Prof. Glenn Loury | Systemic Racism, Trump and BLM

[Music] i'm delighted to be able to talk today to professor glenn lowry he's been one of the most important african-american intellectuals in america now for some four decades from working class beginnings he eventually rose to become a professor at harvard university at the age of just 33 which tells a powerful story in itself he's now at brown university he's written groundbreaking essays and several standard books including the classic the anatomy of racial inequality the new york times wrote a feature piece on professor lowry in 2002 and described his views as i quote fiercely independent and unclassifiable professor lowry continues to weigh in on debates raging today regarding black lives matter systemic racism and indeed reparations to african americans so glenn can i begin by asking about your personal journey your intellectual journey in coming to grips with the nature of race relations in america well um i was born on the south side of chicago in a working class african-american community educated in public schools there and after uh i started college which didn't end well um my girlfriend uh my uh we married early babies coming along i dropped out i ultimately found my way back to the university completed at the age of 23 from northwestern university with mathematics and then went on mit and did a phd in economics um i was a conventional in those years this is the 1970s i was a conventional um liberal uh microeconomist uh interested in inequality issues to be sure but many other issues besides but being black living here in america one couldn't really escape uh being engaged with the debates about discrimination and disparities and racial inequality and so i found myself drawn into that conversation but early on uh and i won't go on too long about this john but i'll just say early on i felt some discomfort with the standard narrative the standard narrative 15 years after the end of the civil rights movement as i was beginning my career when i began to teach at harvard in the early 1980s was that african americans lag behind because whites won't extend opportunity to us doors are shut we don't have the fair chance to show our human talent and i began to think that while they certainly were problems that they were increasingly uh to be found it within the african american community itself and i say this with trepidation i say it cautiously because it's very easy to slip into a kind of blaming of the victim for all of his or her problems but i've looked at the condition of the african-american family i looked at the level of criminal violence in black communities i looked at the extent of um of disparity in educational achievement uh at behavioral problems at the adolescents acting out um at a low attachment to work at a heavy dependence upon welfare and i said you know if we want genuine equality it's not enough to petition the society to end discrimination that of course is necessary but not sufficient we also have to examine the enemy within the enemy without and the enemy within that was my formulation the enemy without being white racism the enemy within being patterns of behavior amongst us uh in some parts of african-american society that impeded our ability to take advantage of opportunities um that uh deviation from the standard narrative cost me a lot in terms of friends and supporting the black community and so forth but i i don't mean to make myself into a matter i just mean to say it's difficult terrain when one takes on that kind of dissident or contrary in view i found myself being attracted by some of what i was hearing on the conservative side of the political divide here in america and i was willing to identify with it i'll stop because we don't have an unlimited amount of time but out of that beginning i have come to engage the questions that continue to drive a lot of the political discussion around race here from the point of view of saying yes there is racism but there are also many serious problems within the community and we must take responsibility for raising our children and for seizing the opportunities that exist as many millions of immigrants many of whom come from non-european points of origin have been doing over the last half century here in the united states well there are certainly echoes of that in australia and i think some of our best thinkers here would say the worst mistake you can make is to remove agency from from from from indigenous people in our country by by patronising saying it's all our fault that disparity may be the result of discrimination but it isn't necessarily the revolt the result of discrimination is that in part what you're saying it is um the removal of agency is a deep concern of mine uh the tone of the conversation here in the u.s in the last 10 years uh has very much shifted in that direction of um you know the evocation of notions of systemic racism and white supremacy and uh so on as the determinant of the outcomes for african americans and the sighting of historical uh effects like the legacy of enslavement and of jim crow segregation carrying on through the 20 middle of the 20th century as if those facts alone determine the outcome in the schools and in the neighborhoods and in the prisons of america in the year 2020 black people on this argument can do nothing but petition white people to deliver equality to us and i think that that is a it's a bogus argument that at the end of the day that's an argument of surrender and it leaves one uh oddly petitioning the putative oppressor to save you from the consequences of of his oppression that's a non-sequitur in my mind that's a very valuable insight and and and beautifully put um it it has to be said that there are many many good people supporting the blm protests including i would imagine many many very fine african americans but it does seem that it's been hijacked in many ways blm itself seems to promote some ideas which are hardly designed to build respect for one another but nonetheless how would you see what would you say is legitimate about what the protest movements are saying i've seen you right i mean obviously what happened in the case of george floyd was absolutely horrendous but as we know from the work done in american uh they're a significant number perhaps 50 or 60 a year although that's not so many and the population of america you know it's a very big