Coleman Hughes @ Lafayette, "Anti Racism and Humanism, Two Competing Visions"

[Music] all right good evening everyone my name is saeed malamin i'm student coordinator for the mill series tonight we welcome coleman hughes coleman is a student of philosophy at columbia university who has since mid-2018 become an emerging critical voice and race matters in the united states when his first article for colette was published since then he has written a great deal more for collette and has been featured on several podcasts like sam harris's show and the reuben report tonight he will be speaking on race in america please join me in welcoming colman hughes [Applause] thank you so much for having me it's real it's an honor to be here at lafayette for the mill series i have to apologize in advance i uh i have a cold i woke up yesterday with an itch in my throat that has since blossomed into a full-blown experience so if i seem low energy it's not you it's me okay so when russia waged its social media campaign to destabilize american politics in 2016 they targeted one demographic group more than any other it could have been democrats or republicans it wasn't wasn't antifa wasn't the alt-right it wasn't christians it wasn't muslims it was black people now i think this is no accident i think race is arguably america's most divisive issue and i think our foreign enemies know that but i doubt i need to persuade you that the american public is divided on race you need only turn on the news or more likely check social media to see the latest scandal last week it was jesse smallett's fabricated hate crime a week before it was governor ralph northam's yearbook photo depicting one man in blackface and another in a kkk costume a few weeks earlier was the weatherman who got tongue tied on air and seemed to utter a racial slur sometimes the scandals are longer they last months or years as with the case of the black lives matter versus all lives matter debacle either way the pattern is the same some event with with racial overtones occurs one half of the political spectrum and it varies has a meltdown and the other half has an equal and opposite meltdown both sides think each other are completely crazy but i'm not going to discuss these specific scandals today instead i'm going to present what i believe is the fundamental disagreement that's playing itself out in our culture over and over again in microcosm at bottom i think we're experiencing a clash between two visions two different ways of orienting yourself philosophically towards the issue of race and i should note here that i'm drawing heavily on the work of a critical race theorist named gary peller who i have a lot of disagreements with but who is who has been more useful than anyone i know in drawing the the distinction between these two visions the verse first vision is what i call the humanist vision this is the vision held by martin luther king byrd rustin a philip randolph and other civil rights leaders and it's advocated today by writers like thomas sowell john mcwhorter glenn lowry adolph reed and many more the central claim of the humanist vision is that racism primarily should be understood as the opposite of reason attributing meaning to the amount of melanin in someone's skin is a kind of logical error in this in this vision therefore it's equally irrational to hate all black people to hate all white people or all asians these are all seen as variations of the same mistake to be prejudiced against anyone because of their color is to have an irrational belief and to discriminate against a person for that reason is to act out your own irrationality so that's the first vision the second vision is what i call the anti-racist vision this was the vision held by malcolm x stokely carmichael and the black power movement and it's the vision articulated today by ta-nehisi coates ibram kendi nicole hannah jones and many others the fundamental principle of the anti-racist vision is that the meaning of racism is based in the historical power relations of a particular society or a particular country in this vision your skin color is not meaningless rather it's injected with meaning by history and by the particular history of the society you live in and because racial power relations in american history have been asymmetrical it's been almost entirely white suppressing blacks therefore the meaning of racism today is also asymmetrical which is to say that a black person hating white people is not the same as a white person hating black people because you can't abstract away from american history and speak of racism as if it had a kind of universal or objective meaning the best analogy i can think of to capture the difference between these two visions and it is a fundamental difference uh is weight before you ever took a physics class you probably assumed like most people that every object has a fixed objective weight and measured in pounds or kilograms that didn't change based on where that object is located in the universe then you took intro physics and learned that there's no such thing as the objective weight of an object it's a meaningless question to ask rather objects only have a weight in virtue of the particular planet they're on and the amount of gravity on that planet what they do have is an objective mass that doesn't change wherever right so that's that's an analogy for the humanist vision racism is a departure from neutral reason it's an objective concept like mass for the anti-racist vision the meaning of racism is embedded in the history of a particular society much like an object's weight is grounded in the amount of gravity on a particular planet so uh let me give a concrete example of a example of each vision from famous thinkers in each tradition martin luther king said black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy and god is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men god is interested in the freedom of the whole human race unquote notice the ethical symmetry here between white racism and black racism king obviously would never deny that the power of white racism had absolutely dwarfed the power of black racism in american society that goes without saying but both kinds of racism are equally irrational in in the sense that they depart from the humanist ethic right and now an example from uh the most famous living thinker in the anti-racist tradition tonahasi coates now here coates is commenting on the ethics of gentrification the process by which white people enter an all or mostly black neighborhood change the culture change the mix of businesses etc uh it'll probably come as no surprise that coates believes gentrification is evil a manifestation of white supremacy i think the exact quote is but a more pleasing name for for white supremacy but i'd like to i'd like you to pay attention to why he believes this right here's what he says quote the notion that washington dc should remain black has always struck me as really bizarre very little in america ever stays anything change is the nature of things it only makes sense if you buy that black people are owed something that is since we never got anything for slavery jim crow redlining blockbusting segregation housing and job discrimination we at least deserve the stability of neighborhoods and cities we can call home unquote so this is the anti-racist vision in its purest form notice the thinking here right but for the history of white racism he argues it would be crazy to single out black people for special treatment right instead the rationale for singling us out for special treatment is precisely the fact that we used to get singled out for especially bad treatment this shows you the degree to which history and the contingent history of american society is a central principle of the anti-racist vision so now that i've explained the fundamental difference between the two visions i want to caution against a few misunderstandings first the difference between humanist vision and the anti-racist vision ultimately has nothing to do with political left and right or with economics in the humanist tradition you have left-wing socialists like bayern rustin was a communist in his early days adolf reed another socialist but you also have free market conservatives like thomas sowell uh likewise in the anti-racist tradition there are left-wing progressives like tanahasi coates and social conservatives like malcolm x in his early days or elijah muhammad secondly i've been speaking as if there's a perfectly clear boundary between these two visions such that everyone falls on one side or the other but as is usually the case it's it's not quite that simple it's less of a binary and more of a spectrum but it's still it's a spectrum with two very powerful centers of gravity in the same way that you can identify black and white on a color wheel without being able to identify the exact row of pixels that separates one from the other you can identify the the basic structure of the two visions without being able to place every person into one camp or the other and thirdly these visions are generally held implicitly rather than explicitly by which i mean many people hold the humanist vision as a kind of gut feeling but couldn't really tell you its principles likewise many people hold the anti-racist vision as a kind of gut feeling but couldn't state its principles principles explicitly the assumptions of each vision are almost never articulated in our national race debate yet this doesn't make the visions any less powerful in fact just the opposite it's precisely the fact that the assumptions are never made explicit that makes the vision seem so obvious to those who hold them and and so obviously wrong to those who don't so till now i've been i've been presenting a kind of neutral analysis of both visions but i'm going to come out of hiding here and say that i am a partisan on behalf of the humanist vision i think the anti-racist vision is a disaster intellectually politically and ethically and unfortunately it seems to be on the rise if you doubt that it's on the rise consider this the quote excuse me the quote from ta-nehisi coates that i gave you earlier that came from an addendum to his essay the case for reparations that essay many of you will probably know was published five years ago it was a kind of long-form plea for americans to grapple with the role of slavery jim crow redlining in the creation of the racial wealth gap the staggering racial wealth gap between blacks and whites his essay really electrified the nation uh it uh launched him to permanent intellectual stardom and provoked a heated debate amongst critics but there's one fact that was universally agreed upon by coats by his critics by his defenders and that was uh none of us expected to see reparations on the platform of a mainstream presidential candidate any time soon the thinking was that coats could afford to make the case for reparations because he's a writer and a truth-teller and a gadfly but a politician trying to win over uh america's ray shy electorate would be committing committing political suicide if they attempted to do the same thing last week we were all proven wrong i would argue elizabeth warren just endorsed reparations for slavery kamala harris said she supports reparations but in her case she seems to have her own private definition of the term namely any anti-poverty policy and that's that's particularly interesting to me right because what kamala when press supports is not reparations it's just policy to help the poor um but she still felt like when confronted that i'm doing a bit of mind reading here i'll acknowledge but she couldn't just say no to reparations in the way that bernie sanders did for example even though their policies are equally race neutral my point is this five years ago even tanahasi coates's most passionate admirers believed that it would be political suicide for any candidate to endorse reparations for slavery now apparently we have a mainstream candidate like kamala harris who thinks it's political suicide not to endorse reparations for slavery and all of this mind you in a country that according to coates remains fundamentally and essentially white supremacist even before the anti-racist vision broke into mainstream politics uh it had al already really swept through the culture in ways that don't often get talked about one rather amazing indicator of this fact rather amazing to me is that black first names and white first names have massively diverged in the post-civil rights era indeed precisely the era in which racism has declined in the late 1960s the