BLM: The Revolution Will Not Be Criticized with Zac Kriegman

my perception of of you know as you say white liberals is that they're you know among the least racist against black people on earth at least in the classical sort of old-fashioned bigot of of um there may be more of the condescension and lowering standards and you can't expect black people to you know play the game by the same rules as white people a kind of bigotry of low expectations but there is truly like the the ghost of old-fashioned racism has truly been exercised from from the white liberal mind and well the funny thing about that is they they'll then go on about how racist they are [Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman if you're hearing this then you're on the public feed which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements you can get access to the subscriber feed by going to colemanhughes.org and becoming a supporter this means you'll have access to episodes a week early you'll never hear ads and you'll get access to bonus q a episodes you can also support me by liking and subscribing on youtube and sharing the show with friends and family as always thank you so much for your support my guest today is zach kriegman zack was a director of data science at thomson reuters before he got fired for posting a fact-based criticism of black lives matter in an internal memo this is one of the worst examples of cancer culture and enforced orthodoxy around the issue of race that i've seen in a while zach was fired for pointing to research by roland fryer who i just had on the podcast and others which show that there was no anti-black bias in police shootings as well as that doj investigations into police departments in certain cases cause an increase in homicides due to the police pulling back now as a director of data science at a major media company that has a respected fact-checking wing part of his job was to ensure that thompson reuters was using data accurately and he got fired for doing exactly that now he's suing reuters for wrongful termination and in the meantime he has a sub stack where he has posted the memo which got him fired as well as some other essays and you should go check that out in this conversation we talk about the circumstances surrounding his firing and most of the time we spend on the substantive issue of blm and the effect it has had on policing and crime i really enjoyed this conversation and i hope you do too so without further ado zach kriegman jyn and i hope you do too so without further ado zach kriegman zach kriegman thanks so much for coming on my show thanks for having me on so i've been following your story as the senior data scientist at reuters and then the director of data science at reuters and uh i've been pretty appalled by everything that happened to you and um so before we get to all of that and we're gonna get to all of it in detail who are you what is your background how did you come to care about data science and then climb the ladder to to such a prestigious position as a data scientist yeah i actually have a very unusual background as a for a data scientist so i started school i guess in 95 uh college and dropped out around 98 after like basically like one and a half year um split up by some other time off and then i um went and started as a software engineer and worked in a few startups and ultimately decided i don't this isn't really what's for me i want to like have some kind of um more human interaction and mistakenly i decided i wanted to become a lawyer so i went back to school got my undergraduate degree they were really nice letting me finish classes that were seven years from seven years ago and um and i went to harvard law school got my law degree and practiced law for a couple years and then um after that i went um to practice as a economist at an econometrics consulting firm so basically like um basically these these very large like anti-trust cases they become like these battle of the experts where each expert will create a model of the economy and how the anti-trust activity impacted prices and stuff and those experts have teams of economists who basically produced those reports and i was an econ major and undergrad and obviously i had a law degree so i did that for a few a couple years helping write these reports and doing this sort of econometric analysis and i realized oh this is actually really similar well i started hearing more and more about this like machine learning and artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and i took a coursera class and everything's oh wow this is really similar to what i'm doing uh in econometrics it's basically just stacking the same models that we're using in econometrics up a million times essentially to create much more complex uh models but anyways i did some kaggle competitions i don't know if you've ever heard of those um and you know sort of like played around with this whole data science thing uh and ultimately got a job at thomson reuters doing data science and then you eventually became the the director of data science there yeah a director of data science um i'm not actually sure if there are any other directors of data science but you know there is a there's a lab of um probably depending on how you count between 70 and like i don't know like 150 data scientists and i started as a senior data scientist and then i was promoted to director and i ultimately had a team of like 10 other data scientists doing basically leading them and applying uh the newest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and deep learning um in two thomson reuters varied data sets like we have huge legal data sets of ip and science finance tax and of course reuters news so we were building these giant artificial neural networks and training them to sort of understand and be able to write legal documents as an example a few years ago there was a huge hoopla in the media and on the internet about this guy james damore who wrote an internal memo at google um thoroughly researched giving reasons why google was not 50 50 male female and he cited research from the top journals and um it was it was clear to me at least that he was not a you know foaming at the mouth sexist yelling at women to get back in into the kitchen by any means he was very much a um he was a true progressive in the sense that he wanted to expand opportunity as much as possible but was citing research based reasons why at the median and at the average men and women don't have precisely the same interests and so wouldn't rep be know represented 50 50 in every profession from coal mining to nursing and et cetera and you would think at a place like google which is highly statistically literate um iq out the wazoo that this would be accepted or at the very least discussed when they solicited feedback from from a diversity training that they had had when i read your story being a lead data scientist at reuters which is you know as close to synonymous with a sort of objective literate fact-checking organization as as we have maybe some people might just dispute that but you know like a year ago if you had asked me what is my impression of reuters's brand in the public imagination i would have said i don't think i could name even two organizations that are more synonymous with objectivity and fact checking than reuters i would struggle to think of any actually um so when i read about your your situation it seemed to me very much like a kind of damore memo situation on steroids but about race rather than about gender and about an issue that uh really had directly to do with you know potentially thousands of lives that could have been saved so in a way was much a much deeper and more important issue than merely the gender balance of a workplace yeah i followed the james damore story pretty closely but um if you had told me that you know that that same story would be playing out at reuters i would have been shocked especially because his story was a little different right so he had he was making sort of this argument i guess about how the internal functioning of the company but it didn't go to the core mission of the company the core mission of reuters is to accurately report the news and i was pointing out that our news reporting was widely diverging from the facts in in a way that was you know like you said leading to thousands of you know contributing at least to thousands of people being murdered um and that sort of like that is a went directly to reuters like core mission if if the reporters at reuters can't talk about the statistics the facts and the research underlying the stories that they're reporting then there's no way they can possibly uh report the news accurately and what i discovered is that you know the a conversation like that was just impossible i should mention that i wasn't a a data scientist at reuters so reuters is one of the divisions of um thompson reuters and like i said we have tax and legal and uh you know news like writers and we also had ip and science and stuff and i was part of a centralized data science capacity that would serve each of those uh different organizations but yeah exactly and you know just watching it you know just seeing i mean james damore really kicked this whole cancel culture thing off in a lot of ways at least i think in the popular understanding of it like oh there's really like strict limitations on you know even very factual conversations that we're going to be able to have in the workplace at this point um because you know in case someone is offended and uh yeah so i was definitely parallel we'll get into the actual substance of the arguments you made that got you fired but before we get there i just want to uh i want you to describe to me sort of in detail what what actually happened from the point where you first gave your colleagues feedback they didn't like to you getting fired for giving that feedback what is that story you know i've been noticing this um maybe i should just do like a quick summary of of what i what sort of what my post was about because basically what happened is i posted a summary of the academic literature about black lives matter which i've been following because as a data scientist i was sort of curious about the the what was actually coming out of you know universities uh in terms of this question um and internally i had been noticing as this sort of like new racial ideology had spread throughout the company um and uh and it was sort of growing more and more concerned because i knew that the sort of research had been um had been showing that black lives matter was core claim that police are biased towards shooting black people just didn't stand up to scrutiny