country of people who are killed each year unarmed people killed by the police but they're by no means um all african americans at all well i i like to tell people when we talk about this that they have to remember the united states is a country of 330 million people we are a continental nation as are you uh but our continent is a little bit bigger uh they're they're sprawling all over dozens and dozens of cities of urban areas of concentrated population which are uh racially heterogeneous there are tens of thousands of encounters between police officers and american citizens on a daily basis about 1 200 americans are killed by police officers in a year of which maybe 300 are african-american that means that most of the people killed by police officers are not african-american and the majority of people killed by police officers in the united states are wide for every instance like the george floyd knee on the neck incident or the tamir rice kid with a toy gun shot in a park incident or the eric gardner miscreant selling illegal cigarettes outside of a convenience store encountering the police and choked until he died incident there are whites who have died in exactly the same manner but we don't hear about these stories because they are not salient they don't get reported in the press so we're a big country and the incidents that we're talking about which are sometimes deeply disturbing are relatively rare and moreover they're not all defined by the race of the people who are participating in these incidents so i want to try to keep things in perspective when we talk about this there are a lot of guns in the country if you're an american police officer and you have the unfortunate responsibility of having to detain a vehicle that you think might be carrying a dangerous criminal you have to reckon with the possibility that he's the firearm is in the vehicle and that you're going to be confronting a life and death situation this does not excuse bad policing bad policing needs to be dealt with police need to be trained properly they need to be held accountable when they violate rules of engagement with citizens and so on there are bad police there are racist police but if you have to pull that vehicle over the the possibility that you might be fired upon by the person who's inside of that is a very real thing in your mind this is a extremely difficult situation for anybody to be in so these incidents have happened but they are not in my view representative of the day-to-day life experience of african americans and the extent to which black lives matter and others uh have uh have uh characterized the circumstances if every african-american must fear for his or her life upon stepping from their door uh this is a a gross distortion of the reality here yeah it strikes me as an aside if i can make this observation one of the problems i'm a former member of parliament you get the same thing with politicians if you create such cynicism about people in that profession it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy you don't get the good leaders you want you don't get the good police you want it becomes an undesirable place to go you want good people to go and try and be good police but if it's going to be assumed simply because they're in a uniform that they're against you and they're a danger i would have thought that serves no one's interests i just mentioned that as an aside because you oh no it's exactly right that's a really important point recruiting uh of police officers is suffering very badly from this passage that we're going through right now who would want to take on this responsibility you have black police chiefs and there are dozens of them around the country who are resigning their responsibilities they no longer want to be at the head of an organization that's going to be vilified at every turn and they feel they can't they're they're in an impossible situation where they can't uh responsibly stand up for their duty and be loyal to the people who work under them and at the same time face the community and be accepted with respect so they're stepping away it's a serious problem recruiting good police officers and i would have thought it particularly troubling for um african-american women who i understand are very likely to be the people statistically even most likely to ring police looking for help in a violent or dangerous situation how does it serve their interests as the former basketball player charles barkley who comments on television about sporting events has said recently who are black people supposed to call ghostbusters i hope that rings a bell in australia because the movie was really quite big here in the united states yeah who we gonna call what's busted i mean the the de-policing movement does not have the endorsement of the rank and file in the black community i can assure you of that there are many many instances of people speaking out against it because they have to live on a daily basis with the consequences of the violent behavior of a relatively few uh who are in their midst those of us with resources move away from communities that have these kind of problems it's poor people who are left behind to deal with the consequences of this behavior to come to another area where it seems to me that in fact those people purporting to speak for african-americans are in fact advocating policies that may in fact really make things worse so come to the delicate but important area i think of the environment in which young children grow up particularly our boys now dr warren farrell uh who i've come to know well through these conversations very astute observer of what he calls the boy crisis i mean 85 percent of the staggering number of americans who are in jail are males so the first thing you've got to face is why is it that men are getting into so much trouble and then you can talk about why so many uh african american men are in jail but he makes the point that something like 75 now of african americans have not grown up with their dads and that that is a very powerful predictor of a boy who may end up in trouble on the wrong side of the justice system or indeed in prison or in deep personal strife we're not apparently meant to talk about these things the modern narrative people get very uptight about it in fact black lives matter though i think they've changed their website now but initially they made it pretty