typical black woman living in a segregated neighborhood had a first name that was only twice as common among blacks as among whites ten years later the typical black woman living in a segregated area had a name that was 20 times as common among blacks as among whites the harvard economist that discovered this fact attributed the tenfold increase in the rate of name divergence to the influence of the black power movement stokely carmichael rap brown nation of islam the sense that black people's true home was africa our true religion was islam so that stokely for example renamed himself kwame toure uh now we have we feel as if it's a stereotype at this point commonly known that if you if you hear someone's name is tyrone you think oh this is a black person that's an authentic black name uh virtually unheard of as of 1960. so this is the power of of the anti-racist vision uh and it's the power of ideas to permeate a culture whether or not they um uh influence politics and last thing i'll say about that is uh often you know if you read the new york times you read really any mainstream newspaper you will find uh these audit studies often reported where you know black candidate white candidate sends out a job application with a typically black name typically white name without exception the black names get a lower rate of response and this is adduced as a kind of evidence for why we need the anti-racist vision although ironically that very phenomenon is largely enabled by the legacy of the anti-racist vision so coincident with the rise of the anti-racist vision has been an attack on the humanist vision and there are two main objections to the humanist vision one is that the anti-racist vision is is necessary because of systemic racism police violence mass incarceration housing discrimination the racial wealth gap how are we going to address this if not a bold kind of anti-racism that seeks to as coates once put it directly redress history right and i'm going to leave the specifics of that objection for the q a i'm i'm expecting there will be questions relating to systemic racism um perhaps police violence or mass incarceration so i'm going to leave that for the q a uh but i will say one thing here which is that the humanist vision was the vision that got black people civil rights in this country really the best thing you can say about the black power movement nation of islam is that and and uh you know prominent civil rights leaders like buyer dress didn't acknowledge this is that it they scared the hell out of white people so thoroughly that it drove more white people into the hands of the humanist vision they said essentially if if that's what you're offering if you're offering a kind of violent militant separatist ideology i'll take the non-violent one so frankly if the humanist vision was good enough for dr king it's good enough for me and you can absolutely combat systemic racism you can absolutely combat police violence you can absolutely form policy to reduce the number of people that are incarcerated without buying the principles of of the anti-racist vision none of that is entailed it was not entailed for dr king nor nor is it entailed for us the second objection um is that the the humanist vision is a kind of naive attempt at colorblindness there's a the idea being that the history of america has not been colorblind you can't just fire the starting gun now and say right now we're going to start treating everyone as individuals when you haven't been doing that for centuries right that is no kind of justice that's the objection right and we're seeing this this is not it's no longer just a view that academics uh throw at each other right this is completely seeped into the culture at this point i could give many examples i'll just give one from the past month although there are several just from the past month uh this one was just particularly sharp bernie sanders bernie bernie sanders said quote a couple days ago i think we've got to look at candidates you know not by the color of their skin not by their sexual orientation or their gender or not by their age i mean i think we have got to try to move toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities based on what they stand for so this is basically a direct almost plagiarism of dr king everything bernie sanders said there including the fact that you should not vote for a politician based on their race are explicitly things dr king said for this he was ridiculed uh stephen colbert mockingly said quote yes like dr king i have a dream a dream where this diverse nation can come together and be led by an old white guy um i i highly doubt he would have said that if it were dr king saying it but um the point being that at this point at least on the cultural and political left it is taboo it is taboo to quote dr king um my my my response to the color blindness objection is you know the addressing goes that because of the asymmetry of history we can't be colorblind now but it is in fact our failure to have been colorblind in the past that caused the very historical injustices that now motivate the anti-racist division to then adopt policies that impose racial double standards and then give new groups reasons to feel grievances right it is setting yourself up for a perpetual motion machine of grievance let me give one example of this forget about whites and blacks for a moment and focus on asians japanese people in this country in 13 or 14 different states were not allowed to own property until 1952 when the supreme court ruled that they could i'm sure all of you are familiar with the internment camps over a hundred thousand japanese interned my point is not that japanese have had it nearly as bad as blacks have had had it in this country it's not my point my point is that they've have had it much much harder than whites historically right so this is a case where the anti-racist vision where racism is embedded in history should be saying logically that we should be giving some kind of if not explicit then um implicit kind of reparations for asians and although uh uh the specific japanese who were interned the the who were literally in turn they did get reparations in in i believe the 1980s as a group uh we do not treat asian americans particularly well in this country you need to only look at affirmative action in the harvard case but we've it's nothing new we've known this for years 2009 the princeton sociologist thomas espinshade found that uh identical an asian applicant to to an elite school had to score several hundred points higher something like 400 sat points higher than a black student and uh some somewhere in the vicinity of 200 points one or two hundred points higher than a white student right so relative to white's asians are discriminated against and i'll i'll never forget a new york times editorial from several months ago which described asian families in new york who quote scrimped on essentials like food to pay for test prep end quote i'll never forget that quote because the article was framed in such a way so as to justify a policy of of discrimination this is what i mean when i say the attempt to redress history ends up creating more injustices more racial injustices that yet call for more uh uh um more reparations in a broad sense of the term um which brings me to my central my central problem with the anti-racist vision is that there's there's just a zero-sum conflict between justice for individuals for living individuals flesh and blood humans and justice for abstract intertemporal groups there's there's no way to reconcile those two concepts the idea that we're seriously entertaining reparations for slavery which would put money in my pocket and presumably not in the pocket of a poor white family uh or a poor asian family uh that that only makes sense if you have this outsized place this outsized role for the contingent history of the united states in your current ethical system but ethical principles cannot be they they they can't just be contingent on the particular history of a country because we'll never get out of this so to paraphrase one of my favorite writers thomas sowell we currently live in a society where babies are born with a set of ready-made grievances against other babies born the same day the anti-racist vision in my view is a recipe for remaining in this condition and the humanist vision is the only way out thank you okay so thank you for coming um i was i volunteered to ask a few questions so i wanted to address your recent article for the columbia daily spectator so well the first thing that caught my eye when it came to that article was the point you made with the citing the poll that said that i believe it was 51 of black americans don't feel 52. don't feel that racism what was the exact phrasing there um uh i think it's 50 to 52 of black americans according to a 2016 pupil say that racial discrimination has had virtually no effect on their chances of success in life and 60 of blacks with no college degrees stay the same and i guess my my response to that would be do you believe that they are right no i think it's a um well let me put it this way i think it's a non-sequitur to say because someone because 60 of a group believes something therefore it's true my point there was not to argue not to make that logical fallacy but to say that why is it the case that when i read the newspaper i never hear that point of view articulated we're talking about 60 of black people without a college degree when polled saying something that i could not think of a single new york times op-ed having argued having argued that claim that that's a it's a massive failure of um portraying the legitimate diversity of opinion among black americans that was the point i was making um if we want to talk about to what degree racism or systemic racism holds holds black people back uh i suppose that's a separate question and the other thing that stood out to me is what you did again here is you set up the division between all black americans and black americans without a college degree so what is what is the purpose of pointing out that there's a difference between college and non-college well at face value you would expect black people without college to report more racial discrimination than black people with college um maybe you wouldn't but at least i would i would expect the lower you go down the socioeconomic ladder the more likely it is that people report systemic racism being a problem in their lives that would gel with the intuition that systemic racism is causing such outcomes for low income people but without exception every poll i've seen that aggregates it by socioeconomics or by um it's rather that disaggregates black people's opinions by socioeconomics or by education level finds that the more educated the more wealthy uh you are the more likely you are to see racism as a fundamental barrier in your life which it could be because the wealthier black people are around more white people that's one hypothesis another hypothesis is that uh black people in this country get educated into the politics of grievance to a degree that's that's another hypothesis and i don't know how to tell tell uh which one is true could be that both are true but that's why i point that out because it's counterintuitive so regarding your speech like the humanist versus anti-racist view like would you say there's a point of i mean you say you say you yourself are a humanist would you say there's a point at which that view goes too far like color colorblindness goes too far so to speak well it goes too far if you are literally pretending not to be able to see color like a child like you have your hands over your ears or something like that howard schultz a few days ago said quote i don't see color got him a lot of pushback and again there are two ways to interpret that statement one of which he deserves to push back because yes you do see color a b first of all literally colorblind people can still pick out black people from white people they confuse red and green but they don't confuse black and white um but you know the question is is he so is he so stupid that that's what he meant or or um is he ceo of starbucks right he let's give him a little bit more credit and say that what he meant was i had i aspire not to have color influence the way i treat people perfectly defendable claim right he should not have said it that way and frankly maybe he is that crazy so i'm not gonna i'm not gonna defend the guy but uh yeah colorblindness goes too far if if if you lie about whether you can see color and and we should still be able to admit