Critical Race Theory: On the New Ideology of Race

foreign welcome to the manhattan institute's event on critical race theory i'm michael hendricks director of state local policy and i'm here to welcome you and our host for this conversation my colleague jason riley but first as a bit of introduction please enter your questions throughout this program both our initial conversation and our panel and we'll incorporate them into the discussion and uh without further ado then i'll welcome jason reilly jason reilly is a senior fellow at the manhattan institute a columnist at the wall street journal and a commentator at fox news his much anticipated next book is called maverick a biography of thomas soule which will be available in may 2021 he is a recipient of the 2018 bradley prize and after joining the journal in 1994 he was named a senior editorial writer in 2000 and a member of the editorial board in 2005. he also speaks frequently on abc cnn pbs and mpr uh jason is the author of several books including please stop helping us and false black power in 2017 and he's also worked for usa today in buffalo news jason holds a ba in english from suny buffalo and he's also a great colleague jason thank you so much for leading this discussion and over to you well thank you very much uh for that introduction michael and i want to welcome everyone to today's event uh critical race theory used to be confined by and large to uh to academia to college campuses but that seems to have changed in in recent years these days it seems everywhere uh it's taught to children in our public schools it shows up at work through anti-bias training uh proponents like robin d'angelo and ibrahim kennedy have written books that have climbed the best seller list uh it's informing our debates about everything from policing and mass incarceration to standardized testing uh the black lives matter movement slavery reparations the 1619 project and so forth so what's going on here uh how did all this get started uh and why has it gained such traction and popular popularity recently uh is it a productive way to address racial inequality uh and what's the end game well we've gathered a very distinguished panel to discuss all of this and i want to start that discussion by talking to john mcorder professor mcgorder teaches linguistics and music at columbia university he's the host of slate's lexicon valley he's a contributing editor at the atlantic and he has two books in the works the first is nine nasty words which is about profanity and the second is titled the elect which is about our topic today critical race theory uh so welcome john thank you jason good to see you so um john we've we've known each other a long time couple decades and uh uh have been following these debates for some time and the first question i had for you is why are we still talking about this stuff um you know what wasn't critical race theory hashed out 30 years ago um didn't we already debate slavery reparations in the 1980s uh what happened why are we going through all of this again well i think what we have to understand is that there is a basic assumption that cuts through all of what we're being taught lately that like many basic assumptions isn't often spelled out and it's at the point where a lot of the practitioners themselves would be hard placed to spell out this basic assumption it's all gone from the concrete to the abstract but the heart of critical race theory is an idea that all intellectual and moral endeavor must be filtered through a commitment to overturning power differentials now if i say power differential frankly that sounds a little boring but what power differential mainly means is getting rid of race-based disparities it's also about sexism it's also about classism but what really motivated this whole thing was a concern with race and where it gets thorny is that there is an even more tacit assumption underlying critical race theory which is that where facts and efficacy and pragmatism conflict with the idea that you are questioning maybe not even overturning but questioning power differentials then the facts have to lose it's less about what actually is than about displaying your intention to battle and supposedly overturn but mostly just to battle and to show that you don't like power differentials and so that means that yes jason of course you and i have been around long enough to know that reparations was you know buried you know eloquently buried by people from both sides of the political spectrum after randall robinson's the debt to me i guess i'm getting old that feels like 10 minutes ago you know that four years that we discussed reparations then all of a sudden in 2014 a certain someone writes an article in a magazine and it's being discussed as if it's the salk vaccine the reason was not because people didn't know on a concrete level that we had already talked about and dismissed reparations it was that talking about reparations is a very handy way for a certain crowd to articulately question power differentials such as the ones that relate to race and for a great many people these days the sense is that to be smart and to be moral to be enlightened is to show that you question those power differentials regardless of whether or not the discussion has been had before regardless of whether you're talking about making anyone's life better that's the problem here that the assumptions are tacit and at this point abstract it makes it hard to have real discussions with people about these things because what we think of you and i as a strange detour and as often just a an obstacle to black well-being they think of as the only way to possibly be a good person well you you you alluded to um people like tanahisi coates uh i mentioned ibram kendy they're a little bit younger um is is this about uh indulging a younger generation that that uh hasn't read randall robinson or or doesn't know who derek bell uh was uh and and and this needs to be spelled out for them or have are the arguments that were made uh you know 34 years ago once again relevant for some reason i mean has have things changed uh in society that have us discussing these things again and um because the circumstances uh demand it i mean what what do you think is the driving the driving force for uh a return to these these discussions yeah i think um yeah if um hebron candy is a young and he doesn't know but you know i think that he probably does know you know if he's anything it's that he at least puts books into his hands he knows who derek bell is etc what's different now is not something that's happened with youth it's social media which changes so many things to me when i think of crt when i think of this frankly rather anti-empirical and ultimately religious ideology i think of somebody with gray hair and that's because as you know until 2002 i taught at uc berkeley uc berkeley was full of people who thought this way and most of them were not especially young the difference back then was that this was mostly limited to cafes on college campuses and certain fringe but there used to be something called a magazine etc what happened is that social media focused people who thought this way in such a way that they could affect other generations and also just whip up sentiment among themselves and so that's why it's around 2013 that suddenly these things that sound so retrograde and and done before and 15 minutes ago to us were being treated as brand new insights and then in the year 2020 oh the historians are going to have fun with this particular year in 2020 what happens is that there's a pandemic and everybody is deeply bored and alienated have to spend so much time alone and inside then there's a particularly egregious cop murder of a black man and people basically coalesce around the symbolism of that man's murder and take it as an opportunity and no one was thinking this consciously i don't think this was cynical but it became since it was may a handy opportunity for people to get outside of their houses and spend time with other people and enjoy fellow feeling if there had been no pandemic robin d'angelo's books and ibrahim kendy's new fame would not have jumped out the way they had and that's just because of chance a lot of social history is chance i am not saying that anybody deliberately took advantage of anything but the real turning point is that social media had made it so that twitter was everything to a certain class by the early teens and so really all of this traces back to a certain sea change that you started to feel as a college professor in specifically 2013. i remember it i was remarking upon it then at that time thinking what in the world happened in the fall of last year i was saying in 2014 and now we're seeing the fruits of it because of what happened with george floyd and how the pandemic would make any sane human being feel well something else seems to um have happened since the last time we were talking about this too and and i want to get your thoughts on this it and it has to do with um the nature of debate on the left i mean when when derek bell was writing about this stuff um kimberly crenshaw people like that um they were taken on by other liberals john i mean yes conservatives were critical but this stuff was being hashed out among liberals in the pages of the new republic or the new york times there seems to be quite a bit of deference now on the left to the ibram candies and the tanahisi coats is uh in the second you know this this um as this as this stuff has come back into the mainstream and and i'm wondering um how much you know cancel culture has to do with this i know you've been been been touched by that where um uh there's no longer it seems to be a place for these ideas to be debated vigorously on the left the way they used to i mean we lost uh stanley crouch this this this year and i remember reading stanley crouch um you know who would go after people on the left all the time uh and call them out by name he did not hesitate to do that and uh but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of room for for that type of person uh or for someone like you or for someone like steven pinker um to to to take on or an andrew sullivan to take on some of these ideas you you seem to get get um they want to muzzle you and not debate you the way they used to have you noticed that that sort of evolution you know the defining trait of these days is that people on the left who don't believe in this pretend to or just shudder in the corner instead of speaking their minds and again and i know this doesn't this isn't a very exciting analysis but i'm not trying to be facile it's twitter it's it's social media so for example you talk about how we're getting old i go far enough back that i once debated kimberly crenshaw you can find it online it was an intelligent square debate not online because it was too long ago i ran up against june jordan for example or ta-nehisi coates you know ta-nehisi coates frankly i think it's accurate to say that he thinks people like you and me are just pond scum he really wishes that we you know we're not listened to by anybody can't