent racial preferences policy one where everybody has the same qualifications are pretty darn close and then you assemble a class nothing wrong with that kind of affirmative action but honestly i'm so i'm a little this is a little bit scrooge here how to make them feel included did they really feel so disincluded on these campuses where everybody is bending over backwards to make brown-skinned students feel included all of the programs and the theme houses and the classes and the fellowships so much is done on these campuses what more could they do i think all of us know that for somebody to be on the typical selective university campus now and to be black and to be there for two years and come away saying my god this is a bigoted institution doesn't quite make sense and i think we also need to remember that there are plenty of black students at those schools who don't agree with that but learn that they're not supposed to say so because they'll get mauled especially on social media as it is now so we have to treat those students with dignity and understand that part of being 20 years old and of color on a modern college campus today is that you might fall into that idea of pretending that things are much much much worse than they are god we don't want to hear that i i feel bad saying it trying to put myself into the head of one of those students it's not their fault they fell into this but it's true and we need to start facing it john to what extent i'd ask is this you know this kind of sense of feeling marginalized and victimized something that actually students are learning at college they don't necessarily come with that sense but they're taught to feel it and what can we do really to push against that talking about how do you change an aspect of a culture and in this case i think what you do about it is where that learned alienation and i've watched that happen that learned alienation kicks in if it's just something that people more or less keep to themselves or discuss with one another fine ripples like that tend to disappear over time but if it translates into into protests that involve abusing other people emotionally and verbally and demanding that the college become something that it wouldn't even be a college then unfortunately we just have to say no that doesn't mean that we're gonna make the students happy campers you know very few people are happy campers but the idea is what you do about that learned alienation and as generations go by we'll have other it's just how much you allow that learned alienation to upset procedure especially for all the other students on campus including an awful lot of the black and latino so here's one one more question there's so many of them obviously i'm spoiled for choice this one's coming from noah and he is asking in your eyes what is the role of the public intellectual and to what extent is that role either consonant or discordant with the role of the activist well to tell you the truth i think that if you're a public intellectual and you're concerned with social issues your job is first of all to try to understand where people on all sides are coming from there is no point in dismissing whole groups of people and crazy there is no recorded time in human history where whole groups of people have lost their minds it's that's never the answer it makes no sense to assume that all groups of people are evil that's not the way humanity works the idea is if you're going to be an intellectual part of intellection is to be an actor in a way try to get into people's heads try to understand how it could have gotten this way without taking the leap of thinking that people have lost their minds then in terms of activism the idea is to look at strategies that have actually changed lives on the ground and try to reproduce them or if none have then try to use a degree of imagination i am afraid that many people today think that the role of the public intellectual is to convince people that the smartest thing to do about injustice is to exaggerate about it and to call for people to change their hearts and that somehow if you don't do those two things you're not doing the real work no i think that the public intellectuals role if we're talking about issues like these is to roll up their sleeves and learn at least a little bit about what's going on with real people suffering in the real world and what people do to try to change it i have a history with the manhattan institute in new york a think tank there are conservative think tanks the vast majority of people who work there are conservative republicans i was one of the democrats among i think a lot of people understandably look back on that and they think well therefore that's what he is notice i said understandably i didn't say all those jerks out there being mean and think no of course they think that why are they going to do deep research into what i was doing so they think well he too was aligned with these frothing right-wing conservatives but for one thing almost nobody at the man institute was that way and more to the point they were very interested and they are very interested in policy they're interested in what helps poor black people's lives change believe it or not that is what the manhattan institute is about many people are thinking oh well but you're doing that thing i'm saying that you shouldn't they are pick up city journal and look and i learned during the 10 years that i was with them about things that help i did a lot of work on um prisoner reentry that was something that the manhattan institute was doing with cory booker at the time and i just thought to myself their slogan is turning intellect into influence and i thought to myself if you're gonna think about these things one you have to understand that everybody isn't crazy and two you have to have a sense of what people are doing out in the real world i think now everybody's saying i'm doing the work and they've got