Heather Mac Donald And Glenn Loury On Policing, Race, And Ideological Conformity

good afternoon everyone i am hannah myers director of manhattan institute's initiative on policing and public safety a lead aim of this new effort is to produce innovative thinking on policing on policing based on empirical research and creative ideas this requires not only rigorous scholarship but brave and genuine voices because without the commitment to truthfully articulate what we see how can we reject what is wrong and move toward what is right our two guests today have earned loyal followings for their depth of knowledge for their gusto in approaching difficult topics and for their honesty even when it flies in the face of popular narratives or even niceties i am sure you will share my delicious anticipation of their back and forth today on policing race and ideological conformity as they challenge each other on these issues so i eagerly hand the proceedings over to glenn lowery to introduce heather mcdonald and himself and start off their conversation thank you glenn thank you hannah hi i am indeed glenn lowery professor of economics and of international and public affairs at brown university and i'm delighted to be in conversation with heather mcdonald who is the thomas w smith fellow at the manhattan institute and also a contributing editor uh to the institute's magazine city journal and a prolific writer and a friend can i call you a friend heather i would be honored uh that's if that's the first time and can i call you a friend then is it yeah okay good excellent let's be friends because i really do uh get a lot out of your contributions to public debate and so on so here we are talking i could say a lot about you i'm supposed to introduce you ba in english from yale oh in english from clear college uh cambridge university jd and stanford law clerking for a federal judge and whatnot best-selling books the war on cops that was a monster of an intervention in public discussion about one of the most important issues i can think of the diversity delusion i know what you're talking about because i live in academia and uh the gender and race obsession of uh my colleagues and our institutions uh uh is is a fit for criticism if not outright ridicule in my humble opinion but in any case enough how are you doing well yeah i'm getting feedback uh you don't have to live in academia any longer to know that the diversity delusion is way out of control arguably that is uh one of the defining features of our world today as andrew sullivan says we all are on campus now you know we're all in gender studies so uh thanks a lot glenn for for being part of an institution that is that is in the process of uh tearing down western civilization i would argue uh strong statement heather well the gatekeepers are are absent that but you know what i'm seeing is the betrayal of the gatekeepers uh there's not a single art professor literature professor head of a classical music organization that is not that is standing up to the legacy that is his obligation to defend in the face of these phony charges of racism and sexism uh it's it's terrifying uh in if this doesn't get stopped there's going to be very little left that we can love and honor in our in our civilization uh within a year or so but i know that uh the manhattan institute wants us to talk about policing so i'm afraid i got us on a on a different track no that's okay but i was going to go further down the road but maybe you're right i mean i was going to qualify a little bit by saying there are pockets of sanity that struggle on by by saying that you know if you work really hard at it you can get an education uh you can find students who are interested in you know the great books and the great ideas and so on uh and there's a lot of cowardice and cowering you know of people who agree with you and me about this basically but who just are afraid my inbox is full of letters from people all over this country i mean dozens and dozens of them saying thank god that you're out there doing what you're doing but and here they tell me a story but i can't say anything you know because because my career would be affected because friendships would be ruined my life would be miserable and so on and so forth so it is a problem but yeah we're supposed to be talking about policing heather um we're at a moment of racial reckoning um whenever a cop god help us if he's white shoots a citizen who is black in the process of carrying out their duties it becomes a federal case mobs gather in streets uh literally mobs gather in effect around courthouses demanding particular outcomes of judicial process uh politicians bring charges against people on no merit whatsoever in order to placate these mobs um i i just wonder what the heck is going on i mean you've been writing about this kind of thing for a long time and it feels like we've reached a critical a critical moment with the brianna taylors and the george floyd's and the ahmed arbouries and and the so forth of the of this world and these incidents and i should say they're regrettable because i believe they are regrettable i think the loss of life is regrettable because i believe it is regrettable but i do wonder whether or not um the the reactions are are um doing more damage than they are good it's even to the well-being of black lives on behalf of which these reactions are are offered and i just want to give you an opportunity to you know talk about that a little bit well i agree this is an amazing moment where there's not a single aspect of the criminal justice system that is not under attack and possibly in the process of being unwound because of disparate impact any anything that a criminal justice system does whether it's arresting criminals or sentencing them if that falls upon a black criminal notwithstanding that that black criminal has been preying on the millions thousands of law-abiding hard-working black citizens in this community that criminal justice system is suspect uh california is passing a law that would allow any criminal defendant