even be bothered but this is the difference the difference is that people like that thought that way back then and then they just have to take it home and share it on the phone with their friends once it gets to the point that people like that can express that kind of view and i'm not calling out any of those people specifically for doing it although they're people today who do a lot of their heirs once people can call you out on social media as a bigot that scares a lot of people to their socks it used to be that those sorts of people would send you an intemperate email or maybe they had a blog or something like that but you know time passed like here i go with coats again i'm taking a page from glenn lowry but he's useful don ossie coates used to say some pretty mean stuff about me in the atlantic but it would just be there and was only people who happened to read that it wasn't on twitter once that sort of thing becomes on social media most people who aren't up for a fight and most people for some reason don't like arguing and being hated most people will just fold and so we're in a situation where somebody can say systemic racism somebody can say black body somebody can say aren't you an ally and 99 out of 100 people who are liberal but not leftists will just go home and be quiet because they don't want to be mauled which is perfectly understandable unfortunately though that has made it so that people who think with this crt religion are falling under the impression that they're prater naturally indisputably correct because they're taken on so seldom that it's possible for them to reject the few people who do take them on as somehow transmogrified sinister weird people because most of what people like that here is hosannas so we're in a nasty situation which is created by the fact that the world has become a village because of this blasted and yet marvelous social media yeah um you're a linguist by training and i wanted to um ask you as a linguist how much of this crt debate um is semantic word play anti-racist implicit bias structural racism white privilege robin deangelo says blacks can't be racist but john that can only be true if she is defining racism in a way that is utterly unrecognizable to most people right yeah there is a thing about language in general and this is an obscure linguists theory this is just life which is that there's always a slit between what words are supposed to mean in the dictionary and the way we actually use them and so the perfect example of what you're saying is social justice very often you'll hear from people like this this person is not in favor of social justice because we disagree with them and then you're thinking but social justice can be many things they have adopted this one sense of it and you know what jason i'm gonna you know lately i get the feeling people are beginning to process me as a little mean and it's not that i'm mean it's just that i'm getting old enough that i know i can say things without being called too young it used to be he's a whippersnapper he has to respect his elders well now i'm goddamn 55. well i can say what i feel like i want to say frankly i think that a lot of people who fall for the crt thing not all of them but a lot of them it's a rather easy theory really the tenets are rather elementary they sit very easily in the brain and so many of the people who are fighting hardest for this stuff have have not been challenged much and they're not used to making an argument so when they say aren't you in favor of social justice i would say that most of them really don't know what a milky thing that is to say they don't realize that social justice takes on many many different forms they've never been asked to think about it and if you ask them to think about it all they have to say is that you're a racist so i want to make sure that we don't demonize these people the idea is to try to get into their heads and i know that's what you're trying to do but yes they do exploit language but they don't know it they're not thinking about that and remember especially if you're under a certain age you don't remember when racism meant prejudice you know a lot of these people didn't grow up watching maude in all of the family they don't know that racism is supposed to mean archie bunker and that's because it doesn't anymore the idea that what racism means is this very abstract notion of systemic racism or institutional racism or white supremacy if you're 40 you don't remember when the word wasn't used that way by educated people so you're not deliberately misusing language you really don't know that it used to be another way people aren't historians only a very few people are yeah um let's talk about some of the tenets then of of critical race theory and and one um you you mentioned uh glenn lowery and i uh i know you do a a blog a uh blogging heads television or internet uh program with him that i uh i like that we're on tv yeah i i like to uh to tune into um but i've heard you two discuss the tenets of critical race theory there and i wanted you to talk a little bit about the the difference between um uh what civil rights activists and leaders of a previous era used to ask of black people um you know they talked about personal responsibility they talked about um a lot of things that today are really dismissed as respectability politics but it it mattered to them um in their cause how blacks carried themselves critical race theory doesn't seem to ask a lot of blacks um it doesn't seem to ask anything of blacks john i i find that um odd uh and i i find it a little disturbing you know jason i know what you mean but what you're saying makes no sense to those people power differentials as far as they're concerned what they've been taught is that black people have no particular responsibility until the playing field is perfectly level whatever ails black america in their view is due to white privilege coates has said that explicitly candy's whole career is based on that proposition and it makes perfect sense to them and so you know we're arguing past each other in expecting black america to be asked to do something somebody who has fallen for this way of thinking the old time civil rights leaders who called for black people to do something that was old-fashioned that was wrong we are now in a different paradigm we know something that they didn't we're ahead and then add to that if you're white you join this paradigm and they're things that you pretend to believe that means that you have checked off whether or not you're a moral person it feels good you were showing that you're goodly you used to do that by going to church now you do it by pretending to read robin d'angelo if you're black then you settle for this sort of thing often because it gives you a sense of warm group membership and you know there's even some psychological research coming out lately that affirms something that many people including me have been saying for a long time which is that if you are not truly concretely victimized then feeling like you are a victim harboring what we might call a noble victim complex is endorphinic it makes you feel good it's a kind of euphoria it gives you a sense of significance and belonging and worth add all that together and of course the idea that you would ask black people to do something as opposed to white people to do it all for us just sounds like literally sacrilege and so i know what you mean but for them you're arguing from 1962 and you need to get with the higher wisdom it just seems so uh counterproductive in terms of a way to close racial gaps to um uh improve the situation of the black poor telling them you know it's not really up to you um you live in a systemically racist society an irredeemably racist society and it really doesn't matter how hard you try um how you behave uh none of that matters the onus is entirely on white people they are responsible for your situation and they are responsible for getting you out of your situation you just need to sit tight until they get their act together first i i i don't know that that is a recipe for uplifting any group anywhere around the world anytime in human history and you know jason this is the sad truth the kind of person we're talking about listen to what you just said and they would deny that they don't think black people have any responsibility but then if you go through all of their writings and all of their speeches they never have anything to say about it and yeah that's the thing and it gets into the fact that once again the reason people are preaching all of this is not because of anything pragmatic it's because of how it makes them feel in the moment and that doesn't mean that you know their poverty pin so they're trying to make money on it it's an emotional thing and it's easy to fall into because it's been so common since the 60s but most people as i said aren't historians and that's not me saying most people are dumb most human beings live in the present that's how we're cognitively wired if you're interested in what happened 50 years ago you're kind of weird and you're probably going to get paid to do it in the same way most people aren't futurians most people aren't sitting and thinking this is going to create this situation in 20 or 25 years the manhattan influence turning intellect into influence the idea being to look at results one of the main tenets of the mi that's not the way most people think and so in my one plug in the book that i'm writing the elect one of my main points is that a lot of these crt views are negative they spell negative things for the black future and yet the people who espouse these things really don't think about that at all which means that it's up to the rest of us to think about the pragmatism as opposed to the beautiful music that a lot of these people are committed to making you you've likened crt proponents to um uh almost religious believers uh you've likened it to a religion uh what do you mean by that analogy all i mean is that what you've got is a religion where you're basing an entire world view partly but significantly on requiring suspensions of disbelief that is a major part of this new form of anti-racism so if you tell somebody that all race-based disparities are due to unequal opportunity frankly any nine-year-old could figure out that that is not completely true and yet you're expected to pretend that that makes sense if someone like you or me says yes there is the occasional rogue or undertrained white cop who kills a black guy in a poor black community but the black guy is of much much he's much more in danger of being killed by somebody he knows from three blocks away and you could argue that that's the bigger problem that makes perfect sense that is two plus two equals four and yet you and i both know that in certain circles if you say that you get hunted out of the corral like yosemite sam you know has a gun and he's shooting bugs bunny you're just not allowed to say it you have to suspend your disbelief and that's religious and then there are all sorts of other aspects of it and so to be racist is your original sin white privilege