Can We Pull Back From The Brink? (Episode #207)

[Music] [Music] welcome to the making sense podcast this is Sam Harris okay well I have been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week and I've actually been unsure about whether to record it at all frankly I mean conversation is the only tool we have for making progress I have firmly believed that but many of the things we most need to talk about seem impossible to talk about and I think social media is a huge part of the problem I've been saying for years now that with social media we've all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent and it's not clear how it will turn out and it's still not clear how it will turn out but it's not looking good it is fairly disorienting out there you know all information has been weaponized all communication has become performative and on the most important topics it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time we appear to be driving ourselves crazy actually crazy as in incapable of coming into contact with reality unable to distinguish fact from fiction and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination and confirmation bias and then lashing out at one another on that basis so I'd like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest and its possible political implications and other cultural developments and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here and I'm gonna circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism because you know that really is at the center of this and there's so much to talk about here and it's so difficult to talk about and there's so much we don't know right and yet most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago I've been watching our country seemed to tear herself apart for weeks now and perhaps lay the ground for something worse to come and I've been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance not because I haven't had anything to say but because of my perception of the danger frankly and if I feel that way given the pains I've taken to insulate myself against those kinds of concerns I know that almost anyone with a public platform must be terrified journalists and editors and executives celebrities everyone has to be terrified that they might take a wrong step here and never recover and this is really unhealthy right not just for individuals but for society because again all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations and if we can't reason with one another there is no path forward right other than violence conversation or violence so I'd like to talk about some of the things that concern me about our current state of communication and unfortunately many things are compounding our problems at the moment we have a global pandemic which is still very much with us and remains to be seen how much our half-hearted lockdown and our ineptitude and testing and our uncoordinated reopening and now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the kovat 19 caseload to spike we will definitely see as many have pointed out the virus doesn't care about economics or politics it only cares that we keep breathing down each other's necks and we've certainly been doing enough of that of course almost no one can think about kovat 19 now but I just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock-on effects in the economy and now this protest movement many of these costs are hidden from us in addition to killing more than a hundred thousand people in the US the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost and the ongoing implosion of the economy he's imposing tangible effects of course but it is also an opportunity cost and now this civil unrest and other recent events is compounding these problems whatever the merits of the protest may be or will be the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering in addition to all the tangible effects of what's happening the injury and death the lost businesses the burn buildings the neighborhoods that won't recover for years in many cities the education x' put on hold and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution could just think about all the good and important things we cannot do cannot even think of doing now and perhaps won't contemplate doing for many years to come because we'll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called normal life of course normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise and the disparities in wealth and health and opportunity we've gotten used to in this country and it's so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted are just unconscionable right there is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth and what we're seeing now is clearly a response to that but it's a confused and confusing response and worse it's a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation and this makes it dangerous this isn't just politics and human suffering on display its philosophy it's ideas about truth and about what it means to say that something is true what we're witnessing in our streets yet online and in the impossible conversations we're attempting to have with one another in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology how does anyone figure out what's going on in the world what is real if we can't agree about what is real or likely to be real we will never agree about how we should live together and the problem is were stuck with one another so what's happening here well again it's hard to say what is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him as a cog in the machinery of systemic racism is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society or is it both it's not entirely clear and the most concrete terms what we're experiencing is widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed to the black community by racist cops and racist policies and this unrest has drawn a counter response from law enforcement much of which ironically is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence both real and perceived and many of the videos we've seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous some of this footage has been unbelievable and this is one of the many vicious circles we have to find a way to interrupt again there's so much to be confused about here we've seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters and yet we've also seen video of police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses what explains this is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them and simultaneously trying to teach a lesson to the rest of society by letting crime and mayhem just spread elsewhere in the city or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters or is the whole spectacle itself a lie now how representative are these videos of what is actually going on is there much less chaos actually occurring than is being advertised to us again it's very hard to know what's easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down and it seems to me we've long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous and now I think they have the amount of misinformation in the air the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs is just astonishing it's important to keep in mind that with the presidential election coming in November the stakes are really high as most of you know I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy and I believe the last two weeks have been very good for him politically even when everything else has seemed to go very badly for him I know the poles don't say this a large majority of people seem to disapprove of his handling of the crisis so far but I think we all know now to take poles with a grain of salt there's a very real problem of preference falsification especially in an environment of intense social pressure people will often say what they think is politically acceptable and then think or say or do something very different in private like when they're alone in a voting booth Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy I know the stock market has looked good but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy right according to the stock market the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus that doesn't make a lot of sense and a lot can happen in the next few months right the last few weeks feel like a decade and my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law-and-order president that maybe his path to re-election if such a path exists now of course this crisis is revealed yet again just how unfit he is to be president I mean the man could not strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it and the fate of the country has depended on it and I also think it's possible that these protests wouldn't even be happening but for the fact that Trump is president not the problem of racism has actually gotten worse in our society having Trump as president surely makes it seem like it has it has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency for many people it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant so all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November but before this social unrest our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the Cova 19 pandemic and now he's been given a very different battle to fight it's a battle against left-wing orthodoxy which is growing more stifling by the minute and civil unrest right and if our social order phrase sufficiently restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November we just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically now things can change very very quickly and to call a basic concern about law and order racist isn't going to wash now as I said trust in institutions has totally broken down we've been under a very precarious lockdown for more than three months which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary your doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political right for protesting this lockdown people have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life they've been unable to hold funerals for them but now we have doctors and public health officials and news anchors by the thousands signing open letters making public statements saying it's fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen the degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate whatever your politics this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy especially so given that the pandemic has been hitting the african-american community hardest of all how many people will die because of these protests it's a totally rational question to ask but the question itself is taboo now so it seems to me that almost everything appears upside-down at the moment and before I get into the details of police violence I just want to attempt to close the door to a few misunderstandings let's start with the proximate cause of all this the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police don't have a lot more to say about this in a minute but nothing I say should detract from the following observation that video was absolutely sickening and it reveals a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by in particular the actions of Derrick Chauvin the cop who kept his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes his actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there's no question he should be prosecuted right and he is being prosecuted he's been indicted for second-degree murder and manslaughter and I