Race and Culture: How Skills, Values, and Attitudes Affect Upward Mobility | OLD PARKLAND CONFERENCE

[Music] well good afternoon my name is anthony bradley and i am a professor at the kings college in new york city i'm also a research fellow at the acta institute for the study of religion and liberty and i'm delighted to welcome you to this next after lunch full of energy session i just commented to jason that that you can tell that people are having a good time because the energy level just continues to escalate and it is such a joy to see such a fascinating exchange of ideas and to see relationships renewed and and some that will be inaugurated this this weekend this panel is titled race and culture how skills values and attitudes affect upward mobility one of the aspects of glenn's opening remarks is that the issues of culture and values and norms are contentious and these are the sorts of issues we do not want to talk about but these are the ones that we must talk about because there are no mono causal variables that got us here it's a multivariate reality and one of those variables are cultural values and norms and thomas solo has done such a great job of bringing those to our attention and so we're going to have a discussion about about those seeing the way this panel we're run i have a set of standard questions for the panelists and i've asked them to speak from their own expertise regarding regarding some of the norms and values that can actually undermine and sabotage social and economic mobility in some of our communities on this panel is craig frisby professor emeritus recently retired which is that glow that you see there on his face from the school of psychology at the university of missouri frisbee has throughout his career studied psycho-educational testing and assessment the education of ethnic and racial minorities development of academic skills charter schools psychology of individual differences and so on our next panelist is bradford wilcox who is the director of the national marriage project at the university of virginia also a professor there in the school of sociology a visiting scholar at aei senior fellow for the institute of family studies professor wilcox's research is focused on marriage fatherhood and cohabitation especially on the ways in which family structure civil society and cultural influence the quality and stability of family life in the u.s and around the world lastly here is mr robert dorr the president of aei and throughout his career he has focused primarily on issues regarding welfare reform and issues regarding welfare particularly in the northeast and in the new york city area he's very familiar to all of us here i edited and co-authored and authored several several books as well so join me in welcoming our panel this afternoon [Applause] so i'd like to to begin with this question because as i as i mentioned the the issue of values and cultural norms and cultural practices is is a bit it's contentious we don't want to talk about those things and i'm wondering if you could pan out a bit and from your perspective from your own discipline why do you think that that progressives in particular are reluctant to talk about the role of cultural values cultural norms cultural practices as as the types of things that can undermine and sabotage social and economic mobility particularly in disadvantaged communities food for anyone concerned i'll i'll go ahead and start uh one of the first things i just want to say before i dive into that uh the answer to that question is that i i am just so pleased to see that this forum has broadened its scope in terms of the kinds of disciplines that the speakers represent when i looked at the 1980 the first fairmont conference i sensed that there was a lot of economists a lot of political scientists and maybe a few others but i didn't see other disciplines represented and so when they invited me to be a part of this panel i was surprised and pleased that they invited someone that represents um psychology as it marries with with education so emboldened by that there are some things that that uh i'd like to discuss that are unusual that maybe you haven't discussed before a lot of these things will be controversial but my understanding is that that is what this forum is is about um i wanted to start off by saying i've i've listened very closely to all of the speakers today and yesterday and and i sense that there's a tension between certain principles coming from my perspective as as a psychologist and i'd just like to articulate what those principles are and then i'll stop let the others talk but just to remind the audience that i'm going to be returning to these principles as i make comments and that is is is you know psychologists study human behavior you know how people think how people feel what their attitudes are and what their emotions are and when we think about differences and similarities among people there are three self-evident truths that are just self-evident and those truths are number one there are universals meaning that there are characteristics that we all have that we share in common with every other human being so to be concrete about this i don't even have to know you but i know that you have to sleep you have to eat and you have to go to the bathroom why because we're all human beings and related to that there are universal principles that we are evaluated by that have similar consequences across all people so at first there there are universals we have characteristics that we only share with certain subsets of other people for example i'm black i share those characteristics with other blacks i don't share those characteristics with non-blacks i'm a male i share certain characteristics with other males i don't share those characteristics with females i'm of a certain age so whenever i talk to to people that are of my age we have things in common that i don't share with with young people and