is the original sin you have to always atone for it but it's never going to go away there is the end of days when america quote-unquote comes to terms with racism which is a phrase that has no talk about linguistics has no meaning whatsoever but people talk about it because this is a religion that has that particular kind of structure there's the evangelism that one sees there is the sense of going against its tenants as making you a bad person so for example andrew sullivan isn't allowed to work at new york magazine because a lot of the woke workers feel dangerous around him now consider that that happened during the pandemic these people aren't even in a building together and yet the idea is that abstractly they feel like they're in danger because of his writings they're treating him as a heritage so when you go against these crt views it's not just that you have a differing view it's that you are somebody who needs to be put in the stocks and flogged all of it is ominously parallel to a certain fantasy version of devout christianity but the main part is the suspension of disbelief as you know you and i know so much of what we're told is enlightenment on racism doesn't make any sense and yet you're supposed to enter into a pact where you pretend it does and hence the whole idea that race discussions are complicated that it's deep the race thing with the idea that it's somehow as complicated as quantum physics all of that means white people and black people in a pact and this gets into shelby steel where white people are asked to pretend that two plus two doesn't equal four and if they do that then black people will absolve them as being not racist but that little dance as shelby has put it for so long doesn't make any black person less poor and it doesn't get us one millimeter past race in any significant way yeah i i think um kennedy in particular is very explicit about where he's coming from here in defining uh racism and it's inequality it's disparities where he sees uh racial disparities um uh he sees racism uh plain and simple it doesn't it doesn't no nothing else can be responsible for racial disparities and and i think that's uh a little a little reductive um you you mentioned power several times in power structures and i guess that's what gets critical race theory um labeled as neo-marxist or marxist and his origins marks of course dealing in power structures between labor and capital and the proletariat and the management and so forth and and um the crt folks dealing with racial power structures um what what i find interesting about that debate though is um black americans today uh particularly politically uh seem to have quite a bit of power john um uh at least in comparison to a previous generation um you know put aside a twice elected black president black secretaries of state black mayors and governors and senators black police chiefs and school superintendents and school principals and and and and police officers and judges probably you can just go down the list of blacks being in charge in many black uh majority black cities um how do they get away with pretending black people don't have any power in america and the answer to that question is because it is more gratifying to situate yourself as eternally battling power differentials in america past and present and so this is exactly what i mean by the suspension of disbelief what you said is so obviously true the idea that black people have no power black people had an awful lot to do with making joe biden the democratic nominee black women in particular and now there's a black woman vice president and let's face it she could she has a better chance than many vice presidents of possibly ending up president and yet we're supposed to say that black people have no power because george floyd was killed by uh an undertrained and possibly mean white policeman one night last spring and really that is what the answer is supposed to be or of course there will be brought up various statistics about say health care about say earnings although those arguments get very very sketchy there are various gaps certainly but the idea that all of that is somehow more important than the fact that black people have so much power both politically and culturally in this country now that any old-time dixiecrat who was reanimated now would have to throw up beside the pavement to even look for five minutes at the way this world is the reason anybody says that is not because they are some sort of cynical charlatan it's because they are under the influence of a highly gratifying religious way of thinking and i know i'm beginning to sound like i'm are of some cult and how much i insist on that but i swear to you that it makes human sense of people who otherwise look so stupid and ridiculous they're not it's just that we are like romans watching christianity aborning you know jason you and i in our lifetimes have witnessed a religion being born i find it anthropologically interesting but it can also be frustrating well racism still exists i think you would agree uh america has not rid itself of of racism i don't expect to live to see the day when it has done that um sexism still exists homophobia still exists so you can't respond to these people by saying stop talking about racism or stop talking about its role the role that it plays in current racial disparities um but why why what is the argument that they're over emphasizing that if you're going to concede that there are racist americans and and that past racism has led to certain disparities that persist today um why are you complaining that that's what they want to talk about yeah and that's a legitimate issue racism is definitely there of course the issue is to what extent and how much of an obstacle is it and it's very hard to present any crystal clear answers about that my feeling is that there is a certain class of person with disproportionate influence on the printed page so to speak who exaggerate the effects of racism and the main thing that i like to say in response to that is that if you look at what the problems are these days and you say that what we need to do to solve them is eliminate racism the question is how how do you get into people's brains and make them not racist and if the answer is to read a book like white fragility then i would ask many people to actually sit down and read that book and see how likely it is to create a real change in the feelings of more than a few very religious people and so how do you do that and haven't people been trying to make people less racist since frankly a good 1966 and it's happened to an extent but the idea that we can truly vacuum out every instance and every inkling of bias in all non-black heads is just it's quixotic it'll it'll never happen and more to the point many people including me try to give arguments that you can make life better for people who are suffering from legacies of racism without the idea that it requires putting the toothpaste back in the tube and eliminating racism as if as if you won you can do that and two as if when you did that all of a sudden there would be no race-based disparities everybody in this situation has lost sight of what political activism is because of this psychological focus which is forced by the effects of this new christianity um last month and uh on election day uh voters in california where you you taught at berkeley and lived in california for a time um there was a ballot proposal that would have reinstituted uh affirmative action in college admissions in california and uh it was rejected it was soundly rejected in uh the nation's largest state which is majority minority john um i i find it interesting that while you know critical race theory is ascended uh the voters in california on the strength of a lot of minorities uh hispanics and asians in particular voted for race neutrality um what's going on here well what's going on is that most of california's voters are not members of this religion we just don't know it because you know they're not as vocal on twitter and they don't write for various media sources but you know that's talk about berkeley in affirmative action that's where i was introduced to these people when i say i saw crt operating among people who were already gray in the hairs it was watching the debate over affirmative action out there where for one thing there was this insistence that the whole debate was over whether or not poor people should be admitted to elite universities everybody's talking about black and poor as if they're the same thing which of course in a different mood is considered an insult but suddenly all the black people at berkeley all the black students come from these terrible neighborhoods in oakland which not only wasn't true but it was visibly not true most of the black kids at berkeley then were middle class by any standard and yet if you brought this up it was as if you had you know started blowing on a tuba in the middle of a funeral and in general it was people speaking untruth and that was considered okay that was my first taste of the truth the actual facts even when they're standing right in front of you don't matter here and i'm watching these august people in their 50s and 60s urgently tears rolling down their faces arguing this as if we were just talking about poverty so much of that kind of thing and here we are today and i remember when prop prop 209 came down and um i argued that this was a good thing and that we needed to focus on class rather than race i remember indignant people saying by any means necessary was the organization i imagine they still exist but the idea being to make things back the way they were there were people who told me there was no way this situation was going to stand and here we are a generation later there are people who have already made new children who aren't alive then generation later the same crowd or their descendants arguing that we need to undo what ward connerly did those people are always going to be there but there is a real world out here and we need to look to that real world as a model for pushing back against this religion america needs to you know we've dealt with one thing this year which is being inside and not being able to have thanksgiving etc we need a little more which is that americans need to get used to being called dirty names on social media and standing their ground we need more things like that vote except that require a little bit more face to face bravery well how how do you uh well two things how do you push back at political race theorists i mean do you mock them do you dismiss them do you ignore them do you try and take on their arguments with logic and reason and data um what's what do you think is the best the best way to go very few people who are truly under the influence of this way of thinking are open to what we would call reason about these issues there's no point in engaging my strategy is once i hear certain buzz words i just as politely as possible disengage change the subject there's no discussion possible you just have to resist the sorts of things that people like that require you to do