it's just untrue but not only that that claim had been powering this decrease in policing and um increase in violent crime including all these murders and i knew that as you know someone with white skin saying anything about this at thomson reuters would be putting my career in jeopardy but i felt like reuters had a public trust to be reporting honestly so what i did was i compiled a summary of the academic literature and i posted it to our internal collaboration platform called the hub and you know just as i expected that immediately made me the target of this barrage of intensely angry and um and ultimately highly racialized attacks and then the company's response to those attacks and this sort of this brouhaha was to censor everything i had written and basically shut down any kind of critical examination about the facts of the black lives matter movement and that was even more concerning to me because now not only were we reporting these falsehoods that were getting people killed but the company was literally saying and we're never going to talk about it internally making it impossible to ever rectify making impossible to ever have for our organization to sort of grapple with the facts and correct our reporting so then i sent an email to senior leadership in the company because so far i've been dealing with hr and i was hoping well maybe senior leadership doesn't know about this uh whole situation they've got their they're busy with other things so maybe if i make them aware of this they'll write the so i sent an email to senior leadership and other colleagues sort of describing how this racialized bullying had made it impossible for us to have a conversation about these facts underlying our news stories um and how our news reporting was uh diverging from those facts and then they fired me for that so does that answer question yeah yeah i'm curious though you know if also you're you're uh at reuters for five or six years right what is the precipitating event that makes you feel i have to write i have to write about this topic is it something that happened in the news something that happened at reuters what what made you feel i have to write an essay and talk to my colleagues about this data no that's a good question so a couple things one i was seeing this sort of this ideology this new racial ideology spread throughout the company including like um uncritical support of the black lives matter movement and its core claims from like senior leadership all the way down um and two i was seeing reuters news uh reporting stories inaccurately and just in a distorted way based on that sort of internal racial ideology that had spread throughout the company um and i was you know simultaneously can you give any examples can you give some exam i know you've written about the jacob blake example can you give some examples of what you mean by misreporting yeah so you have examples like reuters referring to the shooting of michael brown as one of a number of egregious examples of lethal police violence despite the fact that an investigation by the justice department run by barack obama's attorney general eric holder had cleared the police officer of any wrongdoing or you have reuters referring to a wave of killings of african americans by police using unjustified force despite the fact that the statistics clearly show that no such wave had taken place in fact police shootings have been on the decline you have the jacob blake example you know at some point donald trump said something along the lines of you know he pointed out that you know more more white suspects are shot by police every year than blacks and then reuters fact checked him and repeated what i view as the false claim that blacks are shot disproportionately uh to whites and i can explain why i think that's um untrue but so basically and just to just uh also to add color to the jacob blake example what you mean is that they did not include in the article that he grabbed a knife and was poised to be about to stab the cops when the cop shot him so they painted the scene without including that crucial detail exactly yeah they made sure to mention that he was shot in the back which was true but they completely left out that he had just grabbed a knife and he was with arm's length of the police officers and they thought that he'd been wrestling with them he'd been you know violently resisting arrest and they were worried that he was going to turn around and stab them um so they just they would sort of systematically leave out the key contextual details to make the stories much more divisive and inflammatory than they otherwise would be one of the examples that most irked me from the past year or two here is uh kyle rittenhouse who i i me it's it's been a little bit of time now but i believe he shot three people that he was entangled with in in various ways you know some of them were attacking him and he shot three of them and killed either one of one or two of them i don't remember um one or two survived yeah and and all three of these people that he shot were white they all happened to be white and in in most of the mainstream coverage and certainly most of the mainstream coverage from liberal-leaning outlets it was not mentioned in most of the articles that the people he shot were white so i i ended up talking to a lot of people that kind of make a cursory glance at the news that believed that kyle rittenhouse had shot three black people because every every article would include the fact that kyle himself was white they would say a white man or a kid really a white 17 year old however old he was shot three you know people without including their race so as to leave it ambiguous and and let people fill in the blanks with with the the caricature we have in our heads of white guys with guns killing black people so many people actually came away from that thinking he killed three black people or he shot three black people and i thought that was a transparent and dishonest and and it was so obvious what the you know what the conversations were if even if it was only in the head of the journalist writing the article it was it was you know the the the absence of a description there spoke very loudly to me about the dishonesty that is involved in the description of many of these events yeah i mean i think that's exactly right that's there's no way that people weren't uh that the writers of those articles weren't aware of what they were doing that's what i've become more and more aware of myself is that these they're these are conscious decisions to spin a narrative um and when you know when someone does point out the problems in the reporting it's a conscious decision then to you know to bury that or to ignore it uh these are not just sort of like innocent uh decisions and i think you know you can see that just in terms of like in a lot of reuters stories just who they choose to interview and who they choose to ask for a quote right they go out and they'll they'll look for some kind of quote from someone supporting a supportive of the blm movement but they never include a quote from people who are critical of it or people who know who can provide context about well actually police are not biased towards shooting uh black people and i'm sure it's not that they never come across those people uh as they're looking for quotes it's that those quotes don't fit the narrative so they leave those out and they just leave these quotes to give the reader a sense that you know there's a clear answer okay so let's get into the actual substantive questions here because um you know my audience is well acquainted with my critiques of black lives matter which are very similar to yours um but you know that there are i'm always open to the the possibility there there are people here thinking well how how could it be true that black people don't get shot disproportionately by the police i mean i know 10 or 15 names off the top of my head some of which are children of black people that unarmed that have been shot by the police and i can't even think of one name of a white person that has been shot by the police how could it be that my perception how could i have been radically lied to on such a huge scale so as to be wrong uh and deeply wrong about this empirical fact what am i missing yeah well actually i uh read one of your articles today where you listed all these white people who had been killed and you know i was i hadn't heard of none of them um and partly i think that that's that's more of a sort of an organic result uh which i think you you've described in some of your writing but that's sort of more of an organic result of who's doing the filming and who's and when you when one of these hits the you know the media or or social media um how much views it gets how much uh outrage it gets and then as that that's sort of a self-reinforcing cycle where the more outraged these things get the more you see them um and then the more uh the more people assume well these are these are the examples that i'm seeing i'm not seeing all the examples of you know white people being shot by the police i'm seeing examples of black people so then it becomes like well this is literally what you've seen with your own eyes um so i think there is i'm not you know when i sort of was criticizing reporters and journalists a moment ago i do think that there's a sort of organic thing that almost happened more on its own um in terms of this cycle but if you're just talking about it seems like you were prompting me to talk about some of the evidence more than just talk about yeah yeah like well yeah i i was but actually now that you mentioned it let's get to the evidence in a second let's talk that for one second i want to address just this point because it's um it's extremely important and in a way i think it shapes people's opinions even more than the data does you know as someone that has looked closely into this issue for years i know and i know you know that every year several dozen white people are killed by the police unarmed sometimes those are caught on camera and the ones that are caught on camera are every bit as galling to watch as the you know the alton sterling video or the george floyd video and i've talked on this podcast about tony timpa before who was a white man killed in dallas with a knee on the back of his upper back for 13 minutes and the cops are are joking um as they as they crush him into unconsciousness and death uh they're joking about him you know they're saying wake up tony you know go to school um so you know it's like every bit as disgusting to watch and most people i talk to still don't know about these videos there are many other videos of white people unarmed