Conservative Conversations with ISI: Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes

[Music] let's go ahead and start the discussion off by defining some terms listen if we go into the discussion today so i'd just like to ask kind of broadly how would you guys define racism and how is that different from how the term is being used today that's a big question well no i mean uh the uh obvious thing to say here is uh something like this is not a scientific definition but it's just a sort of common sense this is a hatred or antipathy an unreasoning disdain um a belief in uh derogatory uh you know characteristics of the group uh without evidence um a uh dislike of association or uh intimacy with etc a kind of aversion to social contact these would be these would be things that come to mind um and uh how is it different from the way the term is used today well i mean today everything is racism isn't it i mean uh every uh to be a postal affirmative action is to be racist uh to cite statistics about the extent of uh african-american participation and criminal activity uh is to be racist to wear a maga hat is to be racist so i i don't know what uh what limits the definition of racism today having views or taking actions contrary to the um uh desires of a certain set of people who've annoyed themselves as the social police of racial etiquette uh would appear to be the uh definition now uh current um but i would have a more parsimonious sense of racism as something of uh old-fashioned uh contempt hatred antipathy uh dislike disdain uh based upon nothing other than the racial identity of a person yeah i would add only thing i would add to that is the move from conceptualizing racism as something that um one locates at the level of the individual to something one locates at the level of the system and whether it goes by systemic racism structural racism or institutional racism the general idea is that you know what it means to be educated on this issue now is to understand that a system can be racist without anyone in the system being a racist so the criminal justice system can be racist without even if no one can locate a specific police officer or judge or prosecutor that is in any way provably racially biased the system itself just operating by its own logic and its own inertia can produce racist outcomes and that's what people mean by systemic racism there's a bit of a contradiction there because on the one hand people want to say well the racism is in the system it doesn't require any actual racist people to operate but on the other hand what i see is as glenn observed an endless obsession with finding people who are racists so it seems a little bit that there's a desire to have it both ways that people want to find racists and on an as expansive a definition of racism as we've ever had and they wanna they want to find those people the um you know that the karen in central park that calls the cops when she arguably shouldn't have so on and so forth they want to find we want to find these people and punish these people as racists but we we're also supposed to believe that the the really important kind of racism is the one that doesn't require anyone at all yeah there's a new legitimacy to the idea of systemic racism today obviously it complicates the discussion often and glenn you're talking about how the there's confusion of terms and that anything could be declared racist but is there some legitimacy beside behind that idea of systemic racism well yes i think one could make a certain kind of case and this picks up where coleman leaves off in distinguishing between um the consequences of complex systemic processes so mass incarceration this is law what what things are said to be illegal war on drugs this is policing uh what activities are monitored and who gets apprehended this does courts uh how does uh you know pre-trial detention work who gets a good lawyer who gets a bad lawyer what sentences are handed out these are a lot of things that are happening all at the same time and if the net consequence of these things is to work out adversely to the well-being or the interest of a racially defined group one can you know invoke this idea um i think i mean here's what i think is at stake if you start with disparities you don't get talk about systemic or any other kind of racism until you have disparities first you have some social outcome that is uneven some inequality some disparity uh and then you put to yourself the question of how do i account for this and you're not a scientist you're just an ordinary person trying to think about it roughly you have two accounts that you can give one of them puts the onus on the individuals who are suffering the disparity and the other puts the onus on quote unquote the system you can in effect blame quote the victim close quote or you can blame the system so when people say systemic racism sometimes i think what they have in mind is you know this can't possibly be the um uh consequence of the fault of the the uh uh you know responsibility of uh these people because these people are after all disadvantaged they're historically marginalized etc uh this is the consequence somehow i don't quite fully understand it but uh long history you know uh structures of domination whatever and then they have a narrative about how it's a consequence of the system they're blaming the system not the persons uh for the disparity when they invoke the category of systemic racism i think does that make sense to you coleman yeah i think that's exactly right and that's that's exactly why i think it's often vague when people make the charge of systemic racism it it the the reason it's such a useful idea is precisely because it's vague not not in spite of its fakeness and i i also agree that people do view themselves as have as as just choosing between these two options of of blaming individuals you know blaming people suffering in prisons or suffering poverty and saying actually it's society's responsibility it's people with power people who make policy etc and given those two choices it seems like the obvious compassionate choice to many people at least is to say well the burden is on those with power the burden is on those who create policies who run the system uh to fix these disparities my my point of view on it is i think it's a very it's a very natural idea to have but the more and more that i've studied you know like you know tomasulo's whole career and nathan glazer and other people who've spent a long time actually studying cultural patterns between different groups and how that alone can yield very disparate outcomes and just you know forget you know it's useful to not think about the american context because it's such a hot-blooded conversation you know even for me it's a very hot-blooded conversation here but you go and you study the history of ethnic groups in europe and you know in the 20th century and you you'll find massive disparities between ethnic groups that as an american you you may or may not have even heard of that can't plausibly be explained by the system and in fact the more you study this i think the more you're you're probably going to the more you're going to just adjust your priors to expect disparity rather than parity and that that's a big fundamental difference between the way i think about the issue of systemic racism and the way many people on the left think about the issue of systemic racism my starting assumption is that in a multi-ethnic society no two groups are going to have equal outcomes probably it's that's not a hard and fast rule but that's what you should bet and you know if we were just talking about white if we were just talking about whites and asians inevitably we would have a nuanced conversation about why asians have higher incomes and so on and so forth and we could talk about that at length without the knee-jerk assumption being that this m there must be some some something to fix um in the system yeah so we hear a lot of talk today about the idea of anti-racism how does that relate to the discussion of systemic racism and how does it differ from opposition to racism in general [Music] then you want to start okay i'm happy to take a crack at it i'm not sure i understand that anti-racism mania now sweeping the land i think some of it has to do with uh with covering your ass if you're running an institution and you need to kind of inoculate yourself against the possibility of your brand being diminished