suspect he'll spend many many years in prison and this is not to say that the system is working right him it certainly seems possible that without that cellphone video and the resulting public outrage Chauvin might have gotten away with it right to say nothing of the other cops who were with him and who are now being prosecuted and if this is true we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police so as I said I'm gonna return to this topic because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video and from videos like it but let me just echo everyone's outrage over what happened right this is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent now in the general topic of racism in America I want to make a few similarly clear and pre-emptive statements racism is still a problem in American society no question and slavery which was racism's most evil expression was this country's found in sin and we should also add the neared total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil any morally sane person who learns that details of these historical and justices finds them shocking whatever their race and the legacy of these crimes crimes that were perpetrated for centuries remains a cause for serious moral concern today I have no doubt about this right and nothing I'm about to say should suggest otherwise and I don't think it's an accident that the two groups I just mentioned African Americans and Native Americans suffer the worst from inequality in America today how could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects given the nature of that history and if anything good comes out of the current crisis it will be because we managed to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all of its dimensions the real debate to have is about how to do this economically and politically but the status quo that many of us take for granted he is a betrayal of our values whether we realize it or not if it's not a betrayal of your values now it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person and if you don't manage that it will be a betrayal of your kids values when they're old enough to understand the world they're living it the difference between being very lucky in our society and very unlucky should not be as enormous as it is however the question that interests me given what has been true of the past and what is now true of the present is what should we do next what should we do to build a healthier society what should we do next tomorrow next week now obviously I don't have the answers but I'm very worried that many of the things we're doing now and seem poised to do will only make our problems worse and I'm especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this right I'm just trying to have conversations I'm just trying to figure these things out in real time with other people and there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous and think about the politics of this endless imagery of people burning and alluding independent businesses that we're struggling to survive during this pandemic and seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs cannot be good for the cause of social justice looting and burning businesses and assaulting their owners isn't social justice it isn't even social protest it's crime and having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate analyst Lee on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community but it might yet be good for Trump and it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible it's always seems somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we're living in via our Germany I've had many conversations about this I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast and he's been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now and I've known in the abstract that democracies can destroy themselves but the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me it really doesn't anymore of course what we've been seen in the streets isn't just one thing and some people are protesting for reasons I fully defend right they're outraged by specific instances of police violence like the killing of George Floyd and they're worried about creeping authoritarianism which we really should be worried about now and they're convinced that our politics is broken because it is broken and they're deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and to the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society and they recognize that we have a president who is an incompetent divisive conman and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership now all of that is hard to put on a sign but it's all worth protesting however it seems to me that most protesters are seen this moment almost exclusively through the lens of identity politics and racial identity politics in particular and some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order or at least remaining non-judgmental about it and you could see in the early days of this protest news anchors take that line on CNN for instance talking about the history of social protest sometimes it has to be violent right what do you think all these protests need to be non-violent and those words came out of Chris Cuomo's mouth and Don lemons mouth many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King jr. about riots being the language of the unheard they're leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed that riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists and there are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police now this may be psychologically understandable when you spend half the day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters those videos are infuriating and I'll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute but if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in you have lost your mind giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species it ranks right up there with keeping our [ __ ] out of our food having a police force that can deter crime and solve crimes when they occur and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system is the necessary precondition for almost anything else we value in society and we need police reform of course right there are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing and its hiring practices and training and the militarization of so many police forces and outside oversight and how police departments deal with corruption the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job and yes the problem of racist cops but the idea that any serious person thinks that we can do without the police or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails yes we should give more resources to community services sure we should have psychologists and social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill perhaps we're giving cops jobs they shouldn't be doing all of that makes sense to rethink but the idea that what we're witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over resourced that we've given them too much training that we've made the job too attractive so that the people were recruiting are of too high equality right that doesn't make any sense and what's been alarming here is that we're seeing prominent people in government in the media in Hollywood in sports speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society and of society itself is a form of progress and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression at one point the woman who's running the City Council in Minneapolis that just decided to abolish the police force was asked by a journalist I believe on CNN well what do I do if someone's breaking into my house in the middle of the night who do I call right and her first response to that question was you need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is now she's had to walk that back because it's one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said but this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane you cannot say that if someone's breaking into your house and you're terrified and you want a police force that can respond that that fear is a symptom of white privilege that's where Democratic politics goes to die and again what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response and the acceptance of that response on the part of many millions of Americans and if you step back from this you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air right and it's destroying institutions it's destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information universities the press I mean the New York Times in recent days seems to be preparing for a full self-immolation what's happening is that no one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable certainly not anyone who has more awoken aspyn's than they do it's just become too dangerous I mean there are people being fired for tweeting all lives matter hashtag all lives matter in the current environment is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy right that's how weird this moment is a soccer player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted of course there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests people have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world or young people who fear they never will people who've seen their economic prospects simply vanish and people have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops people by the millions are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening but like most religious awakenings this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality and on top of that we find extraordinarily privileged people whatever the color of their skin people who are living wonderful lives in gated communities or 5th Avenue apartments and who feel damn guilty about it these people are also supporting this movement uncritically for many reasons of course they care about other people and I'm sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do but they're also supporting this movement because it promises an expiation of their sins if you have millions of dollars and you shoot Botox into your face and your vacation on st. Barts and you're a liberal the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as a OC and just like everything she tweets the truth is the problem isn't just with the looting and the arson and the violence there are problems with these peaceful protests themselves of course I'm not questioning anyone's right to protest even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right what she did is that DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church awkwardly holding a Bible as though he had never held a book in his life the problem with the protests is that they are animated to a remarkable degree by confusion and misinformation and I'll explain why I think that's the case and of course this will be controversial and needless to say many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here and I could have invited any number of great black intellectuals onto this podcast to make these points for me but that struck me as a form of cowardice Glenn Loury John McWhorter Thomas chattered and Williams Coleman Hughes Camille Foster these guys might not agree with everything I'm about to say but any one of them could walk the tightrope I'm now stepping out on far more credibly than I can but you see that's part of the problem right the perception that the color of a person's skin or even his