John McWhorter on Woke Racism | Forward with Andrew Yang

i think these two pages or page and a half were some of like the the best stuff i've read all year where what you do is you place two statements uh in uh contrast to each other both of which are being promulgated by people who are concerned about uh the power differential um but the they're intellectually in opposition to each other the catechism of contradictions that's right yes it's uh so for example um show interest in multiculturalism very reasonable um do not culturally appropriate when it is not your culture it is not for you and you may not try it or do it you stay away and so it's like okay i'm supposed to show an interest and yet if i somehow go too far then i i will be guilty of something right mimick it right um silence about racism is violence it's like okay i need to say something and then elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own which is like look i can't say anything unless i am of the oppressed class and some people say it's a happy medium just don't say too much but the thing is it's so easy to be called saying too much where is that medium nobody is ever allowed to strike it exactly you must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people you can never understand what it is to be black and if you think you do you're a racist you're racist if you think you get it right yes uh you you know so they you can see why people are kind of like uh tiptoeing uh hot potatoing um through this so that these the these statements it is uh to me maybe the most powerful one black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does i would agree um all whites must acknowledge their personal complicitness in the per perfect of whiteness throughout history and it's different because of power and so if you if you have power then you're all complicit if you don't have power everything is individual yeah who said it doesn't make any sense again and maybe it's because i've been around the country but like that iowa farmer and the diner would be like you're complicit like i've been sitting here in the cornfields for eight generations like you know what the hell did i do [Music] this week on forward we welcome columbia linguistics professor john mcwhorter to talk about his new book woke racism which i really enjoyed the heck out of met him on bill maher and he's on forward this week [Music] it is my pleasure and privilege to welcome to the forward podcast columbia linguistics professor and author of this incredible book woke racism how a new religion has betrayed black america john mcwhorter welcome john thank you andrew i think i remember that book well now i mean you're talking about it probably uh all the time though that might be coming to an end your press tour may finally this is the very end of it this is the last interview yes 5 000 that's right uh so you and i met uh in l.a on bill maher's show we did uh and so i think this should be the beginning of a new tradition where anyone who's on a panel together has to then talk for real as they come together but i bought your book immediately after you and i shared that stage i'm flattered read it loved it think it's so important uh and i wanted to ask first and foremost how has the experience been doing press for the book promoting it all of that jazz because i'd imagine some of the reactions would be varied shall we say you know i think i was expecting with woke racism to have to deal with an awful lot of blowback because what i'm saying are things people don't want to hear and this time it's not one of these john mcwhorter makes black people angry books this one is really written mostly for white people and i thought now it's going to be a whole lot of white people hating me to tell you the truth i'm pleased to say that the book has done what i actually hoped it would which is to speak to center and left of center america people who are concerned about race people who want to do the right thing but are falling for an idea that striking poses is doing the right thing and that that's how you replicate what happened in the past and i think people get it i think people actually see that that's what the book means the book's point is not everybody just stopped talking about race i think a lot of people are kind of waiting for the book to be about that so they can jump on you about it but it's not that so to tell you the truth of the 400 000 [Laughter] i've only had two or three where i had really obnoxious pushback where i had to really work hard and i think that's just because the book isn't saying anything all that unusual i'm just saying folks let's really help people instead of talking about it and striking poses and saying things we don't believe because those things don't help people you talk about striking poses i think the other thing you reference in the book is living in fear it's like living in fear does not help black people so much of what we're told to say is just people afraid of being called white supremacists on twitter nobody wants to be called that on twitter it's hard to be hated for most people most people aren't up for that and so i think that what we're seeing now is the idea that say somebody says all disparities between black people and other people are due to racism somebody says when i see disparities of that kind i see racism and let's say that that person has a kind of a solemn demeanor let's say that that person wears dreadlocks and a suit at the same time and so that looks kind of kind of deep and you think i'm supposed to believe that i know deep down that no social history is as simple as that all disparities are not due to discrimination or even something abstract like systemic racism that's clearly not the case but you're supposed to believe it you're afraid of being called a name if you say you don't believe it and so you pretend to but that means we're having a very fake conversation and a fake conversation is not what black uplift is supposed to be about fake conversation is not what black uplift is supposed to be about uh you should have named the book that john i think you missed and then make that an acronym or something yeah well so there were a couple of things i picked up from the book one is you're a literal linguistics professor so i i love how precise you are in language i feel like you should have a naming consultancy do you have that the companies come to you and say hey we've got this product does that happen no andrew i worked for a company like that once about 30 years ago for about 10 minutes i wasn't that good at it like they no here's this product come up with a name it's like call it i don't know but as a linguist part of you is that you try to say exactly what you mean and that is what this book was oh to tell you the truth a lot of this book is me in the summer of 2020 on a screened-in sun porch late at night after my kids went to bed with a glass of wine or sometimes something stronger and just typing my heart out just thinking i'm really angry at these things going on and somebody needs to say something and maybe they need to be black and middle-aged and that's what i did but yeah i tried to make it very clear what i meant because it's so easy to be misinterpreted on anything and especially when you're talking about these sensitive race issues when you talk about the feedback you get post interview how do you measure it so one one thing is you go on to a tv studio and then you have a particular interaction with journalists and like some of them are benign and some of them you could tell they're trying to stick it to you [Laughter] now what's funny is some of the interviews i saw you do they did exactly what um you said they someone would do in the book is when you say hey this is a problem and be like isn't this the worst problem and you're like well i'm not saying that that is not a problem but i'm saying that this is itself something that we should be concerned about yeah the biggest pushback against to this book one of them is that i don't know