to basically stop the proceedings against him by challenging his his uh sentencing by challenging the way he was charged based not on actual evidence of discrimination in his trial but on statistical evidence that allegedly similarly situated uh defendants in his position of a different race i.e whites or maybe asians or hispanics were not as severely charged or not as severely sentenced this is ridiculous the statistical evidence rarely takes into account adequately criminal history uh the actual severity of of an offense but this is going to stop in california at least it is going to stop the possibility of prosecuting gang bangers and i find it astounding glenn that over the last several months as shootings are going up exponentially in inner city areas the only conversation we've been having on a national basis is about white supremacy i've i've collected just a few of the shootings that have gotten no press response over the last couple months and i'm only going to read a few of them from a last couple weeks but this is what's happening that people are turning their eyes away from october 2nd 14 year old girl shot in the west englewood section of chicago while standing on a sidewalk september 26th 15 year old boy fatally shot in the head on the far west side of chicago september 1. one-year-old boy in kansas city missouri killed when someone walked up to the car in which she was riding and riddled it with bullets september 15th 15 year old girl shot to death in st louis september 11th 14 year old boy killed and drive by shooting in northeast baltimore september 10th female mail carrier on the far side of chicago fatally shot in head abdomen legs and buttocks september 7th six-year-old boy shot at the annual juve party that opens the west indian day parade august 29 seven seven-year-old girl killed at a family birthday party in south bend indiana needless to say those victims are all black children they compromise just one part of the 40 black children who have been killed in drive-by shootings since the george floyd tragic death and we turn our eyes away from them because they don't fit the narrative instead we're talking about phantom white supremacy it is it is a remarkable uh failure i would say in our public discourse the press are playing a fundamental role in this people are deciding what stories to write about which broadcast to make uh and so what commentaries to offer um what do you think accounts for the um the coloration of the press's reaction to these problems i mean what's going on i i really am asking a question because i don't know the answer to this i can't i mean i understand blatant partisanship trump said it i hate trump therefore i have to be against it this this i get but the pathos the loss the tragedy the pain the humanity of these situations imagine a parent who loses a child at gunshot at five years old or something like that this is a story i mean i don't care what color these people are this is certainly a part of our contemporary uh lives that warrants to be uh given voice to to i want somebody at the funeral i want him to cover i want them to interview the parents and the little kids who are the friends i want them to go to the school where these youngsters may have been uh going to a class every day and talk to the teachers in the pres where are these stories i you know so so this is something i really i you know i don't understand uh quite apart from partisan politics why the curiosity about the human dimension of this aspect of our contemporary lives doesn't drive uh reporters and maybe not the new york times but the dayton whatever or you know to to cover these things in a greater debt what do you think about that well not to answer directly i would point out i and i'm i'm appalled by the rapidity with which the left plays the racism card these days and i think it's just again that is destroying our civilization as well but in this case i i'm very tempted to say that it is objectively racist because if we change the race on those children who've been killed to white i have not a moment's doubt that there would be a national revolution that this would be a huge story uh that politicians would be called to account uh and the media would be there if if i were a black activist i'd be furious if i were a black lives matter activist i would be furious we saw what happened with newton connecticut you know two dozen white children killed that became the source of public discourse for months on end now they were all at one time but the cumulative toll in black communities of gang drive-by shootings uh reaches newton connecticut's level uh you know within within months and the remarkable thing and that is another proof that the black lives matter activists that it's all just a fraud and a sham and a a a play for political power is that they don't bring up these black lives they're never there's not i have never ever ever seen a black lives matter activist at at some of the local very local vigils and protests against this violence that the good people in inner city communities do assemble without attention from the national media but the black lives matter activists don't give a damn because it does not fit what turns out to be an enormously powerful narrative uh about white supremacy the the pitulation of elite whites to that narrative is so automatic and the bounty that flows from their capitulation at this point so magnificent in its princely largesse uh that there's simply no reason to to uh change one's tune and i would just add quickly i think you know what's driving this is that americans with well intentions are with good intentions are despairing at changing that inner city culture and would rather turn their eyes away from it because perhaps they fear it is not changeable which i would disagree with but that's that's my explanation for the root cause i don't know what what your explanation is glenn yeah i don't know that i have one actually i think there's something to what you say i but the racism point is a deep point if you really cared about black people