by your career being smurfed or tarnished by uh accusations of uh you know the failure to respond to people's concerns microaggression you know tacit racism uh implicit bias and so on uh so you know the proactive thing to do is to embrace some you know progress of uh some process of uh institutional examination or whatnot which which leads to some of this stuff um but i don't i don't maybe coleman has something interesting to say here i don't think i do i i i'm kind of befuddled by people uh uh you know kneeling and asking for forgiveness and declaring themselves to be racist and apologizing for it and acknowledging and checking their privilege and all of that it it's uh something that uh that i don't fully grasp what's going on there psychologically yeah i think um uh one of my professors at columbia barbara fields who's a great historian and writer on these topics she she said one day in class which i always remembered anti-racism is not a movement it's a starting point i thought that was interesting and it captured my feeling about this as well it seems to me basically all people of goodwill are anti-racist in the in the literal sense of wanting to live in a world where ultimately nobody ever experiences the stinging you know rejection of being discriminated against on account of something you can't possibly control i think you know most i find most children the moment they first hear martin luther king's speech understand this intuition just intuitively so that that's a starting point that's but what has been branded and branded as anti-racism on the left presupposes a very particular definition of racism that is actually really the should be the crux of the debate right it presupposes that you basically can't be racist against white people because of prejudice plus power it presupposes that an asian-american applicant that applies to a college is in and gets rejected where they wouldn't if they were say black or hispanic or maybe even white it presupposes that racism the definition of racism excludes instances like that which is not at all lobbyists i'm not saying it's obviously not true either i think there's a there's a there's a very real philosophical first principles debate to be had about you know when we're thinking about situations where there's a direct trade-off between having a a school or a corporation say accurately reflect the u.s population by race in terms of census distribution versus racially discriminating against individual applicants because on one conception of racism you know you're you're failing to be anti-racist if you don't discriminate against individual applicants and on another definition of racism you have the opposite problem so i think as as barbara field said basically everyone in this debate that that i know except for the true fringe is broadly against racism and it's about the the we can't presuppose um the what should be the crux of the conversation we're having yeah no i think it's a really helpful perspective uh how would you advise conservatives who kind of oppose the idea of anti-racism as a movement in the way we're seeing with like white fragility trainings uh or critical race theory but are truly anti-racist and are opposed to you know want to fight racism when it exists today how would you encourage them to go about entering these conversations coma [Laughter] so i mean i know that the people by the millions are grappling with this problem all across the country how do i how you know say god forbid you're not so sympathetic to black lives matter say you see the protests and the shouting people shouting at people at restaurants you know and your mind goes to the cultural revolution in china you're worried we're headed in a direction that is deeply unhealthy and bad for the country and terrifying in fact and say say that's your opinion how do you go about saying that at work assuming the people around you are at least giving lots of lip service to black lives matter as almost every corporation in the country is the the the honest truth is that from what i can see you're unlikely to get a very fair shake if you express your opinion that might not be true everywhere that could be it could be because i pay attention to the issue too much i have a distorted view of how bad it is out there but it does seem to me that there's almost unless you actually go the route that i've gone or that glenn lowry has gone where you you clear the uncanny valley of expressing a controversial opinion to the point where you are actually now known as someone who has such and such opinions so that your your reputation can't possibly suffer more by expressing them anywhere um unless you're in the handful of individuals in that category which you're not you're you stand of a very a very high chance of losing face even for expressing the most nuanced and carefully worded and compel compelling um answer that is skeptical of black lives matter and i don't i don't i think it's on the one hand i want to tell people you know never back down from your principles because you know if you do then you become part of the snowballing effect of self-censorship that makes it harder for the next person but at the same time i know that people are dealing with uh a lot of different issues not everyone is in a position to to where they can just sacrifice as a matter of principle so i wish i had better advice to give than that well i i just add something we're we're college uh people here right intercollegiate studies and so on so we read books and um you can learn uh some lessons i think by comparative study by looking at other times and places in which similar kinds of dynamics have been at work uh read george orwell politics and the english language reflecting on the debate on the left of british politics in the 1940s about communism and so on or read vaclav havel the czech politician playwright about the samistat uh producing eastern european intellectuals during the time of soviet hegemony in eastern europe when uh people were trying to break out of uh how does vaclav have opportunity he talks about living within the lie uh he asked us to envision the dilemma of a simple man a grocer who every morning puts a sign in the window next to his tomatoes and his lettuce that says workers of the world unite and he inquires why does this gentleman do this when everyone knows it's a fraud everyone knows that the party lies constantly everyone knows that the official ideology of the state is completely bankrupt and yet this goes on for decades of people reproducing and reinforcing this idea and he talks about how some uh intellectuals come to see the imperative of living within the truth and this is really a tribute to a kind of courage and a kind of a heroism if you like some of these people paid with their lives uh for their willingness i'm not saying that the current uh uh mania about anti-racism and the the kind of cancer culture political correctness is anything like totalitarian uh rule but i am saying the personal challenge of do i uh adhere to my convictions and live within the truth or do i by degree submit myself to a kind of tyrannical domination by others this is bullying this is you know i mean small b bullying this is uh a kind of uh you know domination of of a person to feel like you have to withdraw within yourself and you can't even say what you're actually thinking so i didn't answer the question the question was what to do uh my my advice was read what the uh east european intellectual dissidents do in uh vaclav havel's telling in his book called the power of the powerless and then think about your own situation now both of you have spent a lot of time in college classrooms so i'm wondering what has your experience been like there have you found that voicing your opinion has gotten you into any trouble or has it been smooth sailing what's it been like i think we're going to have to answer individually since my time in the classroom is as a professor in coleman's so far as as a student and i'll just say that i get to say what i want to say when i'm up in front of the room and the students don't always feel entirely free to come back and tell me what they think i do get pushbacks in the end of semester comments from some students who didn't like what i have to say but i i find that on the whole i'm able to as it were get away with it being a curmudgeon maybe it's a matter of age uh being as coleman says already out of the closet so that there are no