being killed by cops and and pretty brutal and unjustified ways now in tony tempus case do you think that was an intentional murder or do you think that they were being callous about the way that they were restraining him but didn't realize they were actually killing him i no i don't think i mean it's it's very hard to believe that when almost any cop puts a suspect in a hold that they are intending to murder i think usually they are neglecting the um the plausible consequences of their hold for a suspect that is clearly struggling to breathe and so it's it's a a you know a murder of neglect rather than of intention yeah yeah neglect um or negligence rather yeah or reckless like extreme negligence um yeah i think that's exactly right you know what to close the loop what happens is the media doesn't pick these things don't become national news events when the suspect happens to have white skin and that creates the misimpression that this all this kind of stuff only happens to black people right but let's let's also get into the let's get into the data a little bit you know black people comprise 13 of the american population but far more than 13 of those who get shot by the cops full stop and shot by the cops unarmed why isn't that smoking gun proof of the fact that there is a racial bias here yeah i think that's that gets to the heart of the confusion um so basically so that's basically looking at disproportionality relative to the population and that doesn't work for a number of reasons the most important is that we know that different groups have dangerous encounters with the police at wildly different rates so uh blacks and whites differ uh on you know the total number of violent crimes the total number of homicides or the rate of homicides the rate of resisting arrests and so forth so what you really need to do so in each of these creates a different number of situations where police officers legitimately need to use lethal force to protect their lives or the lives of someone else right um so the question is how how is is the question when we're looking for bias is whether or not police are using force disproportionately to those number of situations where they actually legitimately need to use force to defend themselves or someone else that's really what bias in the application of legal force would mean probably the best easiest measure of how often they need to use lethal force like that is how often police officers are actually murdered by criminals of each group now when you look at it in those terms i think something along the lines of 37 of the murderers of police officers are black but only about 24 of the suspects shot by police officers are black whereas for whites it's along lines of 42 of the murders of police officers are black more because there's more white people uh in the com in the country so that more white people murder police officers but but there's but they also are shot at a higher rate than that percentage so they're shot at around roughly i think roughly 46 of the suspects shot by police are black so what you see it when you measure it relative to a variable that's relevant to police bias namely the rate at which police actually need to use to defend themselves because they're at risk of being killed what you see is that whites are shot disproportionately to the rate at which for instance they murder black to the rate at which they murder police officers the point you just made is a very important one and it's um mathematically it's it's a point that probably you know a smart middle schooler could understand and certainly you know any you know most high schoolers could understand uh so it's not actually that complicated and we i think we implicitly understand it in almost every other context so for example you brought up this example i brought up this example about percent of our species is male born male and about fifty percent of our species is born female uh that that's the population base rate when you look at who gets killed by the cops it is um you know roughly 90 percent maybe even more male now on its face you could ask what the hell is up with that doesn't that prove that the cops are targeting men that there's a bias on the part of the cops well the reason no one talks about that is because it's because we all have a deep and intuitive and instinctive understanding that men are much more likely to be violent than women we all know this um and only a very small segment of highly overeducated people would even deny that there's some some like something made about this men are more likely to be criminals when the operator gets a 9-1-1 call saying somebody is a danger to those around them almost always it's a man so so the police are encountering men much more often even if they treat men and women precisely the same they are going to end up arresting shooting being shot by a lot more men than women so so people understand that the right base the right benchmark is not the us census in the case of men and women but that that observation holds true across the board right the police are not you know knocking on doors randomly likely it's not it's not like jury duty where it should be distributed randomly if they they're responding to 911 calls that is that is one possible benchmark as you say another perhaps even better benchmark is who is successfully shooting and killing cops because that that may be a maybe maybe the best proxy for how often a cop might reasonably need to use his or her gun so when you look at those benchmarks though the whole conversation changes yeah i think that's exactly right and i think i mean it shouldn't be surprising to people that um i mean in a sense like yes we all have this you know i think almost biological understanding that men are more dangerous we're literally larger probably from an evolutionary perspective probably in large part to be more dangerous so we can go out and wage war and our personalities are more aggressive on average than women so i think that's you know you're right that there's like there is something that's fundamentally more understandable about that um uh than racial differences but that at the same time it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that there would be racial differences because the you know the whole the like the whole premise of the black lives matter movement is in a sense based on the fact that that blacks have been disadvantaged in our society through slavery and jim crow and then subsequent uh you know destructive policies and that has a profound socio-economic effect and you know crime rates are strongly related to those um to you know socioeconomic status right uh like if you look at a city like boston i mean i i haven't looked around in other cities but i was recently looking to looking at all the faces of the people murdered in boston and they're almost all hardly any vice right there's like one or two white faces they're almost all black victims of murders and there's very little interracial murder like most the vast majority of people black people who are murdered are murdered by black people and the same for white people and uh i would assume for you know other races as well i haven't looked into that but so you know this like the it shouldn't be surprise it shouldn't be as surprising as it is to people uh given that their whole like the whole movement their whole is about sort of addressing these racial inequalities that these racial inequalities have had impacts on violent crime but anyways the other way in which my background assumptions have been really overturned in life is by reading a lot of thomas soul and basically i think a lot of people in our age are operating with this assumption that when you have different ethnic groups in a multi-ethnic society what would be normal or standard is for for them all to be to have the identical distribution uh the identical you know to have the you know perfect census number of doctors and lawyers and incarcerated people and nurses um i mean this that is one of the most deeply flawed assumptions that you could possibly have uh that that that educated people regularly have so like if you just completely don't think about black people and white people today right just think about quote unquote white people what we think of today as white people people descended from europe if you go back a hundred years ago and you look at the you know just how different the not only the crime statistics but the occupational distribution of irish versus italians versus polish immigrants versus immigrants from sweden you find massive disparities as the norm and this is true i mean this is true for every multi-ethnic society that's pretty much ever been studied ever since different ethnic groups started living amongst each other so so you know the background assumption that there's something normal there's something weird about disparity between groups that's something that has to that people have to sort of get over to yeah i think that's exactly right like even you would basically never expect there not to be a disparity in any meaningfully separate group it could be like a difference of you know it could be a different profession you know it could be a different like hobbies you're gonna find some disparities most likely in a along a variety of different factors the idea that we would ever find like no disparities that's that would be actually a very unusual what it would help what would have to be true for that to be true is we'd have to live in a mono culture right every group would have to have the exact same culture and again culture is another name for all of the values and desires and aspirations and habits that you grow up with so the example i use is as a as a black american i i grew up playing a lot of basketball and seeing basketball as a sort of culturally black sport which it is and then when you look at the nba it's three quarters black right it's completely dominated by black people as opposed to soccer was not really uh it was definitely a round in my youth but it was not something that black people played quite as much as we played basketball and i think as a result you see far fewer black americans um at the at the upper echelon of soccer and that's a matter of cultural choices i mean it's a little bit of a you know culture isn't quite a choice you're born into a culture and you inherit those values and beliefs but you know like we're not we're unsurprised to see disparities that align with different you know different cultures that's actually what it is to live in a multicultural society is to to expect those disparities and differences and then you can have the attitude to celebrate them you can have the attitude