uh you would uh stick your neck out of the foxhole of uh you know the overton window kind of foxhole of what's permissible to be said and you take a chance and you decry you call thuggery thuggery you'd call vicious uh you know kind of lack of uh contempt for the value of human life you call it what it is you you would um uh be willing to confront you know joe biden goes to the bedside of um jacob blake and then he issues a statement about jacob blake and this i mean no disrespect to jacob blake no you know gratuitous disrespect to jacob blake but is he an honorable man i i would have questions about whether or not he's an honorable man whatever may have happened to him i would have questions about whether or not a presidential candidate should be speaking to the country from his bedside and telling us about his hopes and dreams for recovery i would just but who's going to write that piece and is going to say uh no no to that kind of uh that kind of behavior so so candace owens i mean she basically showed herself to be probably the most courageous person in history uh by recording a video uh several months ago about george floyd and lamenting the fact that the the majority of martyrs that are being celebrated now to police violence have very very uh questionable backgrounds they're they're criminals and that points out a reality of police violence that it is overwhelmingly occasioned by criminal behavior or resisting behavior on the part of of uh individuals that this is something that criminology has known for decades that the biggest predictor of officer behavior is civilian behavior you know if a civilian resists a lawful effort to gain compliance uh the officer is going to escalate his own force to gain compliance and and it can ratchet up to tragic levels obviously but but uh that's what's going all of practically all of these shootings could have been avoided if if somebody had resisted arrest uh george floyd i want to talk about it and the this thing that we're talking about now the kind of self-censorship and the uh you know constrained ability to have an open discourse about what's actually going on for fear of giving offense of fear of violating some stricture and coming off looking like you're a racist or like you're indifferent it affects everybody and it certainly affects even me so a friend sends me an email he says a gold casket really this is george floyd's funeral okay caisson you know you would have thought it was jfk you would have thought you know really okay and um i'm thinking i'm an african-american i'm saying oh my god look at my people my black people look at how we you know i see al sharpton up there doing his shtick uh you know i hear all the mournful uh recitations of the platitudes and whatnot now did not speak ill of the dead certainly not speaking with the black dead brought to uh you know death by the hands of a police officer but come on really this is and what are we saying to our children i mean here's what i want to argue with people i say when obama was elected you told me role models he's going to change everything young black men will have another you know whatever well there's a flip side to that if you make miscreants uh you know not even near do wells bombs into your heroes what do you say to your children what are you offering up is a vision about how we that is now african americans should be living so i mean i guess we can go on like this heather i'm not sure i i should probably try to uh well yeah i suppose what a counter argument would be here but i mean you know it is heart-wrenching to see the nobility the honor the courage of blacks in the first part of the 20th century who made the best of themselves who contributed so much to american culture the musicians elephants gerald duke ellington with dress to the nines giving us beauty sublimity in their music in their dignity at a time when they were subject to such heart-wrenching hatred and and contempt and yet they had the the broadness and greatness of spirit to keep moving forward in a belief that integration was possible and that they could strive and meet high standards and that ultimately we would be one culture and now we have an oppositional culture you know the identity of a large portion not i would say the entirety but at least of many black leaders and some uh just black american citizens is oppositional you know the whole anti-white ethic in schools which defines academic effort as a sellout to black identity uh and and this is part of a broader movement that just came out of the 60s where you had protest being celebrated as as necessarily right because the civil rights protests were necessarily right but from then on uh the idea that america was inerratically evil you know took hold and and now you have people celebrating as you say uh actual some of them thugs simply because uh they stand as an as an opposite pole to authority uh but what i would like to ask you i've been tracing this summer a piece that i have never been able to finish yet but the whole law and order meme which is used the new york times in the washington post endlessly say that every time trump invokes law and order uh that's a dog whistle and that that's a racist phrase well i i i'd i'd be interested in your opinion on that is that correct because what's weird about that claim is that it implicitly seems to acknowledge what is forboden to be said explicitly which is that there is an extraordinarily disproportionate level of black criminal offending so if you're talking about law and order uh you're going to be talking about trying to uh protect oneself from criminals who are disproportionately black now they one wouldn't be allowed to say that in the new york times but what is your view is it is is references to law and order now fatally poisoned by 1950s and 1960s rhetoric or is that a legitimate uh campaign platform i'll you know show my cards i think it is i think we are you know the breakdown of law and order these last couple months is terrifying we're on the we're on the edge of civil anarchy but what is how