surprises when people encounter me um and maybe also having pretty good arguments for some of the positions that i make and i'll just say finally having the uh the willingness to expose myself a little bit by being vulnerable by you know confessing air or by changing my mind and talking about how i've changed my mind things like that as for me my experience at columbia was completely dependent on the professor there were some professors that were um i think of philip kitcher for example who used to be president of the american philosophical association the uh the picture of t trying to teach you how to think rather than what to think you know uh we took a ethics class and he would give you you know two papers pro affirmative action two papers against it and you would just spend the whole time trying to understand the argument the strengths and weaknesses um unfortunately there are lots of professors who aren't like that and the professor's rather dogmatic are invariably dogmatic uh on progressive identity politics uh left-wing they're they're no to my knowledge there are no dogmatic right-wing professors so in that sense it's it's very slanted um i've been in a i i i in a sense it's not so different from the real world in that you end up affiliating with and choosing peers that you know don't hate you or will let you speak so you know if you end up choosing classes and screening these professors out ultimately but if you're not i've been i was in a class once where a professor told me all people of color are victims of oppression and we read foucault and i had so many questions that i knew that other 80 people in the class you know at least some of them would i knew i would lose face with them if i even asked a skeptical question about you know foucault foucaultian post-modern epistemology i really wanted to but i frankly didn't have the spine to because the professor so signaled that one was not supposed to disagree so it's it's it was boring and and not intellectually stimulating at all and there's a lot of classes like that too do you have any advice for the college freshman who perhaps doesn't know what the lay of the land is yet because obviously a lot of like the anti-racism classes and focus have been kind of sweeping through college campuses and just last week a vanderbilt a student was docked points on a quiz for rejecting the statement that the constitution was designed to perpetuate white supremacy and to protect the institution of slavery so obviously right now it's you know kind of hostile to people who are more proud of the american founding and have perhaps more nuanced view so do you have thoughts for someone who's just showing up on campus and entering the fray i would say um screen your professors before you take classes experiment listen first of all you might be wrong you know i might be wrong so take one class with a professor that you know is is into it and see for yourself um what you're able to say and and but ultimately you might you might find you should screen your professors beforehand and only try to spend your very limited time in college with professors that are worth your time and the second piece of advice i would say is if you're motivated to find like-minded people you're probably not crazy are probably a lot of other people on campus that are having the same thoughts and feelings that you are i found that was true at columbia and if you find you will find you know find a group of people that are hungry to discuss all of these issues and start a club i was part of a a club like that at columbia and it's one of my you know fondest memories i was just gonna say it sounds like good advice from the younger generation yes yes i'm gonna shift gears a little bit and and talk about a more recent event that happened just this earlier this week trump and i'm sure you guys may have heard about it trump directed federal agencies to cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund what the white house referred to as divisive un-american propaganda training sessions so what are you guys thoughts on this development do you think it's a wise move on the president's part or will it just fuel tensions further well i mean we are in an election year let's not lose track of that um so you know the cynic in me wants to hold my wallet here to guard against the possibility of manipulation by an interested party that is the president of the united states who has his own agenda on the other hand my sense of the matter is that a lot of these struggle sessions and that's what they sometimes seem to descend to in which uh people are in effect berated for uh not embracing the uh the latter-day wisdoms about racism and anti-racism uh are objectively problematic i mean they they are something that uh a organization well might uh if it's well-run elect a to shoe uh to to not get involved in and it seems to me that it's perfectly uh a defensible position uh to say and i one shouldn't say this without explicit reference to the content of these sessions so because i'm stereotyping now i'm characterizing them without being concrete and i don't have all the facts about what's actually going on uh at which this directive uh was targeted but um the uh protecting employees from indoctrination sessions of the sort that i can imagine a robin uh would would uh propagate uh seems to me it'd be a perfectly defensible thing to do perfectly sensible thing to do so i was hardened i was hardened to hear it yeah i for for me i think um i guess my my opinion on the wider issue is a little bit different than my position on this particular you know this particular move by trump unsaid on him you know it could be election posturing um to what extent does he have the ability to control what's in curriculums obviously there's a there's a common core i don't i don't know all of this but you know obviously that the president is president's not a dictator and there's something um um unnerving about the the the notion that a president could you know have the impulse to just ban something like that that said i completely agree with the feeling behind what he is communicating what you know the subtext of this is there's something deeply wrong with the 1619 retelling of american history and that retelling is increasingly expanding into actual school curriculums and getting into the minds of children as if it were factual and that that who you know who is actually going to stand up to it like who's going to stand up to it and condemn it to the degree that it should be condemned um you know even if lots of people disagree with the idea that the cut you know the constitution was much more a slavery preserving document than the opposite or that that slavery characterizes american history in a unique way um that puts it apart from the slavery that's been practiced all over the world for 10 000 years or more um let me put it this way i i plan to have kids one day and by the time i have kids um i'm i'm never gonna worry i'm not gonna have to worry that their textbook will uh will will whitewash slavery or will downplay the horrors of cattle slavery in the united states as many textbooks in u.s history have i'm not going to have that worry what i'm the worry that i'm going to be justified in having is that what they're going to get in history class is going to turn them into um an ungrateful small-minded um you know hater of their own country um to to a degree that is totally irrational and oh and and that that to a degree through propaganda that it ignores the entire rest of the world and that's going to be my worry and so to the extent that what trump is saying is well listen guys who's gonna stop it who actually has the balls to to stand up to this i agree with that sentiment let me distinguish here between uh what's taught in schools like the uh propagation of the 1619 project's view into the history classes and american high schools on the one hand and what's done with employees of the federal government in terms of diversity training on the other those are different things and i think the president does have the authority to direct federal agencies not to spend money on diversity training of a particular sort he certainly can't tell the school district of the city of chicago or whatever what to put in their curriculum that's going to be decided at the local level i just wanted to be clear about that agreed yeah do you guys have recommendations on resources that uh students should look