to hate them and want to close the borders you can react to it however you want but you can't deny the fact of cultural difference and the disparities they inevitably lead to you know all around this is one of the most amazing sort of intellectual mistakes i also read thomas sowell's uh i think it was discrimination disparities or something i can't remember the name of the book now but um it was just such a perfect explication of this point and it's still it still amazes me that we have people saying basically any disparity is evidence of discrimination like like people who have a lot of sway and they're not just like laughed out of the room um that idea is just so deeply wrong it's just one of the things i do sometimes still is just look google household income by ethnic group and you will see you know the rather large difference betw today between americans of french descent and americans of russian descent between you know nigerian americans earn much more money than haitian americans right you will just see disparity all the way down well the funny thing about that is like you look at how much uh asian americans outweigh earn white americans and you're like okay well if you believe that disparities are evidence of discrimination are you saying that our entire society is systematically racist against whites because that's i mean that seems to be what you have to be claiming if you're if you're going to point at every disparity and say but obviously that's preposterous right america is not systematically you know racist against white people the the the informed response to that would be to say there has to be a criterion that distinguishes mere disparities from disparities caused by discrimination and the way to do that would be to subject it to subject it to a kind of econometric analysis where you try to hold every relevant variable constant and if there's any disparity remaining you can you can attribute that to racism can so can you talk about the research uh that you've looked at which has attempted to do that in the case of of uh killings of black americans white americans etc yeah well really i was only able to find one study that attempted to do that and that's roland fryer's study coming out of harvard one of the top researchers in his field actually set out to prove that black lives matter movement's claims were true and it's the only study that really controls for the circumstances of shootings um and i think he coded something like 290 different variables for each shooting and then did an econometric analysis uh to see when you can basically when you compare apples to apples similar circumstances like um is someone shooting at a police officer and they're returning fire or is someone grabbing a candy bar off you know a store shelf and running downstairs like those are two radically different circumstances obviously you need to treat them uh differently and control when you're control when you're comparing two different racial groups uh you need to make sure you're comparing similar circumstances so that's the only i was actually unable to find any other study that did that um and you know his result he was surprised i think shocked by the results um as he recounted uh in a podcast with you that i was just listening to um but uh you know and basically it found that there was no there the police were not more you know readily using lethal violence against black people in fact if anything there was a very slight small uh effect the opposite way they were using more lethal violence against white people although it wasn't statistically significant there was another point that it was i thought would be so yeah the the the other result there were two big results in that paper one was the the what he called the most shocking result of his career which was that there was no bias against black people in shootings in fatal shootings or shootings in general it just there was nothing to be found there and if anything there was perhaps a small bias to be found in the counter-intuitive direction that is to say against white suspects the other result in that paper is that controlling for similar circumstances police were more likely to put their hands on a black suspect to rough up to punch or otherwise non-lethally harm a black suspect which is a an interesting result i mean you would at first glance you would think that those two things would be linked that either the police would both be biased against blacks in roughing up black suspects and shooting them or they wouldn't be biased in both but turning out to be biased in one and not the other it poses an interesting puzzle to which i have i mean i have theories about why i think that is true but in your memo you didn't really put forth any any theories about why you think that may be true but i'm curious if you have any thoughts yeah well i mean i thought roland fryer's explanation of that was not very convincing so my understanding and i'm curious if he still believes this because it because it seems problematic to me but my understanding is his interpretation of that was basically cops have this utility function for exhibiting racist behavior or something and but they but they're rational actors and they know if they go all the way and actually kill someone um that they'll end up in jail or fired or something so they basically they they um they basically um indulge in that racist behavior right up to that line um but that doesn't really explain why uh why there would be a difference in between blacks and whites suddenly at that at that line presumably that's always a concern for police officers when they're using lethal force um that they're always worried oh my you know if i do this wrong uh that they're gonna be uh consequences and it's uh he didn't really explain why they would have a different calculus for whites than blacks in that circumstance the the exclusion oh well i think i i actually think oh yeah go ahead what's your explanation well the explanation that makes more sense to me um and i and i i don't know if there was a way that roland fryer's um study controlled for this but basically you have police officers who are not necessarily engaged who not necessarily um indulging in racist you know proclivities but rather they have i think there probably is a level of bias they have ex personal experience um policing you know difficult neighborhoods um and they want to prevent a situation from getting out of control um police officers the more force they use up front i think they often believe that the less likely that a situation gets out of control the more quickly they can get a suspect under control in handcuffs uh in a position where they're not able to move like on the floor with you know with someone you know holding their arms or something like that on the ground the less likely there is less chance there is for the situation to spiral out of control so my guess is that there may be there may be bias there in the sense of pre-judging situations um in part based on a suspect's skin color or maybe just based on a neighborhood maybe just based on um other factors that might correlate with with racial factors like kinds of clothing that people are wearing and that kind of thing things that uh roland fryer wasn't necessarily able to control for and um that that's ultimately what's driving this that's not to say that i'm sure that there's some racist police officers i haven't but i just don't think that that's what's driving that i just don't see much evidence that that's what's driving that disparity but what do you think i'm really curious what your opinion is on that roland's analysis to be uh to be compelling and and intuitive intuitively true but i also think yours is true i mean multiple things could contribute to it so for me it's it's very easy for me to believe that uh to sort of picture two different kinds of cops one cop is is actually pretty much racist and um you know say he is in this small minority of cops who are really just kind of racist through and through and kind of somewhat sadist there are cops like this like there are cops that are drawn to the job because they have a sadist impulse and and that is a way for them to exercise their sadism in a and and sort of get paid to do it that that's a sad truth it you know the profession is a little bit of a bug like for people with authority fetishes so let's like you take that kind of cop you take that kind of cop um and they go to and by the way some of those cops are black some of those not all those cops are white um so you you take that you take a suspect that they categorize as a thug in their mind and uh they enjoy being you know wielding power over this person and they do it up to the point of of lethality because they don't want to become the next uh you know the next derek chauvin they don't want their life to be ruined so in the same way that someone who beats their wife a guy who beats his wife will beat her without leaving any bruises a cop like that will abuse the suspect in a way that is unlikely to blow back on him because the truth is that cops until recently and and still to an extent rarely get very rarely get held accountable for things that cannot be proven a body is you know if you kill you can't hide a body if you rough up a suspect without leaving bruises it's your word it's often your word against theirs and police never snitch on their own they almost never get punished for those kind of lower level abuses so the incentives really do break down of like you really won't get punished for a lot of this behavior and your life will be destroyed if you are the next white cop to kill a black person but not to kill a white person that will you know but i guess the question is why would it so i that that all makes sense to me that you have cops who who um maybe some some some minority of cops who enjoy sort of basically hurting people to some degree and then but they don't want to get in trouble but what i'm what i'm a little unclear of is if that's their proclivity then why are they stopping suddenly for black people but not stopping like at that line of okay i can't go past this line otherwise i'll get um in trouble and but not stopping for white people um so i guess the idea would be that either that they know that they'll get in more trouble if if uh but but then that doesn't but oh not not just more trouble they may not get in trouble at all you know like like we said earlier when a white unarmed person gets killed by a cop it's not really considered national news when a black unarmed person gets killed by a cop it's news for years than it's in the history books and cops know that they know it in their bones but okay so this this explanation