do you respond to that phrase uh i think it's perfectly legitimate i think indeed it's necessary i think it's imperative frankly i think obama ought to have used it i said it obama when baltimore was up in flames after freddie gray when ferguson uh missouri was up in flames uh after uh michael brown the president of the united states a black man could have done something that might have spared us this heather had he stood up in front of the microphone instead of saying stuff like if i had a son he'd look like trayvon and stuff like uh you know i can't quote him we could do the research but basically let's not overreact to this thing give people a chance to blow off steam after all they've got a beef instead of saying that if he had said as a black man the first priority the first imperative of the government is to secure individuals in their person and their property no political objection justifies setting fire to anybody's anything no political objection does it right we are a country of laws and i am the chief law enforcement officer of the country and notwithstanding my commitment to civil rights and my love of african american culture and my appreciation of the frustrations of people i in the office of president must insist he could have said it he didn't say it i can't tell you why he didn't say it but i can say had he said it it could have completely ch in my opinion it could have changed the uh political possibility set for anybody who occupies that office because then the race card uh argument he's trying to uh dog whistle to the white racists out there by using law order would have no credibility whatsoever trump or anybody would be able to say well wait wait here is barack obama your first black president i'm the president of the united states i'm simply doing my job he could have said had obama etc so um who is going to suffer if civil society collapses in these cities who are going to be the people not only from the criminal violence but also from the collapse of the economic activity as you as you have pointed out in some of your writing i know i'm not going to invest my life savings and opening up a small business on an avenue when i look and see a housing project two miles down the road and i have to contemplate the probability is you know 0.15 that they're going to burn me down if a police officer has to use this uh etc i wouldn't do that i wouldn't make that investment um so of course it's legitimate now i can see what a counter argument here might be they would say uh look at this is a this is something that the republicans have used going back a long way uh richard nixon etc uh there are after all people out there who are uh gonna be responsive to if you know they're gonna if i say suburbs are endangered by civil disorder they're gonna think suburbs white inner city black whatever whatever so uh they'll say that there's some kind of historical precedent for uh for using the law and order trope is a way to activate the the racist uh subconscious racism of american uh politics uh but if you're asking me and i you know i've told you what i think uh i i believe that president obama actually ought to have responded quite differently to the civil disorder that took place during his administration if he had done so i i think we would have had a very different situation going forward well those that was just an absolutely inspiring uh uh speech and i wish you'd been a speechwriter and i think you've got a career ahead of you you gotta you gotta get out there more uh and that raises an issue when you say it's the his you know the argument is well there's a historical precedent for that trope and therefore when we use it today it must mean the same thing that's one of the questions that we're facing today with the uh alleged reckoning with white supremacy and and white privilege how much can a culture change you know is it possible to do an about face or is that unrealistic and i would say contrary to all expectations you know if you had looked at the at the fervor with which segregation was defended as long as possible in the 50s and 60s and and the seeming blindness of the majority of america to its founding violations of of principle and their their endurance you know from if you if you didn't know today you could say yeah the 1619 project that's plausible you know tony he see coats that that's the very it's the very essence of america to destroy the black body that's possible but i would say that the country has changed fantastically we all talk about white privilege let's be honest you know you don't have to look at these uh these these professors who were trying to pass as black uh to realize that if you have a child applying to college today he's got a lot better chance if he's black than if he's white and let's be honest that applies as well to getting a faculty job getting a promotion getting a job at google getting a job at paul weiss law firm getting a job at at bank of america that it would seem when it comes to the overwhelming experience now again one has to throw in the mandatory uh disclaimer well of course there's racists out there i'm going to do that only to recognize that that's mandatory but i actually don't believe it's very useful because those people do not have any effect really on the life course of most blacks today and if we're going to say that i insist that we also say let's acknowledge black anti-white racism which is very real sure uh if you know you don't have to spend much time outside of of sharpton's national action network which i have done to hear some real anti-white racism for understandable reasons but that is pretty ingrained i would say so i would argue that his we have changed our history and we have to be able to say that uh as as as unrealistic it is but often conservatives point out the fact that when it comes to gay rights that too was just an extraordinary about face in a period of time that nobody would have expected so i i think that we shouldn't be held hostage to what was a very blind and very callous history actually if people go back