life experience matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion yet for the discussion we really need to have the color of a person's skin and even his life experience simply does not matter it cannot matter we have to break the spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything okay as I've already acknowledged there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we are still struggling to outgrow that is obvious there are real racists out there and there are ways in which racism became institutionalized a long time ago many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different in this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones now whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not I don't know but it was effectively racist nothing I'm about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts it just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them so criminal justice reform is absolutely essential and I'm not denying that many black people perhaps most have had interactions with cops and other people in positions of power or even random strangers that seem unambiguously racist sometimes this is because they're actually in the presence of racism and perhaps sometimes it only seems that way now I've had unpleasant encounters with cops and customs officers and TSA screeners and bureaucrats of every kind and even with people in stores or restaurants right people aren't always nice or ethical but being white and living in a majority white society I've never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism and I can well imagine that in some of these situations had I been black I would have come away feeling that I encountered another racist in the wild so I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that surely that is one form of white privilege so nothing I'm about to say denies that we should condemn racism whether interpersonal or institutional wherever we find it but as a society we simply can't afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn't exist and we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that the more progress we make on issues of race the less racism there will be to find and the more likely will be to find ourselves merely chasing after its ghost and the truth is we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America and this isn't 1920 and it is in 1960 we had a two-term black president we have black congressmen and women we have black mayors and black Chiefs of Police they're major cities like Detroit and Atlanta going on their fifth or sixth consecutive black mayor having more black people in positions of real power in what is still a majority white society is progress on the problem of racism and the truth is it might not even solve the problem we're talking about I mean when Freddie gray was killed in Baltimore virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black the problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated as we're about to see but obviously there's more work to do on the problem of racism and more important there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race and will still be correlated with race even after the last racist has been driven from our shores the question of how much of today's inequality is due to existing racism whether racist people or racist policies is a genuinely difficult question to answer and to answer it we need to distinguish the past from the present take wealth inequality for example the median white family has a net worth of around one hundred and seventy thousand dollars these data are a couple of years old but I think they're pretty close to what's true now the median black family has a net worth of around seventeen thousand dollars so we have a tenfold difference in median wealth that's the median not the mean so half of white families are below $170,000 and half above half of black families are below $17,000 and half above and we're talking about wealth here not income and this disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10% of the income distribution for whites in the top 10% for income the median net worth is 1.8 million dollars for blacks it's around $350,000 now there are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth it seems that black families who make into the top 10 percent of the distribution fall out more easily than white families do but it's also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance now how much of this inequality is due to the legacy of slavery and how much of it is due to the ensuing century of racist policies I'm prepared to think quite a lot and it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here of course one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans and then one wonder is where all this ends right and what about blacks who aren't descended from slaves but who still suffered some consequences of racism in listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic I'm inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy but the truth is I'm genuinely unsure about this whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past we have to ask how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism into existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth and the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts and the problem with the social activism we're now seen what John McWhorter calls the new religion of anti racism is that it finds racism nearly everywhere even where it manifestly does not exist and this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society it's almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath but it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university or in Silicon Valley or at the Oscars and those exaggerations are toxic and perversely they may produce more real racism it seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group even a group that has a long history of real victimization the imprecision here the bad faith arguments the double standards the goalposts shift in the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times the defenestration Zahn social media the general hysteria that the cult of woke nests as produced I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society and to effective liberal politics end to the welfare of African Americans so with that as preamble let's return to the tragic death of George Floyd as I said I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing so people of any raise our right to be horrified by what happened there but now I want to ask a few questions and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately and I really want you to watch your mind while you do this because they're very likely a few trip wires installed there and I'm about to hit some of them so just do your best to remain calm does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States in other words do we have reason to believe that had Floyd been white he wouldn't have died in a similar way do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years a black man being killed by cops do they prove or even suggest that there is an epidemic of the lethal police violence directed especially at black men and that this violence is motivated by racism now most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that even to pose them as I just did is obscene when the answer is yes and it's a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets the problem however is that if you take even five minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence the answer really appears to be no in every case albeit with one important caveat I'm not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990 but in the last 25 years violent crime has come down significantly in the u.s. and so has the police use of deadly force and as you're about to see the police use more deadly force against white people both in terms of absolute numbers end in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society but the public perception is of course completely different I mean in a city like Los Angeles 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings think about that do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles peacefully and violently in to the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds in many cases businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods do the people who caused so much damage to the city that certain neighborhoods will take years and probably decades to recover do the celebrities who supported them and even bailed them out of jail do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30 year low for police shootings in Los Angeles now before I stepped further out over the abyss here let me reiterate many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I'm about to say you're not gonna like the way it sounds you're especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy this feeling of not liking this feeling of outrage this feeling of disgust this feeling of Sam what the [ __ ] is wrong with you why are you even touching this topic this feeling isn't an argument it isn't or shouldn't be the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world your capacity to be offended isn't something that I or anyone else needs to respect your capacity to be offended isn't something that you should respect in fact it's something that you should be on your guard for perhaps more than any other property of your mind this feeling can mislead you if you care about justice and you absolutely should you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly justice requires contact with reality his simply isn't the case it cannot be the case that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be most offended by conversation itself so I'm going to speak in the language of facts now insofar as we know them all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people's assumptions many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong and that should matter to you so just take a moment to think this through with me how many people are killed each year in America by cops now if you don't know guess right see if you have any intuition for these numbers because your intuitions determine how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis the answer for many years running is about a thousand okay 1000 people are killed by cops in America each year there are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year and about 10 million arrests that's down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually through the 90s so of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police and the police decide to make an arrest about 1,000 of those people die as a result I'm sure if you people get killed when there's no arrest attempted but that has to be a truly tiny number so without knowing anything else about the situation if the cops decide to arrest you it is reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around one and 10,000 now of course in the United States it's higher than it is in other countries so I'm not saying this number is acceptable but it is what it is for a reason as we're about to see now there are a few generic points I want to make before we get further into these data and they should be uncontroversial first it's almost certainly the case that of these 1,000 officer caused deaths each year some are entirely justified right it may even be true that most are entirely justified and some are entirely unjustified and some