plain that one of the things they wanted to deconstruct was the so-called nuclear family how did how would that approach i mean surely we need to be honest and so one of the predictors which must lead us to investigate what's happening here will be the issue of a lack of fathering models responsible male modelling for young men in general but particularly for young african men well now you're running up not only with race but you're running up into the gender uh brick wall of people saying you're valorizing conventional ways of arranging family affairs and of the raising of children why are fathers made central um and you're running into the problem of blaming the victim this is a very old story going all the way back here in the us to the 1960s famously daniel patrick moynihan the late great u.s senator and uh public intellectual uh called attention to the crisis of the what he called the negro family at that time this is the mid-1960s pointing out that the out of wedlock birth rate was uh in those years 20 25 amongst african americans much higher than in the general population worrying that the absence of fathers in the home both their paycheck and the role that they would play in the raising of children would have bad consequences for the community going forward arguing moynihan did in the 1960s in effect that the gains of the civil rights movement would come to not at the end of the day if we didn't confront the problem of the so-called negro family um and recommending that extra shifts be laid on at the post office and other federal employment in order to pre-create jobs on the theory that the reason that there were low levels of of uh children born to intact family was that men were not able to find game for work in any case i say all that to say moynihan was vilified he was made into a racist uh president johnson abandoned the idea of including the discussion of family matters within his larger vision of how to respond to the problem of incorporating quote the negro into the american commonwealth and it's been in effect in polite company and progressive uh audiences taboo to speak about family matters ever since things have changed a lot since the mid-1960s three out of four babies born to a black woman in this country are born to a woman who is not married this doesn't have to be a moral indictment to see that the absence of fathers in the home deprives the household of the resources that are needed to provide a stable environment for the raising of children especially boys now i am not a social worker or social psychologist i can't with professional expertise address the question of the developmental consequences of father absence in a rigorous way but it is my impression having uh exposed myself to this literature by people who are professionals that the person you alluded to earlier is correct and that the absence of fathers is implicated in the development of behavioral problems in male adolescence later on and that those behavioral problems are present both in their behavior within schools where the discipline of uh students is uh racially despaired in very large numbers and black boys are much more likely to be suspended from school but is also reflected in uh behavior later in life in terms of criminal offending and so on that i can't prove that absent fathers causes criminal offending but i am persuaded that the development of the african-american family and the disintegration if you will of it over the course of these past decades is a part of the reason why we find ourselves in the condition that we do now um no it's not polite to speak of it but i think it's an absolutely unavoidable part of the account that one would have to give if you want to understand this this uh problem yeah i think for me the problem is that we live in this age where evidence doesn't seem to matter whereas if we say we're as children of the enlightenment then you say you go where the evidence leads you and you can't ignore this elephant in the room and if you really really care if you really care about what you say you care about i don't know that you can ignore this for the sake of our children we've got to come to grips with it you can't simply sweep it under the collar under the paper but but to switch to the positive my understanding is that since the civil rights movement of the 1960s when perhaps 30 percent of african americans were what you'd call loosely middle class on middle class incomes there's been a significant lift there are a lot of african-american families let's let's be positive for a moment who are doing really well and you know still find america we're not still fight that's probably an unfortunate word but have found in america a place of freedom and of opportunity and of prosperity and surely there's a lot of good news as beside the troubling problems that are raised by the current concerns uh within my lifetime at the middle of the 20th century uh 1950 the modal occupation for african american men was farm laborer and the modal occupation for african-american women was domestic servant household service we have if you look at the penetration of the professions medicine and lawn engineering and the academy if you look at the development of small business and entrepreneurship if you look at the massive footprint that african americans have in entertainment and the sports and so on um we have billionaires the oprah winfries of the world and the lebron james's of the world and so on like that we're the richest most prosperous people of african descent some 35 or 40 million strong here on the north american continent the richest black people on the planet nigeria has 200 million people and it has about a third of the gdp on mass of as do uh the household incomes of african-americans taken as a whole who are 35 or 40 million here uh so uh there's enormous opportunity here no things are there are disparities absolutely there are disparities but um the uh a number of african-americans who have prospered who are homeowners who have accumulated wealth who have relative comfort um numbers in the many many many millions so i guess it depends on how one wants to look at things if you look at it in terms of the absolute living standards of people the curve shows a continuous upward slope if you ask in terms of the relative standing of people there are disparities that have persisted and they are a source of concern yeah so as an outsider