enough about religion to be pronouncing upon this as a religion and that's true i don't know that much about it and if i were a religious person i would be insulted by this book because i can tell that people smell that i'm very impatient with religious belief and that's true that's the subject of another book but it's created problems in in my life so there is that impatience but i get the feeling the main pushback lately is that the things going on on the right are a more serious problem and that me writing about this takeover of wokeness is just some trivial business that will pass and that i'm exaggerating and i respectfully disagree for one thing it's not just academia i'm not just writing about some things happening to some professors it's really gotten much bigger than that and i just think that if you really believe that a culture of mendacity and prosecution taking over how we are supposed to think how we're supposed to research how we're supposed to do art and how we're supposed to moralize if anybody really thinks that that's all just some trivia because of what happened on january 6th and because there are republicans who are trying to disenfranchise black people and actually not doing it very well on the ground which i consider a relief if you really don't think that what i'm writing about is important either you are one of the people i write about in the book or you've been trained to think that because you're afraid of being called a white supremacist on twitter i think these things are very important i think in some countries nobody would ask whether it was important that academia and the arts were being taken over and it's also it is also media and it is seeped into politics and on a personal level i remember the first time i was called a white supremacist and i was like what that was like very very confusing to me maybe because like i i just thought it was so ridiculous like you know it's possible that that it didn't hurt me or frighten me in the way it it would many others um but now things like that have happened to me frankly often enough where you you do become kind of over it where you're like oh it's just yeah yeah and that's and it um so i'm going to make a couple of observations about the importance of what you're talking about in terms of our politics so you write in the book that uh that this belief system is primarily concerned with what you call the power differential and it's like the power differential between whites and blacks primarily though they're they're different concepts in general especially white men yet yes so uh i spent a lot of time campaigning in iowa and new hampshire which were the first two uh caucus and you know the early voting states caucus and primary respectively uh and they're predominantly white iowa is say 94 white new hampshire is 92 white and so if you go to people in those environments and say hey the biggest problem facing us is you is the power differential between uh whites and non-whites and uh you if you are white you need to really reflect upon uh your racism uh and your behavior um it's it's really counterproductive is i guess a you know euphemism for for what it is in part because let's say you're a farmer in iowa your life might not be you know sunshine and roses like it might actually be quite difficult there might be yeah it might be very very difficult and so when you get presented with something that kind of presumes that you're at the top of a hierarchy and uh and that you're sitting pretty and that the suffering of others is what you should be most concerned about you're a little bit like well you know my life is is very difficult um and it would might even be difficult for me to be overtly racist as a behavior because there might not be anyone non-white around for me racist right uh sitting in a diner everybody's white you're eating your eggs right yes yeah and if you look at some of the traditional battleground states that democrats have been losing ground in they are ohio missouri wisconsin pennsylvania states that aren't as predominantly white as iowa but there are still majority white and so if this is one of the things you're leading with uh as a political party um then it actually can really push voters the other direction one of my favorite insights that you get from genuinely really smart people these days on the left is that what you just said doesn't matter you know the new hot idea is that that messaging does not affect the vote it has nothing to do with how that kind of possible swing voter feels about democrats and so you condescend to them you tell that white guy sitting there in the diner he's not sure how his farm is going to do even the people back in the kitchen are white and you tell him that he has white privilege because of his white skin because of the history of the country and he doesn't get it and he sees that you look down on him for not getting it to say that that somehow doesn't matter i think that comes from people who were just so wedded to the supposed wisdom of that message that they can't stand to hear it criticized even when we're talking about whether the democrats are going to have real power in the future of this country i think a lot of people genuinely think if we have to give up talking in that way if we have to give up preaching that message then we are not ourselves i think they'd rather lose elections than consider how to break bread with real people in the real world it's dangerous it really does worry me because i'm not a republican and i don't think i'm going to be any time soon especially lately but this messaging really doesn't work the reason that people will fight for it this hard and the point of the book is to a large extent it's because these people think of this as beyond question this isn't just a political opinion this idea about the power differentials this is a religious message that grounds a certain kind of person's very sense of why they're on this earth they must preach that good news but that's not the attitude you take when you want to win elections with real people beyond college towns [Music] these days a lot of stuff's getting delivered to our homes and why would coffee be any different given that a lot of us feel very strongly about it trade will bring the best coffee in the world right to your front door it will match you to coffees that you'll love from a selection over of over 400 plus craft coffees we'll send you a freshly roasted bag as often as you'd like trade guarantees you'll love your first match and on the off chance you don't they will replace it with a different bag for free you can give feedback they'll tailor it to your tastes you can feel good because it's sourced from small us-based roasters who are committed to ethical and sustainable sourcing and for our listeners right now trade is offering your first bag free and five dollars off your 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obvious thing is like well maybe you don't want to use this term because 98 of people don't think of themselves this way and a third or so are going to like you less if you use it so where did this term come from and it came from academic circles who were i believe trying to address with what they saw as um like a gender issue yeah gender issue in the term latino right um uh so if your goal is to win elections uh have control of congress you can maybe make positive things happen then you would look at this and say well like this seems like a terrible idea or like a term that is is very very counterproductive and so to your point it's like well then what is the argument for it and it's some kind of ideological correctness that treats voter responses as secondary or irrelevant if you say latinx a certain sliver of the population applauds you and that may strike you as the main goal even if it's only a sliver and even if a significant proportion of the people who aren't applauding even find it off-putting that's a weird situation unless you see this rather liturgical aspect to it i mean as far as