are much harder to judge and that will be true next year and the year after that of the unjustified killings there are vast differences between them many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily it might have been a terrible misunderstanding or incompetence or just bad luck in certain cases it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he's become enraged or he's just a psychopath right and it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings another point that should be uncontroversial but may sound a little tone-deaf in the current environment after we've been inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests but this has to be acknowledged whenever we're discussing this topic cops have a very hard job fact in the current environment they have an almost impossible job if you're making ten million arrests every year some number of people will decide not to cooperate now there are many reasons for this a person could be mentally ill or drunk or on drugs and of course rather often the person is an actual criminal who simply doesn't want to be arrested and among innocent people and perhaps this is getting more common these days a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do ethically or politically or perhaps as a matter of affirming his identity may after all put yourself in his shoes he did nothing wrong right why are the cops arresting him I don't know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race but I can well imagine that if it's common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death and this is certainly one reason why it's wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community its policing now unfortunately there's no evidence that this reduces lethal violence from the side of the police in fact the evidence we have suggests that black and hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and hispanic suspects than white cops are but it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is the likely explanation for police behavior which itself might reduce conflict no when a comp goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest that person's resistance poses a problem that most people don't seem to understand if you haven't studied this topic if you don't know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are and if you haven't thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt when attempting to do that a gun that can be grabbed and used against you or against a member of the public then your intuitions about what makes sense here tactically and ethically are very likely to be bad if you haven't trained with firearms under stress if you don't know how suddenly situations can change if you haven't experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon if you don't know how hard it is to shoot a moving target or even a stationary one when your heart is beating out of your chest you very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these and there's another fact that looms over all this like the Angel of Death literally most cops do not get the training they need they don't get the hand-to-hand training they need they don't have good skills with which to subdue people without harming them all you need to do is watch youtube videos of botched arrests to see this the martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects and cops don't get the firearms training they need of course many police departments have elite units but most cops don't have the training they need to do the job they're being asked to do it's also true no doubt that some cops are racist bullies and there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys and cover up police misconduct generally whether it's born of racism or not but the truth is that even if we got rid of all the bad cops which we absolutely should do and there were only good people left and we got all these good people the best possible training and we give them the best culture in which to think about their role in society and we give them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations which we absolutely must do and we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books so that when cops were required to enforce the law they were only risking their lives in the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem just and necessary so the war on drugs is obviously over even under these conditions of perfect progress we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified and therefore tragic every year there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter or father or mother or brother or sister and videos of these killings will occasionally surface and they will be horrific this seems guaranteed to happen so while we need to make all these improvements we still need to understand they're very likely always going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable or inexplicably stupid that results in an innocent person's death or not so innocent persons death and sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black we have 10 million arrests each year and we now live in a pan Opticon or practically everything is videotaped now I'm about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence but I want to just put it to you now if we're going to let the health of race relations in this country or the relationship between the community and the police depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed about a week into these protests I heard van Jones on CNN say if we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man this country could go over the edge now he said this not as an indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become he seemed to be saying that as an ultimatum to the police with 10 million arrests each year arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is we have to put these videos into context and we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another if some of them are easy to interpret but some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people especially by activists and there are a range of cases some have video associated with them and some don't that are now part of a litany of anti-racist outrage and the names of the dead are intoned is that they were all evidence of the same injustice and yet they are not Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and he got out of his car and tried to flee there might have been a brief struggle over the officers taser that part of the video isn't clear but what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away that was insane there was zero reason for the cop to feel that his life was under threat at that moment and for that unjustified shooting he was sentenced to 20 years in prison I'm not sure that was long enough actually that seemed like straight-up murder to me a George Floyd video while even more disturbing to watch is harder to interpret now I don't know anything about Derek Chauvin the cop who knelt on his neck it's quite possible he's a terrible person who should have never been a cop he seems to have a significant number of complaints against him though as far as I know that details of those complaints haven't been released and he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping an e on their neck I don't know I'm sure more facts will come out but whoever he is I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd and think about it he was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history it seems very unlikely he was intending to commit murder in that moment it's possible of course but it doesn't seem like the likeliest explanation for his behavior what I believe we saw in that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops or terrible recruitment rights possible and none of these guys should have ever been cops I think for one of them it was only his fourth day on the job just imagine that just imagine all the things you don't know when you're a new cop and it could also have been a function of bad luck in terms of Floyd's underlying health it was reported that he was complaining about being unable to breathe even before Chauvin pinned him with his knee and the truth is the knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death it could have been the weight of the other officer pinning him down this is almost certainly what happened in the case of Eric garner it seems that half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric garner to death in that video that does not appear to be what happened okay when Eric garner is saying I can't breathe he's not being choked he's being held down on the pavement by several officers now being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person especially someone with lung or heart disease in the case of Eric garner it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him if you doubt that watch the video again and if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos you really should watch the video that shows the killing of Tony timppa it's also terribly disturbing but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask it really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos now tony temple was a white man in dallas who was suffering some mental health emergency and I think cocaine intoxication and he actually called 911 self and what we see is the body cam footage from the police which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived a security guard had cuffed him and then the cops take over and they restrained Tempah on the ground by rolling him onto his stomach and putting their weight on him very much like in the case of Eric garner and they keep their weight on him one cop has a knee on his upper back which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck but they crushed the life out of him all the same over the course of 13 minutes he's not being choked cops are not being rough there's no animus between them and tempeh it was not a hostile arrest they clearly believe they're responding to a mental health emergency but they keep him down on his belly under their weight and they're cracking jokes as he loses consciousness now your knowledge that he's going to be dead by the end of this video makes their jokes seem pretty callous but the truth is this was about as benign an imposition of force by the cops as you're going to see and the crucial insight you'll have watching this video is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony tempeh they don't take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they're doing is perfectly safe perfectly within protocol they've probably done this a hundred times before now if you watch that video and again fair warning it's disturbing but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony tempeh had been black if the only thing you changed about the video was the color of tempis skin then video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society exactly as the George Floyd video did in fact in one way it is worse or would have been perceived to be worse imagine white cops telling jokes as they crushed the life out of a black Tony tempeh given the nature of our conversation about violence given the way we perceive the videos of this kind there is no way people would have seen that as anything other than a lynchin and it would not have been a lynching now I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of the cops in Minneapolis and perhaps we'll learn more at trial and perhaps there'll be a tape of Chauvin using the n-word in another context