then you know you you can extend that to to religion to where you grew up to where you come from so there are subsets of people that we share things in common with but not with other people and then finally there there's the principle of individual differences all of us here are unique and there are things that we don't share with any other human being on the face of the earth because we're unique even identical twins are not thoroughly identical in every way if if you get to know identical twins for a long period of time you can tell them apart so they're universals things we share with every other human beings there are subgroup characteristics things we only share with people who are like us in certain ways and then there are individual differences we're unique and we're different from any other from any other individual i sense attention among those three principles with respect to a lot of the things that we've been trying to talk about so i'll stop there but i'll i'll revisit those principles later on and would you say that that progressives really struggle with acknowledging some of those and and i mean if we're struggling with it would you say that is that fair the short answer to that and this is uh something that we we've said constantly they don't want to appear to be racist and a lot of times when we bring up these issues they will run from these issues because they don't want to be considered insensitive or or racist so that's great next i think on that you know note i'll just kind of carry the baton here and i think obviously when it comes to my our own area of interest the family and marriage there's obviously a recognition that daniel patrick moynihan's you know infamous report kind of raised a sort of racial issue around family which made a lot of folks more reluctant to address the headlines i think that's part of why on the cultural front there's a lot of reluctance to address um family issues in our public conversation i think the second point obviously is that we are a very individualistic and freedom-loving uh country and there are ways in which you know even in this room that we can appreciate you know those dimensions of our life together when it comes to sort of the sort of cultural traditions that would inform our lives together including ones related to marriage for instance that impulse to come embrace individuality and freedom can be intention with a more familistic orientation it's also why we can have trouble around some of these cultural issues and i think the third point i would make is the way in which obviously since the 70s there's been a kind of polarization in american life that's linked to how the two parties are addressing culture related issues and so that makes you know i think a lot of progressives and democrats instinctively um you know uh reluctant to address some of these cultural issues head on or just take the this simply non-republican position as well so first of all i want to say that i'm i'm not kahimowitz who i was originally pl planned to be on this panel and and i miss kaye and for all those who don't know her writing for the manhattan institute and others she's wonderful and we miss her today uh the second thing is i have sort of a second con confession i don't want this to sound like i'm exhibiting white guilt or anything but i am my career is as a social services worker i am a recovering bureaucrat i spent most of my career as a government official in the body of the beast providing assistance or aid to people in need in new york city and new york state and i saw a lot there that had to do with cultural messages that were harmful and one thing i want to make clear about those harmful messages about work or about family or about responsibility or about substance abuse was that they were corrupting the lives of everybody not just black americans but this is a serious issue for white americans they're more white children born to non-married women in the united states every year than black children so i think we need to acknowledge that the pathologies or the difficulties or the issues that we're talking about um are prevalent in our society broadly and not are limited to one group and i saw that in the social services or welfare offices and and the last thing i'll just say about that is that um i don't know why it is i want i want to think a little bit about why but it is there in so many ways the messages of the government agency and i'm sorry to say this but for a lot of poor americans their relationship with the government agency is their most significant relationship with a institution they're not i'm sorry to say in churches they're not in other community groups they have a card they have a food stamp card and a medicaid card they know their government and the government messages that we are still unfortunately putting forward uh are anti-work they're anti-two parents they don't care about the father they ignore and are willing to look the other way when it comes to substance abuse and behaviors that are harmful and what i did and what eloise anderson did and many others have done is try to acknowledge the government plays a role in people's lives and at least it should make the messages clear about these cultural issues and not be afraid to use the bully pulpit the signs in the in the waiting room and the way in which we incentivize behavior to promote better cultural uh behavior and i think it it there's a story in welfare form of it being successful but unfortunately it is a small story against a sea of messages that come from our public assistance providing entities that don't promote cultural behavior that would be helpful to the their themselves and their families let me let me just say with you for just a moment here on on this question so in your in your work in new york city and in new york state i mean what i mean this this is where the controversy is where everything blows up i mean what what actually are