is interesting but it's it's different from roland pryor's explanation because roland fryer's explanation was more like these are opportunistic racists and you're saying these are opportunistic statists um who who are you know and i guess they can they can both go together um yeah so my guess is like there's opportunistic sadists there's opportunistic racists and then there's also what you described which is to say cops that are neither racist nor sadist they are just normal cops doing a very dirty and tough job a job where they're putting their life on the line and they can't afford to be politically correct about their judgments of people if they get a hunch i mean again if you think this is all callous talk go look up a video of cops getting i would call it sucker shot because it's like a sucker punch someone that seems like the most peaceful person in the world one second and then less than a second later is shooting the cop to death there are plenty of these videos on youtube this is the job that cops have to do that keeps you and me safe that's that's the cold hard truth of the subject and it's one thing to sit in judgment from afar it's a whole nother thing for that to be your job and so there's a lot of cops in that position they they cannot afford to be politically correct or to worry about racial sensitivities if they feel like they feel like they see a bulge in the pants that could be a gun or a hostile look in the eyes that could be that that could be the difference between life and death and i think those cops are still are are they maybe they they will ha they have whatever facility with their hands that they do like some of them are going to be a black belt in jiu-jitsu like anthony barksdale who i had on my podcast most of them are not and they're going to do what they can to de-escalate the situation non-lethally so i think what makes me dissatisfied with roland fryer's analysis is that there's he's not providing anything to to distinguish between his version of these racist cops with their utility functions and my version with these maybe biased cops uh but not racist cops not acting out of racial animosity so um he he might say i don't know what he would say but one thing i would say is the difference between racism and bias against black people in this context may just be a distinction without a difference i mean yeah it's interesting is it is it a distinction without a difference so uh there's a there was an idea it was just having it's it's lost me but i mean i think there is a so do you think that there's no difference like if you're a cop and you've you've been in the you know you've been basically so bias can be uh rational in a sense right if you know that um people in a certain where wearing certain kind of clothing are more likely to be gang members and carrying guns and so you go and you pat them down without them actually seeing them do anything illegal that's not um that's not irrational it might be something that we want to discourage as a society i don't know um i could see both both directions on that but it's not but it's not based on uh hatred it's based on your your experience of that those that people wearing that kind of clothing being more likely to carry guns um you know i'm just using that as uh to move it away from race for one second um because i think it does make a difference whether people are acting out of racial animosity uh versus acting out of a a subtle understanding of different statistical probabilities basically do you think that that's is that a distinction without a difference no i think i think that's i i so i guess i'm of two minds about it on the one hand i think there are different things i think um you know there are people that are foaming at the mouth about the jews running the media or something crazy who've never met a jew in their whole life right like it can't be anything rational that's behind that bigotry it's just pure it's not like they they got beat up it's not like they got mugged by a jew once and and and reacted to that overreacted to that right it's just like pure invention right and so there are racists like that racist of pure myth and invention and then there's you know there's someone who got mugged by a black person and only after that overreacted to that by you know developing an an overwrought and an er you know outsized fear of of black people in general right those are different things those are different kinds of people so i and and and what's more there's there's the other case of of a smart cop who who has a who's been working in a neighborhood for years and makes informed and educated guesses based on superficial characteristics and those guesses may be right much of the time they might be they might they might actually be very useful right he's acting on his intuitions he's not acting like a rookie he's acting like someone who actually knows uh what criminals tend to look like around here right and i can't dismiss you you can't really dismiss that knowledge unless you are from where he's from it's like what are you gonna say he's wrong you don't you're not even from there right like how could you know um so i do think those are different things on the flip side i would say they don't feel that different if you're the one being discriminated against wrongly right if you're one of the cops wrong guesses where you're just a black guy minding your own business but you fit the profile it doesn't it doesn't really matter to it tends to not matter to your psychology whether the cop is a racist of pure invention or a racist or or rather sorry like a statistical discriminator that's making an informed guess it it tends to piss you off a lot uh the the sort of implicit false accusation and the road rage that kind of results from being falsely accused it tends to land in your psyche the same way yeah oh i remember the point that i wanted to make which is that um you know so you you know you may be right that that's the that ultimately doesn't matter but one of the reasons why i find rowan fryer's um explanation a little bit less convincing is that i think the statistics show that uh black police officers are just as likely to have you know basically just as likely to shoot maybe even more likely to shoot black suspects and if it was really racism driving that distinct that those differentials um that you know are and and more likely also to to lay hands on black suspects it was really racism um that was driving those you you'd expect to see it with black police off you'd expect to not see it with black police officers and see it with white police officers and i think i haven't actually looked into this um specifically but i think that the data shows the opposite um which is more compelling to me for a something that's maybe biased but not uh motivated by racial animosity i mean i i've actually had the experience of being racially profiled for a while because i was a hippie and i had a beard uh down to here and i really looked very distinctly like you know i'm i'm um you know i'm jewish and uh and i think with my beard down to here i looked distinctly like a like a a muslim and whenever i would get on the plane i was always pulled off but for out of the security line for extra searches and they would pat me down and they'd go through uh and then as soon as i cut my beard that disappeared um and obviously it's totally different it's totally different than uh then if you're um you know if you're compared to being a black person in american society especially a poor black person who's struggling to make their way and has is receiving all these messages about uh and and personal experiences about racism but um i think that a lot of it does have to do with the messaging that you're getting um one of the things that i that i think of is like when all these sort of like white liberals are talking incessantly about how racist white people are like as a black person how could you you know how could you not listen to them and trust them and believe that um you know all the all you know all their white peers are just walking around with this intense racial animosity all the time or you know that's seeping out and if you did believe that how could you not then uh let that color every other interaction you have with um white people for me that it's almost impossible for me to imagine like being able to work in a professional environment if i believed that everyone was out to get me or there was like this sort of subtle like hatred for me that was seeping through and it's like there's nothing i can imagine that would be more sort of poisonous to my my success or my well-being than believing that yeah you know one thing i've noticed is that black people who grow up around only other black people um in like predominantly or only black environments sometimes have really like black people who truly don't can't say they have a good white friend right um their perceptions of white people are entirely what they're getting from whatever media they're consuming or from rumors essentially it's like i sometimes you see people that they are suspicious of you know even white and met them like white people in general thinking that all white people are racist um whereas a black person like me that grew up around a lot of white people the natural way like face to face becoming friends my perception of of you know as you say white liberals is that they're you know among the least racist against black people on earth at least in the classical sort of old-fashioned bigot of of um there may be more of the condescension and lowering standards and you can't expect black people to you know play the game by the same rules as white people a kind of bigotry of low expectations but there is truly like the the ghost of old-fashioned racism has truly been exercised from from the white liberal mind and and uh and um i think there's no reason not not to be honest about that um i i do want to talk about well the funny thing about that is they they'll then go on about how racist they are and if you if you're hearing these people who i i agree i think that they're i mean apart from the bigotry of low expectations i think that they really have exercised all this racism out of their bodies but then they're talking constantly about how racist they are how could you not believe that because you can't step into their minds right you just but anyways go ahead yeah no so i think i think people that don't actually grow up around those people sometimes believe their claims about and then carry that oh yeah they carry that paranoia and they're they're they're in an environment where the white people around them are not at all racist but but you're worried that there