or say and unfortunately what you have to do is say you can call me anything you want you can put it on twitter but i'm going to do what i'm doing more school boards need to start doing this more people need to start doing it in face-to-face interactions you just say you can call me anything you want it is not gonna change my mind until that becomes a norm these people are gonna one think that they're right and two keep on operating through a reign of terror rather than swaziland where they are one of many factions at the table which was fine they will not sit back down unless people start telling them quite simply no you can call me what you want and we have to be able to watch them do it they're going to call you a racist on twitter and you have to keep chopping your potatoes and hunker down for a couple of weeks and move on and then after a couple months stand down another one i think after about five years we'd be back to the paradise of 2012. well that sounds to me like uh like the strategy to use when this was confined to academia john but the 1619 project is being is going to be taught in school i mean you have school-aged kids i have school-aged kids uh what are you going to do when they come home talking about this stuff um it's in it's in diversity training at work where people are being you know separated by race and given instructions on confessing their sins as white people and acknowledging white supremacy it it doesn't seem like ignoring it or simply mocking it is is going to get the job done uh at this point it seems to be spreading i mean it's ascendant it might partly be a fashion i hope so but even if it isn't issue for example with the diversity seminars it depends on one your job situation two the nature of your employers and three how much you're up for a little bit of conflict and people will differ one person alone might say i will not go through this and if you fire me i'm fired some people will be able to accommodate that some people won't but if a person could do that one they probably won't get fired and two if they did they should put that on twitter and that sort of thing is seen around the country more to the point a person like that should try to get together roughly half of their colleagues to say none of us are going to do this and if you want to fire all of us you may in most cases in most corporate circumstances like that if half of the employee body says we're not doing this they're not going to fire all those people they're just going to say well okay you're going to have to have a kind of strength in numbers and then it it builds after a critical mass of things like this happen and are publicized the kinds of people who do this sort of thing will learn that they have to be more communitarian in spirit and companies will start realizing that they can move along without the cynicism of imposing this kind of nonsense on their employees because you and i both know most often the corporations and bodies that are imposing that sort of thing on their employees they don't really care about this stuff they've just learned that if they don't they're going to get called racist but if it turns out that after a while even if somebody does call them racist they keep on doing what they're doing we move on are you concerned about a a a backlash at some point particularly a white backlash i mean black people are still only 12 or 13 percent of the population john how how how long are they going to indulge in tonight coates or nicole hannah jones rewriting uh history um calling revered figures like you know george washington and abraham lincoln calling for you know schools not to be named after them or their statues to be taken down and likening them to stonewall jackson i mean how long are frankly are white people gonna put up with this before you get some backlash and i you know i i i there's a certain element on the right that um uh we'll put up with an indefinitely but i don't know if they represent most of white america i mean are you at all a little concerned about where this is all headed i mean we are a very polarized country right now um this isn't helping no two things could happen it could be that person you're talking about this person on the right almost certainly male and probably under 35 who does something really hideous because they're they're tired of seeing abraham lincoln's name taken off of things that could happen i wish that a more temperate and civil kind of white person would backlash against this sort of thing by saying no we are going to continue to have this school named after abraham lincoln and you can call us whatever you want on twitter and seeing what happens but equally problematic jason is there's gonna be somebody like this from the left and i assume you didn't hear it from here first probably male probably under 35 probably white is going to hurt somebody in some way and hopefully just one if it has to happen it might be many out of an idea that he is on the side of the angels battling white supremacy as a white person his name is probably going to be something like jared you know that's going to i worry about that if we don't temper this stuff okay well we'll we'll leave it there john uh thank you very much for uh for this discussion i appreciate it thank you your time it was very enlightening take care so um now we are going to uh move on to a panel discussion and as i mentioned earlier we have uh gathered a a very distinguished panel here to discuss some of what i was just uh talking about with professor mcorder and and then some um and so let me introduce these panelists and i want to start by introducing professor randall kennedy who teaches at harvard law school he attended princeton university and received his legal education at yale uh he also clerked for supreme court justice thurgood marshall he's written several books one of my favorites is race crime and the law and and he's written a collection of essays uh called say it out loud which is due to be published in september of next year um a second panelist is professor richard banks who is the jackson eli reynolds professor of law at stanford university law school he is also co-founder and faculty director of the stanford center for racial justice he teaches and writes about family law employment discrimination law and race in the law and he is the author of is marriage for white people how the african-american marriage decline affects everyone and finally joining us is chris ruffo who is a filmmaker a writer and a policy researcher he's a contributing editor for the manhattan institute's city journal and director of the discovery institute's center on wealth and poverty he's directed documentary films for pbs netflix and for international television so i want to welcome the panelists uh to the discussion um everyone uh everyone here okay uh why don't i start with you uh professor kennedy and when i was uh putting this event together uh you were one of the first people i thought of um and it's because of how long you've been following some of these debates uh back uh in the late 80s 1989 i believe you wrote a harvard law review article that got quite a bit of attention about um critical race theory critical legal studies uh and i just wanted to start by asking you um you know what motivated you to write that what were you trying to get at in that article and and how do you think the arguments uh hold up all these all these years later well thank you very much for including me in this discussion the reason that i wrote that article many years ago is because i wanted to put out on the floor certain ideas i think that some of the people that you've been criticizing were making certain arguments with which i disagreed there were two in particular i thought that some of the people who now call themselves critical race theory people i thought that they were making uh exaggerated claims of racial exclusion that was one of my arguments their their argument was that the people in legal academia minority people in legal academia weren't getting they're just due in terms of acknowledgement of their scholarly contributions and i didn't think they made that argument well and i set forth my reasons and then there was a second argument that was being made which was that minority people had a sort of special insight into certain areas of culture certain areas of law and i push back against that because i think that in the area of you know culture and the in the in the intellectual realm we shouldn't be putting up racial fences so yes i've i've been critical um of uh certain expressions of critical race theory for a good long while and in the in the in the decades since that article you referred to i've i've criticized various people that have been mentioned uh professor kendeep mr coates my colleague longtime colleague derek bell criticized them all um let me go on to say however and here i guess i'm in considerable disagreement with yourself and professor mcwhorter um you all spoke for you know good 45 minutes as if the people who call themselves critical race theorists you know don't have anything to contribute um the fact of the matter is that one reason why uh critical race theory and the people who were behind it and some of their ideas one of the reasons why these ideas are prominent why they are getting traction is because um there's something to them there's a certain strength one of the reasons why critical race theory has become prominent is because uh some of the backers of it are good uh are in in cultural terms good entrepreneurs they gave themselves a a name you know critical race theory they they branded themselves um they have been industrious they've been enthusiastic they've been passionate they've pushed their points and they have had in certain instances you know good ideas the central thing about critical race theory and again remember this is coming from a person who has been quite critical and i'm happy to be critical but you know let's let's um let's let's let's give credit where credit is due the critical race theory people at their at the at the heart of what they're saying is race is has and racism and of course racism can be defined in various ways but i'll take your definition of it i'll take a narrow definition you know there's there's there's broader definitions but however you however you define it the race question has been important in american institutions and in particular american law and they have pushed that point over and over and frankly i think some of what they've been saying has been actually quite enlightening one of the points they've made is that the race question arises not only in public law you know constitutional law statutory law but they talk about it in terms of the law of contracts the law of torts uh the race question has been quite central you asked early on you know why now i'll tell you one reason why you know have things changed yeah things have changed that have made some of the ideas of the critical race theory people more pertinent and to some people more attractive i'll give you two things one one the major one the presidency of donald trump not