i can see latinx is going to become a term used by people within highly educated circles it's not going to spread beyond and you could think of it as harmless it's going to be the way a certain kind of person usually with a phd or something close to it says something that you say in those circles most people are never going to say it i live in jacksonville well the issue is that what happens is you have political figures who are surrounded by professional staffers who will say use this term because they are of that mind yes and they figure we need to please a certain kind of person but suppose it isn't the majority it's not about the world that we live in in the neighborhood that i live in i don't know the statistics but frankly it feels to me as if every second person is latino you hear as much spanish as english on the street if not more i have never heard the term latinx used by any of those people and i'm sure these are the people who often reject it that has nothing to do with their world view are we interested in their vote i would think we'd be more interested in their vote than in the vote of people who went to college and listened to npr and read the nation but instead there's almost a kind of elitism but it's not illegitimate it's that these people feel this as a religious duty they wouldn't put it that way but it's a religious duty and sometimes you might let religion supplant what actually makes sense from a to b to c if you feel you're serving some larger purpose and i i am very pragmatic so i'm all about like okay what's going to work uh i named universal basic income the freedom dividend because i tested better with conservatives out of you have the word freedom in there they like it more uh so let's do a bit of level setting as we get into the the substance of what you say in your book um why you characterize this as uh religious so a few things i think that we agree on uh just to put them out there so racism is real it's a real thing it's there uh america is vastly unequal uh in terms of particularly uh by race no even playing field and is partly conditioned by race that's right and it would be a good thing to try and have policies that reduce that inequality uh and help black people it is part of bringing us closer to our ideals yes yes so uh i'm on board with those three things i know you are too most people right so right so so after you establish those three three things then it's like okay how do we actually try and make something positive happen and this is where you diverge very significantly and i believe correctly from this orthodox you described so um you call this group of people and their belief system the elect which i found very interesting um i think the way that people describe it out in uh the world would be something about like wokeness or uh political correctness what most people think of as woke now yeah exactly yeah um so how did the the elect get started uh it started in a legal scholarship right a lot of this traces partly to foucault and a way of looking at literature where there's no such thing as truth and everything is about the position of the person who wrote it these are things that went on academia a lot of that gets crystallized in what critical race theory began us which is a few legal scholars mostly of color who argue that we need to reconceive our sense of how justice works because of the evil of racism because of power differentials because of the experience of someone who's below as opposed to someone who's above and these people had some extremist views about how say vigilante justice should work about how a person who's not white and especially a man should think of themselves and your primary sense of self should be a sense that you are a victim of the operations of other people all of this stuff is it's strong brew it's not crazy i don't think it's something that would ever be embraced by most people but it was just there that has trickled down so this was kimberly crenshaw richard delgado regina austin derrick bell all of this got really popular especially in the mid 80s and if you you know hung around the campus scene they were in my law school textbooks by the way they were in there and these people would visit campus i remember once listening to derek bell at a black graduation ceremony this would be circa 1994 openly saying genially but openly saying you know you you guys are going to get your butts kicked out there you've got to really watch it the world is set against you and that was considered a positive message at the ceremony people ate it up but that was a fringe thing most people didn't think the way derek bell did and he had some books that got around but they partly got around because his ideas were so strong and seemed almost eccentric they were interesting it was there was almost a drive-by aspect to his ideas and you kind of i hate to put it this way but you thought of him as kind of an eccentric he had good ideas he made you think but most people didn't think like derek bell it trickles through the 90s and the arts into a more general idea that you're supposed to place battling power differentials at the center of any kind of endeavor that takes mental candle power it's the arts it's intellectual it's legal and it's one thing to want to battle differentials in power power corrupts certainly it does but for that to be the thing where if you step aside from battling power differentials you were ruled to be some kind of moral pervert that's something that crystallizes in academia slowly it had become a problem even in the teens and then our racial reckoning really focused it because people who thought that way acquired a kind of an authority over the populist that they hadn't had before so power differentials let's say that's one of 10 things that you're interested in that's the way it was circa 2010. these people are saying that power differentials are supposed to be everything and what makes it really hard is that they don't think of it that way they're not thinking don't think about 10 things think only about power differentials all they know is that they think of the power differentials as central they can't imagine why anybody wouldn't who's a moral person so you say why only this and for them you're asking them to question truth itself so it's a very delicate discussion but i really do think we need to realize what these people are so frustrating because of is that they think of the power differentials as what we must hold front and center all the time most of us don't feel that way so this fixation on uh this particular power relationship starts out in elite law schools and elite universities and i will say i think that it's stronger in elite universities and environments like if you go to a random uh state school someplace like i'm i'm not sure if it's uh as prevalent particularly if you were in like let's say part of the midwest and maybe that's partially because of uh i hear it's changing but i know what general phenomenon you mean yeah so uh and then that ends up um very very influential in the media i think in large part because a lot of people who were trained in certain environments then uh head to media organizations a lot of them are based here in new york um or l.a or l.a so so you you have this very very significant part of the culture gets into uh really just about all of our forms of media i'd say at this point um tv permeated definitely uh journalism for sure it gets compounded by social media which is used to kind of enforce a certain conformity social media really focuses this because twitter and facebook become default in 09 and of course that doesn't mean the world changed overnight but by the early teens we were in a new world that kind of person is very active on twitter that kind of person kind of defines twitter in many places and next thing you know a certain assertion starts happening yeah i i think that there is a very very powerful feedback loop between twitter and the media exactly because media takes their cues from twitter this