to or like coleman the type of thing that you would like your future children to see in the classroom as they're trying to have a holistic understanding of our history and of where we are today any actual history book you know we read edmond morgan american you know american slavery american freedom or you know any of the classic history books even if they have um left-wing or progressive bent to them um are better than you know what what what's being offered by you know by journalists with an agenda so it's not that i want my my children to come away having the same politics as i do i just want them to have a balanced outlook to have been exposed to both sides and i think you know the resources i would recommend are sort of are no different than um than you would expect from just a responsible history teacher agreed yeah no i think that those are definitely good advice or good advice i know a lot of people are asking if you have any specific books that address the current issue as opposed to just history if you have recommendations as to resources that they should turn to well i do have one peter wood of the national association of scholars has a book that's about to come out called 1620 and it is a critique of the 1619 project and it's it's just beautifully done he's an anthropologist by profession but uh in fact plays the role of a of a historian here in recounting the early settlement of what had become the what became the united states of america in virginia and in massachusetts and in looking at the nature of of social economic political life amongst the these in these settlements uh into which africans were introduced as the 1690 project points out but uh their state is in uh law in virginia was not yet settled into uh kind of racial chapel slavery for another i don't know 75 to 100 years and it's just anyway i don't want to try to describe this entire book he takes on the new york times uh publicity machine and how it promotes the 1619 project he takes on the politics of the newsroom and of the uh left intelligentsia in the country who have fully embraced what coleman was decrying as a kind of uh account of the country that uh was extremely unsympathetic and and uh disdainful of what was accomplished in the creation of the united states of america at the end of the 18th century uh peter wood's book 1620 which will be available i expect in a matter of weeks uh something that i think people should know about and then the other one is the 1619 project by philip magnus who's written some very good long essays about the relationship between slavery and capitalism to what extent american wealth comes as a result of slavery he's an economist and political historian so i recommend his book no definitely write those down for those of you who have been asking i'm just wondering have you guys found that there are a lot of kind of middle ground uh perspectives that are being offered because it seems often with these fierce national debates there's a lot of polarization where you have the the wide extremes as opposed to trying to grapple with issues and obviously you guys are doing that you know and doing your work and doing great work there but have you found that you're the outliers or you find that there's more of a uprising of kind of the middle ground there i'm not sure i could judge whether there's an uprising of you know centrist political or intellectual analysis you know i'm not i'm not really sure how i could judge it um but i on on this topic i've people i've read that are you know consistently interesting and in their in their analysis of issues not predictably left or right i would put kathy young has written about the 1619 project from i guess as close to a centrist perspective as i as i've read glenn do you have any thoughts there um not really uh i mean there are we live in a highly polarized time right i mean there are efforts i i think of braver angels this is john wood jr um you know let's get people around a kitchen table metaphorically speaking who are pro or anti-pro-life or pro-choice or who are pro-chomp or anti-trump or whatever and see if we can't you know affirm our humanity our common humanity by agreeing to disagree about some things but nevertheless maintaining a constructive relationship of deliberation and so on this kind of this kind of talk um so they you know there are people who realize i think the threat uh to the um republic uh from allowing uh the of fiercely uh a partisan disagreement to harden uh allowing ourselves to get uh settled into armed as it were armed camps lobbing grenades back and forth at each other and who are trying to uh you know maintain space for us for a common good to be affirmed um but that's all very generic i mean i don't have any you know i don't have anything further to offer on that yeah so we've got a lot of questions that are building up in the q a over here so i think we'll transition over into audience questions um but before we do that if you've enjoyed what you've heard tonight this event is just a taste of what isi has to offer and if you're tired of progressive orthodoxy on campus and eager to go beyond the narrow range of debate in the classroom i'd encourage you to come learn the timeless principles of liberty with the intercollegiate studies institute isi introduces students to the american tradition of liberty and to a vibrant community of students and scholars our members get an education and a community that they don't find at their universities and in the process they become articulate voices for conservative principles so if you want to get the college education you deserve i'd encourage you to become a member today at join.isi.org which is a link that's pinned to the top of the chat there and also just encourage you guys to check out both coleman and glenn's podcasts coleman's speaking over at conversations with coleman and then glenn as at the glen show and if you want to hear more specifically what they have to say i highly encourage checking those both out but just to launch off our audience questions trevor asks are the ideals of white fragility and white privilege useful in understanding and addressing racism and why or why not so coleman you want to start that off um sure i i don't think i i'm not sure i could be friends with someone who actually took white fragility as a recipe for how to live um luckily i don't know anyone like that but what she says in the in the book is essentially for if if uh you know say you and i are having a conversation you're white i'm black there's there are totally normal human conversational moves and feelings that you're you're not supposed to avail yourself of or else you you fall into the sin of committing you know white fragility you can't remain silent you can't argue back this is if we're talking about race you can't you can't express your opinion you can't express your disagreement no matter how how understanding the mere fact that i'm black and you're white means you have to accept what i'm saying you have to a admit that you're racist as a starting point and anything less than that admission is just on this view by definition denialism so it's a it's um it's a very str again like i i have intimate friendships with white people and i don't think any of them could operate under such a a rubric it's a very strange way to show you respect me as a black person to say you'll never disagree with anything i say in fact what you're treating me like implicitly is like i don't know a petulant child who who can't be can't be pushed back against because my feelings because i'm so i'm so um unreachable by reason that you have to essentially you have to be the adult in the room and and i have to be the child so that that that i don't see how that points a path forward at all i suppose you could say that there's some value in asking people to put themselves in the other person's shoes so if you're an organization that's mostly white and there are relatively few people of color in it it's not unreasonable to ask if you're a white person in that organization that you imagine yourself to be this other guy imagine yourself to be the odd person out the the only woman on the team or the only black uh in the in the department or something like that how do you think it feels how do you think it feels if people look at you and they impute to you certain views or or expectations or whatever just based upon the fact of the way to you that it uh you look uh how do you