and open up gunner merida's two-volume treatise an american dilemma written in the 1930s and 40s and take a look at what he describes as the social situation of the negro uh at that time i think the modal occupation of a black man was farm laborer and of a black woman was domestic servant i think the ratio of median family income black to white was like point four something like that forty percent on a dollar uh family income and it'll be like point seven right now uh i think the representation of african americans in the professions was essentially zilch i'm talking about law medicine engineering and so on uh segregation was rampant lynching was still ongoing etc uh and this is within a lifetime of uh my lifetime i was born in 1948 uh of uh of uh transformation it's really quite remarkable i i don't think you can find another example frankly of a country of any size with a substantial uh racial ethnic uh minority of subordinated persons who have been held in a kind of serfdom-like status whose position within society has improved to the same degree and extent as has been the case for african americans i mean we lose sight of this because uh the little bit of progress remaining to be uh realized uh looms so large in our minds especially for the activists but i i think a fair historical reading uh would uh would contradict the the the narrative coming out of the likes of tonight's colts but i want to say something else heather and see how you react to it because you mentioned disparate impact and i think that's the heart of the matter the heart of the matter is there are racial differences in the average rates of success and certain kinds of activities and a failure in certain kind of activities there's an over-representation of blacks amongst people who are in prisons that's called mass incarceration and it's said to be racist there's an underrepresentation of blacks amongst people who are achieving outstanding results and some of these academic specialties and that's called not enough black faculty in the physics department not enough black faculty in the sociology department universities are beating themselves because there's not enough representation and what i think we've got is the juxtaposition of two things i think we've got the fact of this dramatic historical transformation in the status of african americans from a kind of serfdom into something that's very close to equal citizenship and in some cases privileged benefits because of affirmative action and so on we've got that but we've also got the persistence of inequality we've got the over-representation of blacks amongst those who are incarcerated we've got a huge uh achievement gap in the educational spheres and so forth and people are just having a hard time dealing with these two things and it requires a denial of one or the other it requires saying it's the system's fault that's where i think systemic racism comes from it's basically saying yes there are disparities but no it's not the fault of african americans who suffer on the short end of this yes there's an over-representation of blacks in prison but no it's not because they're greater criminal offending it's because the cops are biased the laws of bias and so forth and so on yes there's a shortage of black professors but no it's not princeton university declares to the world we've got to do better brown university doubles down its commitment to diversity and inclusion harvard university declares diversity inclusion and belonging and belonging uh in in the face of the uh insufficient numbers of african-americans the stench of failures in the air and people just can't bear it i i say that as a proud african-american failure failure to see such opportunities as exist in the society the existence of which opportunities are demonstrated by the fact that others who are not of european origin who are coming to our country in the millions over the last couple of generations are seizing these very same opportunities so that is what i think is at the at the core of this uh this temper um and and i i think it's fraught with all kinds of interesting psychological and and really phil moral philosophic aspects shame shame shame at the failure uh uh a kind of uh bluff a bluffing that goes on where people dare you to say they you know they they trot out the evidence of the disparate impact they assume that the only acceptable explanation of it is uh unfair treatment and they basically dare you to contradict him they dare you to call whoever it is george floyd what he actually was they're daring you to say if you didn't resist the rest you wouldn't end up in a physical conflict with a police officer the consequences of which can be fatal etc well the cardinal rule in progressive or liberal discourse is thou shall not observe behavior and culture that is dysfunctional when it comes to official victim groups you're just not allowed to see it as you say the only allowable explanation is system and structure and this began with that book in the 1960s so you cannot blame the victim i don't know where that came out of but that was going to happen it was a reaction to the moynihan river i see right so you have to treat blacks as as automata as people who do not have agency uh who are inevitable uh pawns of structures in which they live and that cannot make good decisions through their own individual choice choices they they are doomed and destined to end up in those situations where they are not competitively qualified for a whole variety of jobs and i've said before that is to me the basic divide between a conservative and a liberal outlook is that uh conservatives are more likely to see large-scale outcomes or individual outcomes as the result of bad choices or good choices and decision-making and and liberals will see structure now both sides are blind i could i'm willing to admit that perhaps conservatives are not attuned enough to inherited structural disadvantages uh but i think it is as just purely a um a strategy for success one's better off erring on the side of yeah you've been dealt a bad