those cultural practices and norms and values that undermine social and economic mobility i mean what what are what what were some of the ones that that you you notice in the city and in the state they were actually keeping communities stuck in these in these cycles of pathologies well one of the most clear was when we started in new york the centers that provided aid were called income maintenance centers and the message was that we're responsible for you and we're responsible for your income and that we're going to guarantee you are going to be a ward of the state and that's how you should see yourself when we got some effort to reform we turn the name of the offices into job centers and so there are all kinds of ways another way is how do you react to a family that comes before you of you know a single mom and and where's where's the parent of the children who's not present where's the father and the cultural uh expectation or norm that i think comes from public assistance generally is they're not important they're not relevant they might they might there might be some but it's really we don't have to worry about that now if you have an office that says no this is something we're going to raise with you and we're going to discuss and we want to talk about how we can get the father engaged in your children's lives and how they can make a contribution to your financial well-being because people should at the ins in some respect expected to make some effort to help themselves before the government rushes in so those are two areas where just very clear and of course you know you want you started the question by what is it about the progressives and and you know i sometimes i i was just trying to organize our offices in a way that i thought would help people but my my i guess i would say it is that they they want they want people to be wards of the state they want to they want government to be responsible for people's lives and they reject the the language of responsibility and the language of personal agency and they accept the language of victimhood and it is all to expand their power and their scope and for my viewpoint it's good for them but not good for the people they're trying to help that's great and so i'm wondering how would we how should we talk about and or rather identify what some of those cultural norms and practices are that sabotage mobility because they're not black right i mean so so many of the norms and values that we saw undermine communities from the late 60s through the the mid to late 80s there wasn't those weren't black issues necessarily because we saw the same sort of things in low-income white communities as well we racialized those but they weren't black right so prior to the civil rights movement passage those sorts of norms did not exist and but there was a switch what what are some of those from from sociology from psychology what what are some of those norms and practices and values that actually undermine that mobile that sort of creeped in in the in the late uh 60s through the 70s yeah i i'm not necessarily necessarily coming from psychology and answering your your question in fact when you sent to us some examples of the questions that you were going to ask i was struggling there because the first thing that came to my mind was the bible and i thought i said well you know this is kind of a secular situation here should i mention that will people think that i'm judgmental and i'm sure many of you have struggled with that because you imagine yourself standing before an audience and actually saying this is right and this is wrong and what kind of reaction would you get and this leads into your question about progressives because progressives in my experience they hate talk about universal values the reason why they hate that is because universal values imply that there's one standard from which everyone can be evaluated and that you might find that one group doesn't do as well as another group on those standards i mean that's the natural implication there so i'm going to step out on a limb and explore this a little bit then i'll shut up okay the bible is a unique document because it's the it's the best selling book of all time and it will continue to be the best-selling book of all time the bible is a book that speaks to the individual heart as well as being universal in scope in terms of its application the bible is the only book that talks about it assumes right off the bat that there's a god and that he's active in the affairs of human beings and it tells you what he thinks okay so now i know as soon as i say that some of you don't accept that and that's fine some of you do accept that but starting with with the premise that this is a book that that is unique the bible is a book again that speaks to the individual you know everyone's individual reaction to this person called jesus christ but it also has a lot of material about how god deals with groups and what he expects from groups and so most notably in in in the old testament you know the bible tells a story about god selecting the jewish people as his mouthpiece for his ways and then in the new testament that moves to the church so there's a lot that the bible says about you know god basically saying to a group of people whether it's the jewish people or the church these are my standards these are my characteristics and if you follow these general characteristics now we know within every group of people not every individual is going to follow that but generally if you're a group that lives consistently with my moral laws things will generally go well for you and if you don't things will not go well for you okay so i'm going to throw out four observations i'm not going to answer them but but i would like you to to think about this the ten commandments okay the six commandments the sixth commandment says thou shall not kill now i i look at secular literature that survey literature what which