are that they are because of what they've told you yeah they're literally telling you over and over again how racist they are and apologizing for it but but also reaffirming it so um let's talk about the other the other half of your argument in your memo was that black lives matter the rhetoric around black lives matter the anti-police rhetoric um the entire cultural transformation revolution of you know i mean it's it's it can be almost hard to remember how totalizing this was in in 2020 um but it was i mean just like put yourself back in in that in that moment of it's like it's impossible to go a single day without talking about blm right it's it's every article it's every face silence is violent book post it's every instagram post every instagram user with a black square it's every company circulating in an internal memo it's that's right it's people texting you to ask why you haven't posted anything on instagram not why not why you have have posted some anti-blm stuff people simply texting you to ask why you haven't posted anything right to inquire in an accusatory sense as to your silence that's that's where we were so your your argument and the argument of many other people has been that that environment created a situation where the police pulled back they stopped proactive policing they stopped going up to the person that looked sketchy to them and asking for their id and perhaps finding an illegal gun that they had which led to an arrest which ended up preventing a murder right and the net result of that was that the murder rate spiked you can't argue with the fact that the murder rate spiked and and the spike is directly it starts pretty much the day george floyd is killed right there's you know the chart looks like this for years yeah and then george floyd is killed and it looks like this yeah well there's another spike a few years earlier in the earlier blm flareup but yeah that's right so your argument is that the rhetoric and the environment that resulted from black lives matter um created thousands of excess homicides that fell almost totally on black people and and so blm i i suppose you could say indirectly but blm caused indirectly the deaths of thousands of black people that otherwise would be alive today can you can you flesh that out um yeah i mean there's i feel like you did a pretty good job of it um there's a bunch of studies uh mostly looking at this um you know the timing of the spikes in the murder rate and looking for alternative explanations uh and the first after the ferguson effect so i guess there's two separate uh there's like the ferguson effect and the minneapolis effect and both go by different names uh depending on who's talking about them but basically the first time they were looking at other things like maybe this is about heroin or something like that but none of the other explanations for why there was a sudden spike uh right after ferguson um really made that much sense and i think that's another one where roland fryer's research was really the best because he was able to take advantage of the fact that there were different in in different cities um there were different police shootings that caused an uproar at different times and correlate the uproar or the lack of uproar about the around shootings with those time periods in those cities and really connect it um so it wasn't just like in this case of um minneapolis effect after george floyd it was more of like almost like a national thing that was happening all throughout the whole country simultaneously but in the earlier case it was more there was some more regional stuff in city and city and what he found was that um uh in cities that where the the justice department was doing a uh investigation of the police department um if there had been like a highly publicized uh shooting that would result in this dramatically higher murder rate following that but if there hadn't been a highly publicized shooting there wouldn't be a increased murder rate so that really connects it specifically to the black lives matter organizing protesting um and promoting this this falsehood that police are basically hunting black people or at least bias toward shooting them um with the uh the the evidence i think just sort of builds when exactly the same thing happens in minneapolis and again the timing is like is is sort of perfect like at the beginning of the lockdowns you saw sort of violent crime declining actually or staying roughly sort of constant um as there are fewer people out on the street and then as soon as george floyd dies you see this huge spike um in violent crime um just as police are reporting themselves that they're you know oftentimes less likely to be willing to go out and confront suspects engage suspects uh we're talking about defunding the police all this kind of stuff um so it really is it builds a very clear uh picture and i don't know of any alternative theory that can capture the the pattern of spiking homicides uh the timing of them how they've happened in different cities and so forth and and the the the homicide rates are really pretty dramatically higher so i think before before these the alignments uh homicide spikes we had like i think there was around 8 000 uh black people were being murdered each year and now it's closer to 10 000 so i'd have to go back and check those statistics more carefully uh but i do know that you know for the last few years it's been reporter and just around ten thousand people a little bit over ten thousand i think last uh right after george floyd was killed so it's just i mean that the number of people who are who are being killed um is just astronomical and when you compare that to the number of unarmed people who are killed by police right you've got about roughly 18 unarmed black people killed by police each year obviously every year is a little different and like somewhere in the neighborhood of 26 unarmed white people and thousands of black people being murdered by criminals in their own neighborhoods uh ten thousand every single year and and maybe somewhere in the range of like you know an extra thousand as a result of police pullback over the last you know basically since blm started so it is pretty sobering and pretty disturbing it is sobering it's it disturbs me a lot because i fear i mean there there are i fear there are literally millions of people in this country who are totally psychologically normally people normal people good people who would hear the last three minutes four minutes of our conversation and just think we were total nut jobs it's like really these guys think that blm caused the murder rate to go up blm caused more black people to die than are killed by the police i mean that like the the this set of facts is like yeah they're i mean there's so many ways people are confused that they they would there's so many confused reasons people would think that you and i are crazy for taking that statement seriously i mean the first one is people have crazy innumerate and incorrect beliefs about how many black people have how many unarmed black people get killed by the cops and this is correlated with politics the fox news watchers um think think it's quite low and they're correct um the very liberal people you know are are um often think that a thousand people or more unarmed black people are more get yeah get killed every year because people you know people aren't in the weeds on this they're taking their cues from their friends and their social media feeds um and and just to be fair there's there's a you know if you if you ask the fox news watchers how many like illegal immigrant homicides there are a year i'm i bet my life their guess is going to be way higher than the true number right so there are different issues on which people on each side have totally warped ideas this is not a partisan point this is just to say uh so it's like that's the first thing people don't understand how think the police few unarmed black people and unarmed americans in general get killed by the cops every year the second link is that people don't a lot of people think the police have nothing to do with the homicide rate right like or they they seem to believe that police behavior police morale police practices has no relationship to the homicide rate like the nypd can do they could behave any kind of way they could work half as many hours they could work twice as many hours and the new york homicide rate would stay exactly the same or it would fluctuate for reasons totally unrelated to the nypd's behavior i don't think i don't think the average democrat voter thinks that right by the way this is a very fringe belief but it seems like basically the entire journalistic class on the left is pretending to believe this i know every every elite journalist living in a low crime neighborhood pretends to believe this working class black people do not believe this nor do working class white people um but this seems to be again a widely subscribed belief among overeducated people right this is like that that would be like a mainstream belief at like columbia where i went for for instance so there's that sure and um and so you combine it all and people think that someone like you especially because your skin happens to be white is both crazy and racist to say that blm has has likely caused an excess of maybe 2500 maybe even 10 000 um um murders and um and it's it's very hard to to knock down all of the layers of ignorance to to sound less crazy yeah i mean it is one of the interesting things like you're only allowed to talk about black lives matter as a white person if you're supporting it um otherwise you're racist or at best uh a ignorant clown kind of like uh you know clueless um about your own racism or something like that but i mean but it's sort of like a remarkable position to have that you're only allowed to talk about these things if you support blm because so many black people don't support blm and there's so many black intellectuals and researchers who've um who are horrified by what blm is doing but as a white person you're only allowed to agree agree with the the black uh the part of the black community that supports blm you're not allowed to sort of like you know agree with thomas solo or agree with you know your criticisms it's it's really sort of amazing and by having by having that belief and by you know and by and by the way i think it's largely white people who are enforcing that um like it certainly was white people who were enforcing it at thompson reuters all the people who came out and really dug into me uh were white as far as i can remember or maybe asian white or asian interestingly um but it's like how can we possibly as a society have honest