looking in i'm also conscious it seems to me that vast numbers of white americans obviously voted for a black president as well you know they they lifted themselves you know that is a reflection of the transformation of attitudes and the acceptance of african americans a first family occupying the white house barack obama michelle obama their two little children their dog they become emblems of the american uh of the american project they they are the uh quintessential americans uh these uh this family uh loved by many people now they did meet with resistance one doesn't want to overlook the fact that uh there are anti-black races who continue to uh you know speak out and and uh have their uh have their voices heard in various quarters here in the united states barack obama met with some resistance because of his race i think that that's undeniable uh but he was elected twice the most powerful person on the planet um and uh had a huge impact on uh on american society although uh but with uh the uh trump administration's uh efforts uh uh much of what obama uh attempted to accomplish is being undone nonetheless i understand and i don't have the the you know the actual figures i do understand that some african americans perhaps more than i might have expected support trump in the uh in the current rather divided america that we look on and as one who loves america and uh uh loves a can-do attitude and the way in which they've stood for freedom in a troubled world um yeah that's true i didn't mean to observe i mean trump is appointing judges that obama would have never appointed trump is uh enacting legislation that obama would have opposed i didn't and that's what i meant when i said much of what obama was trying to do has been undone i didn't mean to say however that african-americans our approach to politics turns entirely on uh whether or not the uh actions are in uh you know in in line with what it is that this particular black politician wanted to do donald trump speaks i think to a lot of the conservative culturally conservative uh sentiments that are a character where religious population more so than of the country as a whole the argument about immigration trump says i want to have a border on the country i want to be in control of who comes in if they're going to be they're going to love our country and have something to contribute we welcome them if they're going to be a burden on our country uh we don't necessarily welcome them i don't see why black people uh should be uh opposed to an idea of that sort many would think that abortion is not especially welcome uh public uh support for abortion is not especially welcome public posture um they are i think many african americans on the other side of the debates the cultural debates that are dividing uh the country right now between elites on the coast who are want to shut down the economy in order to save the planet um who think that the transgender rights is the at the forefront of the agenda of what human rights debate should be about um and so on who you know uh uh so i'm not at all surprised that trump has seen growing support although still a minority of amongst african americans because i think some of what he stands for resonates with some elements of the of black uh history and culture here the reason i mention as much as anything else is it seems that the people who have the megaphones particularly in the media and in academia who are driving a lot of the debate at the moment refuse to give us the whole picture the whole picture about the african-americans who are doing well uh who don't share what are so-called what are now called progressive values that uh that feel comfortable in the society that they're in you never hear about that and it just seems that without the complete picture you fall victim to some of this language that's around to come to a couple of terms that are bandied around with incredible abandon at the moment systemic racism and right and white privilege and and you yourself recently said i think along these lines structural racism by contrast is a bluff it's not an engagement with history it's a bullying tactic in in effect it's telling you to shut up i thought those were very interesting observations so you're saying that these are taxis designed to say fall into line with our perspective on the debate don't enter into a wide-ranging truly helicopter view of what's happening good and bad that that's right people say structural race races let me be specific they look at the prisons the about 40 of the people incarcerated in the united states are black and blacks are about 12 percent of the population so that's a vast over-representation in the prisons and they say structural racism as if citing the over-representation of blacks amongst those who were held in prison proved that the system was racist and not that blacks participated in criminal offending at a higher rate were being apprehended as a consequence and therefore were being represented in prison at a higher rate because they were more likely to commit criminal offenses now the latter has to be the case that is to say while there is certainly some racial discrimination in american criminal justice criminologists have looked high and low to try to find evidence that the disparity in prisons is due to racial discrimination and they cannot demonstrate that because a disparity in criminal offending is itself off the charts with blacks being vastly overrepresented amongst those committing violent crimes now you can call that structural racism if you want but what i say to people who say that is you're not trying to explain anything this is a rhetorical move that you're making you think by using those words we're going to change the subject from in the case at hand the example that i'm giving the criminal behavior of a relatively few black people relatively few compared to a population of 40 million the criminal behavior you're going to change the subject from that to something about and then you're going to start talking about the slavery and about redlining and about uh you know anti-black bias and whatnot when in fact what we really need to deal with what we really need to confront as a society sympathetically putting resources into it if necessary is the foundations of the behavioral deviance which has produced this outcome so we're not going to have an argument if when you people are talking about