group of people in the united states are number one in crime murder okay the eighth commandment is thou shalt not steal what group of people in the united states tend to be number one in these kinds of crimes the next commandment says thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor what group of people tend to accuse everyone else for their misfortunes of racism i fail you're racist you do this you're racist you're racist you're racist what group of people does that the 10th commandment is thou shall not covet the crt the crt movement is based upon a foundation of envy it encourages black kids to envy white and whiteness envy basically says you have something that i should have i envy that therefore i'm to make your life miserable and we see the proliferation of studies in college campuses of whiteness studies white privilege white this white that whites have torn up everything and it all comes from one emotion envy so ask yourself if if you're a people that lives life guided by these principles are things going to go well for you generally okay it's kind of a rhetorical question are things really going to go well and so wouldn't it make sense for us not only in this room and elsewhere if we stand up and say these kinds of behaviors are wrong they need to change okay i'll stop there very good [Applause] i guess in terms of thinking about sort of how things have changed obviously and this is a kind of a a topic that's covered um at length by charles murray and coming apart there there has been a series of normative shifts across you know the country um when it comes to sort of the importance of of work when it comes the importance of putting marriage before the baby carriage when it comes the importance of um embracing you know regular religious practice so all these kinds of things have kind of played out across the country in ways that have pushed us in a more socially progressive direction and i think as we look at sort of the implications though of this what's happened is that in this new world where there are fewer guardrails for a whole bunch of different important social endeavors and social relationships what we see obviously is that our elites tend to navigate this new reality pretty successfully but that a lot of other ordinary americans do not you know so sort of the abolition of regular religious practice the abolition of sort of marriage as a core anchoring institution for family life you know the abolition the expedition that every you know uh prime age guy should be working full-time you know the breakdown of these norms tends to have a disparately negative impact on poor working-class communities and we've been seeing that in a variety of ways in our conversation today and the way that you can bring the norms back or make some effort in the absence of other other venues in government at least with assistance is reciproca a reciprocal relationship we're going to provide aid the government's decided the taxpayers have decided the voters have decided we're going to have this safety net but we're going to provide it with a understanding that you need to do something in return that and if you don't your benefit is at risk and the fact is is that that's not that's not um actually that controversial because if people we learned not just in new york but around the country is when people get that message they respond they go to work at big numbers labor force participation increased from below 50 percent to over 70 percent people made changes in their behavior because they got leadership from the entities providing aid that said the aid is contingent on your making an effort to move back toward the norms another one that i think and we've lost ground on this recently has to do with substance abuse i mean the rule was if you if you won't go if you're if you're got an issue and you won't go to counseling or get make some effort to get treatment your benefit is at risk and we're gonna reduce your benefit or take it away and that's a way in which you can enforce cultural norms in a country where the media hollywood other messages from other communities are not enforcing those and so this is the vehicle you have and i think it's an underappreciated one because for conservatives it makes us all nervous because it's government and for liberals they don't want to do it but the fact of the matter is as i've mentioned before a lot of them people we're talking about white and black hispanic asian they're they are engaged with it already i mean the the horse is out of the barn they they are in the government benefit programs in big numbers so we ought to use them to enforce uh cultural norms whether it's about parenting or substance abuse or employment the other one i wanted to mention because you can do this in offices and and anyone who's worked in social services office that brought welfare reform to them knows what i'm talking about there can be messages you know about the benefits of work about in how income rises with work or messages about the time limited nature of assistance you know your only assistance is intended to be temporary you're not supposed to be on assistance forever there can be messages about the benefits of two parents active and involved in children's lives so you can do that and you can also send messages about things like patriotism i i don't uh when i was the commissioner in new york state new york city um uh i felt that you know it was a government office and i i believe in respect to our leaders uh our office holders of both parties and so i always wanted to make sure that there was a prominent place president unites president united states picture in that time it was president obama and the governor and the mayor so there was a sense of leadership that we're all in this we're part of something bigger and that uh the policies that we're following are pushing have a consensus behind them about the importance of work and family and and temperance