mentioned in the previous segment years ago decade ago i said in various writings that there would never be another major politician in american life a national politician who would traffic openly in racial resentment racial division call out racial animus against people of color i thought that we had turned the page on that i was wrong and on this one the critical race theory people were right well okay people who understand that they're people who understand that and so let's continue to talk but let's not let's let's let's continue to talk but let's understand that the critical race theory people do have a point to make and that there is some good with what they are bringing to the table um professor banks do you uh do you agree with that that um the trump presidency has been a major contribution to the rise of critical race theory and um i i one reason i would i would quibble with it i think is because i don't think people like uh michelle alexander or tanahisi coates uh or even uh professor kendy uh uh gained prominence post-trump i mean they were already doing this stuff prior to the election of donald trump i i i saw the rise of this movement um predating predating trump i don't deny that he might have contributed to to it but um i don't know if he can he gets all the credit uh what what do you say well i i uh agree in some ways that critical race theory has been prone to excess uh and in some ways it is horribly misguided and pernicious except compared to the alternative frankly and the alternative is that we are too often complacent about racial inequity um we tend to believe and want to believe that racial problems have been solved uh we indulge judgments of of blame and and about african-americans that we want to apply to any other group uh while wanting to imagine that we're colorblind as a society are almost there so of course you can look at critical race theory and cite lots of problems and there are many problems uh with many particular arguments and tenets and assumptions and that's all real but it's also the case that sometimes the alternative can be worse and the alternative is is a view in which we frankly refuse to see our society as it is uh you mentioned earlier that the 1619 project uh which again has some problems uh but i also speak as a person who who was taught from elementary school on that the civil war was actually not thought about slavery that's what i was taught in school it wasn't until i became a law professor in fact that i realized that abraham lincoln was not quite as extraordinary person as i had imagined uh he did have some warts in particular for example um you know the 13th amendment prohibits slavery most people don't realize even educated people that there was a proposed version of the 13th amendment before the one that was enacted that prior version of the 13th amendment would in fact have prohibited the abolition of slavery abraham lincoln referred to that with some sense of approval so these are historical facts that most people don't know about and most uh you know our understanding of ourselves as a nation uh is not really comfortable with well professor let me follow up with you uh professor banks um i i asked professor mcorder um or he discussed how he defines uh critical race theory and i and i wanted to ask you what what your working definition is because um you're an academic and among theorists they might be working from a different definition than the one activists are working from or consultants are working from so when you talk about critical race theory um how how are you defining the concept so the core and this could i mean there are books written on this topic and and uh you know what the elements of critical race theory uh are but the core of the the insight frankly is the recognition which i think is correct uh the recognition that race has been and remains central to american society and institutions that one cannot understand american history without recognizing the centrality of race and if one wants to stan to understand even now how basic institutions in american society operate uh public education employment in in employment uh large corporations if you want to understand how things operate in american society you need to attend to the role of race in those institutions and and that i think is certainly correct and that view stands in opposition to the the more liberal and i use this in a i guess a small l sense the more liberal view that you know over time race is going to fade away uh american institutions are going to be oriented around individual merits and opportunity uh and race is going to be something that we can sign to the past right and this is similar to randy's observation that or or expectation the hope that uh we would have presidents who would no longer uh make racial antagonism or racial resentment a centerpiece of their appeal and you know that's the vision that is very attractive uh this notion of that we're that we're progressing uh but i now am somewhat you know less uh i try to be hopeful uh but i'm less optimistic in some ways uh because you see that race does remain uh a central part of our nation uh and frankly there are some ways in which we i think as a nation don't regard african americans as fully american and as full citizens uh and even in some senses fully human we don't we do have a challenge to recognize the humanity of african americans and that has been the challenge of our nation uh it is a challenge of our democracy and what i hope we realize frankly is that these debates about race they're not simply debates about race there are actually debates about the sustainability of our democratic project if we don't address the racial issue our democracy will be in peril uh mr rufo uh you've done a lot of reporting uh into how these uh critical race theories play out in the real world in the workplace in schools to some extent can you talk a little bit about what what drew you to this topic and what you've what you found yeah you know i i found something that really surprised me and i think would surprise my fellow panelists but critical race theory has really become the default ideology of public institutions and uh to an extent that it's you know reading actually the uh the professor's uh law review piece from 1988 which was very much focused on uh kind of issues of uh kind of status and credibility within university um i think it was shocking to see that that was where it was you know 30 years ago but now every major corporation every major federal agency every major school district in the country is perpetuating really a very different vision of critical race theory than uh the last panelist outlined i think we all agree that a race is a central issue in the united states that um uh there are there is a legacy of racism and oppression and as you were talking about with john uh still kind of racism racist attitudes and perceptions in the united states but i think that's an anodyne way of of of of describing critical race theory what i found and then i'll use some examples to make my case but what i found is that critical race theory um is essentially taking the old marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed that's really the key categorical framework but basically abandoning it from a class perspective so saying well we're not going to use bourgeoisie and proletariat that has kind of a hundred year history of failure what we're going to do is we're going to graft a kind of 1960 style identity politics onto that binary and now the new oppressor and oppressed framework is black and white and then they kind of manage at the margins other racial groups most prominently latinos and asians and uh recently you know latinos have been kind of subsumed into an overall kind of uh the overall kind of oppressed dynamic and some school districts are now categorizing asians as white um because of or white adjacent so i i think that's really the key framework and what happens and what i've showed through a number you know more than a dozen stories uh leaking internal documents from very prominent institutions the united states treasury department of education um at the fbi the department of homeland security uh the department of justice uh and then a series of universities and school districts is that they are are really taking these concepts and and making them operational in institutional settings and uh their really ugly uh outcomes you know i i had one story about the sandia national nuclear laboratories they designed america's nuclear arsenal and they had taken white male executives on a three-day retreat in the form of reeducation camp and explicitly said we're here to deconstruct your straight white male identity um and they had the the white male executives including the chief weapons engineer of the united states uh right on a white board you know kind of synonyms or or kind of corollaries of white culture and i have an image of this they say white culture is associated with the kkk lynchings slavery maga hats all of these mass killings uh etc and then they they went through a process of deconstruction where they were forced to admit that whatever their outward behavior that they had internalized white supremacy that they were guilty of a kind of collective sin and then they went into a kind of repentance phase where they had to write letters of apology to imaginary kind of people of color and women and and others uh apologizing for their privilege apologizing for their identity and this is really kind of a similar format to trainings in dozens of organizations and i think it's a really um you know in in a way it really does two things one is that it creates divisions and then i think it gets away from a kind of despite its flaws a liberal enlightenment kind of constitutional idea of moving towards greater equality um and i think the last point that i'll make briefly and then open it up for discussion or debate is that to me what critical race theory does um is that it serves to uh provide kind of secure elite social status for people of all races and my sense and again i could be wrong but my sense is that for uh for people i think uh even minorities that have uh in the united states that are educated there are uh uh you know more opportunities than ever and for a kind of multi-racial coalition whether you're the ceo of a hospital or a sociology professor uh in a university critical race theory is something again across all racial groups that can kind of secure your social status but what i think is really the kind of great uh crime if you will of critical race theory is that um you know based on a a documentary that i directed for pbs looking at american poverty in three cities a white neighborhood a black neighborhood a latino neighborhood the core tenets of critical race theory and then critical race theory as applied social policy really serves the interests of kind of the multi-racial elite coalition but actually would do nothing to serve the interests of you know of of really kind of the multiracial poor and working class um and and i think that's really the game of it and i i think that you can on