structural racism about the behavior of the criminals we're going to have an argument about the system they want to blame the system for everything that is both false as a social scientific matter the causal arrows don't go in the directions that they're claiming it's also devastating as a political matter i argue because just about everybody listening to this conversation knows that what you're saying is yeah bs yeah they know it's not true they know they know what's going on yeah and you talk about those those uh you know disparities there in the numbers what is it 12 of the population 40 of the jail population the other one that hits you in the face is warren farrell's point males are half the population of any given society roughly but 85 percent of the inmates in american jails and i suspect it's much the same in australia are male what is the boy crisis what is the male crisis no one talks about that uh and again it comes back i think to the issue of who is modeling appropriate behaviour to these boys as they grow up but just to come to a couple of other things that you've said that i find incredibly interesting you recently said that you can live with disparities or you can live in totalitarianism and i just can i draw you out why do you think the project of removing disparities or bringing about equality between identity groups would lead or tend to lead us towards totalitarianism taken to its logical extreme i argue it would lead to totalitarianism because i argue that groups actually are different in ways that in escapably produce inequality um look at asian immigrants success in elite academic venues in the united states uh there's a lawsuit now where harvard is in court and a consortium of asian american students are suing saying that harvard university the greatest university in the country is discriminating against them because only a quarter of the harvard student body or so is of asian american descent and if they went by academic test scores they would be half of the i give the rough numbers it may be awful by a percent or two they be half of the student body if you admit it strictly on academic merit asians would be twice as prevalent at harvard and they would be half of the students at harvard um and as it is they're about a quarter so they're in court suing now why is that why are there so many jews who are at the forefront of various venues of intellectual competition in the united states why is that uh genetic arguments are off the table and i'm not making one here i i wouldn't i wouldn't go there that would be the last place that i would go i i as a social scientist i have to allow the evidence to determine my answer to that but let me bracket the question of whether or not the natural differences between human populations that are implicated in these disparities there are huge cultural disparities between these populations how the children are raised what things are valued in the community what aspirations are embraced how hard do people work how do they deal with their setbacks what kind of resilience do they have etc are they worried about disappointing their parents expectations are the parents supervising their behavior in the household to ensure that they apply themselves in ways that maximize the chance of developing their talents these things are vastly different between human population groups within the united states and i expect within any society people who say that every disparity is an evidence of historical wrong are are in effect um ignoring the differences between these human populations that are reflected in their achievements so you can try to eliminate the achievement differences between these populations but you can only do it by stifling and damping down and extirpating the behavioral patterns within the population groups that produce the differences in the first place uh and when you do that you're on a slippery slope to tyranny you're saying the parents who want to spend half of their available income on their child development can't spend that much they can't send the kid to a special school they can't hire a tutor you're saying kids who want to spend eight hours a day studying instead of four hours a day of studying somehow have to be limited from doing that if you don't control the micro environment within which human development takes place so as to eliminate the differences in across the groups and the outcomes you're not going to get rid of the disparities so that's what i mean it's a theoretical point i say if in if you insist on leveling so that all disparities are flattened and eliminated what you're going to have at the end of the day is tyranny yeah now i take the point entirely and it's very well made thank you um now in june you warned your fellow americans in an article in in quillet uh that americans are in a very dangerous situation now we stand on the brink of a widespread epidemic of civil unrest whose ultimate consequences are difficult to reckon that seems to me to be particularly pertinent pertinent in the context of the upcoming presidential election you know a deeply atomized america it wouldn't take much for somebody in a moment of panic you talked about the policeman approaching a car not knowing whether he's going to be hit or something for a policeman or a figure of authority or someone in a moment of blind panic um is themselves blindsided does something irresponsible you've got a tinderbox it is dangerous isn't it and that's that's worrying to all of us what happens in america it goes well beyond america uh it's a very concerning situation uh here that quillet peace of mind had a title something like uh denounce the violence without equivocation i can't remember exactly how they put it but i was appealing uh to fellow americans that as the um violence and the arson and the looting and the murder and the assaults on police officers was unfolding in cities across the country being celebrated uh at some level by many progressives and as the the uh appropriate the just comeuppance uh people were saying things like uh what does it matter if they burn a building down or they take some property it's only property we're talking about lives here are you gonna if someone said law enforcement should prevent this uh disorder from happening the response would be well law enforcement can't use the appropriate force in order to prevent the disorder because that would be putting uh