that you know if a psychologist put us all in a lab and measured our implicit bias or they would for the most part whether you're black or white you find some kind of bias you find some kind of gender bias one of the creators of the implicit bias test though has admitted that it doesn't predict bias in real life your prefrontal cortex comes online for the most part and um prevents you from treating people wildly differently but we can we should all acknowledge that we ca we're capable of being prejudiced the question is whether that entails a view of ethics view of politics that is fundamentally grounded in redressing history and i don't think it does thank you so would you say there are positions taken by the anti-racist side of the debate that you would side with more than those taken by the humanist side of the debate um that's a good question no nothing i can't think of anything it's conceivable i see i mean there are a lot of um again there's a lot of uh i mean i can't conceive of myself agreeing with the fundamental principles of of the anti-racist vision i can conceive of myself agreeing with okay so okay i'll give you one example so if an anti-racist said to me well did you read the new york times last week they did a study that found that court stenographers routinely mess up when they're transcribing people who speak black english black people and sometimes they mess up so bad that they transcribe it to mean the opposite of what the witness is saying um and that's an example of systemic racism i would say yeah i agree with that but again you don't need to be a part of the ant you don't need to hold the anti-racist vision to acknowledge those cases of legitimate systemic racism that exist okay well thank you i'm gonna turn this seat over to daniel then so [Applause] all right hi i'm daniel hi it's nice to meet you good night um so i wanted to talk about my favorite subject which is politics okay and and the intersection of politics and culture and race because it seems like race is a heavily politicized topic right now i mean you've seen 95 support among african-americans for democrats and you see similar levels of support for people who hold racial animus among republicans but you seem to talk about politics less than most thinkers who talk about race so i'm just wondering how intentional is that i'm not a political buff i find politics uh largely toxic i have to follow it because you have to be informed if you're in my profession and i want to keep tabs on what's happening but i'm much more concerned in the long run with the power of ideas i the reason i gave that example of the divergence in black and white naming patterns is explicitly because an idea can be so powerful that it can move entire cultures without it necessarily having to break into politics i mean politics is often i suppose downstream would be the way to put it of culture not always sometimes politics can cause a change in the culture as well it's a it's a feedback loop but that's why i mean just just the fact of having blacks and whites have such different names the consequences of that for division social division are not measurable you can't you can't put the um you can't put a number on on how much unnecessary strife and paranoia and needless division that has caused but it was a straightforward consequence of just people writing and speaking that's that's how powerful ideas are so i suppose my reason i don't talk about politics that much is because i'm more concerned about the big picture okay yeah no but i suppose this this might be unfair in the specific moment but we live in an all-encompassing political moment and when i hear what you just said culture is downstream from politics is a quote let's say is more frequently used in conservative than liberal publications i think it's a quote directly from a conservative thinker and so i guess do you think you can really escape politics in today's world because it seems like like i i've seen when you when you've been on podcast and you've been interviewed there's a lot of talk about like the the harassment you receive and i think if you look at twitter harassment is an unfortunate existence in the world and on the comments on your youtube videos as well but so do you think you can really escape politics in today's world what's the connection with the harassment because it's all political as far as i can tell they're saying you're whatever it's it's a political statement i'm not sure i mean uh art is it political i mean people say many things about me but it's usually it's um my critics at least uh usually it's either a a uh an epithet of some kind or it's a criticism of my ideas okay because um yeah i mean partly i'm speaking for myself and i am a political hack so i acknowledge this but but i think but i think it's interesting because what you say it brushes up against politics right and the intersection between politics and culture is interesting because like for example when you talk about uh you briefly alluded to the left and the right and the locus of the sort of you talk about the anti-racist and the humanist movements and i just you don't have to answer this is too political but to bring it around to politics you mentioned bernie sanders and you mentioned the left you mentioned the right and it seems to me that the entire continuum to anti-racist thought exists within the political left because if you look at someone like barack obama he practiced my mind what you described what you would describe as humanist politics to the highest extent possible right um i wouldn't say that i would say he's he's one he's like me like uh barack obama would be hard to characterize that depends what mood he was in in some moods he sounded well he's not entirely consistent like many people um in some moods he was very much a humanist and in a way that i considered quite beautiful in other moods not so much james baldwin is another one i would say is in some moves he said things like in order to minimize the bill our children must pay we must i'm paraphrasing insist that the color of the skin is everywhere and always a delusion right so that sounds that's perfectly humorous but if you read the totality of his work he's a very hard you couldn't just put him in the humanist basket that would be cherry picking yeah no that's right but i i think it's interesting the way this is talked about on the left on the right because and i i think you have insight on this it seems to me that the entire debate about using your language humanist and versus anti-racist occurs on the left i don't see any discussion of this for the most part on the political right there are some thinkers you mentioned thomas soul is very much on the right but if you look at the debates within the mainstream of the republican party today right you see absolutely no discussion of this and i think this is partially because to be honest there are very few members of racial minorities on the right right now so my question is do you think it seems to me this topic this whole debate is self-contained on the political left today can you really see that this sort of spans the different political factions in our country right now that's a very good point um i think i think it is i mean i think uh part of what motivates me is uh in my view to save the left from its excesses so that it it presents a robust challenge to mr orange hair okay yeah um um the other mr it's a it's a good question though i mean i wonder if if it was a democratic incumbent and we had republicans vying for the nomination what the conversation would look like i mean it's no secret that trump is to put it mildly not the most sophisticated person on race issues he loves the blacks though that's what they say um but yeah i i would want i mean it certainly could be that they're not competing to court black voters for the most part uh that could definitely have something to do with it do you think mr orange hair is a racist um it depends i mean i suppose it depends what you mean by racist racist i i find that like communist in the era of mccarthy it is the stigma on the word is super pointed and specific but the definition of the word is mellifluous um um i mean and there the the most racist things that i've heard him allegedly say are alleged so like the the worker he fired from from one of his hotels or casinos who if if trump said what the worker said blacks are lazy that's what he alleged if he said that that's that's a racist thing to say um but i you know i'm not omniscient i can't tell if it was just a disgruntled employee um i think in the age of jesse smullet we should have a healthy skepticism not jump to conclusions about whether someone is telling the truth i think that's the lesson here uh but if it's true that that's obviously a racist thing to say okay uh and then so to be a little less political which is very painful for me but the the next thing i want to talk about is you've talked about sort of the causes of poverty in the african-american community i think you wrote an article on quilled about it and i think this has been a a really interesting debate uh this i think has crossed political factions i think there there is discussion of this on both sides but i think it's a really interesting thing because there were quotes in different articles about like is the nature of poverty in the african-american community different from poverty equivalent poverty in the white community so what do you think of that issue i guess i would say two things one thing is i don't think i've ever talked about the causes of poverty because poverty doesn't really have causes wealth has causes fair enough the causes to some extent poverty is the absence of wealth right um and for most of our species history virtually everyone has been poor the second thing is black poverty different than white poverty i think i think you could have made that argument many decades ago but now we've seen for example the same rise in single parent homes there's the crack academic epidemic in the black community now we're seeing an opioid epidemic in white communities there's a kind of symmetry it's just that the in the white community it happened a few decades later um but i you know i'm i would i would say fundamentally there are no major differences because i think that i think your reference to opioids is a really important one because i know a lot of commentators have made the point that what's happening in appalachia in the sort of the post-industrial rust belt areas the sort of level of despair and poverty and the sort of rapid change from relative affluence to just complete destitution this level of desperation is similar to what has happened in certain minority communities in that it's not only you have poverty you have sort of the absence of connection to wealth right in the areas around here where all the factories have closed it and it's not just that people are poor it's that they don't know people who are rich it's that they the poverty is of a fundamentally different character yeah and there are quite a few targeted government programs that people are talking about for these opioid-stricken areas right there's you know there's a national emergency declare there was there's talk of targeted investment when you talk to the governors of these states they say we need to revitalize these areas and it seems like obviously the difference between whites afflicted by the opioid epidemic and ones who aren't isn't a racial one but it seems it it seems an interesting point that obviously there are different forms of poverty and there's a sort of different depth to it in these communities so it seems a reasonable argument to say if targeted policies are needed for poverty of a certain depth and intensity and long sort of long length right then then perhaps poverty that is intergenerational that might be linked to these factors of historical oppression does warrant a differentiated response is there a question um that different types of poverty admit of different kinds of solutions yes that's an interesting question i'm not sure i have an intelligent answer to that okay fair enough yeah sort of sort of ranging far feel here but but it seems like it's sort of an integral argument to the sort of in defense of the anti-racist view which is that if you have certain problems in certain communities that cannot be combative by the tools of traditional social policy they need some different aspect and anyways one last question i would just like to ask is once more to the subject of politics when you're talking about uh the african-american community's support for the