group as you're describing i i think if you take twitter out of the equation then you know it's actually difficult to enforce [Laughter] if there were no twitter this wouldn't have happened that's right they couldn't have had this disproportionate influence derek bell saying some colorful things at a commencement is one thing but a derek bell who's 27 and is on twitter all day that's different [Music] so you write in the book about why different people find this fixation on the power differential uh appealing as a belief system uh so i'd love for you to unpack that a little bit how did this gain so much currency and power it gained power partly because if you are an elect you feel that you have a mission you feel that you're seeing further than most people who wouldn't like that you have a sense of community with people who are as on fire about these things as you but you know to tell you the truth a lot of it is and i think we all feel this way about certain things you feel smarter than the average bear you see further battling power differentials you're the one who sees how important that is and so there you go and you're helping to save black people we have progress in this country in that people are so ashamed of being racist that's a good thing if you're an elect then you've got that covered because you have devoted your whole heart and soul to battling racism and supposedly saving black people if you're black and you fall for this it's different and it's hard to talk about especially for me but you can fall for the victimhood mindset the victimization mindset is something that psychologists recognize as a human trait it's not about black people it's human there's a certain kind of person who exaggerates their victimhood you can only do it if your life is really pretty much okay you exaggerate your victimhood and you dismiss the victimhood of other people and you derive your sense of significance from you being a survivor of this supposed victimization that's a mindset we all know the tattletale we all know the martyr black america has a way of oding on that because it's such a terrible history we've got in this country treat it like animals for hundreds of years and jim crow slavery even talk about redlining and then there are even things today depending on how you feel about microaggressions it can be hard to be proud of being black it's easy to fall for the idea that being black is inferior what do you do about that there are all sorts of things one thing a black person might do is to grab on to this idea that what makes you special is that you are a victim of this ongoing onslaught of racism that you and your people deal with every day i think all of us can understand how that would be a tempting way of processing the world if there's a hole inside of you if there's a hole in black america's soul and i think many people if they didn't hear me saying it would agree completely there is a hole one way to fill it is to manufacture a sense of victimhood and to build your identity around your being a noble survivor anybody would do that given black people's history but that's what it is and so white people and black people in this elect religion end up doing a kind of a dance white people pretend to agree with this characterization of what being black is like black people give white people a certain kind of power we absolve white people of their sin to an extent but none of this has anything to do with black people having real problems including racially conditioned systemic racism type ones out in the real world this little dance is like this cotillion that people are having while the rest of the world burns and i'm hoping to make people realize that's what's going on yes i i agree that that there are real fundamental problems and let's work on those um as opposed to monitoring someone's statement on social media as if if you just got that right then all would be well right that's like how that connects with this right yeah exactly um so i'm going to share some uh stories from my childhood to give you a sense as to my reaction and one reason why i believe that um what you're saying is so important so i grew up one of the only asian kids in my school my school is predominantly white there were two black kids um there were you know two asian kids like that kind of school um and so it was very tough to be black it was tough to be asian the culture was somewhat different it was like the 80s and 90s and so you know like you remember like there wasn't exactly a surplus of i remember this well yeah yeah um and so i got taunted for being asian all the time um and the the black kids had it tough too jewish kid had it tough um and so there is like this sense that i have from my upbringing um that you know like uh that racism is something that i think is present in a lot of people in some form in terms of their like attitudes towards different people um and that because of that i i don't have any thoughts that's like oh we're going to be in a place where you don't notice that i'm asian like i mean that that would be ridiculous yeah and so then the question really is how do we try and uh make concrete changes in the real world i'm like less interested in policing people's thoughts or even to some extent uh their statements um and i'm more concerned about trying to move things around in the real world that will make um a difference uh make things positive i will also comment that if you were a non-white kid in that era of 80s and 90s like blackness was the only cool way to not be white if you know what i mean which is one of the reasons why you had all of these these hip hoppings yes right yeah you know and so i had baggy jeans uh you know like the whole thing and there were a lot of white kids in the suburbs who bought the food like the rest of it i mean you know that was like the um like uh especially in my case as an asian boy i felt like my masculinity was always in question there's that trope yes and so then and and so uh you know um black culture was a way it's like oh this is what non-white masculinity is right so let's i remember this yeah yeah it's um and i'm 70s i'm i'm a little bit older and i got some trouble for being black i grew up in very similar environments there were two asians that i remember in my my private school there were some black people but it was white people who called the tune and i'm from i can't believe how old i'm getting i'm 56 i'm from even before hip-hop and so in the 70s there wasn't yet this idea that people who weren't black could pretend to be that hadn't quite happened yet and so the white kids were just being white if anything they liked hard rock which i never understood and the black kids well you dealt with stuff and what i don't get about today is that i'm supposed to say you hurt me by saying something or by not saying something a generation before me black person wouldn't have been hurt but i am now i feel like that is giving into something i'm saying that i'm in the down position i'm pretending a certain vulnerability there is i would never want to do that there is some of that where it's like um you know when i was a kid and someone uh called me like [ __ ] or something be confused maybe hurt the rest of it um you know at a certain point you feel like the natural reaction instead of screaming injustice on social media would be just [ __ ] you like you can't hurt me you know um but no that's not the current idea and so yeah if somebody even called me the n-word whoever it was chances are there'd be something kind of wrong with them and my idea would be if you did that i'm looking down upon you just who are you and now i'm gonna go do whatever i was doing but no i'm supposed to you know jump onto a bed and cry into the pillow i was told to go back to my country like you know not that long ago but the person who said it was clearly mentally ill so like [Laughter] right yeah go back to where you came from how stupid is that yeah so you know but like person was you know like you know they needed help