one hand say that race is central united states there's a history that we have to reckon with there are current uh issues and problems we have to recognize the kind of centrality of that but you can then really say critical race theory um uh is is really the kind of opposite side of the coin of kind of white grievance politics or or kind of white resentment politics uh that we were discussing earlier okay um professor kennedy toward the the end of your law review article um you mentioned that you had passed uh some early drafts around the colleagues and some of whom urged you not to not to publish it um why didn't they want you to publish it as is my first question and secondly um you suggested in the piece if i recall correctly and please correct me if i'm wrong that um critical race theory was being used um uh as a tool to advance affirmative action in higher education for uh academics of color um uh and and i i wanted in other words there was the self-interest here uh they they were they were speaking on behalf of of of blacks writ large or the black poor so forth when it came to discussing this topic but they had a vested personal interest in advancing this theory um can you talk a little bit about that sure so first yes i was asked not to publish it as i've been asked subsequently not to publish various things and i think that you know the idea is uh this will get in the way our enemies our ideological enemies will use this against us uh you're black you're criticizing other black people can't you see that the white establishment is going to use your blackness against other black people i mean these are various arguments that you know that have been voiced obviously i decided to publish what i wrote i'm glad i published what i wrote and um again i've been critical and uh you know mr rufo spoke and the various points that he made i think that there's strength to them the anecdote that he told about people you know being you know basically indoctrinated people being um uh you know sort of this this it was a horrible anecdote and there are misdoings and i think that when people you know go off they ought to be criticized but and here i'll go back to my initial comment you know critical race theory one problem in talking about critical race theory is it's very amorphous i mean frankly if i wanted to call myself a critical race theory person i could you know if i just went and just said i'm a critical race theorist what's to stop me it's a very amorphous thing we're talking about a lot of people some people have ideas that are arise some people have ideas that are pernicious on the other hand there's some people who call themselves critical race theorists who write things that are very useful very interesting very instructive so i think that we need to sort of um get out of the you know this you know critical race theory it's it's it's a it's a it's an abstraction that i don't think has much bite to it and talk more concretely about individual um ideas finally you asked me about you know were people using things in a self-interested way yeah sure i think that you know one of the things that i especially did not like is and i still don't is the idea of people of a given race making a claim that they have some sort of monopoly on insight i'm very much against that um i think that the world of knowledge should be an open world open to all and that what we should do is judge arguments on the basis of evidence on the basis of logic and not on the basis of you know somebody's background uh professor banks just picking up on that and and something i asked uh john mcquarter earlier about uh how in the past in my recollection at least there there seem to be more randall kennedy's out there criticizing uh concepts on the left than you find today um and there doesn't seem to be a lot of tolerance uh for what he was doing in that article in in today's environment um uh i'm curious if if you if you read that the same way and if so what what happened what where where where did all the randall kennedy's go [Laughter] well i i think you are you you you are correct i think we we live in a time that is extraordinarily polarized and divisive uh what passes for public debate is really just one side and then the other uh claiming the moral high ground and asserting their ideological commitments and oftentimes people don't pay a lot of attention to evidence uh they don't want to hear what people who disagree with them have to say they don't have a lot of tolerance for dissenting views uh i think john mcwhorter was correct that people regard uh their positions on race almost as a form of religion and there's a religious fervor to their views this doesn't only happen with critical race theory though i mean this happens on the left and the right this happens on all sides of the political spectrum uh and that's a source of sadness for me is that we we have lost uh an ability to debate hard issues to recognize that people who disagree with us might have good points uh that they might make those points in good faith uh we don't have a lot of respect for evidence and that's true on the left and on the right uh we don't have a lot of respect for evidence uh we often approach situations as though we already know uh what the right thing to do is and that is uh not the path to anywhere good and it doesn't bode well for society uh mr rufo uh you you heard um professor kennedy refer to critical release series this amorphous concept um uh i i was curious if you think that that's sort of by design so that it can it can be used uh the way the person wants to use it but also there's a there's a criticism that uh what conservatives have done when addressing critical race theory is to really cherry pick some very extreme examples and present them as representative of critical race theory and the proponents say no that's a distortion yes there are some excesses here there but that is not representative of what um uh this movement is really about those are outliers those are outliers distorting uh you know those are activists or consultant uh distorting political race theory for their ends and and that should not be used to tar the greater good that is being done in the name of critical race deal i'm just curious um how you respond to that yeah i mean you know i i i would disagree i actually i actually think that it is both kind of consonant with the kind of theoretical premise of critical race theory but in practice we have kind of a critical mass i i gave one example but i i'm sitting on a database again i'm one reporter um been working on this only since the summer time and i'm sitting on a database of probably five to six hundred corporations uh schools and government agencies that are doing these trainings exactly like this and these aren't just anecdotes from disgruntled employees these are training sessions with documentation powerpoints recording et cetera another thing that's happening and i broke a story for the new york post that showed in three institutions since since then uh that number has gone up quite a bit they're reinstituting race-based segregation in the workplace where they're saying um you know we're actually going to have separate training sessions for white employees and for people of color um and i i think that it is it is both the mass of anecdotal evidence once you get into the 5 600 level i think can't really be dismissed as cherry-picking uh or or or unrepresentative but i also think in a deeper point and and to to to professor kennedy's point that he made earlier is it's amorphous because it rejects standards of empiricism uh evidence uh debate etc and this is not my interpretation if you actually look at the uh the work and i spent quite a bit of time looking at at derrick bell and looking at richard delgado and looking at cheryl harris etc they explicitly not implicitly reject kind of enlightenment standards of of of of rationality they reject objectivity as a vestige of kind of white heteronormative uh epistemology and then they're deeply skeptical of the kind of liberal project of individual rights uh they're deeply skeptical of debate as a matter of fact many critical race theorists refuse to debate because they reject debate itself as a kind of form of oppressive whiteness um and i i i don't think that these are really mistakes at all and i think that we have to as conservatives and liberals come together to defend the kind of core standards of liberalism and and the critical race theorists are really uh kind of a different lineage of a different view of progress and uh i think that we we can look at that at those both levels theoretically uh but also in practice at frankly institutions where people should know better i mean some of these large school districts universities treasury department um i i really think there's no excuse for these kind of uh training sessions um professor kennedy did you want to do you want to respond to that at all well i you know um i agree with much of what was just said um again you know i've been critical of much of what goes under the flag of critical race theory at the same time i would just say you know two other things picking up on a point that was made by you know professor banks we live in a big country there are many menaces around us and you know uh we've been talking about a type of menace um there are others and if we're talking about you know the race question in american life we cannot overlook what has been going on well throughout american history but you know in in um recently as well i mentioned the ascension i mentioned you know the the election of donald trump and um you were you mr riley you you said well you know what about before him well yeah fine let's take donald trump out of the picture uh let's talk about the supreme court of the united states in 2013 eviscerating a key element of the voting rights act of 1965 the case shelby county versus holder i did not think that i would see something like that in my view that was a an egregious act of judicial delinquency i would say that that the holding of that case will go down in history alongside of plessy versus ferguson koromatsu versus the united states it was a horrible attack as far as i'm concerned on american democracy the supreme court of the united states in a wholly unjustified way striking down a congressional enactment which had proven very effective in undoing racial disfranchisement it's things like that that have given resonance to the arguments by people who say that the racial problem in the united states is bigger more intractable than you know people like me have been writing about and what i have to say is they have a point and so if we're talking about criticism of them fine but i also think that we have to acknowledge we should acknowledge that they are onto a point when they say that the race problem in american life is deeper uglier um more stubborn than many people have recognized um professor banks as you understand it um and define it is is critical race theory compatible with freedom of speech property rights and so forth segregating employers on the basis of race subjecting different groups