democratic party and i have heard you mentioned this a few times you've sort of mentioned how it's tied to the past and you've mentioned how you've received a lot of backlash from your friends for some how to put this less orthodox views that don't align with the left especially on a college campus and as we know here college campuses can be different politically from the rest of the country and so i guess i'd say like do you think there's something sort of about the within the african community do you think it's political support for the democratic party is justified oh um it's justified well that's a very big question that's a very big question i mean i can think of policies on both ends of the political spectrum that have been good and bad for black people i mean if i think for example minimum wage policy has been a net bad minimum wage hikes in the 50s 60s 70s for for the black teenage unemployment rate which used to be virtually identical to the white teenage employment rate until roughly 1950 and it's since then it's uh it's viewed as a chronic problem that that uh black especially male teens can't can't find employment um again in an era with far more racism the teenage unemployment rate was much much more manageable and virtually identical to whites so i can see that's one example of a policy that i think democrats have pushed to at the expense of black people but i could come up with examples i think where democrats have done much better than republicans as well so it's not a i don't think it's a simple story to weigh the costs and benefits of of each and say which party has been better for black people in terms of the policy and its consequences that's a that's a that's beyond the scope of my mind right now but one thing i will say is that most people don't vote based on policy they don't frankly like who among us has time to really adjudicate based on a cost-benefit analysis the consequences of every policy right like the the green new deal who like what percentage of people that are foreign against it really understand the likeliest consequences at a deep level i very very few um it's about how politicians signal it's about bill clinton playing the saxophone and he gets your culture um it's about obama speaking a little a little blacker in front of a black audience and it makes you feel like home it's about trump pissing off the people who call you racist all the time and who you like to see squirm it's largely about that kind of signaling in terms of why black people continue to vote democrat the republican party does a very job a very bad job of signaling to black people culturally socially that they where for you yeah because i i've noticed that the sort of the it's it's shocking because i mean donald trump is certainly not someone who is known for his racial sensitivity to say the least and i think he's racist but that's a different issue we've talked about one of the few things he's done to reach out to the black community he said constantly i've done so much for you right he says this a lot and he sort of makes these like ham-handed appeals i guess for one of a better word he says things like why are you all voting for the democrats what do you have to lose to the african-american community and so i mean i guess you sort of answered that that you don't think there's sort of much validity to that line of attack i mean it sounds very sort of blunt but um um i mean well in a weird way at least with the first step act criminal justice reform basically everything in that act is what michelle alexander is calling for with the new jim crow what the left has been calling for and it just so happens that there was this happy alignment between the left and libertarians the koch brothers loved that policy there was a moment of bipartisanship yeah it was really beautiful and it kind of passed us all by right nobody yeah no talked about it that much um a because it's kind of painful i think for many people to give trump that win um or to admit that he did something potentially good but uh i don't that's apropos nothing i don't know okay yeah no no yep that's fair all right and then i guess this is actually my final question but sure i would just like to ask when you talk about the humanist versus anti-humanist distinction or sorry uh anti-racist versus humanist distinction you mentioned that you don't think it's conscious uh it seems like it might become more conscious like sort of as time goes on like if this becomes a political issue that becomes polarized do you think that would be like a good thing or a bad thing if this moves from subtext to text oh i think it would be much better if it moved to text because i can't count how many times i've seen two people disagree vehemently on some racial issue and you know upon reflection i i realize that they have two fundamentally different philosophies as to what racism means uh what racial justice would entail um it's not just a semantic disagreement i mean if i call this a table and you call it a bungalow that's going to be problematic potentially but you know the the well-being of society does not depend on it although i'm sure someone creative could come up with a scenario in which it did but when i have when we're both using the word racism and we not only have a semantic agreement as to what that concept means um but we have an ethical disagreement because because we're talking about two totally different concepts we have two totally different ethical programs one is purpose towards redressing history towards a kind of what i would consider to be a more abstract form of justice and one is purpose towards a kind of justice that is in my view within the scope of human power right one is a utopian vision of justice that has consequences for flesh and blood people because utopia never works especially utopia that utopias that try to balance out the scales of history and leave living people to pay that bill versus a vision that says the very reason that we have this impulse to redress history which is totally an understandable impulse is precisely because we had these kind of racial double standards in the past we can't then we can't just switch it then put other living people on the bottom who don't really give a crap that they're paying the bill they're footing the bill of people who are dead so yeah i think if all of that was made text rather than subtext it would prevent a lot of talking past one another on all of the these racial scandals that seem to pop up in the news every day at this point okay all right so keep shouting it loudly and it'll get easier hopefully all right uh hey thank you for your time sure uh i just wanted to hear more about uh your views on so let me put it this way so you said that there's less disagreement between the humanist view and the anti-racist view on the fact that there is systemic racism in racial injustice etc it's rather their sort of vision towards how to address these issues and how to bring about racial justice uh there is something of a disagreement uh that's a good question uh the the concept of systemic racism initially called institutional racism came out of the anti-racist vision it came out of the black power movement uh stokely carmichael and charles hamilton in 1967 wrote that institutional racism was a kind of more subtle kind of racism it wasn't a bigot hanging a black boy from a tree it was it still relied on individual bias but a subtle bias that was the initial concept of systemic racism and i gave the example before of the recent news recent study about the criminal justice system and court stenographers because i think that's a it's a perfect case of systemic racism um in the sense that the stenographers black and white by the way were basically equally bad at transcribing black english they had this subtle kind of unaware subtle lack of awareness or lack of capacity to do something that had a systemic effect it wasn't an it wasn't just one person or two people it was it kind of permeates the system or it's large enough to to speak in those terms uh so that it's a concept that is um what i would say about that is that there are very few examples that are that straightforward what you generally get when people argue that systemic racism is a fundament fundamental barrier to black people is you get studies that hold all of these demographic variables constant so we're just going to compare 30 year old black males with two parents to 30 year old white males with two parents and we're going to hold everything equal and if there's some disparate outcome that's systemic racism that paradigm is fundamentally misguided because uh and this is where thomas sowell has probably written 15 books but nobody has really listened to him or very few disparity is the norm throughout history if you just look up on wikipedia income by household income by ethnic groups you'll find all kinds of facts you'll find certain in native american tribes this right now earn twice as much as certain other native american tribes it's not as if the system is twice as bad for one or history has been twice as bad for one if you we haven't even achieved parity within white people if you look at french americans french households that are french american in descent versus russian american russian americans make a dollar for every 79 cents made by french-american households and you and i could not tell the difference between these people the point i'm pushing is that disparate outcomes um in even in disparate outcomes tend to occur even in the absence of systemic racism of any kind so you can't just look at a gap you have to really do what they did in the court sonographer study and show the bias itself so i would say the anti-racist vision in practice tends towards that bad research paradigm and the humanist vision at least i'll speak for myself i'm perfectly happy to acknowledge instances of systemic racism that are proven on the bias end not just the disparate results end following question i'm more familiar with how the anti-racist people who hold the anti-racist vision would address racism but i think you spoke a little less about how the humanist vision tries to address it so could you speak just a little about how the humanist side would you know say that this is how we should address racism and racial issues what do you mean by address racism do you mean individual racists yeah or yeah political issues concerning racism as well and how we should make the world or america specifically a less racist country um uh i would say i can't speak for the entire humanist vision i mean if you know anything about the civil rights movement which i think most americans do you'll see how they addressed racism all of that is is par for the course in terms of the humanist vision what i will say is that i'm under no illusion that there will ever be no racism in uh in america i think we can't mark progress by the complete elimination of racism i think that's extremely naive um let me let me it's interesting that we never have these intuitions for something like murder right who who honestly expects there to be no murder who no no one there's never been a society with no murder you cannot be everywhere at all times you cannot um you cannot cure the hearts of everyone and we should not try to because it's impossible uh but yet we can make a lot of progress and we have made a lot of progress just like with murder you know the murder rate in new york used to be nine times higher than it is today um in the in the early 90s now it's like two or three hundred people get killed a year in new york it used to be two or three thousand in recent history huge progress we're never going to get that number to zero uh that doesn't mean that new york is a systemically murderous city it doesn't mean that there is a murder epidemic it is in fact a very safe city so we have to take that approach with racist incidents in a country of 350 million there will never be no racist incidents ever i'm sorry it's just think of the math of it right one is roughly a third of a billion people so if something has a one in a billion chance of having happening to you on any given day it will happen once every three days to someone somewhere and it could still be the case that that thing is extremely rare so there are going to be hate crimes hate crimes have been going down for decades there are going to be racist incidents in many in many directions and we cannot measure uh um we cannot make the benchmark of progress a zero racism country patricia do you think that in the lack of the history of the power dynamic that existed we would still run into that