so [Laughter] so there is um so the this movement has uh has some currency um and you say that look this is actually counterproductive for black people in the real world and you have a few examples in your book that i thought were very very powerful and important so on one hand it's like hey let's try and modern moderate people's or you know monitor people's behaviors and statements and then you were like look it's actually hurting black kids right now because here are the real issues and one one you put out there was uh trying to improve the discipline and behavior of middle school kids and if you go and say hey look like i'm not going to enforce standards because uh like these black kids cannot be expected to conform behave or conform to these standards you know like that's actually a profound disservice to the kids themselves yeah and that's one of these things there's a meme out there which is that black boys are suspended for violence disproportionately not because in a great many schools black boys are more violent than the others now just let that drop you're not even supposed to say it nevertheless as unpleasant as the fact is it's true it couldn't be because of that it must be because of bias now the way to look at it is to pull the camera back why are the black boys so often more violent and poverty has a lot to do with violence fatherlessness has a lot to do with violence and everybody knows that there is a lot of fatherlessness in many underserved black communities and why is that you can talk about the war on drugs you can talk about all sorts of things but it's there there's a reason why the black boys might be more violent but nevertheless they are and studies have proven this again and again and again any big city that you live in probably journalists at the big newspaper if there still is one have gone out trying to find this bias and didn't find it study after study and yet there's this idea that there's this bias against black boys and the three b's are seen as somehow being some kind of truth like alliteration is truth and the thing is if teachers hold back and don't suspend black boys for violence which has happened what happens is that big surprise the schools get more violent the grade point average of the school goes down and i think some people are thinking well good because those white and asian kids in the school they deserve that violence because it's going to get back at all the things that have been done for what no no no because you have to remember that fact that everybody knows that a disproportionate number of black kids go to all black schools it's just hurting other black kids my kids who are being hurt nobody wants to talk about it and so there's a kind of person and it's not that i think this person knows all of this and insists on soldiering ahead all of us go through life looking through a little a little hole but there's a certain kind of person who stands up there in a suit talking about the bias against black boys and everybody claps and they're not thinking about the fact that if those boys aren't disciplined other black boys and girls are being beaten up in these schools along with often the teachers it should matter yes you had another problem which you called yale or jail and what you're suggesting is that look uh it's not that if you don't go to uh yale then all of a sudden there's nothing waiting for you but uh you know ruined you know that there's like a multitude of highway that's right of these other opportunities and that sometimes putting uh students in environments that aren't the best fit for them actually ends up hurting their ambitions i think you cited a study where um you have fewer scientists because they if they go into some of these courses um uh and uh majors that they end up being pushed out of them whereas if they were in another environment then they might actually finish and then become that scientist yep you see it again and again and you know there are some counter studies that are being done that are nibbling at the edges of some of the specific claims of that work but the larger truth is painfully obvious and not refuted which is that if a kid is admitted to a school where everything is going to happen faster than they're prepared for they're not going to do as well they're not going to have a good time they're going to leave disenchanted and that's just there and no study can eat away at that there have been some things said about stem in particular stem is one of many subjects that people can major in in school about which nothing has been said and what it means is that to insist that you have a certain percentage of for example black kids at elite schools and that you're going to do it by lowering standards for most of the black kids so that you can have that number ends up hurting the black kids and there are studies that you aren't shown i don't think anybody's going whoo-hoo-ha-ha and hiding them but when black kids like that for example in california when racial preferences were banned 25 years ago started going to perfectly solid but not flagship university of california schools they did better kids at uc san diego who would have been admitted to berkeley or ucla and kind of treaded water did excellently at ucsd you would think that that would have been on the headline of every newspaper in the country nobody cared because what you were supposed to talk about was the racism of banning racial preferences and that just won't do a lot of black kids who are admitted to the selective schools would have a much better time and have much better grades this also goes for law schools if they were admitted to the second tier but excellent schools and i think some people are thinking why should they settle for the second tier but there are all these people teaching and working at these second tier schools who think of themselves as being part of excellent institutions what's so horrible about them why does everybody have to go to the top 32 and so this is a conversation we don't have because what we're supposed to talk about is solely racism racism racism we must make these kids welcome but often they'd feel more welcome at a school where they were being taught at a pace that they could keep up with the conversation has to change [Music] so [Music] a lot of things do end up being how a young person develops confidence like if you go into an environment and then you're told you're good at something then you're like ooh let me do more of this you know and then or if you show up and then you wind up with like c's and you're very hanging on you'll be like oh like i shouldn't be doing this right yeah uh you know i'll tell a stupid story but you know like like i think uh you know i majored in economics in part because i took an economics course and i got an a and i was like ooh i guess i'm good at this right yeah so yeah you know i think people being in environments where they're told like hey you're actually good at this make you a better person than going somewhere where you feel like there's something wrong with you and no the problem is that maybe for reasons connected with what we call systemic racism maybe that's the reason you weren't prepared for harvard that's not where you belong you'd be better off at rice you'd be better off at the university of california san diego and you'll have a grand old time maybe your kid can go to yale and does it really matter that much in the end but we don't talk about that well you certainly don't sound very asian talking about this man i mean john if you go to an asian parent and be like hey no you don't you don't need to worry about harvard you would like to say it did they go they would be like they'd be like this man cannot teach my child [Laughter] it's an unfortunate thing that we have this and then the the law school studies are so clear if you go to a law school where you're taught at the at the speed that you're used to being taught you're more likely to pass the bar you're more likely to get out of law school but we don't talk