hand but you can make certain basic decisions that will vastly improve your lot in life and you know this is the the success uh strategy that we've heard about from william galston but uh you know instead you have elite culture now struggling for any other explanation other than a lack of a fanatical school culture uh the the disappearance of fathers which is not only important for any individual child but is equally important for having a culture that values paternal responsibility and marriage and sends a message to young males that they are expected to develop those bourgeois habits of deferred gratification and self-reliance that would make them acceptable mates so what we have now is really sort of the pathos of these uh statue burnings and and monument desecrations with the idea that if we if we get rid of some statue in some public park that nobody for the last two centuries has known what the hell it represents and who that person is but if we get rid of all these statues uh and and and names on streets that somehow uh black academic achievement is going to improve i can guarantee you we can throw out everything we can we can get rid of washington dc we can tear down the washington mall nothing is going to change because it's not the statues that are responsible for the academic achievement gap uh saying that the statues are a symbolic uh emblem or representation of a history of racial domination and so on and and you know i mean but i i agree with you about depressing efforts it's all it's it's all a kind of symbolic thing and it doesn't get to it doesn't get down to cases it doesn't get down to how kids are being raised how they're being educated et cetera they're also going to say i just have to say this they they're also going to say look at such deficiencies that you see in uh african-american social life family life and so forth are themselves the consequences or at least to some degree of the history of exclusion and so forth they're going to say slavery was a total kind of domination thing where families didn't have a chance to breathe they're going to say uh that the denial of access to employment opportunities for black men uh helped to undermine their standing with a family and encourage a kind of matriarchal dynamic to evolve and so forth and so on so they're going to say sure a first order observation would leave us thinking that these people are not behaving properly but a deeper and more sophisticated historical view would understand that the reasons that the blacks are like this and the jews are like that and the asians are like this and so forth are themselves the product of of uh structural uh dynamics that's what they're gonna say to which i would say please really i can't shape my own life i'm completely a prisoner of some uh you know i'm a puppet at the end of the string being pulled this way and that by historical forces i don't believe that for a minute i mean if i believe that what kind of way of being in the world is it to think that i have no control over what happens in my own life or in the lives of my children i would say and here i kind of uh echo amy wax yes i mentioned amy wax if you step off the curb in a negligent bus driver runs over you that's obviously not your fault you're a victim of negligence but if you don't go to physical therapy you're never going to walk again now whose responsibility is it to get up go through the painful exercises and recover the facility to walk it's your responsibility notwithstanding the fact that the bus driver should have been paying attention and for me that's where we are as african-americans here now it's our responsibility to raise our children it's our responsibility to make the most of the best of a hand that you know to some degree has been a bad hand but it's nevertheless our responsibility no one is going to do it for us nobody is coming to save us that's that's the speech i've been given yeah i was going to mention precisely that the amy wax rights and remedies and it's not just responsibility it's efficacy uh you know what she also emphasizes is that as whether they not have we have a responsibility we can't do it there is not a substitute government programs are not a substitute for fathers and the idea that we that there hasn't been massive effort uh on the part of society as a collective to try and change those urban pathologies is ludicrous and it's not just the trillions of dollars that have been spent in government uh transfer programs and and social services i don't know a single wealthy republican donor who is not trying with again true good intentions and good will to help people in the inner city whether it's the after-school chess program or guarantees of tuition payments the idea to get back to this ludicrous meme of white supremacy is ridiculous i i think that the vast majority of whites today have nothing but goodwill for blacks and those with power uh exert that power to try and change and and close that skills gap to the extent they can but the question is has that worked and can it work it it cannot without without individual effort and and on the the sort of statues and and his history of discrimination point i recently re-read uh trollops the way we live now because i was recording a a book discussion on george l it's middle march with with michael knowles and i wanted just a comparison of victorian novelists for style and and sort of well i'll just say this i love this about you heather that you are a very cultured woman music opera literature and whatnot but you write the most trenchant essays on political and social matters and that's a rare thing to find i tell you so i you know hats off to you well thank you i wish i wish i could spend all my time on beauty as i'm sure you do well you and and not not taking on this this uh tragic stuff but but anyway what was clear uh in the trollop was um the the frank portrayal at least and whether it's shared by trollop one can question of anti-catholicism but particularly anti-semitism uh there's a character uh in in the trollope way we live now who's