issue where we could never reach that number of having no racist incidents i guess my question is and i'm from india so i see it in a flip i see brown not white because my country was colonized for 200 years and there is some inherent biases against white people do you think that that power dynamic would or that sort of feelings of animosity would still exist if we hadn't been colonized for 200 years the feeling is animosity towards whites or europeans in the indian context i'm not sure i don't know enough about that um i think i think history has probably shown that even in the absence of brutal systems of racial oppression it's still often the case that tribalism the kind of boilerplate human psychology our tribal nature sometimes can be enough to get racial resentment off the ground but obviously our history has made it far more uh resentment of blacks towards whites and white surface blacks has made it far more far worse and far more durable i'm not really at bay to make any like determinations about you cited uh the virginia i think you did the virginia governor um and he was a picture of him from about 40 years ago was um was released to the media and um it portrayed him as wearing blackface uh and then came out later that the attorney general of virginia also uh came out and said he wore blackface to a party um uh i'm not obey to say whether or not they should resign but i find it interesting that all of a sudden all these instances of um of racism in the past uh while um back then those individuals may not have viewed their behavior as racist nowadays the the media has generated so much attention surrounding these incidents that they feel that they're um they feel obviously they'd be noteworthy and you know stories for the me the public to consume but my question is do you think that i pretty much can guess your answer but is there any way a manner in which these sorts of this sort of behavior can be redressed um like blackface for instance you mean i mean um do you should these officials i know you don't want to be political but is resign resignation and adequate response and adequate equal response um one point i would make is that i believe washington post did a poll found that a higher percentage of white virginians than black virginians wanted northam to resign um that's obviously for partisan reasons i would argue because whites are skewing republican they just it's not as if all of a sudden they care about blackface they just want to get the guy out but but significantly more than than blacks right um uh second point i'll make is that the blackface controversy it's it's a it's a very clear example of the deaf of the difference between the anti-racist vision and the humanist vision the anti-racist vision has this history of minstrelsy where white people would dress up as caricatures of black people um oftentimes kind of taking jobs from aspiring black actors and do sometimes loving portrayals but often times really ugly and racist betrayals and um that is the reason in the anti-racist vision because racism you can't know what what racism means without examining the history of a country and that history was associated with racism therefore blackface is forever racist and many people wouldn't articulate it necessarily that way they would just say at a gut level blackface it's wrong don't like it but they're unwittingly holding the anterior anti-racist vision the humanist vision for example i mentioned bayern rustin martin luther king's strategist and the chief organizer of the march on washington in 1963. in the early 1950s he wrote that obviously blackface and minstrel c was associated with uh white supremacy it was one of the many reasons why black people had low self-esteem in this country and yet he said obviously it was obvious to him that at some point we would get to the point where we're humans i can if i'm a comedian if i'm the waynes brothers i can i can dress up as as white people and paint my face if i'm um and vice versa right it would just be we're a human family so that was that was obvious to him in 1950 um as someone who got arrested two dozen times for for activism someone in other words who understood racism but it was he he is a classic example of the humanist vision uh and then the last thing i would say about blackface is um it really sucks to be a politician at a moment like that if you were an entertainer for some reason we don't care we don't care that jimmy fallon did actually somewhat um uh let's say rubbed me the wrong way he did an impression of carl malone in the early 2000s that was actually in poor taste i i would argue sorry that was jimmy kimmel did i say fallon or kimmel uh but kim will also fallon rather also did blackface uh sarah silverman fred armisen did honeyface to dress up as obama uh robert downey jr tropic thunder ashton kutcher dressed up as an indian man as just like a stereotypical indian man for commercial we're not calling for all these people people's heads frank zappa joni mitchell if you like their music i'm sorry they're cancelled so we have a different standard for politicians and musicians perhaps it's because politicians don't make us happy or bring us any joy but comedians and musicians do so we keep two sets of books and it's worth reflecting on why that is so would you say that calling for them to resign in the first place or any is is that is redressal not that's not what it is um is that sort of response from someone in office who is obviously um at least in herring's case not northam because he's now denies that he did well northam might also have been in the kkk costume which i think is different different yeah it's different yeah although we came out yeah well i meant um another northern did say he was in michael jackson yes uh blackface then almost moonwalked but they are expressing remorse and saying that they understand the hurt that it caused what is the um the balance if there is any i mean i think i think we are partially training people to be hurt and i'm not saying that that hurt is not real um offense is a real phenomenon when i take offense to something i feel it in my gut and i dislike it at the same time you can be educated into offense about a given issue and it's not as if there's a set amount of offense taking in the black community or in any community for that matter it flows over time and it is a direct consequence of the power of ideas um you could persuade people in in the grand sweep of history to be offended by all kinds of things and you can persuade them in reverse to not be not be offended by those things so blackface is not inherently offensive and i think the implicit acknowledgement of that fact is that we're all losing no sleep over sarah silverman and jimmy fallon and jimmy kimmel virginians are losing no sleep over those people so you know i suppose it's up for northam to decide what what he does but i would personally feel under no obligation to resign if i were in his position they can vote him out in what two years they'll vote him out or or not that will be the referendum at what point does the act of taking offense itself become the offense and more offensive if there if there is such a thing if we're perturbed then we're less of a positive influence on the people around us and so i feel like generally speaking as you mentioned there's the possibility that people are being educated toward taking offense um i see that it's huge danger um because then we're then then to be the most educated you have to take the most offense and now then we create a culture where everybody's taking offense to everything all the time how can we move forward um i i i likewise a humanist i think that the the way to get there is absolutely together and we live i guess in the most polarized time um you know it's been almost two decades since i was you know in school and your guys aged and i'm i'm scared you know i'm scared that we're we're definitely polarizing in a direction that's not going to get us where we all want to be so i just might you know um again my question would be where's the line um i mean i yeah i we're definitely polarized but um it's probably not as bad as it was in the late 60s which i suppose we can that's a a scary benchmark to be comparing ourselves against but um where's the line i mean the the line for me as as a humanist is the difference between reason and racism you know like we should all admit that we you know if if we were to broadcast our thoughts over the radio for 24 hours as comedian bill burr once said if we did that on friday we'd i'll be out of a job on monday but what you believe upon reflection how you treat people um not in the first millisecond of interaction but you know as the seconds and minutes unfold is uh in my view who you are and it's that that aspect of a person that we should be judging um not whether they dressed up in blackface in a particular context 40 years ago that none of us are really privy to what meaning i mean have you ever had like an inside joke with your friends i'm assuming you're all normal human beings like i am so like i can guarantee you if i heard the inside jokes i was making with my friends at 17 i probably don't even remember where they came from or what they meant let alone the mass media now having a window into my history um so the line should be intentions and beliefs those beliefs matter it's not just obviously impact matters too but it's not all about impact so how do we how do we raise the level of this course how can i help raise the level million dollar question thank you i i'll just actually return to affirmative action and thank you for being here i actually only discovered you yesterday when i watched the reuben interview and i love what you have to say oh thank you uh one thing that got me really excited is when you mentioned us asians in the race in america question a group of people i think have barely mentioned but to me affirmative action is not just about college it's about society as a whole i think american society feels that because for some reason it tends to be that black americans latinos and other minorities deserve more help in a sense or deserve benefits that we don't receive even though as a chinese person i can speak to the fact there's been a chinese exclusion act there's been the chinese lynchings of 17 20 chinese people in san francisco in 1871 on top of the internment issue so we faced discrimination that passed but now we've come to a point where we're sort of considered the model minority or the highest socio-economic minority in fact even exceeding a lot of white americans when you look at race as a whole and not ethnicity right uh so i think my question is i think you're with me in the sense that i don't think apparent action is a solution and some some of the anti-racist ideology that just because the race of some person they deserve a easier form of access to a company or college my question is sort of what's your view on affirmative action just so you could elaborate more on it and i think sorry this is really long been invited but um i think with affirmative action institutions are trying to level the playing field trying to help people who have historically been at a disadvantage what do you think is the proper replacement for affirmative action and i think when watching the reuben report you mentioned in fact the comparison of west indie families and black women people that a lot of people from the outside can't tell the difference of but now in fact have a great difference in social economic yeah status yeah yeah i think do you get what i'm trying to get yeah i get the gist for sure yeah yeah um it's a very good question i think the idea of leveling the playing field for different that that only makes sense if you view groups as units in in practice affirmative action benefits people like me who did not need it who grew up solidly middle class with strong parents who emphasized education you know affirmative action for the most part doesn't really help those black people on the bottom of society in practice this has been true for the whole tenure of the policy it's it's much whenever there's a policy of some kind of dispensation it's usually the people with the most power to access it that take advantage of it so for example uh like like many like you mentioned many immigrant groups west indians uh nigerians ghanaians uh um african and west indians make up depending on the study anywhere from forty percent to two-thirds of kids at elite institutions uh ivy leagues even though they make up ten percent of the total u.s black population because like many immigrant groups there's