about that and so for example what was it um i've been doing the tour so long i've forgotten where we are in time it was last spring at georgetown when a white professor said when she thought nobody heard it was at the tail end of his uh and she said to another professor that she's concerned that the black kids tend to cluster in the bottom quarter of the class she didn't sneer it she said it's a problem what are we gonna do about this and the other professor basically like nodded and said yeah of course she lost her job and the other professor now doesn't work there anymore but she was talking about something that's real everybody said why you racist but nobody said prove it is it that the kids are clustering at the bottom and if they are what's the reason and it's not because if anything it's like that that professor expressing concern should have been she's supposed to be on the side of the angels yeah and you know the kids who are clustering the bottom and i don't know anything about georgetown law school but i know that that phenomenon would not be there if a lot of those kids were just at some other law school and getting law degrees and passing the bar but the conversation was not allowed the idea was just she's a racist she has to go that's fake that is what i hate to use this great graceless analogy i've used it with glenn lowry but there isn't one better that is people peeing in their pants that that is just it's it smells like that and it's not real everybody watching that knew we're supposed to talk about why the black kids are clustering in the bottom and try to solve the problem instead she was just fired for being a bad person that was fake now another problem you cite with this approach is that it doesn't help black people themselves because it's leading them to try and define themselves by what white people think of them um which should not be the the their primary uh lens of the world here's where i get jealous of asians i must admit because you can correct me if i'm wrong i don't feel like that's as much of an issue among asian americans that you define yourself based on what whites think of you you think of yourself to ponder this guy okay sorry continue john the idea that my sense of worth is based on whether a white person sees me fully whether the white person insults me whether the white person understands my humanity as exquisitely as black people do that's my identity and because white people don't see me fully then my identity is how i grapple with that how i position myself according to that because they are in power and i'm a subordinate my identity my identity is that an asian thing well this is a tell me if you guys know because it it it does make it seem like you're like this approach actually subjects you more to a white authority they win at uh perception yeah um okay i will i will reflect on this for a moment as an asian guy i don't think that much about what people are well white people are thinking about me because i you know and because and this is going to sound this you know it might be uh funnier self-effacing because i don't think they do think about me i like like the average amount i mean you know like it's i've joked in another context like i've always felt like as an asian guy you have sort of an invisibility cloak you can put on at any moment and so for us the problem is that we're seen as kind of less masculine unthreatening like uh not as american like like that that that sort of thing exotic um yes but um but i i don't think asians uh think in those terms like we don't get upset um on the regular about how we're perceived my sense of it yeah uh now of course black people feel that we're thought of as violent or angry and so maybe that's different from being thought of as facing and you know quiet that might condition part of this but yeah yeah yeah so so in my my case growing up um so i i would get really mad i'd go to the gym i'd study martial arts be all ticked off i'd be one of those angry asian guys in the gym that was my my reaction i don't know if you've ever seen i us i know what you mean guy friend what's he doing now uh hopefully that response yeah but it's just one of those things where my daughters are six and nine and i think to myself are they going to reach a point where they start defining themselves not as their wonderful selves but according to how the white girls in their school don't see them and i don't want that okay i so th this is is so important it's like no one should be defining their happiness by other people perceive them no it's a terrible way to live you know it'll never work everybody isn't going to like you and yet to an extent even with you know we violent black people to an extent my thought often is white people aren't thinking about me at all and that may be partly because i'm black but that's fine with me because i like the people who do think about me and i'm busy well well that's normal they aren't thinking about your doctors they think about themselves i think so yeah one of the things so i was a very shy introverted asian kid um and then maybe in sixth grade or at some point i had this epiphany which was that like you know i was all busy being self-conscious sixth grade yeah it's like the other kids were busy thinking about how other people saw them they you know you know like they were closed yeah they were too busy trying to figure out how they were being evaluated uh so you know they said that they were evaluating me it was like very much secondary or tertiary um was was this thing i i had who knows maybe i was saying something that would make me feel better but at that point i think there was a point during my adolescence where i explicitly remember saying to myself that uh i will never live according to how other people uh or i think how other people see me and so then this belief system you're talking about now i'm realizing that it's one reason why i find it um so troubling it's like you know you can't live like that you have to you have a hard enough job trying to figure out what makes you tick your own values what you care about your relationships being a good you know son brother friend father parent like all that stuff is really really tough and it would be impossible if you learned on top of that it's like oh how does this abstract group uh you know evaluate me see me it's maybe one reason why i i have felt somewhat um you know uh like less touched by by some of like the um you know the social media flagellation i might have received in like uh moments in time and part of it too is that uh it doesn't feel real to me in part because nine times out of ten um it would only happen online like if you're in person someone then they'd be like oh notice that [Laughter] people who yell and scream like that on twitter most of them if they were in a room with you would never behave that way there's something that happens to people when they're sitting there and unfortunately it's not just this person called the troll i think a lot of people are thinking that the trolls are these people who look kind of like danny devito and there's something wrong with them it's not trolls often it's your friends it's it's people who are like your friends they're very ordinary people who will sit there on twitter and rip somebody's entrails out and then go out and be perfectly normal people that's the weirdest human impulse i think i have seen in my entire life but it's there but yeah it's unreal it's something somebody does with their fingers when they're alone that didn't come out right but it's not how they would in a real social space yeah yeah that's certainly been my experience when i traveled the country seeing people too i think of americans as mostly good um because i've been in a whole range of environments with thousands of different people yeah and they have been mostly kind and open and generous most people are and cordial um and it's only when you uh turn on your smartphone or watch our news media does everyone just seem so vicious [Laughter] and