uh a jewish merchant very successful and he is the target of of just absolutely unapologetic shameless proud anti-semitism on the part of a family whose daughter is so her wits and for not being married isn't and she thinks she's becoming an old maid that she's actually contemplating marrying this guy he turns out to be one of the noblest characters in the book so whether trollope shares that that um anti-semitism is questionable but ultimately irrelevant as far as i'm concerned my point only is that uh the history of anti-semitism as as you know you mentioned princeton uh that's one of the things that princeton is currently beating its chest about but it hasn't been anti-semitic for decades uh but but there was very real contempt and hatred for jews and they basically said to hell with that and whooped everybody's ass anyway uh they put up with the segregation they gradually worked their way in but they they embraced western civilization i mean some of our greatest literary critics have been jewish uh and read these books of of of the english 19th century victorians with with perspicacity and and gratitude so you know one doesn't want to sort of play one group off against another but there are historical examples of the possibility of overcoming societal-wide discrimination by dint of hard work and we are just not willing to send that message today nobody is saying that it is very curious and it gets back to the original question you posed glenn which is what the hell is going on here and and i repeat myself that i think that whites are preemptively wanting to solidify the myth of bias and the bias explanation uh because they don't want to contemplate other possible explanations for for the persistence of of those large-scale inequalities well other possible explanations include essential or genetically based differences between populations and that is you know fair boat and we know that that's racist and we know that that argument is out there so that should be noted uh but you speak of the jews you speak of the jews and i want to make two points one is if you do so much being counting that you're telling me about underrepresentation every time there's any kind of selective activity like who gets in the faculty of a great university and they're not enough blacks they're not they're underrepresented well you know the representation numbers have to add up to one the fractions they have to add up to one so if there's under representation there's over representation i don't know how you go down the road of a discourse about underrepresentation without implicitly indicting the overrepresented for somehow another not being deserving of their status well that's going to be the jews in many cases okay so you better think about that um the other point i want to make is i agree that you know as an african-american i have had to confront this personally people have doubt about your abilities they don't know whether or not you're fit sure now there are a couple ways of responding to that one of them is to dismiss their doubts call them racist and tell them to go to hell another is to double down your effort and dispel their doubts here you look at what i just accomplished you think i'm not fit deal with that um there is actually a case to be made for the second uh way of uh going about it because the first way invites patronization it it invites uh people to uh to to tolerate you by saying oh yes you're right you're right uh we have to do better the second way is the is is a is a way of power i have a friend who's an african-american scientist and he's always talking about racism and science to whom i say you know what if albert einstein was i think the year was 1903 when he published those three great papers on special relativity on brownie and motion and on the photoelectric effect he published three papers any one of which in one year any one of which could have been worthy of a nobel prize i say if einstein has spent as much time thinking about being jewish as you've been thinking about being black he would have never had time to write those papers he's also not going to get hired today because a lot of schools now are making diversity commitment and diversity status the precondition to being considered in stem school after school in the university of california system the initial screening procedure is is your diversity statement of sufficient enthusiasm and zealotry uh or are you going to contribute to diversity i.e are you female or minority uh and and if you don't pass that bar your your uh your application to teach is to put in the junk file it's remarkable so whether einstein would have gotten through uh whether people that were developing nuclear physics you know lawrence liverpool laboratory none of them would have uh because they were too involved in the eros of knowledge of pursuing the the uh ability to understand our universe so it is it is truly incredible the diversion of our scientific talent somebody sent me uh a a notice from the university of california davis uh a science department that sent around a memo that they'd had a very long conversation about this and they've decided they have to stop calling their their uh weekly meetings and within the department brown bag lunches oh come on this is what our scientists are doing silly i'm sorry it's silly they're doing it i have everything is silly everything is silly i mean this is what we're i don't know i don't believe i don't believe in conspiracy theories but i'm moving to the point now where i do think it is conceivable that china is the funder of our ideology because this is this is suicide this is scientific suicide okay donald j trump his name came up briefly before we've only got a few minutes and i wanted to raise the name again because i believe without being able to prove it that the advent of trump and the schism in our politics that has come about because of trump's success getting himself elected president appointing three supreme court justices it will be soon enough um and the hatred of trump by by many uh quarters including