conversations when by default every single white person which still includes most of the people in power have to adopt one you know one perspective um whereas anyone who you know any white person who doesn't adopt that perspective it will immediately be sort of ejected from the the conversation and their jobs and cancelled and you know when you when you still do have so many white people running these media organizations that creates an environment where you can't possibly sort of report honestly or have an honest conversation about anything it's really pretty disturbing no that that is right i mean it reminds me a little bit of uh an article several months ago on barry weiss's sub stack common sense where they were talking about hollywood news sorry hollywood writers rooms and it turned you know one of the observations someone made is that white people are so afraid to talk to do anything that's not woke because the consequences for them are huge that it ends up being mostly the black writers that are courageous is not enough to ever push the boundaries it's like the black writers are the ones that are trying to push the boundaries and do um sort of not woke stuff and and it's the white writers that are terrified just because you know black people as as my friend camille foster says we have the melanin force field which deflects an accusation of racism um so yeah no it it is a problem uh i wanna i wanna talk a little bit about um you know like what is the remedy here for this in your in your memo you say that identify basically why you know you ask a question why is it that we've gotten this so horribly horribly wrong like what is it and you i definitely ignorance of of rudimentary facts which is why um you know pretty much the left has gotten this particular question the link between race racial bias and police killings of blacks the the second and third order consequences of anti-police rhetoric on the homicide rate and specifically the black homicide rate why is it that we've gotten this so wrong and you say ignorance of facts um i want i wanted to speak dispute that with you because i think the ignorance you know i i think unfortunately the truth is that we people on all sides are ignorant of all kinds of facts and we are driven much less by at least most people by assessing facts and and which facts we know uh we're driven far more by just belonging to a tribe and for white people in particular not being called racist i i think that for many white liberals what's going through their head when they read your memo has it's like the you you basically run the part of their brain that engages with numbers is completely switched off right it's like you're talking about people at reuters none of them have an issue understanding your argument about the census and about what's the proper benchmark right like i said that's middle school statistics at most high school they all get that the problem is the part of their brain that deals with that is completely shut off because uh most most of us are very emotional creatures and guilt and the possibility of ostracism is a thousand times more powerful than facts for many people so when they see that you're making a cr you're a white guy making a criticism of blm they know they have two options one is to destroy you and to continue to be in esteem within their community and the other option is to not destroy you they've worked for you and to themselves be labeled a racist as a result and therefore cast out of their society and everything or you know like and to have some of their friends hate them and maybe lose friends and to maybe lose relationships and given that choice they choose option one before your arguments even reach the part of their brain that deals with math yeah i i mean i i think i agree with you to a large degree i mean i don't see these as mutually contradictory i mean i think the you're describing in a sense why they're so ignorant and part of the reason is because their their media sources are part of these tribes as they are themselves and so their media sources aren't reporting basic facts to them like their media sources aren't reporting there are 10 000 people black people murdered each year but only about 18 uh unarmed black people killed by police um and when they're covering the black lives matter movement but i completely agree with you i think that you know human beings are tribal animals uh the tribes are bound together by these like pseudo-religious ideologies um and to go against the religion of your tribe is basically to be ejected and kicked out of your tribe and to do that in our sort of i see i tend to see all these things in terms of evolutionary perspective but to do that in an evolutionary perspective to be ejected from your tribe meant you know probably certain deaths so people are extremely tribal and they're you know i think the research really shows that the people capable of shutting off their brains completely um when it comes to their tribal beliefs and i think it's just sort of an unfortunate accident historical accident almost that the the liberal tribe tribal belief system has adopted um this incredibly anti-reality perspective of specifically about uh policing police being biased towards shooting black people because and it's probably driven by the fact by a genuine you know liberal interest and fairness and equality and compassion for other human beings and the horrific history of you know you know slavery in the united states and jim crow in the united states and sort of like a genuine so i think that's probably what drove that belief system into the liberal identity uh the liberal you know ideology but now but now it's like it's completely tribal and no one can ever no one can ever challenge it um one of the things that you point out uh well let me put it this way actually one of the one of the best ways to counteract your own tribal false beliefs is when you have so much skin in the game that you have to get the answer right for your own safety right if your own safety depends on the answer to some question you suddenly become extremely good at getting the right answer right and all of the tribal stuff goes you suddenly find your mind out of the window this is why if all of your money is being bet on whether some stock is going to go up and is far more clear about an objective and not influenced by um by trendiness and by than if you're betting your friends money right this is true when you have skin in the game everything changes in including that so um you know one of the things you pointed out which i think is really pernicious is that all all of the people so outside of the activist class right the ideologues and even some many of them actually all of the journalists and elites that linked arms with the activists and promoted the defund the police narrative um they did not live in almost 201 they did not live in the neighborhoods that have seen the massive spike in homicide and other crimes they don't live in those places those places might as well not exist as far as their immediate experience is concerned and that is a very big that is a very big problem um i've said this many times on the podcast before when gallup pulled black americans in 2020 during the the height of everything and asked the question do you want more police in your neighborhood less police and the breakthrough neighborhood or the same police presence in your neighborhood sound of the answer from our most respected polling organization of black americans was 20 said they wanted more police in their neighborhood 20 said they wanted less police in their neighborhood and sixty percent said they wanted the same so that means combined eighty percent said they wanted yeah the same or more that left only one in five black people agreeing with black lives matter's take on police presence in general that's a minority right that's on its own that tells you yeah you know a lot of the people demanding more police in this neighborhood including the people that have forced cities to reverse their decisions on defunding and dismantling police such as in minneapolis have been poor black residents of crime high crime neighborhoods the one who directly have skin in the game on what the crime rate is not you and me not elite journalists at the new york times or vox um not you know the high profile activists that have moved out of those communities into you know nice houses in low crime neighborhoods none of them have had skin in the game on on those issues so it cost them nothing to say defund the police it cost them nothing yeah that's i think that's exactly right and um i often think of my hometown newton where there's basically no murders i mean most years probably no murders um very wealthy town but i just imagine like you know just a couple you know just a town over you you've got like dozens of murders each year and if that was happening in my hometown i think the people there would be calling for police on every single street you know on every single corner and they would be telling the police make sure you pat down every kid who comes by because i don't want my kid to be the one who's murdered who's one of these dozens of murders in our town each year right but those are the i mean in you know a place like newton you've got you know these very powerful people very very successful careers these are the kinds of places where our journalists are living and i think if the the violence was happening in their neighborhoods um and and the executives you know at these news agencies if the violence was happening in their neighborhoods and threatening their children it would be a totally different story yeah okay so final question and this will seem like a total curveball given our entire conversation is there anything good you can say about the effects of the black lives matter movement is there any good they have done for instance i'm a big proponent i'm super in favor of like uh body cams i think that's a a great idea um so some of the some of the things that you've suggested in your own writing i think are good ideas i mean to be honest though i think that i think that they've been the movement there's not that much good to say in my opinion and maybe i differ from you a little bit in that regard like i think that the that even to the extent that they're raising these issues they're uh they're they're raising the issue of how do how should our society um try to remedy you know years of hundreds of years of slavery and jim crow and all this kind of stuff but they're raising it in the most counterproductive way possible um you know they're raising it as um by making it in by pretending and forcing everyone to pretend that the challenges