selection variables there are different cultural factors that make them more successful these are people who have no no grievances against america historically speaking we're not here for slavery we're not here for jim crow at least for the most part um so the idea is we're leveling the playing field by giving a leg up to people who did not suffer from historical racism in america and part of what that what that entails is not only discriminating against wealthy asian americans who don't need the help so to speak but also discriminating against low-income asian americans who at minimum should get a level playing field themselves the last thing i'll say about that is that it's not at all obvious nor is it at all borne out by the data that you can correct for a for a lack of development in someone from 0 to 18 by at age 18 shuttling them into a college that they're frankly not prepared for based on test scores alone it is not at all obvious that that that that's the case um i think probably most of us anecdotally and in our social lives will know that much of what can be done for you can be done from 0 to 18. and much of the policy that could correct could mitigate some of these disparities or just make society better for those on the bottom so to speak would be interventions at the early stage public education charter schools et cetera so you may make this sort of distinction between african-americans and sort of west indies people who come from the recipes and sort of other um black um cultural groups who have come in sort of i don't know making the argument that you you drive back to sort of like a cultural difference in emphasis on education and i do agree with some exit but get some pushback on that point with regards to how um people who come into america sort of are selected it's there tends to be a more stringent process of immigration there's still to be more stringent immigration process which tends to select more higher skilled and higher higher qualified people who are then bound to of course become more wealthy in that regard than the typical african-american population so what would be your um counter to that point of this sort of thing yeah this is a immigration selection effect which is uh real i mean obviously it's not as if immigrants are plucked randomly from a country and end up here they there are patterns as to who comes and um i mean the the counter argument there would be uh why is it the case that there are such huge uh disparities between different ethnicities of black immigrants haitians jamaicans nigerians ghanaians um you know those those selection effects presumably run the gamut of all those groups i'm sure there are differences in terms of who's coming um but you have you know you have black immigrant groups that make far less than the national average you have black immigrant groups like nigerians who make slightly more than than the national average and you know there's a story to tell a very complex story to tell about why that is it's not just culture but culture matters um it's immigration selection effects geography where do you live right like income in new york is not the same as income in you know in rural places because a dollar goes a much longer way in terms of standard of living so there's a very complex story to tell here the basic picture however is that disparity is the norm both within races and between races if we haven't gotten to disparity even within white people like what what possesses people to believe that we should be seeing equal outcomes between blacks and whites groups that have completely different histories completely different legacies um this is never this is all this is this tends to be assumed but never never argued for if one's goal is to try and form like the most full conception of racism do you think that there's any merit to some of the anti-racist philosophies i guess in your view you talked a lot about um reparations is like a policy that is irrational and wouldn't benefit anyone but do you think that the type of philosophy something like analyzing race as being based in historical racial power divisions like you said and putting positive meaning to race do you think that that's worth something in trying to like form a sociological or maybe just philosophical conception of race or do you think that humanism like as an idea is full i can elaborate with that i think i understand what you're saying what i would say is that neither the humanist vision nor the anti-racist vision is obviously true or obviously false there are different conceptual schemes to layer onto reality i most of my analysis of the two visions is not in terms of let me put it this way most of my analysis of the vision is in terms of their consequences for society they're two different conceptual schemes they're fundamentally opposed irreconcilable and they have fundamentally different principles that therefore lead to fundamentally different outcomes for the societies that are ruled by them and it's enough for me to say that the consequences of the humanist vision are far better than the consequences of the anti-racist vision to make the case does that answer your question yes just a brief follow-up sure i'm sure you get countless questions about systemic racism in america you talked about um briefly nugent crow talk about police brutality and i'm not i'm sure i'm not as executed on those issues as you are just in general like the idea of the reason that people bring up those topics i guess is that they're trying to maybe put evidence towards one viewpoint or another so i guess with regard to that is there for a person trying to form a vision or a person like who has an experience in america regarding race as they are forming their own viewpoint is there how are they going to come to their experience so i can like set an example like if you're growing up in somewhere like ferguson where there were recent protests now obviously there are a million different views on that but one viewpoint was that that was a situation that was located in which there was systemic racism so people from ferguson maybe i don't know would have adopted an anti-racist vision in that race had consistent meaning for them in their life so i guess like you make makes total sense when you're saying they're just two different visions which have their consequences like i guess how do people come to that how are people coming to their own vision yeah yeah no i mean yeah many people do come to their um vision via human lived experience um i would point out in asymmetry here though uh which is i think uh the typical peer of mine at columbia if i were to say if i were to make these arguments they might say well yeah what do you say to the guy in ferguson who actually has experienced unjust treatment by police being pulled over for no reason there are such examples um are you going to tell him he's wrong are you going to human powerpoint this and just show a bunch of data and say you're wrong because well i i would point out in asymmetry there a whenever someone is saying something you disagree with and coming from lived experience then their experience is just a single data point that doesn't prove any larger point but often when it's someone that agrees with what you're saying and they come from lived experience then it's indicative of a larger trend it's proof of something so for example there are countless white people in this country one uh who scott adams the creator of the dilbert cartoons wrote in his memoirs that twice two different times he's been passed over for a job and the boss explicitly told him scott we love you we love you to death we'd love to hire you but we got a lot of pressure to increase diversity here and we're going to go for the slightly less qualified black or hispanic person another thaddeus russell podcast host very interesting person it's happened to him twice in his life uh there was just a story i think in the independent the uk i think it was the uk could have this wrong um about a fire uh um fire department that actually officially instituted a rule whereby if you were black or hispanic you could get a 60 on on on the exam and be admitted on the written exam where if you were white you had to get a 70 and 70 had been the neutral bar for for a very long time uh if one of those white people were to come to you and say well i have this lived experience of being discriminated against because i'm white many people would just laugh that out of the room white tears white fragility crimea river world's smallest violin but it's the same i mean it's not not necessarily the same magnitude but it's the same structure which is you've had an experience you feel is unjust from your point of view it is unjust i would argue um but does that prove that white people are that there's a pervasive system and not not by itself no that's it's just an anecdote um my name is dave it's a pleasure to meet you my friend tim and i drove out from allentown uh i saw you went with or listened to you on sam harris and on the regular board i think you're fantastic thank you thank you uh we were really excited to come see you in person dave rubin discussed with you about the taboos that you're breaking you talked about kanye west and how you came out with kind of a hammer oh yeah yeah yeah and um i guess i'd like to know what your experience at columbia has been like since since you're famous sort of i'm not famous the shia labeouf i'm not famous no no i don't get stopped at columbia nobody uh there's a couple people who know who i am but it's so it's not a thing no all right i'm not so thank god because well that's what i was wondering is because i was figuring in columbia life could become brutal if it became uh nothing nothing bad has happened uh i might be like the the man who jumps off a building and a 10-story building and at the ninth floor says well so far so good but i don't know i don't know well that's good could be perfectly fine i was hoping that things hadn't become a nightmare i don't know um and the other thing i'd like to say is i think that martin luther king would be mortified right now um you you discussed on it was either sam harris or or with david rubin um the number one homicide or the number one cause of death for blacks is homicide young black men and yet for young black men right and the new york times is focusing on microaggressions um well promoting people like like like like sarah jong um and deflecting from the real issues that need to be addressed and i want to know in person what your take on that is no um yeah the point i try to make there and which i try to make often is that according to the cdc the latest number i i know is from 2014 homicide is the leading cause of preventable death for black men aged 15 to 34. um it's not the leading cause of preventable death for any other uh ethnicity that that's not it's it's it's normal historically to have disparities in terms of the irish used to commit homicide at three times the rate of the germans right there are many reasons for this uh but you will not hear the new york times mention this fact because it seems to traffic in stereotypes about black criminality that i think we all rightly oppose right the question is what what is the cost of not talking about are we so um should we be so shackled by our fear of resurgent white supremacy that we can't talk about the leading cause of death among among right you talked about the rule of the law of diminishing returns and that you're never going to bring down you know the murder rate to zero the cost of doing that would be far worse than the action than actually achieving a murder rate of zero correct so in that vein do you think that the cost of not attacking say there's a stigma to to talk about the real causal issues because of worrying about stereotypes that might come out that you don't want being heard is the cost of not addressing those things far worse than being afraid of offending people uh in my view yes i mean we're talking about a uh a death toll a literal death toll uh every single year about twice as many black people are killed as ever died as were ever lynched in the history of this country right 4 000 would be the latter roughly uh roughly 8 000 the former and yet if you if you read the new york times often as i do every few months you will see another article reminding us about the history of lynching lynching was terrible it is awful do we need to do why why though is the focus on that and you will never hear a peep about the murder rate all right a million dollar question and by the way this is martin luther king talked about the