think it feels to be you know in that position and if if that's what people have in mind when they they talk about uh privilege be aware of the fact that whiteness actually matters in certain circumstances and that people who are not white in those circumstances may have to bear certain burdens or meet certain challenges i mean i can go that far of course you know you could also ask the person to imagine what it's like to be the white person in that service that's for example to imagine being a cop confronted with a recalcitrant citizen who might be dangerous and armed and you're white and you have to deal with that situation and you might be afraid and you might do whatever you do i can ask a person to imagine and put themselves into that so in that situation so in a way that's just a kind of human empathy and you can ask it of people depending on the circumstance whether they be white or non-white and so far i'm willing to go but i think there's something really important what coleman just said which is that uh often this emphasis on you know white silence equals violence uh this idea of check your privilege uh presumes a certain kind of black fragility it it's it's kind of predicated upon the either idea that black people have to be uh treated with kid gloves in all situations otherwise uh offenses given to them discomfort is imposed upon them uh they are uh made not to feel welcome uh what what's the new uh the term of art inclusion and belonging you know inclusion and belonging we have to make sure that people feel that they belong and this uh infantilization of black people uh on the supposition that the least off word said the uh smallest gesture might be uh you know somehow threatening to their very sense of well-being uh is i think what's at the root of a lot of this emphasis on uh on white privilege and so on andy has a question for us here uh he wants to know if there's anywhere you see systemic racism in the united states today so perhaps not in the entire system but are there any systems where you do see racism um so tabling the question of systemic whether i would call this racism which i think is a a long and complicated question where do i see racism presumably i i i i imagine the the questioner means against black americans um i saw i think uh no doubt some people in the audience will also have seen a a documentary i can't remember who did it but it came out about nine months ago um and i believe it was about the housing market the real estate market in long island i could i could get i might have gotten some of these details wrong but i think that's what it was and they just basically did a sting operation they put people under cover they got two you know 50 year old white man 50 year old black man made everything about them identical other than the race and sent them in to see real estate agents and look at houses with an undercover camera and found a disturbingly high level of disparate treatment between in in the way that that a lot of people would predict which is to say black people were treated worse and uh so so that there's no denying that that racial bias exists um and i do think that kind of experiment is the best way to show it and the most compelling way to show it maybe that's what people mean by systemic racism again there it's it's still a little confusing because you can actually locate the people in the documentary that are being racist and their faces on camera and you know these people some of these people are mortified and have made public apologies and whatnot so it seems very much like a case of individual racism um but again that's a longer conversation about what people mean by those terms i want to add something i think there's a lot of racism i think there's always going to be a lot of racism i think where many of us guilty of it um let's look at the marriage market let's look at who makes choices about intimate associations with other people do you think people are doing that without regard to race well if there were there would be a lot more interracial marriage than there actually is what about adoption is the average uh waiting time for an orphan in uh uh for someone to offer to adopt them an infant uh independent of the race i don't think so i think white babies are very scarce and and highly prized uh objects of adoption and i think that uh black babies languish in adoption uh without uh without anyone offering to take them up what about in vitro fertilization in the market for uh eggs i'm looking to purchase an egg do you think that the value in the marketplace of a woman's egg is independent of her race i know it's not independent of her race uh so there's a there's a lot of uh preferential association behavior not just in real estate but also in life that reflects people's differential valuation of prospective intimate partners based upon the racial identity i don't think we need to stop the world from turning because that goes on it's a part of life so asks in a similar vein uh if there's a way of talking about these racist incidents that happen in the racial biases that acknowledges the impact of things like slavery and jim crow laws without employing the systemic racism rhetoric within it which i know you both have taken issue with and i think rightfully so so you're talking about racial racist incidents how can we talk about this productively when we're talking about things that do need to be changed when there are problems in the system that are real perhaps and could be addressed but we have this whole issue with the rhetoric of systemic racism do you have advice for someone engaging in that conversation i'm not sure i perfectly understand the question maybe glenn um i think what's being asked is um maybe i don't like a lot of this latter-day fashionable emphasis on systemic racism but i do realize that um i don't know a ton of heisi colts has a point when he talks about redlining creating facts on the ground that really blighted the lives of african americans and that those effects persist so can i acknowledge that historical uh link without necessarily buying the entire uh kind of uh you know ideological outlook uh that we see in some of the anti-racist literature isn't that um that's how i understand the question so okay having clarified the question coleman i went your answer with interest is that was that a good summary of the question yes no i think that gets to the point yeah well yeah then definitely i i think um i will say you know if i try to transform myself back to 15 years old before i had ever encountered anything remotely smelling like critical race theory or woke i think my attitude towards the history of racism was one of sincere relief that that error was over of um anger at the thought that anyone had ever experienced such horrors and pride that you know the civil rights movement was such a noble and peaceful and universally admired um affair peaceful on the part of the protesters and and whatnot and a kind of pride in looking back on that as an american touchstone of of progress um and implied in that was you know that we had overcome something horrible something um deeply unethical and i don't think so i don't think any of the the no the notion that you know white people have to be meditating on their privilege and we have to have our racial identities on the forefront of our consciousness um that we have to condemn america as a as a unique uh uniquely evil nation i don't think any of that is implied in a frank acknowledgement of um of the sins of our history i mean the strange thing is that a lot of people i think will say things like america you know we don't care about the past enough we just we want to we want to brush it away we don't want to talk about it we don't want to have the uncomfortable conversations about redlining and blah i think what is actually true is that in general people all across the world don't like talking about the horrible things that their country has done for the most part the typical person the typical you know british person the typical chinese person doesn't like thinking about something horrible china did 50 or 100 or 200 years ago it's just it's not really in the typical person's nature to dwell or to feel shame for such a thing that said america if anything picks america apart it's not the degree to which we don't look at our history it's the degree to which we obsess over it relative to other places on earth um you know saudi arabia abolished slavery