property ahead of lives and i i think that's just madness i mean we're on a slippery slope here that i i grew up in chicago uh the photographs of the images that i saw coming out of chicago of north michigan avenue uh high-end boutiques being looted and then black lives matter spokesman saying well people are entitled to take it they have to feed themselves after all they're entitled to a reparation for the racial uh injustice that they've had to endure uh and so on it disturbed me deeply um and of course it's not only on the left of american politics that we have the potential in the reality of armed people who are prepared to go into the streets um i think you're right to point to the prospect that this election that's coming should it be close should it not be decisively um uh determined as to who's the victor uh on the night of the election should we uh drag on for days or even weeks should we end up in court as we did in the year 2000 with the close election in florida between george w bush and um albert gore um we're now in the year 2020 not the year 2000 we have a different set of predicates that have been laid down from past behavior we've had these george floyd riots in cities around the country things could really easily i think get out of hand police officers are being assassinated here in the united states in real time i mean so that we had an incident not more than a few days ago um so um i i think it's i don't know the answer but i do know that the danger is very real one of the things that strikes me about this glenn is that the 1960 civil rights movement was really a peaceful movement strongly dominated you know strong determined focused articulate uh and widespread but dominated by the sort of christian idea of turn the other cheek don't break the law you know letter from prison from martin luther king advocating non-violence obedience peaceful protest and it's as though that's been repudiated in fact my impression is that there are leaders in in the current black lives matter movement who would actually say no we've moved on from that approach altogether how does that play out given that as you mentioned african americans are more likely to go to church than other americans where they'll hear that doctrine all the time of being peaceful of being loving of seeking to turn the other cheek neither give insult nor nor take insult this whole movement seems to be born in a deep anger and i wonder how on earth that can play out the right way anger seems to endanger everything now yeah um i i don't know how it's going to play out but i do see the very different foundations on which the movement of the 50s and 60s rested relative to the movement that we are witnessing today and there was a christian uh uh not quite pacifism but but uh a commitment to non-violence a belief in the goodness of the fundamental structures of the country the regime of discrimination and racism was taken to be a deviation from something martin luther king and company were calling the country to higher ground yeah they were saying to the country this is not who you slash we are i have a dream that one day my four little children will be judged by the content of the character they'll walk hand in hand black and white and so on integration was supposed to be the goal the idea that we wanted to become a part of america now at the same time or roughly the same time there were other strands of african-american political expression malcolm x and the black power people the black panthers and so on the male the balled up fists the angry shaking fists there were people who said about the riots in america in the 1960s that started in watts los angeles in 1965 and that proliferated around the country at dozens of cities when in that uh summer of 1968 after king had been assassinated there were people were calling for the uprising they wouldn't call them riots they would call them uprisings and they would imbue them with a certain nobility so that was also a part of that era of a half century ago in terms of african-american political expression and the thing that i think must be noted is that the effective legacy of the 1960s on contemporary african-american political expression is much more influenced by the uh the the angry uh defiant uh violence threatening uh uh behavior and attitude and outlook of the black power uh black panthers uh black muslim uh radicals much more influenced by it than it is by uh the christian piety and pacifism of the of the conventional civil rights movement rooted in the church they are iconic in american history but they are that is the church-based pacifist civil rights movement of king very much less influential than the radicals uh you see that from the way in which the uh i think from the way in which the athletes the young talented african-american athletes who are instant millionaires as soon as they finish high school if they have the right kind of talent the way in which they're reacting to this particular moment with the fist raised up and the black lives matter uh symbols and all the rest of a kind of defiance and if someone comes along and says wait a minute america is a good and a great nation uh america is a has been a light until the world america defeated fascism on both uh oceans uh in the middle of the 20th america stood against the darkness of the soviet communism uh with the threat of nuclear extinction and faced them down america is a beacon to the world everyone wants to have a representative democracy on the model that the americans modeled at the end of the 18th century uh and so on if you say that to people they snare at you america is not all of that america city on the hill doesn't apply to us uh popular writers characterize the american dream as a fraud when the american dream is a light at the end of the tunnel for millions of people all over the planet and it is the natural birthright of we black americans and yet it is uh dismissed as if it were a fraud uh so the sensibility of contemporary activism uh on behalf of african-american interests in the year 2020 is vastly different from uh what characterized the civil rights movement in the 1960s and i actually don't think it's progress no and you've got this sort of incredible self-loathing now where um leading white thinkers essentially argue that racism is about white supremacy and that whether you're conscious of it or not if you're white you are racist and