and that'll bring a credible allegation of racism into the case and it seems to me that Chauvin is gonna have a very hard time making sense of his behavior but most people who saw that video believe they have witnessed with their own eyes beyond any possibility of doubt a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man that's not what that video necessarily shows as I said these videos can be hard to interpret even while seeming very easy to interpret in these cases whether they have Associated video or not are very different the Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun as far as I know there's no video of that encounter but if true that is an entirely different situation if you're attacking a cop trying to get his gun that is a life-and-death struggle almost by definition for the cop and in most cases it will justify a lethal use of force and honestly it seems that no one within a thousand miles of black lives matter is willing to make these distinctions an attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is simply not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct I've seen many videos of people getting arrested and I've seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be the inappropriate use of force by the cops one overwhelming fact that comes through is that people whatever the color of their skin don't understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe people have to stop resisting arrest this may seem obvious but judging from most of these videos and from the public reaction to them this must be a totally arcane piece of information when a cop wants to take you into custody you don't get to decide whether or not you should be arrested when a cop wants to take you into custody for whatever reason it's not a negotiation and if you turn it into a wrestling match you're very likely to get injured or killed this is a point that I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Lowry and essentially it became a public service announcement and I've gone back and listened to those comments and I want to repeat them here this is something that everyone really needs to understand and it's something that black lives matter should be teaching explicitly if you put your hands on a cop if you start wrestling with a cop or grabbing him because he's arresting your friend or pushing him or striking him or using your hands in a way that can possibly be interpreted as you are reaching for a gun you are likely to get shot in the United States right whatever the color of your skin as I said when you're with a cop there is always a gun out in the open and any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun a cop doesn't know what you're going to do if you overpower him so he has to assume the worst and most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person for good reason because they're not very well trained to do that and they're continually confronting people who are bigger or younger or more athletic or more aggressive than they are cops are not superheroes they're ordinary people with insufficient training and once things turn physical they can't afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt and this is something that people seem totally confused about if they see a video of someone fighting with a cop and punching him or her in the face right and the person is unarmed many people think the cop should just punch back and that any use of deadly force at that point would be totally disproportionate but that's not how violence works right it's not the cops job to be the best bare-knuckle boxer on earth so that he doesn't have to use his gun a cop can't risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out because there's always a gun in play right so this is the cops perception of the world and it's a justifiable one given the dynamics of human violence now you might think that cops shouldn't carry guns right what can't we just be like England and that's a point that can be debated but it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns in circulation the United States is not England again really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person it's not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested and does it matter that you know that you didn't do anything wrong no and how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by you're not following police commands I'm going to ask that again how could the fact that you're innocent that you're not a threat to the cop that you're not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he's attempting to arrest you by you're resisting arrest and unless you called the cops yourself you never really know what situation you're in if I'm walking down the street I don't know if a cop who's approaching me didn't just get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery I mean I know I didn't do anything I know that I'm mystified as to why the cop is paying attention to me at that moment but I don't know what's in the cops head the time to find out what's going on the time to complain about racist cops the time to scream at them and tell them they're all gonna get fired for their stupidity and misconduct is after cooperating at the police station in the presence of a lawyer preferably but to not comply in the heat of the moment when a guy with a gun is issuing commands this raises your risk astronomically and it's something that most people it seems just do not intuitively understand even when they're not in the heat of the moment themselves but just watching video of other people getting arrested okay end of public service announcement the main problem with using individual cases where black men and women have been killed by cops to conclude that there's an epidemic of racist police violence in our society is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops and there are actually more of them in 2016 John McWhorter wrote a piece for Time magazine about this and here's a snippet of what he wrote quote the heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters that has seemed plausible to me and I've recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrages in cases such as what happened to Tamir rice John Crawford Walter Scott Sam DuBose and others end quote so McWhorter issued that challenge as he said and he was presented with the cases but there's no song about these people admonishing us to say their names and the lists of white names is longer and I don't know any of them right other than Tony tempo I know the black names in addition to the ones I just read from mcquarters article I know the names of Eric garner and Michael Brown and Alton sterling and falando castile and now of course I know the name of George Floyd and I'm aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops I know the name of Brianna Taylor I can't name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these other than timpa and I just read mcquarters article where he lists many of them so this is also a distortion in the media right the media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops activists are not demanding that they do this right I'm sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot who knows but in terms of the story were telling ourselves in the mainstream we're not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence so back to the data again cops kill around a thousand people every year in the United States about 25 percent are black about 50 percent are white now the data on police homicide are all over the place the federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind but they've been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources like the Washington Post at least for the last five years or so and this ratio between black and white appears stable over time and again many of these killings are justifiable right we're talking about career criminals who are usually armed and in many cases trying to kill the cops those aren't the cases were worried about we're worried about the unjustified homicides now some people will think these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice after all African Americans are only 13% of the population so at most they should be 13% of the victims of police violence not 25% and any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism okay well that sounds plausible but consider a few more facts blacks are 13% of the population but they commit at least 50% of the murders and other violent crimes if you have 13% of the population responsible for 50% of the murders and in some city is committing two-thirds of all violent crime what percent of police attention should it attract I honestly don't know but I'm pretty sure it's not just 13% and given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black I'm pretty sure that most black people wouldn't set the dial at 13% either and here we arrive somewhere near the core of the problem the story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black on black crime it is also in part a story of black-on-white crime but for more than a generation it really has not been much of a story of white on black crime now the murder rate has come down steadily since the 1990s with only minor optics but nationwide blacks are six times more likely to get murdered than whites and in some cities their risk is double that and around ninety five percent of these murders are committed by members of the african-american community the weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community 92 people were shot and 27 killed in Chicago alone at one city this is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community and this type of violence is far more representative of the kind of violence the black community needs to worry about and ironically it's clear that one remedy for this violence would be effective policing now these are simply the facts of crime in our society as best we understand them and the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts professionally and ethically and the question is are they doing that and obviously there's considerable doubt that they're doing that professionally and ethically but Roland fryer the Harvard economist whose work I once discussed with Glenn Loury on the podcast he studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force his paper is titled this is from 2016 an empirical analysis of racial differences in police use of force and Friar's black and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there's an epidemic of the lethal police violence directed against black men especially but he didn't find that however he did find support for the idea that black people suffer more non-lethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do so let's look at this the study examined data from ten major police departments in Texas Florida and California generally fryer found that there's a 25% greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones cuffing them or forcing them to the ground or using other non-lethal force specifically in New York City in encounters where black and white citizens were matched for other characteristics they found that cops were 17% more likely to go hands on black suspects 18 percent more likely to push them into a wall 16% more likely to put them in handcuffs in a situation where they weren't being arrested 18 percent more likely to push them to the ground 25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton 19 percent more likely to draw their guns and 24 percent more likely to point a gun at them