some republicans is somehow implicated in this moment i mean i can't prove it but i somehow feel that if we ask why is the press not reporting differently that the answer at least in part is because if they did they reckon it would help trump if we ask why are uh activists seizing on certain kinds of tropes i think the heightened sense of their um being behind the barricades and under uh duress because trump represents a certain thrust in american culture and politics he's pro-life he's pro-gun he wants a border uh he's not an internationalist and whatnot threatens uh people in ways that they are then somehow reacting to i've said enough i want to hear what you think about the role that trump's ascendancy plays in uh contributing and people's reactions to it plays in contributing to this uh this moment of crisis that we're in i both agree and disagree i think that you're being way too charitable towards the press to think that pre-trump they were reporting the facts i mean glenn you know that's not the case the new york times has been running it's it's gotcha bean counting stories on diversity in companies and and whether it's gender or sex or race forever uh they've been promoting uh the racial divisiveness i i think that this is i see it more as the result of another say let's look at the first iteration of the black lives matter movement in 2015 and 2016. things are much worse the crime the what i call the ferguson effect we can redub it either ferguson effect 2.0 or the minneapolis effect is much worse the the breakdown is much faster the crime increases much faster i attribute that to another five years of poisonous academic ideology and with all due respect i agree glenn you're right that it is possible if you are an extremely enlightened student to find teachers like you in the social sciences and the hard sciences and you're doing very very hard work very those students are are working their butts off but the import or the export from universities today is overwhelmingly this this very poisonous ideology so that's what's going on is we are becoming more and more of a marinated a society marinated in academic allergy that being said i think that yes the degree of hysteria that and the the sheer uh insanity of the mainstream establishment is is heightened by the trump hatred but nevertheless if we got rid of trump like for instance here's a thought experiment there's many people who are optimistic who say when biden is elected this all ends that we open the economy no more uh white supremacy talk no more white privileged trainings i disagree completely i think this thing is a juggernaut that is fueled by something that long preceded trump but do you think if if when biden is i'm saying when not if and i'm going to make all the trump supporters which uh very mad yeah it does look like he's going to be elected but do you think so do you think that that we're going to return to sanity or is is biden going to just continue uh the left-wing agenda which has i think it's a juggernaut right now well the latter i mean we may have a less uh you know uh tortured kind of uh public uh uh schism uh i don't know how trump's people will react to losing maybe they'll react better than hillary clinton's people reacted to losing so it may tamp down the temperature a little bit but i just got a former student who works for the aclu just sent me a notice saying i'm on a task force to try to figure out what a biden administration should do what are your three best ideas for anti-racist policies in the event of abiding these people are getting ready for uh you know rolling back everything that trump was trying to do and pushing forward on on their own stuff right we may get candies we might we may get the amendment i mean i am i'm such a pessimist that i am not going to rule that out that we get an anti-racism amendment to the constitution if that happens well we'll see we didn't get the equal rights amendment how are we going to get and there are a lot more women than there are black people because we've had another 40 50 years of this we've had more and more people going out into the corporations into the law firms into government into arts organizations uh that have been marinated in this stuff again it breaks my heart to see julia the head of juilliard okay nobody is defending the civilization and that's because uh of of the academic culture that is telling us to hate our past and to hate each other um this is glenn lowery i'm with heather mcdonald we've been having a conversation and i have enjoyed the heck out of it but i'm gonna give it back to hannah now uh and the manhattan institute central so thanks so much heather thank you glenn i look forward to talking to you again me too my friend well they say the better the company the darker the conversation um so thank you both for letting us all be flies on the wall as two friends newly codified discussed some of the most troubling and looming problems around us right now um we are so appreciative of your time and of your thoughts before we close i would like to invite our public audience to sign up on our website to receive updates from the policing and public safety initiative including information on our two event casts happening next next week one will focus on different models of police reform including total department overhaul and the other on the experiences and perspectives of black police executives on our website you can also browse the manhattan institute's research and subscribe to our newsletters if you are able please also consider supporting the institute at the link you see below mi is a non-profit organization and our work depends on the support of people like you um again thank you to our two fantastic guests i've never heard such dismal information uh put forth um with so much charm and uh and it was a delight to listen to both of you thank you everybody

Channel: Manhattan Institute

Views: 88,139

Keywords: Glenn Loury, Heather Mac Donald

Id: hT0KZFKZoRs

Length: 58min 1sec (3481 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020