no one else is racist which i find extraordinary um you know you've got these best-selling books um white fragility how to be an anti-racist this critical race theory how can that possibly help that sort of approach i i i don't know and i i'm not going to be able to explain it actually i i i'm a little bit before by myself you've got groups of white people kneeling down and begging forgiveness and so on there seems to be a kind of moral panic a kind of mass delusion that has loosened the land so it seems to me um the the essentialization of race the the use of race at every turn as the ex explanatory category that's going to help us understand what's going on in society this is fostering racism it seems to me people think that they can constantly harp upon we're going to be a majority minority nation soon whites are going to be a minority white's going to be a minority they they trumpet they crow they talk about the black vote the latino vote as if voting on block because of your race was somehow uh a a rational uh approach to to politics when my interests are extremely varied and uh mostly haven't got anything to do with the color of my skin um they think that they can play these race cards one after the other in one context of venue after another and not provoke racial identity based political mobilization on the other side if whites are going to become a minority if we got to get rid of the whites and whites are always guilty if there was white supremacy at every uh term what are white supposed to do many white people aren't they going to start thinking about their interests in terms of themselves being white and if you say to me oh they always thought that way i would say you know as a matter of fact they didn't when you take an encounter between a police officer and a citizen and you say nothing about it when the citizen is white and gets mistreated by the police officer and you make a federal case out of it when the citizen who might be acting badly in the encounter gets treated badly by the police officer you're begging it seems to me for a reaction uh from many whites which is going to be something that you you you really don't want to see uh so i don't know that george floyd and the incident was horrible a man laying on the ground an officer seemingly indifferent with his knee on the man's neck the man subsequently dies that's bad that's not good that's not good police and that's bad policing i insist that as far as i know it was not a racial incident which is to say if i had changed the race of the man from being black to being white it wouldn't have happened i don't know that that's the case i don't know that the police officer was acting in that circumstance based upon the race these are things to be determined uh the supposition that this is so um it it is is extremely troubling to me it seems to me that i take your point that fundamentally the problem here is that we're dividing we're drawing the line between good and bad in all the wrong places and in this case we're drawing it between people of different skin color whereas in reality it's far more complex if you take the horror of slavery and a lot of these issues are traced back to the horrors of slavery i think it's probably fair to say one obvious point is why are people not marching in the street about the fact that there's an estimated 45 million slaves in various parts of the world today that's just almost an aside but the history of slavery itself horrendous as it is tells you a great deal more it tells you that the dividing line between good behavior and bad behavior is is not between people of different coloured skin as as a fact the black african-american pointed out to me the other day the african slave trade involved africans rounding up other slaves other people killing off the children and the old and the infirm and then selling those people there's another aspect to it many white americans took on the most horrendous and hateful war that perhaps the world's ever really recorded there have been wars that have killed more people but in terms of civil war is so ugly but that was largely about a lot of people in america deciding that slavery was a bad idea then you take the royal navy when britain abolished slavery in its own country in 1833 the most powerful nation on earth it deployed the british navy to make sure that nobody was slave trading on the high seas and 17 000 white british sailors died securing freedom for people who would otherwise have been slaved of a different skin color so it's to draw the lines between good and bad on the basis of skin color seems to me to be abhorrently racist and extremely dangerous well yeah but you're this is a sacred uh kind of narrative and and people will go ballistic i mean there are many points that could be made certainly the fact that the europeans did not go into the interior of angola or congo or nigeria and ghana and dragoon millions of the people living there and bring them out of their hamlets all the way down to the coast and then put them on boats and carrying them across the atlantic ocean to the new world they didn't do that they couldn't have possibly done that there was no possibility to produce that commerce in human chattel without the profoundly deep involvement of people on the ground in these uh places who were indigenous to those places and who were engaged in the you know you bought a slave you someone sold you the slave okay so so there's that fact um the civil war six hundred thousand dead uh the the the uh incredible trauma um now people will say the war wasn't fought to end slavery the war was fought to preserve the union lincoln would have been happy to see the union preserved even if slavery had persisted i expected that's correct although he abhorred slavery uh he was intent on slaving to you on preserving the union but the fact of the matter is that the consequence to that war was the in effect with the 13th 14th and 15th amendments to the us constitution which were enacted after the war to make the channel the descendants of the african slaves citizens citizens now they weren't equal citizens that's true they were made into citizens of the country and in the fullness of time another 100 years equal citizen should it have taken 100 years no should they have been enslaved with the benefit of retrospective hindsight no they ought not to have been if you take my sensibility today and you import