to different diversity trainings and so forth doesn't that run up against uh the civil rights act for example i mean ibrahim kendi wants the government to create a department of hate speech um so again is this type of thinking consistent with some of our liberal traditions in this country yeah those are great points and i i do agree that sometimes the the focus on on speech for example can be misguided uh and that can be a distraction i also agree that these so-called you know re-education programs and many sorts of trainings can also be a distraction or even harmful so that's true but it's also the case that there is good reason to have skepticism of uh what was referred to as the project of individual rights because the reality is that our regime of individual rights may be and i think is insufficient to create the sort of society that we need and this is true with respect to race and it's also true more generally i should add we live in an america that is more unequal economically than at any time in our lifetimes and that frankly does not work for all too many people uh there are millions and millions of people who cannot afford a 400 unexpected expense a life expectancy for working class white people white men is declining so these are symptoms of a bigger problem and we when we think about individual rights and property rights and so forth we need to understand and if they're not serving the needs of society yet we cling to them then yes those commitments to rights might be impediments to reform that block us from creating the society we need to create well well just to follow up there professor then if these are our problems that transcend race how does an ideology so they're focused on race help us as a country that's that's an excellent question and and i i think that the where that's leading to i think is that in many ways right the the some of the tenets of critical race theory can lead us astray uh once you start to divide society into you know be oppressed and the impressors and the black people are always on the downside and the white people are always the possessors of privilege i think that's a mistake it's a mistake to fixate on the idea of white privilege because most white people in american society are not um and don't feel themselves to be privileged most white people in american society are actually struggling uh they're struggling to raise their children uh they worry about whether their children's lives will be better than their own uh they confront um all manner of illness and distress and economic anxiety so it's it's both analytically wrong and politically misguided to promote an ideology that suggests that you know all white people have it good and all black people have it bad right that's a mistake that is a mistake but that's not to say recognizes in the centrality of race and the entrenched nature of race-based disadvantage is a mistake because that's also real do you agree with that professor kennedy that um that that there is a danger here uh with this uh promotion of critical race theory and uh in practice could could foster more racial resentment and division yeah i think i think there is a problem i i think i'd like to underline what was the basis of your question you know is there a danger of racial narcissism in critical race theory and in my view is you know people who call themselves critical race theorists and in my view is yeah there is that danger so for instance i'm particularly interested in the in the administration of criminal justice and sometimes you will hear these discussions about the police and uh police misconduct and i think that police misconduct is a huge problem in america i think that the american legal system i think it's a scandal that the police are not made more accountable but sometimes you'll be in these discussions and it'll be as if the only people who are being menaced by police officers who are not being held accountable are black people you know well what about the white people there i mean there are white people who are shot by the police in an unjustified way there are white people who are harassed by the police in an unjustified way and in some of the discussion about the police we don't hear about them it's it's all race race race race race the race question is important you've heard me say that but it's not you know there's a huge country it's not the only thing so i think that there is a problem of narcissism and here and to get back to a point that mr ruffo made ironically um i took it that one point that mr what miss ruffa was saying was in a certain sort of way some of the people who call themselves critical race theorists are not being radical enough they are talking about issues they want to advance issues that actually or or programs that are going to be helpful to people who actually are already doing pretty good i mean frankly if you are a plausible candidate for admission to the university of michigan law school if you were a plausible candidate for admission to the university of california at berkeley law school if you are a plausible candidate for admission of those places you are doing pretty good it means that you've graduated from college and it means that you've done pretty well in college if you're a plausible candidate so we spend all of this time all of this time on those people what about the people who don't make it through high school what about the people who when they make it through high school they're still functionally illiterate what about them they don't get as much time and attention as they should and i took it from what mr ruffa was suggesting you know actually the people who are calling themselves radicals are actually not being radical they are actually advancing you know um policies that help people who are actually you know frankly doing pretty well and they are not paying enough attention to people of all complexions who really do need more help uh in navigating american life so what's your point well first professor you know that's that's the long time one of the long long uh time arguments people have made uh against affirmative action that it essentially helps people who are already better off which is why i i reference your your mention of it in your article that critical race theory amounted in some sense to an argument for affirmative action and it was being promoted by your colleagues who would of course be in a group that's already pretty much you know better off than than uh than most people in this country and and so that that was uh that was packed the punch what's that did you know you know as you know we've we've debated these things before we disagree on the margins but the point that you've made is a real point and i would say that you know people with you know we differ with the people coming from my perspective need to take that on board more because i think it is a strong point sure uh mr ruffo i wanted to ask you um a more pragmatic question since you've looked at these uh implementation of critical race theory when it comes to things like diversity training and so forth um do we have evidence that all this anti-bias training works that it's effective you know in new york city where i'm based the school's chancellor recently announced that he's going to spend around 25 million dollars on implicit bias training for about 125 000 employees in the new york city school system um is is this money well spent given the the goal the objectives yeah it's not i mean even the designers of the implicit association test or the implicit bias test have basically said it can't be applied this way in the workplace you can't draw any strong conclusions it's a social science test that once you put it into practice is not actually useful the government of the uk recently declared that they've done a kind of retrospective study of their implicit bias testing and now they've said it doesn't work it doesn't help it doesn't do anything beneficial so there they've canceled it that's just out this week and then i think believe it's a harvard business school professor who's been studying diversity programs for 30 years over 800 organizations uh just released a long paper summarizing his conclusions sadly his conclusion was that they don't actually do any good and in some cases they do harm so um i i think the evidence is is very mixed but what i think a lot of these things uh can can boil down to is that um there is a kind of circular nature uh that transcends that kind of connects rather bureaucracy to activism to training firms to speakers and in a way it's a it's a good it's a good kind of economic circle in this kind of almost a lobbying way where people are you know making 20 grand for a 60-minute zoom call and i think that it really serves the kind of circular interests of that that group but i i think professor kennedy made the most important point and the point that i personally care about as i mentioned i directed a documentary for pbs and i had the uh the privilege to spend three years in uh the poorest zip code in memphis tennessee uh particularly in you know one of the poorest public housing projects and i interviewed hundreds of people i followed their lives over a period of time catalogued a huge kind of body of evidence and story and the concerns that people were talking to me about in this housing project in the surrounding environment are just absolutely completely disconnected from the concerns uh that that the kind of most popular critical race theorists are talking about and i think that the more we can go actually to people's real life concerns people that are truly disadvantaged people that are truly the victims of uh residual historic racism um uh and and then build that coalition out because the the continuity between the poor people in the south side of memphis and the poor uh white people in in the south side of youngstown and then the poor latino and multi-racial people in the central part of stockton california what connects them now i think in the social science from robert putnam from others would would back this up statistically is that lower class life in america is increasingly becoming more similar and i think the concerns of a kind of broad multiracial a working class a group of people in the united states has to be absolutely taken more seriously needs an absolutely more radical agenda and i think that we can if we can both at the same time recognize that race differences matter race differences are in many cases very large very important and need special care and attention but also that the things that bring us together that that i think can transcend race are also important and the more we can have the sophistication to avoid the kind of binary thinking on those issues the more we can actually make progress for people who are truly uh kind of dispossessed and on the margins of our society okay um i i had a question uh from one of the viewers that i wanted to present to uh both both the law professors um uh maybe we could start with you professor banks and the question is uh do you believe that critical race theory recognizes uh the personal agency of blacks to improve their