in the 1960s i would i'm i'm curious how much they think about it or if they think about it at all um so the the that's the comparison to me i think often we are blaming america for things that are sort of flaws and foibles and unfortunate features of human nature and in fact we're not we're not we're not um unusually bad on those issues i would say we're unusually good i just want to add that i want to add two things one is it's very hard to know as a matter of social science the causal consequences of historical events that you know you you you have had redlining how big an impact did redlining have on the nature of life in an inner city ghetto today uh you you had uh discrimination and uh uh not equal pay for equal work what is the consequence of that fact of history for the disparity of wealth holdings between black and white families today it's very hard to know the answer to these questions just as a matter of data uh causal analysis inference statistics it's it's not such an easy thing to know what is the implication of slavery for the structure of african-american family life in the 21st century it's almost certain that the consequences of slavery were not neutral with respect to the way black people live among ourselves but it's very hard to know uh so so that's one thing the other thing is even if one could establish a causal link for historical events it doesn't follow that the way to best respond to that consequence is to uh develop policies along the same lines as the history uh produce the circumstance racial discrimination in the past which leads to poverty amongst african americans today might be best met by the development of social policies today that take care of the problem of poverty for all people including those who happen to be poor because their ancestors were discriminated against so um i thought it would i thought it was important to emphasize both of those points one's an epistemic point how do you know what the causal effect is and the other is a kind of normative point about what's the best thing for society to do given that you identify a particular causal effect and it need not be to have a race uh defined remedy in response to the history one student mentions that you coleman has spoken in the past about closing the wound as in resolving the psychological feeling of injustice that black lives matter supporters in the black community often seem to have what do you guys think are the best ways of doing so going forward yeah so when i've spoken of closing the wound i'm i'm thinking of people and i have no idea how many people there it's not most black people that i know the reason i met people like this is from having talked about reparations but there is a set of people for whom the fact the historical fact of slavery represents a a psychic wound to them almost almost akin almost as if their trauma that they experienced in their lifetime the desire obviously my desire for anyone with any level of trauma whether it is because something that happened to them or because they feel a deep connection to those who suffered during slavery i want i want you know to figure out how that person can deal with the trauma you know to to get to the place where it feels like a closed wound for them so so the question is how do we get there and i think a lot of and then the wider question is as a nation that we've not closed the chapter but done some some kind of healthy you know i don't know truth and reconciliation around the topic of slavery such that it doesn't it no longer feels like an open wound for people right and that so i think some people imagine that reparations is going to help us get to that place but i think they are misunderstanding the nature of the problem like if if someone feels a deep psychic wound over something that happened hundreds of years ago i'm not sure that there is actually anything that can be done at the level of public policy coming from washington that could actually help that person no longer feel that this is a deep wound there was someone who once said of therapy that you know often therapy can be great but there are certain cases where um you know you you try to get to the bottom of something and you realize there actually is no bottom and that's true for for certain people on the issue of slavery which is to say if reparations happen tomorrow they would be surprised at how how little it changed in their psychology the next day and we would be exactly where we were so when people talk about healing the national soul that's what comes to mind for me glenn do you have any thoughts down there yeah but i don't know if i can say them out loud slavery was a long time ago a person walking around in the year 2020 a a a a an american an african-american um we are amongst the richest people of african descent on the planet uh nigeria is a country of almost 200 million people if i'm not mistaken its gross uh domestic product is on the order of magnitude of 600 billion dollars a year less than a trillion there are 200 million nigerians their gdp is less than a trillion uh there are 35 million americans uh we're about a tenth of the population maybe a little bit more and the gdp here in the united states is on the order of magnitude of 20 trillion dollars a year we are not proportional we have lower incomes on average but not half we're vastly richer than uh than the nigerians i'm sorry for that little arcane calculation but i'm just trying to say black people in america are rich relative to the world's population we're powerful um there was just a black president of the united states who was commander-in-chief of the largest the most powerful military in the history of the world there are black billionaires we could name them um walking around burdened psychologically by the fact that some of your ancestors were enslaved 150 years ago some of them because some of your ancestors are european and some of your ancestors are native americans not a rational posture you should be disabused of it um what is this race thing that we keep uh reifying and defining ourselves uh totally in terms of it some of my ancestors were enslaved not all of them uh so i i mean i almost want to try to disabuse the person uh who needs to be healed from this wound of uh having to contemplate the fact that some of their ancestors were enslaved disabuse them of their of their uh the psychological cult to sack into which they have wandered sorry coleman would you agree with that absolutely i mean i i think i said it more diplomatically as is my style but i feel the exact same way i mean listen i i grew up so i have ancestors that were slaves in america on my father's side um on my mother's side not not slaves in america but probably probably in the caribbean who knows the bottom line is i came up very aware that i was descended of slaves in fact when i was a kid my grandmother would often show me the names of our ancestors in the wills of ultimately thomas jefferson because there was warmly hues and um betty brown and a few other names where we have the whole uh lineage going from them to us because they kept great great records at monticello so i grew up you know very much you know close to the knowledge that i myself was descended of people who were slaves in this country but it never and and there was something um interesting about that to me and i find ancestry to be interesting i understand why people you know spit in a tube and send it to ancestry.com um it's fascinating to see where the people who you know contributed to your existence came from but there was never any thought in my mind that because they were slaves because i was descended from slaves who had the same last name as me and you know that therefore their wound was somehow moderate it would have it would have felt totally disingenuous and posturing for me to adopt their wound as if it was my own in fact it would be it would be it would be um disingenuous of me to adopt my mother's wound as a as a you know as a kid who grew up in the chaos of the south bronx in the 60s and 70s to appropriate even her traumas would be disingenuous of me and and unhealthy detrimental to my own happiness and the happiness of those around me much less uh ancestors of mine from you know several hundred years ago so i do think it is a very strange way to go through the world and it's very strange to see smart people reifying and encouraging that kind of mindset so this is kind of a bit of a similar vein coleman