and um so i i just think that there's an opportunity that we are in the time since uh the sort of the chain the change in the political atmosphere we're losing to use government as a way to uh uh promote and and and uh enforce these cultural norms that are but the most important thing i want to say is if if eloise or i ran a welfare office that got that led to a lot of people turning to work instead of dependency some of us might say look how many people we got jobs the person who gets the job is the person who gets the job the government agency they say they're there but the the focus should be on the potential of the individual to step up and the fact is when those messages are sent people go to work and they change their behavior and they become stronger and their families are better and i know you mentioned a lot about data there is just an enormous amount of data about rising incomes from work better outcomes for children in households where there is work rising income from support from absent parents and the better involvement from absent parents in children's lives lead to better outcome for kids so all of these things in addition to you know promoting our values i get that or or these values they also led to better outcomes for poor families white black hispanic asian all americans now there are some that would argue because the the data bears this out that for many in low-income communities the sort of pro-social norms that that lead to social and economic mobility were actually undermined by the government programs themselves and you know between 1971 1974 the welfare rules went up like 425 percent and so in terms of discussing this in the in the larger social fabric of this discourse how would you explain to people some of the ways in which these well-intentioned programs that were launched in the late 70s early 70s sorry late 60s early 70s actually curated and introduced disincentives for pro-social norms actually made some communities worse off how how have you seen that and so i mean i think certainly we've you know seen evidence um [Music] in the literature on the way in which there are unintended consequences you know for expanding the the nature and scope of of welfare in the 60s and 70s and then since then as well and even today what we see is that oftentimes particularly working-class families with kids will face a real penalty between about 10 and 30 percent of their income so i was talking to a couple for instance a white couple in in virginia recently and they've got two beautiful young daughters he's working as an i.t tech his wife's a stay at home his partner's a state-owned mother and as i was talking to them it came out that they weren't married and i was asking him about that he said we actually had sat down at the kitchen table and we kind of calculated how our medicaid coverage for the mother of the kids and the two kids would have been affected by getting married and they calculated they would have lost you know coverage through medicaid for her health care and he didn't have a family plan at work so this is just kind of one example of how there are these programs that unintentionally end up you know penalizing in this case marriage or other kinds of virtues as well so that's part of story was course discussed at greater detail last night but i think it's also sort of important to acknowledge that since the 60s and 70s we've seen you know dramatic retreat from marriage across much of the population for instance and in ways that cannot be attributed just to the welfare state so we have to think too about how changes in the economy you know and also changes in our culture have ended up making you know marriage even life a less sort of compelling way of life a less important way of life for for many americans so the state is not the only actor in in kind of what's playing out right now in in the culture and i i just would rear it the state is a big player in it and it goes can go either way and you're absolutely right that you know there's there was a time when we made some reforms and we got it i think right but the vast history of the use of the state in these in these communities is not positive because it was afraid to inculcate and promote values about work and it decided partly because it's easier you know it's a lot easier to just send somebody a check saying you know but uh the fact of the matter is is so i think you're right and and while i'm talking about way to be done properly the fact is the history of it is it's mostly been done in a harmful way in my judgment because it's promoted dependency on government as opposed to independence for the family and the individual i'd like to to also add something related to academic institutions and this is something professor lowry mentioned in some of his talks earlier and you know we've all been talking about how black people have progressed over the the decades and centuries in terms of uh playing you know an equal role in american life and how we are perceived as a freed contributing people but there are things happening that are undermining that and let me give just a few examples universities now are starting the trend of getting rid of their s.a.t requirements uh they will say that well you know we want to look at more holistic assessment methods blah blah blah blah blah blah just let them talk and eventually they will say blacks because we need more blacks so get rid of the s.a.t get rid of the a.c.t because we need more blacks go to schools there's one school out in oregon that had a graduation requirement that basically said in order to graduate from this high school you have to show certain essential skills they recently turned around and and got rid of that their rationale for that was real flowery you know but let them talk and eventually they'll say because of blacks many schools over the count over across the nation are getting rid of their advanced placement courses and honors courses