robin d'angelo's book telling them that they're terrible people no matter what they do what the hell kind of work is that i find myself thinking about the people in newark who were running these organizations taking people fresh from prison and reintegrating them into society and the way the manhattan institute was hoping that that could be scaled up that was the work that was the real thing you have to think about them i don't think any of them would be reading these books that i don't even need to name or if they are i think we have a hard time relating what's in those books to the things they were doing holding objects and talking to people and talking to officials and changing policy in the real world that we live in with its oxygen and its buildings and its grime and its streets the public intellectual has to at least think about those sorts of things if the public intellectual is some sort of social scientist or at least wants to play one on tv and that's what i'm trying to do but you know the two things are equally important one think about the world instead of only people's feelings and two try to get into people's heads because very few evil people exist and almost no one is crazy this stuff is complicated and dealing with the complexity is part of what an intellectual so to speak is supposed to be very quickly too many of our intellectuals are telling us that everything comes down to some one simple equation no if that's what you're peddling you're not thinking hard enough that's not what our job is supposed to be okay can i ask one more okay um how do we appropriately bring up heterodox viewpoints or constructively disagree with dei and anti-racism ideas in the classroom and you know put another way what's the better way to work towards anti-racism and inclusion without falling into the current anti-racist trap i think some of that you've already answered but the first part of the question which is you know in the classroom how do you bring up petrodox viewpoints and disagree dei and anti-racist um frameworks because the minute you do you get labeled as i think and i'm going to do something extremely unconventional my battery's running down i'm going to run attach this to something and i'm going to keep talking but things aren't going to be pretty so here we are one thing that's very important there is that i think that we need to keep in mind once again that the people in question are not crazy so the idea is to really think about why somebody would be putting forth these diversity and inclusion procedures that seem so draconian and exaggerated but the idea is to understand that they're not crazy that's not what's going on they just have a different perspective and then to try to get through to them and to let them know that there are other ways of looking at these things and i think that the most powerful and folks i'm sorry about this but now we're going to go back out to the pretty place i think that the most powerful argument that we can make is to let people know that often these sorts of things are reproducing racism nobody wants to be accused of that i mean that's what everybody is so afraid of if you can make people realize that a lot of these things end up hurting people as much as helping them i think that that might go some way to helping people to understand that these diversity and inclusion initiatives often are more a matter of symbolism than actually helping someone do something and the minute you get into this kind of condescension in the name of doing something constructive i think that people need to be made to think about it so that's that would be my first step in something along these lines i'm under a piano okay wait a minute thank you you actually got a little tour of your house so it was like missing well i'm really sorry about this i don't know why this happened please don't apologize we we're all living in the zoom world and we fully understand um it's a miracle that a small child hasn't popped into my room right now and interrupted our conversations so it means a cat i just want to say thank you so much for joining us tonight and for offering us such rich insights um we really really are grateful to you you've been incredibly generous with your time and before we wrap up i'd just like to share a few exciting announcements so the first is that heterodox academy has recently released a new podcast it's called heterodox out loud which brings you the best of our blog in audio format so look for it and subscribe to it and take a listen and we're also launching our first ever grant offering for our members and graduate affiliates with grants of up to 30 000 available to support hx community projects that demonstrate and promote heterodox values in education you can find more information on this on our website and we'll be sharing more of this via our members email and if you join this event this is a public event and you are not yet part of heterodox academy wait no more go on to our website and become either a member or a friend of hsa and we really do hope that you will consider joining us and finally as we look ahead we hope you mark your calendars for our next webinar event which will be on tuesday march 9th at 7 pm eastern time and we'll be joined by judith shapiro former president of barnard college and brian rosenberg former president of mcallister college for a conversation that's going to be titled or that is titled a fine balance academic freedom and academic responsibility there's more information on the event and how to register that'll be coming forth in our bulletin next week thank you all for joining us tonight and thank you again john this was fantastic it was a pleasure thank you

Channel: Heterodox Academy

Views: 48,314

Rating: 4.9429793 out of 5

Keywords: john mcwhorter, heterodox academy, viewpoint diversity, anti-racism

Id: -D9LZdjnxKk

Length: 80min 18sec (4818 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021