problem of crime multiple times okay um you're gonna call him a racist i don't think so so uh it's a problem for sure thank you um so actually i want to see if i can tie up some of the things in here because i like what you were saying and i like what you're saying i'm not sure if you're aware of a book perhaps you are you just need to be aware of everything um written by amy chua called the tiger mother yeah yeah so that was that was really well you know caused quite a stir but in that she makes it very very clear why asians do better and what you've mentioned in some of your talks before what thomas seoul has talked about is that the culture among um black americans which is different than in africa that to be educated to do well uh is to be considered white so there's actually investment in the culture not to do well so this this i i feel that when uh you're talking about like what the new york times is deliberately not addressing the diversity of um the the the opinion the the black opinion he said the 51 and the 60 percent uh they don't feel and you're talking about that they're talking about microaggressions it seems to me when we look at history that deliberately attempted to redress the crimes by imposing it on a people like was done after world war one led to world war ii so when you're deliberately like uh engineering a conversation to gin people up and get them really round up and say hey you need to be redressed for this well where do we draw the line do we draw it at women do we throw it at mexicans do we draw to every minority except for for whites and as you point out too there are there's a disparity among whites so when you're doing that you're really just the intention to me seems like to uh divide the people so united we stand divinely form and it seems like when it's universally the case that the the media pushes this message pushes this message so that it breaks down conversations so that the whole education is to to get us to disagree with each other and educate us as you pointed out towards um offense to taking offense that the whole agenda is really to break down the conversation so that we'll fight with each other and destroy our culture can you say something about that please um about the last statement i will say uh learning more and more about the anti-racist vision has given me at minimum well let me put it this way i think it's always better to assume that your enemies are coming from a good place your intellectual enemies right i don't conceive of people with anti-racist vision as my enemies they're too many of my friends have that vision for for uh for me to say that but i think it's just as a practice i think the economist tyler cowan has a great quote if you want to increase your iq by overnight just follow this improv simple rule of assuming people who disagree with you are not evil or i'm not saying that's necessarily what you're saying but is there goal to fracture society or is is that the effect i would i would argue the latter the latter is enough it doesn't have to frankly i don't care if it's if it's the goal um with regard to what you initially commented on the the acting white phenomenon uh i guess it's a sign of things that have changed just in the past few years that uh harvard professor henry lewis gates published an op-ed in like the mid-2000s in the new york times where he called out this phenomenon very specifically the phenomenon being black kids middle school high school age even younger potentially accusing each other of acting white or being a coconut if they speak in a certain way someone like i do if they're more carlton banks than will smith so to speak the problem is carlton banks probably ended up doing much better in terms of socioeconomics but this is something that's been pointed out by barack obama by michelle obama by jay-z um henry lewis gates even chance the rapper even uh in one of his songs uh says something about it um yeah it's this kind of thing that if you bring up you're blaming the victim blame really has nothing to do with it in my view it's a matter of the consequences of beliefs um and as you said we know from you know the brookings institution did a study that found that median american student studies spends twice as long studying as the median white student who spends longer studying than the median black student why again why why would groups that have completely different histories be identical replicas of each other in terms of values beliefs like this this makes no sense this has never been true anywhere um but it's taboo to point out i think the the harvard sociologist at orlando patterson who's done great work on the issue of culture as a cause in itself he said he sometimes refers to it as the c word because it is treated like that uh you brought up the idea of reparations and and i think all of us have heard this idea where um and jordan peterson has said this like uh and he talked um when he was called an angry white man um and and the whole thing is what is that idea so it's like they just throw it out there in terms of like um some light some abstract idea but is it like concretely framed reparations yeah yeah because i feel like it's almost like a gateway card because as soon as you do that for one group you're going to have an endless line of people saying well what about us you know how long have women being oppressed and and you know how long have mexicans been across um and and how far back in history do you go to establish the beginning point and when does it end because if you give people money now what about their children yeah where do you start and end this thing and and perhaps the intention in doing that is like i say again specifically to to create chaos and pull the whole thing apart and why i think that i would say that the chaotic thing i'm not as generous as you are is because when you hear jordan peterson get interviewed every almost every single one has the same questions that are deliberately meant to provoke a response that i mean he's answered the same things hundreds of times you can't even believe that the interviewers haven't even listened you know they have that's their job well no i feel like they're probably prepped by their interns five minutes before um but um so the question is about the nature of reparations mainly um i think in practice successful instances of reparations jews in the holocaust japanese americans and uh the internment camps have been extensions of the principle of our normal legal system which is that you specifically suffered you get the payment that that coincides with our um idea of oh what would you call it uh um liability and and i don't know what the legal term is but it's it's um co-extensive with the the the way our justice system works in general and there's a good reason it works that way because when you try to give justice to abstract historical groups as if i have something in common with a slave in you know 1818 that wear the same we're part of the it's a way of speaking metaphorically not literally right um again yeah there's a good reason our justice system is not set up to to deal with group justice or abstract inter inter-temporal group justice it's because that's a dead end or really it's the opposite of a dead end it's a perpetual motion machine of grievance and the last thing i'll say about that is i've gotten a few people who are generally fans of my work saying things like uh well honestly i'd be for reparations once if that was the end of the conversation if we could finally just we did it and it's over i don't i i think that's very unrealistic because it's a basic economic principle that if you pay someone to do something they'll do more of it not less so reparations in some sense in effect it's a kind of paying people to agitate for reparations what makes you think it would only be once and by the way you cannot pay off people for the for the harm incurred by slavery right holocaust victims they got payment but they did not get restored there's no there's no amount of money that that can restore that so i guarantee you the day after reparations if it happens um three quarters of black children which black children will still be in single parent homes we'll still have the education gaps the crime gaps that still have most of the racial wealth gap and there will still be journalists and intellectuals saying in fact not only am i not satisfied i am pissed that you think you can pay us off with that small amount how dare you the moral enormity of slavery a check really um john the water said that the pendulum at least in the realm of discourse on these issues maybe swinging a little bit more gently come 2019 and beyond do you agree with that ooh i don't make predictions that could be true i would like that to be true well let me qualify that we don't hear much from tahashi coach now he's writing a novel he might be writing supposedly graphic novel or something but another graphic novel i mean um again it could be the the evidence i've seen has shown that there's been a swing to the left within the democratic democratic party on identity issues it's now the case for example that uh white liberals are far more likely to think that discrimination holds black people back than black people are themselves this is from a pupil it's like a 19 percentage point gap right so in some sense white liberals have become more woke than black people um perhaps that's been true for a while but it seems like i mean i encourage you all to do this when you go home or right now on your phones look up google trends searches for the word systemic racism you find a flat line from 2004 when when it starts counting flat flat flat flat until roughly 2014 and then which says to me that um so i mean perhaps that's it's kind of been like a five year spurt caused by you know the availability of videos of young black men unarmed men getting killed uh social media the way in which social media skews our sense of what's going on in the world the way in which uh the media doesn't report the higher number of white un unarmed men that get killed because it probably gets fewer clicks everyone knows the name michael brown but not the name daniel shaver uh you know point point being you know i hope john is right that that that was just a kind of five-year spurt and now we're turning a corner but i don't i try to not make predictions because most are wrong so back to the anti-racist and feminist viewpoint one one viewpoint of the anti-racist is the reparation idea and then if we view the blacks and whites as like scoreboards the white will be here the blacks will be here and we should make them level and with that we need to take from the white's gift to the black and level the feet excuse me and the resources are limited so we need to take from somewhere to give to the other group you said that it's that's a dangerous way to go in because you don't know how to stop and it's like a circular pattern and it's dangerous but one other viewpoint would be i would say [Music] i lost my train of thought it hurts less to take from the white and give for the black because getting the black from the bottom up is more valued than taking someone who is privileged down huh what is yours um if that's the logic why not take from the rich and give to the poor regardless of color could wouldn't that even be um you're saying it hurts less for the people losing money then it feels good for those gaining it right so this idea is not just about money it goes for affirmative action too okay you reject them from college they will certainly get to another but for the black person that's that one opportunity for to go to the road of success well again this is where our speaking in terms of black and white gets very misleading we're talking black people we're talking about a group 40 million strong that includes me my grandfather and you know somebody in a single parent home in baltimore or south side of chicago that is looking to the street for father figures right very very different we have tax returns you know we have we have the information of how much money people make roughly you know your logic would seem to it seemed to work just much better to do it in terms of class rather than race if we were going to do by the way this is what the welfare state is we have a welfare state it's not perfect should be improved but it hurts you say it hurts less for white people to get something taken then the gain the gains are greater for blacks than the pain is for whites well the gains are much greater for the poor of all colors uh than than the uh then the hurt is for the rich of all colors