you had talked about how it seems like there's there's no bottom on the the push that we have in trying to close this wound or really just perpetuate it um we have a couple students who are asking what do you guys think that black lives matter supporters would need to see to conclude that systemic racism has been resolved in america is there anything well just stop killing us is what they say so an easy answer would be uh termination an end to uh police killings of uh black of black people in american cities of course that's not going to happen you know i regret to report that that's not going to happen i'm sorry maybe i should make myself clear because we're a country of 330 million people because there are tens of thousands of encounters between police officers and citizens every day because there's a lot of crime that's going on there are these circumstances in which uh there are 1200 police killings of citizens in the united states in a year most of them are not black the idea that there will be a secession of incidents where for complicated reasons there are these uh conflicts between police and citizens that end up escalating the violence it's not going to stop i think we need to take that on board they're going to be more and more and more of these incidents we're going to have to find a way as a society of processing these incidents that doesn't re redound in a violent conflict and so on uh on each occasion because they are not going to stop coleman do you thought dad there i mean i i agree with everything that was just said it's um yeah so what would blm have to see yeah i think if there was a complete cessation of videos of unarmed black people getting shot dead by the cops i have to imagine blm would would lose a lot of steam and there would be a you know a aside from the mo the truest of the true believers a lot of the you know a lot of people say oh we've made some progress on this issue you know of course we hardly go a week in in this country without a a white person getting killed by the cops and that is largely the result of everything glenn just mentioned it's partly how big america is we just have so many more interactions per day than you know europe european countries or canadian countries and yet we're all watching the same six o'clock news at night feeling that if something happened twice a week that we're all implicated because it's our country so we face a lot of challenges that other countries don't face we have a gun culture we have so many legal and illegal guns that policing here is should be considered a different job than policing in a country where you know the person you're pulling over never has a pistol in the glove compartment so we have a lot of very real challenges um the more i think about the issue the more i don't the more i i feel it's it's much harder to solve than people imagine and um yeah i think that is what would have to happen for people in blm to um change their approach to the race issue in light of that we have another student who is asking what you think the path forward is as people are not with the real data that you're mentioning about the poll including when it comes riots and the looting and the mass hysteria is there a path forward do you just see this continuing on indefinitely shall i yeah go ahead nothing continues indefinitely um i mean i guess i i i derive both hope and fear from history because um everything that has looked almost everything that has looked permanent if you're thinking of a crisis tends to end up being temporary we we we tend to um not be imaginative enough about the the solutions or new equilibriums will come to in order to survive as a you know as a civilization or as a country on the other hand sometimes things go terribly wrong and civilizations collapse or else you know jared diamond couldn't have written the book with that title and you know if i actually think about the details in detail what would it take for us to engineer ourselves out of this situation where cops um cops get into encounters with civilians feel their lives to be threatened pull the trigger and kill some number of those civilians end up being black some number of those instances end up being filmed get going viral and if the weather is nice enough or not cold enough people people riot on account of their interpretation of what that video means about the the country and if i actually ask myself what would have to change in that link of causation for this not to keep happening i can't find a single thing a total reset of how people understand those videos um you know if everyone in america you know were to spend as much time watching the videos of white people getting killed by cops as black people aside from you know the the mass horror of watching these videos that would be you know perpetrated on the american people i would hope that it would recalibrate people's sense of why these things happen it would get people to rethink um their their jump to assuming that the only reason this could have happened is because the person in question was black if that were to happen then i could see us getting out of the situation where there's riots every summer for the next several decades i was just going to observe that the same question could have been asked was asked in the 1960s during the period of civil disturbances and the long hot summers of the 1960s the cold the kerner commission on civil disorder big report i think it came out in 1968 uh you know chronicled what was going on and uh tried to give some advice about how the country might get to a better place that was uh 1965 watts 1967 detroit if i'm not mistaken 1968 a lot of cities with the assassination of king so on that was over 50 years ago uh fast forward to 1992 you had the rodney king uh riots and the uprisings as well you would have it uh in los angeles and so on that was a quarter century ago um and here we are uh i don't see any reason to think that we're not going to be here in another 50 years i i see no reason to anticipate that somehow things are going to get better things can get worse um you could have widespread civil unrest we're already seeing something of an inkling of that in the um uh reaction amongst white nationalists and so on people there are a lot of guns in the country um it's possible to organize uh small factions of very devoted people to do very horrible things because our methods of communication and uh connectivity are so much more powerful than they were just a couple of decades ago i'm i'm very concerned i would not have an optimistic forecast i think if we can't find some ways of countering some of the underlying problematic uh uh ideological commitments like the commitment to race itself i mean i know this is going to some pie in the sky but after all racial identity is a very superficial aspect of human uh existence it's not it's not very deep it doesn't go all the way down um king had the right idea with this colorblind stuff i mean i know it's a micro regression now it's regarded as a microaggression to say that i don't see color but and it of course it's impossible literally not to see color but we definitely don't have to give it the overarching significance that we now do so maybe there's a way out but i think it's going to require very deep rethinking about some of our basic conceptual the social commitments i don't see that happening so i'm not optimistic we have a different question i hear from carl that's a little bit more personal he's wondering how have your views developed on this issue over time because he's heard pullman talk in the past about how you had more perhaps left-leaning views on the issue of race and have changed over time um glenn have you had a similar experience there yeah i've been back and forth back and i had the stephen tell us the political scientist at johns hopkins was on my podcast a couple of weeks ago and i asked him where he was politically he says i'm where i've always been and i've watched you whiz back and forth past me going from left to right right to left left or right uh so i was a reagan republican in the 80s uh and uh i had a kind of break with the right in the 1990s i'm old everybody should realize i've been around forever okay so we're going back 40 50 years uh but uh i broke with my uh right-wing colleagues in the early mid 1990s and uh became a little bit of a kind of social justice warrior in my own small way i i wrote about affirmative action and a very supportive