so this is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force and it seems based on the data we have that blacks receive more of it than whites so what accounts for this disparity racism may be however as I said it's inconvenient to note from other data that suggests that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and hispanic suspects than white cops are I'm not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that are there other explanations well again it could be that blacks are less cooperative with the police and if so this would be worth understanding a culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force now whatever is true here is something that we should want to understand and it's all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops do to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods which are disproportionately black an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects with or without an arrest for whatever reason it's easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism whether or not racism is the underlying motive and it's totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop and given the level of crime in the black community it seems that a disproportionate number of innocent black men are guaranteed to have this experience right and it's totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police this is another vicious circle we have to find some way to interrupt but fryer also found that black suspects are around 25% less likely to be shot than white suspects are and in the most egregious situations where an officer was not first attacked but nevertheless fired his weapon at a suspect the police seem more likely to do this when the suspect is white again these data are incomplete this doesn't cover every city in the country and a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture but as far as I know the best data we have suggests that for whatever reason whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted and a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results and given the data we have it seems undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year again both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society now can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outraged our society is in serious trouble now we are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic and our response to it has been totally inept and on top of that we're now being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression and the streets are now filled with people who imagine on the basis of seeing several horrific videos that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans look at what this belief is doing to our politics and these videos will keep coming and the truth is they could probably be matched to for one with videos of white people being killed by cops what percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way in light of the belief that the data run the other way people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves right and to even loot and burn businesses and most people and institutions are supporting the civil unrest from the sidelines because they to imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers and all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video now as I hope I've made clear we need police reform right there's no question about this and some of the recent footage of the police attacking the peaceful protests is totally outrageous nothing I just said should signify that I'm unaware of that I mean from what I've seen and again by the time I released this podcast the character of this might have changed somewhat but from what I've seen the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime at least in the beginning I mean in many cities they just stood by and watched society unravel and then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protest this is a terrible combination it is the worst combination I mean there is no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear on all sides but racializing how we speak about the problem of police violence where race isn't actually the relevant variable again think Tony tempeh this has highly negative effects first it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics for instance you take the recent case of Brianna Taylor who was killed in a so-called no-knock raid of her home as occasionally happens in this carnival of moral error we call the war on drugs the police had the wrong address and they kicked in the wrong door and they wound up killing a totally innocent woman but the truth is this had nothing to do with race the problem is not as some commentators have alleged that it's not safe to be sleeping while black the problem is that these no-knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably stupid laws white people died under precisely these same circumstances and very likely in greater numbers I don't have data specifically on no-knock raids but we can assume the ratio is probably conserved here I mean just think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread if someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night and you're a gun owner of course you're going to reach for your gun right that's why you have a gun in the first place and the fact that someone bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled police you know or might have not yelled police it's alleged in some of these cases that they don't yell anything the fact that someone yells police isn't necessarily convincing right anyone can yell police and again think of the psychology of this if the police have the wrong house and you know there's no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you especially in the middle of the night right because you know you've done nothing wrong you are not the guy running a meth lab right and now you're reaching for your gun in the dark of course someone is likely to get killed but this is not a racial issue it's a terrible policy now unfortunately the process of police reform isn't straightforward and it's made more complicated by the kinds of things that are happening now I mean yes we will be urging police reform in a very big way now that seems clear but Roland fryer has also shown that investigations of cops in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating have dramatic effects and dramatically negative effects I studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings of Freddie gray and Michael Brown and laQuan McDonald and he found that for reasons that are pretty easy to intuit proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically sometimes by as much as a hundred percent once these investigations get started this is now called the Ferguson effect right and the police still answer 911 but they don't investigate suspicious activity in the same way they don't want to wind up on YouTube and when they alter their behavior like this homicides go up and fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into a thousand extra homicides and almost forty thousand more felonies over the next twenty four months in the US and of course most of the victims of those crimes were black no one shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect were about to see nationwide I'm sure the morale among cops has never been lower I think it's almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force and it's gonna be much more difficult to recruit good people to the police force I mean who's gonna want to be a cop now who could be idealistic about occupying that role in society it seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards I'm pretty sure there's a difference there I think we're likely to see that difference expressed now in the future it's a grim picture unless we do something very creative here so there's a real question about how we can reform police departments and get rid of bad cops without negatively impacting the performance of good cops that's a riddle we have to solve or at least we have to understand what the trade-offs are here and why is all this happening now police killings of civilians have gone way down and they are very rare events they are 1 in 10,000 level events if measured by arrests and one in 50 to 60,000 level events if measured by police encounters and the number of unarmed people who are killed by cops is much smaller than that right of the thousand people killed by cops last year around 50 more unarmed and again there were more white people killed than black and not all unarmed victims are innocent right some get killed in the act of attacking the cops again the data don't tell a clean story or the whole story I see no reason to doubt that African Americans get more attention from the cops though honestly given the distribution of crime in our society I don't know what the alternative to that would be and once the cops get involved blacks are more likely to get roughed up it seems which is bad right but again it's simply unclear that racism is the cause of that and contrary to everyone's expectations it seems that whites are more likely to get killed by cops actually one factor seems to be that whites are 7 times more likely to commit what's called suicide by cop and they're actually three times more likely to commit suicide generally what's going on there who knows there's a lot we don't understand about these data but ask yourself would society seem less racist to you if the disparity ran the other way is less physical contact but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed a form of white privilege is a higher level of suicide by cop and suicide generally a form of white privilege we have a problem here that read either way you could tell a starkly racist narrative we need ethical professional policing of course right but the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it is there any doubt about that I mean a city like Milwaukee blacks are 12 times more likely to get murdered than whites and again they're being killed by other african-americans nearly a hundred percent of the time I think the lowest figure I've seen is ninety three percent of the time what should the police do about this and what are they likely to do now now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct so we need to lower the temperature on this conversation and many other conversations and to understand what is actually happening in our society but instead of doing this we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos everything I just said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands but I think what we're witnessing in our streets and on social media and even in the mainstream press is a version of mass hysteria and the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won't be evidence to the contrary and there will be another video right there are 10 million arrests every year there will always be another video the media have turned these videos into a form of political pornography and this is deranged us we're now unable to speak or even think about facts the media has truly been poisoned by bad incentives in this regard and social media doubly so now in the mainstream of this protest movement is very common to hear that the only problem with what's happening in our streets apart from of the cops are doing is that some criminal behavior at the margins a little bit of looting a little bit of violence has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism and most people in the media have