it back to 1800 they ought not to been enslaved but here's the thing slavery is a commonplace of human experience going back to antiquity emancipation freedom for the slaves the abolition of slavery that's a new idea that's a western idea that's an enlightenment idea that idea was actually brought to fruition here in the united states of america liberating many hundreds of thousands of people and creating the foundation for the world that we now live in it would not have been possible without the western uh cultivated in the 17th and 18th centuries about the dignity of the human person and about the limitations of government the legitimate exercise of government power over other people wouldn't have been possible without those ideas so something was created here it was a horrible horrible holocaust out of which emerged something that i think actually advanced the uh the morality and the dignity of of humankind uh the abolition of slavery and the incorporation of african descended people into the uh body politic of the united states of america was a world historic achievement well you've been very generous with your time i'm incredibly impressed by the way you've unpacked so many of these issues and the integrity with which you do it and i imagine courage not easy to speak out against the common narrative but can i ask you this from your perspective to to round this out okay name two or three things if you could that you think can now be done to try and improve race relations which really does matter put aside the causes what's really happening the false narratives the false solutions what should be done what can be done in your view yeah i am a big advocate for opening up the provision of educational services to people so as to allow for uh competition with the public schools and increase the opportunity for poor people to get good education i want to put choices in the hands of parents to seek out whatever provision of educational services best suits their needs and let the chips fall where they may so that's one thing that i would that i had to point to i i think that um integration intermarriage messagination miscegenation is the way they used to put it mixing i think a ratcheting down of the intensity that we uh invest the investment the intensity of the investment that we make in our racial identities tamping that down because that's not the most important feature of our human uh you know profile here has martin luther and king himself said character character so so uh i think a de-emphasis on race uh i i mean i i think the war on drugs has been a very very bad mistake for the country and i think some of the collateral damage uh it's not the only thing going on with the rising imprisonment in the united states but it's a major factor uh it's no surprise that if you're going to have a black commerce in narcotics that it will flourish disproportionately in those communities which are most disadvantaged because those are the people who are going to take the risk to do the kind of uh activities that the illegal commerce requires um and as a result the overrepresentation of blacks in the drug trafficking is part of what's going on in the uh conflict of blacks and the police because the police are out there enforcing laws and you know i i inclined toward a somewhat libertarian outlook on some things i think uh the war on drugs has been has been a policy mistake i think we desperately need better african-american leadership uh more courageous uh leadership uh and and uh people were prepared to um you know step away from and stand up for for example stand up for what uh they know to be right so uh this uh um you know demonization of the police officers uh the the you know um there are many many black police officers who are beginning to speak out here uh in the country now uh this young he's not a police officer he's the attorney general of the state of kentucky where a particular case a woman who was shot in her home by a police raid when uh the conflict broke out between her boyfriend and the police officers police officers fired bullets her name is brianna taylor she's become a cause celeb here in the united states uh the police officers were not indicted with a criminal offense uh for killing her on unfortunate circumstances and that has led to much consternation and the gentleman who is um in charge of the attorney general's office in the state of kentucky happens to be african-american uh and he's been trying to cue a very difficult line and he's met with much vilification but we need a hundred of him uh to to uh foster a different account of what's going on and to represent african americans in a different way um so those are some things i think of well glenn thank you you've unpacked a great deal for us and i know that'll be widely appreciated because the issues that america confronts in this area are also been confronted in australia and i would just close by making the observation that one of the patterns that we see here that you've referred to is an under recognition of just how many indigenous australians now have managed to break through the education system into the professions and are doing very well and for whom our society is working well and that is not to downplay at all the plight of those who for whatever reason find themselves in a bog of misery and turmoil and despair but it is to say that unless you get the whole picture and unless you're honest and unless you go where the evidence demands that you ought to go you'll only make the problem worse so i deeply appreciate your insights and you're giving us the time to share them you're welcome i'm i'm very happy to have had this conversation with you john thanks glenn thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to stay up to date with new releases [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 291,439

Rating: 4.8604422 out of 5

Keywords: Black Lives Matter, Glenn Loury, Economist, US Economy, Government Debt, BLM, Systemic Racism, US Debt, George Floyd, Ben Shapiro, John Anderson, Harvard Economist, Trump Vs Biden, Racism in America, Thomas Sowell, US Votes 2020, Election Commentary, Is america racist?, Reparations for slavery debate, Anti-reparations argument, Harvard debate, US Government debt, Trump Economics, Systemic racism debate, White supremacy

Id: OL5G2Y6LMpE

Length: 58min 15sec (3495 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020