way i wrote about mass incarceration in a very critical way um and i i've found myself in the last i don't know 10 15 years uh reverting to some of my conservative instincts and i i think i've got to acknowledge that i uh was wrong uh with uh some of the moves that i made away from some of my more conservative uh instincts and you know it's everybody's different and my story is i wanted to try to mend fences with um african-american uh colleagues and friends and i got tired of being out in the wilderness my um ability to tolerate the the lonely path of the truth teller uh uh just the waned and and i i found myself wanting the comfort of the tribe i wanted to go home uh and you know as a matter of fact you can't you can't go home again so no just to follow on that and coleman feel free to jump in on this too what do you think it means to be conservative on issues of race i was gonna let coleman comment no i i mean you're you're i'd like to hear your because i think you know it's funny i i go back and read bayern rustin essays from the 70s and he would be completely considered a conservative today you know it's hard to know that that's always there's a version of conservatism that is like the roger scrutin um you know people who have thought deeply about actually what the hell does this word mean what what's the common thread of you know british conservatism in the in the 17th century and american conservatism today and come up with you know principles that you know broadly make sense you know the pace of change can't be too fast and preserving what you have and so on and so forth principles that you know probably to some degree a lot of liberals might even see some nuggets of wisdom in but then what is conservative with respect to the issue of race in america is just ever changing right like to to believe in just equal treatment for individuals is basically the conservative position now um but if you had as as uh as i think thomas sowell has has equipped if you believe in equal treatment you'd be a radical in in 1950 like a a centrist in 1980 and a conservative today um so it's hard to know what is meant by that now i think that's right um the use the use of the category conservative with respect to race commentary doesn't mean the same thing as the use of the category conservative with respect to economic policy or cultural issues or something like that it it seems largely to mean a willingness to depart from uh the consensus view about uh matters of interest to um to african americans so for example an emphasis on race neutrality and color blindness is taken to be conservative a willingness to uh to talk about the problems in the african-american family life has taken to be conservative a appreciation of the difficulty of policing a city is taken to be conservative but these are not you know conservative uh in any kind of deeply ideological way this is not a theory of the state or a conception of the individual or any kind of coherent uh cultural vision this is merely apostasy being conservative in race commentary means deviation from the party line especially if you're an african-american so we have a couple students who have been asking uh kind of as a follow-up do you see point of agreement and liberals on issues of race that can help to move the discussion forward so we keep lining up in the same circle you guys have talked about are there any points of accord that we can find coleman do you have thoughts there um you know i think probably more people than you might expect would agree about the world that they want to see if they could you know wave a magic wand um i think a lot of people at the black lives matter protests actually if they could you know if they if they had omnipotence would create the same a similar world as a lot of people on the right which is to say somehow scrub all you know racial prejudice from the human mind and create a maximally you know maximize the equality of opportunity and just you know get rid of all of the the uh you know the failing systems and bad incentives and so on and so forth the the problem is there's obviously a fringe within in black lives matter who like essentially speaks for black lives matter that has a very different set of concerns a very different set of goals for for the world they would want to see that is much more top-down and authoritarian and based on equalizing outcomes at any cost and almost implicitly about domination really just about domination and respect for for black people at any cost and but but i i do think there is a more agreement than you might expect on what would be the end goal on both sides when do you have thoughts there well i used to be a christian and there's a passage in the bible where uh the apostle paul is uh in one of the epistles i can't remember which one i wasn't that good of a christian he says i strong i might be in romans our struggle is not against flesh and blood but it's against powers and principalities or something like that anyway if there's a serious person out there who knows their bible they will know the passage that i'm referring to and here's what i'm getting at the bad ideas in the heads of people is the problem and they need to be combatted and replaced with good ideas okay so racial essentialism is a bad idea i'm against black lives matter as a political movement because it's a racially essentialist movement you could even say it's a racist movement i know that's a very very radical thing to say and i don't i don't mean to cast aspersions i i just mean literally it essentializes blackness all lives matter now i know you can't say that because the meaning of those words now in context is freighted with a whole lot of other stuff if you say it it's like saying blue lives matter it's like taking sides it's it's like being anti-anti-racist but it's just true um the the notion that race is the central thing driving these outcomes is wrong it's just an error people should be disabused of it um our political institutions are not to be so organized that they think of them the people who are actors in them think of themselves as representing races that's racist that's south african circa 1960. we should disabuse people of the idea um you can't have uh a fetishizing of group disparity without implicitly indicting the groups who are successful if you constantly view social outcomes in terms of racial differences in a success you've got some losers of quote-unquote victims of the system who are on the bottom then you've also got some winners who are on the top what about the jews how can you avoid anti-semitism i'm not count i'm not here indicting any particular person or movement i'm making a logical observation if you think that uh the blacks and latinos are underrepresented i don't know how you avoid thinking that the jews are over represented i don't know how you avoid thinking that there are too many asians in the stem disciplines if you think there are too few blacks and latinos in the stem disciplines those fractions have to add up to one you can't have an underrepresentation without having an over representation are the people who come out on top guilty of privilege did they steal their success do they owe their success to the denial of opportunity to someone else is that universally true is that a is that a a dictum that we have to adhere to it's it's the wrong way to think about social outcomes i think uh so um you know i want to fight in the battle of ideas i don't want to give up uh principle uh even if uh it takes uh you know a long time to be able to persuade people of the correctness of of the ideas we lost coleman we do appear to lost we're timing out anyway aren't we thank you so much everyone for attending the webinar thank you and coleman and we will pop back in the next minute here uh you talked a lot about the importance of replacing the bad ideas for the good ideas so thank you for working to do that relisting isi is all about educating for liberty and putting forth the good ideas side of current world finish going down qualified people come up there but thank you all for tuning in we'll have more events coming up in the next couple weeks so come out for emails you'll see more notifications there thank you all and have a good night good night everyone you

Channel: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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Length: 88min 16sec (5296 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020