fixated on um uh race and like something i mean race is a very important thing but it's like you know people aren't obsessed uh about it like every moment of their days like that is not real life and twitter is a bad neighborhood it's hard to remember that but yeah it's not real life and it's a bad neighborhood [Music] so so you have a couple of scripts which i really enjoy that you recommend for trying to uh address the elect with the giant proviso that um that there's no convincing anyone you cannot change of anything and so you have to try and navigate it and weaken it um are you optimistic and you'd be the foremost authority on this are you optimistic that the fever is breaking that uh that there are enough people who are coming together being like yeah this stuff is isn't working it's not improving lives it's scaring everyone it's like you know like uh driving people out of their own neighborhoods et cetera et cetera like like did you think and i if the fever does break i genuinely think you'd be a big reason why well you know i i wouldn't mind but i can't imagine i would be that important but i like that expression fever breaking because it would that's the perfect analogy and i do think it has broken i six months ago i wasn't sure seven or eight months ago but yeah i think as the pandemic has lessened at least temporarily and we've all kind of come out of our dens i think people are realizing yes systemic racism exists yes the racial reckoning has been good in some ways but we're allowing people to call the tune who are so far off to the side of what most of our concerns are that if we let these people win we're going to be living in an unrecognizable world and so i'm seeing more and more people stand up to this kind of person the idea is not to chase them out of the room unfortunately they want to chase us out of the room but i just say for them i want them to sit back down it used to be that that kind of person was maybe one person at the party one person at the faculty meeting one person at starbucks one person contributing these extremist views and making you think about the way the world maybe should be we were arriving at things by consensus the grand old days of the early 2000 teens then social media messes it up and we have this elect kind of person with a miter on their head basically saying that if you don't do it our way we're going to call you a white supremacist on twitter which is basically saying you have to do it our way we cannot let those people run the world because frankly they have a very narrow view of what it is to be an engaged person they have very very hazy plans as to how they would actually run the world and frankly i pity anybody who has to grow up in a world that is focused only on battling white's hold on power differentials that's just too narrow considering what a wide wondrous thing human existence is so yeah at the end of the book i give some scripts and what it basically comes down to is just telling them no and so if some small group of people said these scripts are really funny to me it's like it's like i don't consider myself a white supremacist and nothing you say will convince me otherwise don't hold and don't look away and that person then is going to call you a white supremacist on twitter let them you know and just let it blow over and notice that it doesn't have as much effect as it used to yeah yeah you also say like if you do this then i will call you out on twitter try to take over my school with this then i'm going to get a bunch of parents and we're going to call you a racist on twitter that's right i i will not retract this innocent thing i said or wrote and you can call me anything you want it's funny funny hearing it read back to me but i really mean those these scripts are really uh really funny i like this one too you're telling me i'm a racist but i am more committed to actually helping poor people of color than you are that is a very important thing to say because the person's gonna say you're a racist no i'm helping black people you're striking poses and i insist on that i think you know it deep down and if you call me a racist on twitter i'm gonna keep doing what i'm doing if we say that enough to this sort of person i think that slowly it will emerge among them that they can't just stand up and yell white supremacists and get what they want and if they start knowing that that's it that means they've sat back down they can say what they want but they can't get what they want by saying that they're going to call you a racist on twitter we're allowing them to do that and we don't want the world that they would have us stuck in if we just allowed that well again it's living in fear i mean who wants to live in fear uh you know um and and that i think is one of people's biggest frustrations with this time is that uh good people moral people uh feel like they're going to lose their careers if they say the wrong thing uh on a zoom or the wrong which apparently has happened i mean i guess you pointed this out although you know andrew actually i'm thinking a lot of that stuff is becoming a little 20 20. these people who actually lose their jobs because they said the wrong thing there's a pushback happening and so they're people who would not have their jobs now who got hung by this sort of thing in say march 2021 who are still in their jobs partly because of what i think is a backlash against the extremity and that's what i hope this book is going to be part of encouraging people to realize that that's not racism that that gives me hope the person i thought of just now when you uh related that was a young black woman named alexi um i think her last name is hammond um she was hired by teen vogue and then she lost her job because of a tweet she uh put out there that i think was anti-asian when she was 17 years old by the way a minor and and then x years later she was going to take on senatorial position and the offer was rescinded and she lost that job um and i thought to myself it's like wait a minute one she was a minor two she's a a black woman three she like uh you know it's like she was like hey apollo like at what point do you just show some humanity and be like look like where's the forgiveness yeah like who wouldn't say something idiotic when they're seven years when they're 17 years old like she didn't know that like x years later she'd end up um you know like being uh and most publishing people would not be bothered by this it's just a certain type of elect person who is speaking for asians i imagine in getting rid of her and making it that she doesn't have her job most asians most i i will say you know i would never claim to speak for an entire broad community but i can say most asians like you know would not have heard about this controversy it didn't hurt their feelings they weren't like in their rooms crying over what this person said when they were 17 years old i mean that's part of it too is that nine times out of ten the statement um was just some place and seen by nobody uh you know what i mean it's like what harm was done um 17 people yeah like like you know 10 years ago fact of it is a stain upon this person's character that's what i mean by the religious part that that only makes sense if you're thinking about salem massachusetts yeah yeah yeah so uh i think these two pages or page and a half were some of like the the best stuff i've read all year where what you do is you place two statements uh in um contrast to each other both of which are being promulgated by people who are concerned about uh the power differential um but the the they're intellectually in opposition to each other so i'll give you an example and you know these well you must have have now said this over here but i thought this like i i found this to be brilliant and uh the catechism of contradictions that's right yes it's uh so for example um show interest in multiculturalism very reasonable um do not culturally appropriate when it is not your culture it is not for you and you may not try it or do