of black communities are because of ongoing overt racism by white people and i think that racism has been devastating and i think that the biggest challenge is that the black communities are you know the black communities are facing like a lot of other black people are not over racism i'm sure there's some levels of that overt racism from white people uh harms black people but i do not think those are the mean i do not think that that's the main thing holding any black person back in this country today um and historically certainly uh historic historically you know i think that's what's holding a lot of black people back um because families were destroyed and communities were destroyed through years of this kind of oppression but i think the black community i think the black lives matter movement is focusing the entire discussion on ongoing racism systemic institutional racism happening today and i think that that's almost entirely uh a misdirection of what a misunderstanding of what the challenges are and i know that i'm really not allowed to say that as a white person but you know there's i again it's like i there's a lot of other black there's a lot of black researchers and people who are making that point and i agree with them i think they're they have the better part of the argument no i think i think we've let what the academics would call standpoint epistemology see far too into our consciousness like you know the notion that you as a white guy would have to apologize for having an opinion about this that is you know very researched is ridiculous um you may be wrong maybe you're right or wrong but it's got nothing to do with your skin color uh you know like as a black person yeah let's say i did a lot of research about the opioid crisis which you know a lot of which has hit like you know with the white middle class in the white lower class do i not get to have an opinion on the causes and and the solutions because of my skin color no no one would accept that logic in any other in any in any other scenario you know as for answering my own question um the the one thing i can really say that i would put on the on the positive ledger line of the blm movement is that before the blm movement before 2013 when it or 2014 when it really began to be big um there was a troubling norm of police simply not getting punished for anything no matter how bad that actually really was the status quo like it you would have to search like a needle in a haystack to see an example of a cop going to prison um for anything that's you know killing white black hispanic asian purple it doesn't matter what the abuse was the norm was was non-punishment and that that's a dysfunctional incentive structure for any group of people to be working under whether you're talking about cops or surgeons or you know anything where malpractice can lead to death so i put on the positive ledger line that that's no longer the case cops do get misbehaved punished now um for beer and and basically the other the previous 90 minutes of our discussion is all stacked on the uh the the ledger line of the harm that that blm has caused to the black community and to to the nation at large so i try to be to always be fair in in giving credit where credit is due and that's why i asked that question um and i would agree with you you know something like universal body cams is a is is really a no-brainer not only because it protects suspects but also because it protects cops i mean good cops should want universal body cams because what better way to prove that you didn't actually harm a suspect than to have the whole interaction on camera right you should have nothing to hide so you know discussions like that were totally rocket fueled by blm and that's all to the good unfortunately there is you know the whole rest of our conversation testifies to the negative consequences which supporters of the movement have really failed to reckon with honestly and well and which where would you say the overall if you had to weight the good and the bad do you think that the do you think the bad outweighs the good of the of the blm movement yeah i mean like so we have more focus on you know with body cams and more police accountability but we also have uh i don't know if you agree with me about this focus on uh you know maybe misplaced focused on on ongoing racism as a number one challenge that black people face and we have these lies about police shooting um you know police bias which where do you think the if you had to add it all up i i hesitate to shoot from the hip on an answer like on on a question that big but you know i guess it's very tough to see how the pros could add up to several thousand lives lost and i think it's it's very easy to underweight the value of those lives because the media literally does like no one talks about the like quite literally no one i know could tell you the name of a two-year-old or three-year-old black child killed by a stray bullet in chicago this year even though it happens every year right and there's some link between that child dying and police behavior and and blm rhetoric like there is a plausible link there it's it's now i think beyond dispute um and i don't know anyone who could tell you the name of of of such a of such a child i know a lot of people who could tell you the name george floyd or brianna taylor all to know though sterling and i'm not saying they shouldn't or tamir rice i'm not saying they shouldn't use names they should know those names um but what i'm arguing is that we in practice we actually do undervalue certain black lives which is to say those black lives that are taken by other black people by black criminals and we we underweight those people in our moral analysis of the time and and of these policies and so so that that's you know i i'm not i can't really do a a full omniscient moral accounting of the pros and the cons but i can say we really we really horribly underweight the cons on on the ledger sheet i mean and it's not just the people who are actually killed i mean for every person who's killed there's a hundred traumatized kids a hundred kids who you hear about that and think wow that that could be me that's you know i maybe don't expect to live that long or you know like transforms their view of their world and how they should go about achieving success in this world right it's like it's it seems like it's it's just potentially just totally devastating to the communities even the people who survive in those communities um where those killings are happening and that's yeah a lot a lot of kids have ptsd from growing up in the hood that is a fact and how can you how can you know how can you struggle and deserve to you know it's a struggle for everyone to be successful but when you when you believe that you're you know you're you know i i don't think anyone can get to these you know top level schools and stuff easily but when you're dealt with that much disadvantage and you you're you're worried about surviving every day um and you're also told that the entire society is stacked against you and working against you i mean it's just hard to imagine how anyone uh succeeds in that environment so listen we have come to the end of our conversation this was um this was really great zack and i i really commend you for your bravery for you know it is not easy to have a good job and a cushy position at that job and to see something true in the world that you know is going to blow back on you um in the short term at least in a horribly negative way and you know you describe in your memo talking for a long time with your wife about whether you should even publish this and what it what it means for your family and your prospects i mean this is the kind of thing that these are the kind of kinds of moments that you know i i actually i heard ilya shapiro i i hope i'm pronouncing his name right recently who who kind of got cancelled from his position at georgetown over a poorly phrased tweet um he said that you know next to his i think he said next to his mother dying it was the worst day of his life when he realized that he was being cancelled um yeah so that you know this is not something to minimize you know so you know when people will people will uh minimize the fact that you got fired uh at a news organization for reporting something reporting a failure of news reporting basically people will minimize oh he he just lost a job you know he's fine look he's on coleman's podcast he'll he has a sub stack he'll he'll find his footing and i and i think you will you'll you'll i hope that you'll find your footing precisely because um people like me and barry and hopefully my listeners will uh support you and and you know they're a community of people that will essentially call out your bravery and reward it because otherwise you know the incentives of the system don't change right um but you know it's it's nothing it's really nothing to minimize what what they did to you you know when there's a recession and everyone lose their jobs no you know no one is talking about how a job doesn't matter then right like everyone thinks that 2008 financial crisis is a huge deal but will minimize it when a person loses their job in a cancellation type situation so i commend your bravery and i hope that my listeners support you and i would ask that you can tell ask them you know tell them where they can support you oh yeah so you can find my sub stack at kriegerman.subscribe.com so k-r-i-e-g-m-a-n and you can find um so i actually have a a legal case against thomson reuters um you can find a ways to contribute there um [Music] which you know it it's hard to find a legal case harder to fund a legal case when you're unemployed so any contributions are welcome but i you know and i would minimize a little bit the uh i think that you know in all these cancel culture situations you know the people who are canceled suffer but i think the people who are really suffering are the people who need these conversations to happen and you know i can go out and find another job probably and um and and we'll be okay um but that's that's who i think the real the people who really carry that burden all right zach but thanks for having me on i appreciate it yeah absolutely yeah it's been a pleasure if you appreciate the work i do the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website colemanhughes.org and to subscribe to my youtube channel so you'll never miss my new content as always thanks for your support [Music] you

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 50,442

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Id: YRJCFrC65gU

Length: 101min 49sec (6109 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022