taken exactly this position right people like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden and the most prominent liberal voices in our society believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral sense and perfect political sentence and that movements like black lives matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history I mean how could anyone who's concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way I mean how could anyone who isn't himself racist not support black lives matter but of course there is a difference between slogans and reality there's a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims and this can be genuinely confusing and that's why propaganda works right I mean for instance many people assume that there's nothing wrong with an Tifa because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as anti-fascist now what could be wrong with being anti-fascist are you Pro fascism there's a similar problem with black lives matter though happily unlike an Tifa black lives matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest which is hugely important so the problem I'm discussing is more ideological and it's much bigger than black lives matter but BLM is the most visible symbol of this movement and the wider issue is that we are in the midst of a moral panic right and it's been made possible by a near-total unwillingness particularly on the left among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations and have a legitimate fear of being hounded into oblivion online this is nearly everyone left-of-center politically people are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America and we're making ourselves sick right we are damaging our society and by protesting the wrong thing even the slightly wrong thing in unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process looting that doesn't even have a pretense of protest the left is empowering Trump whatever the polls currently show if we're worried about Trump's authoritarian ambitions as I think we really should be this is important to understand he recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House I don't know if we found out who those guys actually were but that was genuinely alarming but how our democratic calls to abolish the police going to play in half the country that just watched so many cities getting looted we have to vote Trump out of office to restore the integrity of our institutions and we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality a problem which affects the black community most of all we need police reform we need criminal justice reform we need tax reform we need health care reform we need environmental reform we need all of these things and more and to be just these policies will need to reduce inequality in our society and if we did this african-americans would benefit perhaps more than any other group but it's not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society and just ask yourself what would real progress on the problem of racism look like what would utter progress look like well here's what I think it would look like more and more people and ultimately all people would care less and less and ultimately not at all about race as I've said in various places skin colour would become like hair colour in its political and moral significance which is to say it would have none now maybe you don't agree with that aspiration maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can't be outgrown or shouldn't be outgrown well if you think that I'm afraid I don't know what to say to you right it's not that there's nothing to say it's just there's so much we disagree about morally and politically but I don't know where to begin so that debate if it can even be had will have to be left for another time for the purposes of this conversation I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here which is to say you share the hope that there will come a time when the color of a person's skin really doesn't matter what would that be like well how many blondes got into Harvard this year does anyone know what percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette do we have enough redheads in senior management in our fortune 500 companies no one is asking these questions and there's a reason for that no one cares and we are right not to care imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care or seem to care or imagine that others care or allege that they secretly care about skin color imagine a world in which discrimination by haircolor was a thing and it took centuries to overcome and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society even where it no longer exists what an insane misuse of human energy that would be what an absolute catastrophe now the analogy isn't perfect for a variety of reasons but it's good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and anti racism were truly broken the future we want is not one in which we've all become passionate anti-racists it's not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult the bad joke the akward complement the tweet that didn't age well we want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant and if you don't agree with that what did you think Martin Luther King jr. was talking about and finally if you're on the left and you don't agree with that if you don't agree with this vision of a post-racial future please observe that the people who agree with you the people who believe that there is no overcoming race and that racial identity is indissoluble and that skin color really matters and will always matter and these people are white supremacists and neo-nazis and other total [ __ ] and these are also people I can't figure out how to talk to much less persuade so the question for the rest of us those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings merely the question is how do we get there how does a racial difference become uninteresting can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity can it become uninteresting by having thousands of institutions whose funding and therefore very survival depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance by becoming a fetish a sacred object ringed on all sides by taboos can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood at any moment by saying one wrong word about it now I think these questions answer themselves to outgrow our obsession with racial difference we have to outgrow our obsession with race and you don't do that by maintaining your obsession with it now you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post-racial society would seem but you might disagree about the path to get there and the question of what to do next and in fact one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post-racial future he thinks it's just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us and he asked me to imagine just how absurd it would be to have told Martin Luther King jr. at the dawn of the civil rights movement that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race that seems like a fair point but Coleman Hughes has actually drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seemed just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I'm hoping to be here and you can see these quotations on his Twitter feed none of those statements by King would make sense coming out of black lives matter at the moment but in any case as I said I think we're living in a very different time than Martin Luther King jr. was and what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we're paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism and social justice generally and the importance of identity generally and this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn't generally barred by white racists who won't vote for them or hire them or celebrate their achievements or buy their products and it isn't generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair now they're surely still some of that but there must be less of it now than there ever was the real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality with respect to wealth and education and health and social order levels of crime in particular and the resulting levels of incarceration and single-parent families and it seems very unlikely that these disparities whatever their origin in the past can be solved by focusing on the problem of lingering racism especially where it doesn't exist and the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point and yet now we're inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company an organization singing from the same book of hymns I mean black lives matter is everywhere of course black lives matter but the messaging of this movement around the reality of police violence is wrong and it's creating a public Asteria I just got a message from the American Association for the Advancement of science talking about fear of the other right and then the quote from the email is left unchecked racism sexism homophobia and fear of the other can enter any organization or community and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future ok fine but is that really the concern in the scientific community right now unchecked racism sexism and homophobia is that really what ails science in the year 2020 I don't think so well I'll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted everywhere right now it's the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue it's the other who will not listen to reason who has no interest in facts who can't join a conversation that converges on the truth because he knows in advance what the truth must be we should fear the other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren't something to be corrected for because they're the very foundations of his epistemology we should fear the other who can't distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science or worse can make these distinctions but refuses to and we're all capable of becoming this person if only for minutes or hours at a time and this is a bug in our operating system not a feature and we have to continually correct for it one of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the Cova 19 pandemic was first landing on our shores and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools was that for tens of millions of American kids going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day now I'm pretty confident that most of the kids we're talking about here aren't white and whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind there's no question that some of us start out on third base or second base everyone has a lot to deal with of course life is hard but not everyone is a single mom or a single grandparent struggling to raise kids in the inner city all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered right the disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable and we need a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions we have to pull back from the brink here and all we have with which to do that is conversation I mean the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments a willingness to update one's view of the world when better reasons are given and that is an ongoing process not a place we ever finally arrived okay well perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended but it certainly felt like I needed to say that I hope it was useful and the conversations will continue on this podcast stay safe everyone [Music] you