their own condition um or does it sort of uh downplay that in any way and does that if it does if you believe it does does that bother you well again i think it is important to note that the the reference to critical race theory as a whole right is a difficult one to to work with because you know different writers different scholars would have different approaches to personal agency uh my own view is that of course uh we want to recognize and encourage people to take steps to improve their lives uh and i think any position other than that is unreasonable so we have to always want people to take steps to improve their lives but we have to also be cautious to not uh focus on or be so fixated on personal responsibility that we allow it to substitute for the need for policy responses to social problems for example we have an opioid epidemic in this country right now uh those opioid addicts are disproportionately white we would not you know hopefully uh respond to the opioid epidemic by saying oh those people just need to clean up their lives and stop doing drugs we instead would recognize that we have a social problem and we need to figure out how to respond to that social problem and we will think more clearly about how to respond to that social problem if we stop blaming people judging people blaming them for for example becoming opioid addicts and with white people we tend to do that we we don't fixate on blame and we don't fixate on telling them to fix their own problems we recognize the need for a collective response with african americans frankly we're less likely to recognize the need for collective response and we are more likely to blame black people for problems in ways that i can't help but think resonate with our long-standing patterns of not wanting to to recognize uh race-based disadvantage well uh same question to you professor uh kennedy the the role of personal agency and personal responsibility when it comes to uh the thinking of critical race theorists uh if you uh believe that all black problems are are the fault of whites and the responsibility of whites to solve where does that leave black agency yeah well i'll answer it this way anybody who does not take seriously the importance of personal agency is making a big analytic and moral error so you know now um of course personal responsibility is important at the same time environment is important too they work you know they they work together um people don't just fall out of the sky and develop habits and develop sentiments and develop ways of being people are taught things people are taught things by other people and so if you have folks who you know unfortunately you know grow up in an environment in which they are ignored in which they they don't they don't get good teaching they don't get the benefit of people who love them and who try to nurture them and who punish them when appropriate uh you know when people don't have these things well you know it shouldn't be any surprise that they are you know that they're irresponsible that they're selfish that they act in all sorts of you know anti-social ways it's not just that you know it's not that it's not simply that they're being cussed it's that partly largely because of environmental circumstances they're now acting in a way that's you know personally deeply unattractive so it seems to me that in our thinking about things we have to take we have to keep both things in our mind obviously there is personal agency just as obviously there is environment that impinges on personal agency both have to be there in our thinking uh professor banks civil rights activists and and of the previous era used to talk a lot about color blindness um uh in law and in the in the approach uh to to helping black underclass in particular get race out of this we want race-blind policies you give us that our people will take care of the rest on their own what what what happened to to that concept we are now talking about racial determinism racial essentialism um that that whole that whole concept has been turned on its head um is that does that trouble you at all or are we just were we being naive before well i think the the idea of colorblindness isn't it's a noble aspiration uh and and especially the idea of wanting to ultimately uh in some distant future create a colorblind society where race is is no more significant than eye color hair color i embrace that view i think that's the right goal but in terms of whether trying to be colorblind now in having a legal regime for example that pays no attention to race and so in a set of governmental policies that pay no attention to race i don't think that that approach uh can move us forward uh and in short um and i think the reason why there there are two issues i think one is that you know we've always focused on individual rights and colorblindness um but those rights haven't done enough to redirect resources uh and people need resources uh and i i think here financial resources for one and economic stability economic security uh we haven't redirected resources uh and we also haven't done enough to reshape relationships which is an issue that's rarely if ever discussed most people obtain their education and they will later obtain jobs primarily through their relationships with other people we live in a society where we for better worse we view relationships as beyond the reach of the law and as a result our relationships beginning with where we live and who we invite into our homes who we're friends with who our families are we have relationships that are racially segregated and if you have groups that are racially segregated in that way um we're not going to see nearly as much mobility or advancement uh by disadvantaged minorities as we might expect uh not because there's any pernicious uh decision maker or any government official who's out to get someone but merely because most people hire employees from based on referrals from other employees the best way to get a job is to have the one is to know someone who has a job who will refer you and african americans are systematically disadvantaged in the employment market for example uh because they lack relationships with other people who have jobs and can bring them into the loop so to speak so um individual rights doesn't address the question of resources it doesn't address the question of relationships uh i don't think uh we can move forward unless we address those two issues uh and we have to have a color conscious policy in order to do so okay well we are we are short on time so i wanted to ask uh a last question for uh each of you to address uh but but briefly please and and that is where you where you think things are headed uh in this debate and and i wanted to start with you mr ruffo um these diversity training programs the school curricula implementations um uh are we just getting started is this gonna let's go are we gonna continue down this road or do you see some backlash coming uh uh where do you think we're headed i i think we're headed for a kind of politically stratified society where you're gonna see this accelerate in blue and urban areas and then you're going to see some kind of disengagement from suburban rural red areas and i i i think what what is really happening and something that really stunned me is as i was reading the kind of foundational texts of critical race theory from the 90s and then listening to as a reporter and reporting on the the recent unrest and the kind of protest speeches and the most extreme kind of chas chop in seattle or the antifa riots in portland there's a kind of direct line from the core concepts that are in academic jargon and then translated into kind of the language of street protests so i i think this is both deeply rooted and deeply persuasive for a certain segment of the population i think cities like seattle chicago san francisco new york et cetera are going to accelerate and unfortunately when these programs fail to yield the current results they're going to double down that's my prediction uh professor kennedy where where where is this debate headed with critical race theory you know i um i'm not sure i'm going to change your question a bit and and that and answer not where i think things are going but one thing that i think that we need to do i think one thing that we need to do is think harder about what we truly want we have various slogans out there so you know color blindness is a slogan some people talk about the rainbow some people talk about the mosaic some people talk about looks like america you know a cabinet that looks like america uh some people talk about integration some people talk are talking about racial tribalism we've got an america where there are a lot of competing definitions of the racial good and i think we need to really think about that more carefully what do we truly want because i think that there's actually um a lot of confusion out there and that we need to actually uh think about this and develop more clarification about what we truly want thank you very much for having me on uh professor banks i'll give you the last word are you optimistic oh well i've actually shifted because when i shift it when i'm in the predictive mode sometimes i'm not optimistic but even when i'm not optimistic i do try to be hopeful and and there is a distinction between optimism and hope and and hope is uh what fuels my hope um is the belief that we can recognize that the problems we confront are deep problems they're long-standing problems we need to recognize that no one group has a monopoly on good ideas or the or the right way to approach issues uh we need to stop demonizing each other we need to stop separating ourselves into the the good side and the evil side um we need to descend from the high level of abstraction frankly and talk more concretely about how to address the impediments in our society which stop people of all races but especially of african americans from thriving and living the lives that they want for themselves and their children and i am hopeful that we can do that and i say that even as sometimes my optimism flags okay okay well uh i was very optimistic about how this panel would go and how this discussion would go and it turned out to be right to be uh to be optimistic i i hope you uh all found it worth your while so i want to thank you again for for joining us uh uh have a happy holiday uh uh and um be safe thank you jason okay take care thank you um that will end our our our program um i don't i'm not sure i'm if we're going back to michael if i'm going to close things out but i do want to thank everyone our viewers for tuning in i want to thank you for all the great questions that came in and i hope you you found this a productive conversation so everyone be safe take care thank you

Channel: Manhattan Institute

Views: 88,208

Rating: 4.7802196 out of 5

Keywords: manhattan institute, think tank, Jason Riley, John H. McWhorter, Randall Kennedy, Christopher F. Rufo, Ralph Richard Banks, racial injustice, critical race theory

Id: ZuvhrXM3v7U

Length: 104min 15sec (6255 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020