it you stay away and so it's like okay i'm supposed to show an interest and yet if i somehow go too far then i i will be guilty of something right mimick it right um silence about racism is violence it's like okay i need to say something and then elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own which is like look i can't say anything unless i am of the oppressed class and some people say it's a happy medium just don't say too much but the thing is it's so easy to be called saying too much where is that medium nobody is ever allowed to strike it exactly you must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people you can never understand what it is to be black and if you think you do you're a racist you're racist if you think you get it right yes uh you you know so they you can see why people are kind of like uh tiptoeing uh hot potatoing um through this so that these the these statements it is uh to me maybe the most powerful one black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does i would agree um all whites must acknowledge their personal complicitness in the perfity of whiteness throughout history and it's different because of power and so if you if you have power then you're all complicit if you don't have power everything is individual yeah who said it doesn't make any sense again and maybe it's because i've been around the country but like that iowa farmer and the diner would be like you're complicit like i've been sitting here in the cornfields for eight generations like you know what the hell did i do you know and and i will relate too as my experience means that my my my my my parents immigrated here in the 60s as grad students and then you know like i i was born in upstate new york um in the 70s um so we're relatively recent arrivals to this country so so we got here listen right and of course people say well you're benefiting from the power structures that were set up that's too abstract to make sense to more than about 10 000 people ever i feel and they're too many black people who need help for us to engage in that mental here we go again mental masturbation of this notion of complicitness it makes a certain abstract sense if our life was a hard philosophical problem or some play but it isn't and it's time to knock it off yeah well well i would say for myself as a child of immigrants in a relatively recent round of this country in terms of multiple generations i remember talking to a friend and him talking about his like you know great parents are great great grandparents um and i think i thought to myself i was like jeez like you know imagine yeah imagine i was like you know my my my parents grew up on a farm in taiwan and so like like when i think about what their gran like what their parents or grandparents was like i imagine they were on that farm it was probably the same place um but because of that background i really appreciate being american a great deal because my parents came here and we're like hey land of opportunity like get educated try and have opportunities right yeah it's like to go from the farm to um new york suburbs and one generation and then for for me to go from those suburbs to to the city and you know doing the things that that i'm doing you know that there is some uh um awesomeness or magic uh to to this country does it have deep problems yes uh is racism very real yes should we be trying to um mitigate uh the effects of racism and reduce inequality in my opinion yes um like is the intergenerational legacy of slavery uh you know like is it destroying lives to this day yes you know like so like you you can understand like the the depth of the problems um but still have affection and uh loyalty um uh to the country and say like we need to try and solve the real problems if there's inter generational poverty in black neighborhoods we should be investing a ton in in my mind like that the way that i wanted to do it was just start giving everyone my money which by the way would end up helping uh people with less more and you know like i might not be running around talking it's like help this group more than that group but if you just you know did something relatively even you get to do what you want to right yeah so that that was uh always my perspective on it and it's something that when i i do talk to people whose families have been this country longer which is most people you know like you you do have like a different historical context that i i do try and appreciate um but maybe it's because you know where we're recent arrivals i'm always like okay what do we do now what do we do now um and this is where i line up with you 100 which is like okay what you want me to do is apparently like monitor uh turns of phrase and behaviors and and perform certain uh rituals uh that demonstrate my my my uh sensitivity and everything like that to this and i'm like i'm not sure how that helps like that that person i just passed who you know is on the street but so or i could try and do something that i think is going to help um the person on the street and i very much obviously the latter would be more important yeah yeah i think um there's a certain kind of black person i would say middle-class black person who will tell you that they encounter racism every day that their experience of life is a racist one i disagree and that person will say well how do you know and i'm gonna sell because i'm a middle-class person and i've been one for a long time little stuff happens now and then but the idea that racism is part of the american fabric to the extent that people like this are implying is a fiction it's a melodramatic fiction especially if you think about why people come here how much better here is than anywhere else and i think one of the things i want in closing i want to say one of the things that props up this fiction is the relationship between black men and the cops and so my feeling is that to the extent that we have a major cop problem in this country in general and that it is perceived sometimes misperceived but perceived as particularly a black problem we've got to fix that because i think that one generation of black men nationwide who did not grow up thinking of the cops as the enemy would be a generation much less likely to fall for this elect way of seeing things and i'd really like to see that happen that's why i say no war on drugs because i think that that would mean 90 less interactions between black men and the cops for all sorts of reasons vocational school so that black men have steady and relatively lucrative incomes keeps you away from the cops the cops are less likely the cops aren't going to meet your kids that'll do that sort of thing means that the whole cop narrative goes away and then i think we're in a position to have a more constructive and realistic conversation about race and so yeah the idea of what racism is to build something it's not just uh everybody you know pull themselves up by their own bootstraps book it's not a book saying white people stop trying to help us it's just saying help us for real instead of striking poses on stage channel those energies towards these things that might actually help some real black kids in philly or you know wherever phil is that's right which is my town yeah i know just through that out uh amen uh i can't wait for the sequel it'll i was be next book is going to be a be about something fun but i hope that people take a message from this book that i intended if the fever does break uh in my opinion uh you'd be one of the big reasons why woke racism how a new religion has betrayed black america i thought this was a very important book and a great achievement and also very principled and courageous and i'm going to even say patriotic so thank you john thank you andrew appreciate the heck out of you sir this is great thank you [Music] you

Channel: Forward with Andrew Yang

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Id: bvikt3Ynsss

Length: 66min 48sec (4008 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2021