so it seems like no reason not to go for classes instead of race on so would you go for the class well in practice we do and i think it's a yeah i think you know it's not an accident that every mixed free market or mostly free market society on the planet has a welfare state because you know there are no libertarian utopias the welfare state's not going away i don't want it to which is not to say it can't be reformed but that's kind of a matter for economists to work out uh referencing your welfare state you know you would know better than i what thomas sol has to say about that and the evidence that he points to um where the introduction of that after the civil rights movement really actually destroyed those people that they were trying to help or they claimed that they were trying to help that actually historically the people that were most in favor of the raise of the minimum wage uh were the ku klux klan like oh yes give it to the blacks they were so delighted because they knew that economically it was clear as day if you did that you would destroy them and that's exactly what it did yeah yeah um things that appear to be uh beneficent on the surface actually are the reverse and it's that thing that i find so troubling about the media yeah um i think it depends on you set a good example um much the same could be said about historically at least about trade unions vast majority of black leaders opposed trade unions because it was understood that they were means of keeping black people out of work minimum wage is another good example welfare many contemporary observers of the great society did find and uh my mother used to tell me this having grown up her having grown up in the south bronx in the 60s and 70s that it was well known when the welfare auditor came around that there couldn't be a man in the house or else you would lose the checks you can understand how that might incentivize single-parent homes which subsequently spiked doesn't mean it's unclear to me whether the welfare state is the whole story behind the um behind the rise in single parent families because we saw the same rise in the white community a few decades later so it may have just been a larger cultural phenomenon and on the other hand there are parts of our welfare state that are agreed upon on the left and right that work very well like the earned income tax credit so i would caution against i guess a totalizing story but there are there are seriously seriously bad examples that don't get talked often don't get talked about often enough of of policies that are intended to help blacks that that end up hurting for sure the book please stop helping us by jason reilly is pretty good on this with regards to discussion of culture and race in general in the united states we're in a weird time in the united states in general but so we're in a very acidic cultural moment i mean obviously polarity and basically polarization basically every category is as high as it's been since as you were saying earlier in the 1960s so how does that inform your viewpoints on race and more specifically on culture because it seems like there's such a focus on the reevaluation of like america's image especially you know returning to populism and in some ways it seems like straight xenophobia so this isn't a specific question but like we're not living in 2012 i guess it seems like that's a very long time ago so how does that inform your discussion i guess it just makes it more urgent to me um i'm not sure i have an answer that's more specific than that i think it's more urgent than ever to inject nuance into conversations on both sides of the political spectrum that's a cliche but it's true i don't know that i have more to say other than that i guess just when you have a plurality of the country that's primarily white and on the majority male 1 you could say trump voters but maybe a lot of them would have preferred someone else so just when you see this i guess this division in the united states and a lot of times there's at least a cultural idea of frustration with identity politics with a focus on identity with skin color or gender or something back do you think that it's troubling i guess how do you respond to that that anxiety that exists in america which seems like there's this fear over identity politics whether it's a good thing or a bad thing i mean a human's point of view would certainly say like the idea of identity politics is not great because we should have we should look at it in a more intellectually honest fashion but at the same time that can seem to overlap into language which is often if not racist what do you mean do you have an example i think donald trump's rhetoric is and if you want to look for a specific example i'm sure you could look at like sort of the growth of the alt-right is a group that seems to jump from hatred of identity politics into aggressive and discriminatory well well the alt-right loves identity politics they practice it yeah yeah yeah i would argue um i mean jews will not replace us it's interesting actually reading some of the uh going back and reading some of the anti-racist thinkers from the 60s they would sometimes say things like um you know integrating schools is a kind of painless genocide right there's no blood spilled but you're killing black culture exactly the same thing that uh um uh somebody in in the i think uh um a member of parliament in the uk said uh immigration from south asia was a kind of i think he said bloodless genocide but the the symmetry stood out to me now i'm not saying that anti-racists are not racist and i've talked about these two visions the anti-racist versus the humanism there's of course a third vision namely the racist division which has ruled america for most of its history and the humanist vision and the anti-racist vision are two different reactions to that um and it's a mistake i think i think a mistake that people in the humanist tradition can sometimes make is to say the anti-racists are just the same as the racists uh that's that's usually that's generally not the case there are some examples uh louis farrakhan elijah muhammad but in general it's not true because racists locate the meaning of race either in genetics or god any anti-racists locate the meaning of race in history those are those are two different they can sometimes sound the same as in the painless genocide versus bloodless genocide example but they are different i can take maybe one more i have to pee rather badly so do one more yeah kanye west what's up now is really because when podcast but you did refer to the moment where he tweeted um i like the way canvas always that owns things um as sort of like a um an open moment for you where you thought i don't know confident enough to hear your views on collecting all that so my my my my thoughts for with regards to kanye west and that entire flow is with regards to the idea of a vocal um minority and sort of a more silent majority and kanye throughout his rant throughout that period up until august or september actually kept on hammering on the point of the silence of a larger group and i was interested in what you think about that sort of phenomena whereby there is or there may be a group that's pretty quiet or more silent that is that fight that hasn't found its voice because for whatever reason versus signaling or whatever um reasons do you think that do you think that um things like kanye what people like kanye west or what things would move that might that quite that silent majority if it is a majority to a more prominent light or do you think that that stasis or sort of like a silence is bound to continue it's a good question and again i don't make predictions um but we we know from po i mean virtually every poll of the opinions of black democrats finds slightly more conservatives than liberals among black people these people are almost all voting democrat but they identify as conservatives at a slightly higher degree than they do as liberals which is a minimum interesting that's not necessarily something you would know if you just if you're just a passive consumer of media so is there a silent majority uh i mean i think there certainly is i think is a it's a majority that is not necessarily silent but is not really listened to or catered to as recently uh as recently pointed out to me that i think four years ago their black families basically ran into the basically like stampeded the naacp and i think ohio basically because they wanted charter schools and democrats and teachers unions in general the teachers union are completely against charter schools no matter how much massive demand there is wait lists thousands of kids long right for these charter schools and um you know that's considered kind of a conservative issue for some reason i'm not sure what it is about charters sometimes they're a little bit more disciplined but charter schools run the gamut and it's like a perfectly sorry perfectly valid um hypothesis that charter schools some of which have been very successful are better than public schools it can be for for black primarily serving low-income black and hispanic families branded as a conservative issue plenty of demand for that in the black community you don't really find people other than jason reilly at wall street journal and a few others really making the case again not for lack of demand as your question what would change it uh will kanye help i don't know seems like he's kind of dropped off the grid who knows what he's up to he's uh not totally there and he also said that slavery was a choice and he also said that slavery was a choice um you know i'm not sure that kanye or candace are the best articulators the best spokesman for the silent uh silent majority if there is one i don't know i don't know how that problem gets fixed going back to uh systemic racism and education it seems to me i mean i've heard that there's like a lot of kind of shuffling from inner city predominantly black schools to the prison system which is of course for profit in this country i wanted to know if you consider that systemic racism or not i i i don't i don't know so that's why um the the percentage of prisons that are private is very small the percentage of our nation's inmates who are in private prisons is very small relative to those who are in state prisons okay and federal prisons okay um you could i could snap my fingers and release everyone who's in a private prison and we would still have the mass incarceration problem if if we want to frame it that way okay um do i consider incarceration an example of systemic racism uh i mentioned earlier that there is this example of systemic racism what i consider to be a paradigm case of it in the in the justice system with court stenographers right that made it harder for black defendants to get a fair shake in the system from what i know and again i'm not a criminal justice policy expert but uh you know i take from john faff who wrote a great book um what is it entitled um locked up yeah i mean does that sound right he attributes most of the rise in incarceration to the perverse incentives facing prosecutors we've just gotten news of kamala harris's old very tough on crime prosecutorial stance of you know making it illegal for parents not to send their kids to school making truancy a crime that was part of a whole incentive structure for prosecutors to go for the longest sentences possible toughest crimes or rather toughest sentences possible um and it was really it was a phenomenon there was no grand conspiracy i mean frankly much of the push for law and order was coming from black communities that's why two-thirds of the congressional black caucus voted for the 1994 crime bill right clear majority and they were responding to demand in their commun in their communities at a time when the crime rate was astronomically as they put in new york nine times higher than it is today it's easy to forget that especially people my age who weren't alive to remember it but um no i don't i mean it's possible that there could be some bias in the system and at the same time the vast majority of the increase can be due to uh things that are not related to bias both can be true all right thanks again

Channel: Brandon Van Dyck

Views: 134,133

Keywords: Coleman Hughes, race, racism, anti-racism, humanism

Id: 6orCV4I7jjU

Length: 121min 41sec (7301 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/0LTakingLs]

He’s giving lectures now? Awesome!

[u/smgarrison13]

That man is a trooper for lasting as long as he did in the q&A. He looked like we was about to keel over at any moment. Bless him.