Channel: Sam Harris

Views: 947,087

Rating: 4.6201315 out of 5

Keywords: sam harris, sam harris podcast, waking up podcast, waking up, waking up with sam harris, sam harris waking up, waking up sam harris, sam harris jordan peterson, sam harris joe rogan, author, neuroscientist, philosopher, philosophy, Making Sense Podcast, Making Sense

Id: vmgxtcbc4iU

Length: 113min 0sec (6780 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Saintwalkr81]

Sam is able to navigate through the labyrinth of our modern hysteria while the world argues at the gate. I truly hope his voice is registered by the masses.

[u/isitisorisitaint]

Will be interesting to see if Sam gets huge blowback from this. I could also see people being afraid to even comment on it.

Although based on some of the comments in the other sub, it seems like a fair number of people didn't get a proper understanding of what Sam said in this podcast...although I suppose that probably shouldn't be surprising, since a big part of the problem is the shortcomings in human perception and cognition.

[u/diditmakesound]

This was a good episode. About as intellectually honest as one could hope for.

[u/AltCommentAccount]

Submission Statement: Sam Harris takes his time to articulate his points about current events after being quiet for a short time. Protests, civil unrest, racism, and police violence.

[u/breticus07]

I couldn't agree more with Sam's take here.

[u/TAW12372]

Listened to this today. I normally listen to podcasts at about 30 minutes at a time but found myself unable to press stop and listened to it all in one. Thought it was fantastic and expressed a lot of concerns I've been having in the past few weeks (really the past few years but magnified lately.)