because they say that it doesn't promote equity there's too many black students that are not participating in those courses so instead of upgrading the skills of black students let's get rid of them and parents are going nuts again because of blacks so what we're seeing is the the progressive story is oh we are we are being more fair and inclusive by get getting rid of these objective uh entrance requirements but what most other people black and white parents are seeing is that black the mere presence of black people are destroying these kinds of standards and you want to tell me that that's progress so these are some of the things that are encouraging an attitude i fear among black students that well we really don't have to meet standards because things will be given to us without our having to earn them and to me that's immoral and so those those well-intentioned uh programs actually undermine create the sort of uh disincentives i i remember seeing some footage in the late 1970s of a of a welfare a social worker uh ex essentially explain explaining to this woman that she said oh you don't actually need a man yeah you don't you don't you don't need a husband you don't really need one you have us and there's footage of this it's grainy footage from the 70s but she's explaining you don't you don't you don't sort of need need that and it creates this incidence for education just disincentives or family formation in many cases disincentives you know remember early on in the programs if you save money they kick you off right and so and so these are the sorts of of habits and cultural norms and things like that that that contribute to people escaping poverty and when when government comes in as a as a way of saying we're your friend to help you do this and the very programs undermine that it creates those sorts of tensions and you're exactly right in education it's going to foster this sense of resentment but also this this sense of of well i don't want to do any work right which undermines their education as well you know all of this is uh has to do with messages and that's one of the great things about this conference is we've gathered and assembled wonderful people eloquent people thoughtful people and they're communicating messages that aren't heard about from our media and from our prevailing heights of our culture and so i've been talking about you know how to operate a welfare office but there's also the bully pulpit of leadership and media and i think there's a tremendous opportunity to send these messages that send a different message about responsibility and opportunity in about our country that can get get through to communities that have lost touch with those values and i really feel like one of the great things about this conference but it can't just stop here it's got to keep going that everything everything a leader does whether it's changing the standards or communicating about the importance of of marriage um is heard and listened to and we just have to i mean this is why it's so inspiring um is is we just have to keep having the courage to say these things in a way that's heard because first of all they will help the people we're trying to help but more importantly they're correct and and they're being overwhelmed by a different message uh and so i i ian always wants me to remind everybody about you know we were big in public messaging in new york city and we did a campaign on the success sequence and we did a campaign on the importance of two parents and children's lives and proper decision making and we got a lot of blowback people said well what do you mean you might be embarrassing and so we went to the local low income communities and talked to young people and the messages were very strong they had babies in them and there were strong messages about responsibility and we asked the young people from these communities did you see those ads on the subways and they said oh yes we saw them apparently people very rarely remember an ad but they remembered these so that was that was good for the advertising crew and then they we said well what did you think and they said well they're true that's correct we know that we know that well from our own communities and our own families and so there wasn't this this embarrassment or this blowback there was an acknowledgement and again if you have the courage to say it and to say it in communities where it's not being said i think there's greater recep there will be more positive reception of it than we realize and that's what i want aei and others in this world of sort of communicating to be part of in the coming in the coming years just to kind of pick up on on robert's point i think one of our challenges is that we are living in a world where our elites talk left yeah and walk right you know a variety of fronts from you know how they handle schooling to how they handle you know marriage and family life but i think part of the challenge is how do we get our elites to publicly articulate the virtues and the values that they're they're following on lives we did a report with ai recently for instance um looking at kind of california trends and was striking was that there were like three neighborhoods in the center of hollywood that had virtually no single parent families you know and so these are kind of wealthy folks living in hollywood living the dream living probably neo-traditional family lives and yet they're probably involved with projects that are kind of conveying a very different message to broader publics i think one of the challenges going forward is how do we get you know our university presidents our school superintendents you know hollywood showrunners you know the whole nine yards new york times writers to actually articulate you know the virtues they themselves have followed virtues they themselves expect of their own children for you know the the you know for the broader population kind of recognizing that sort of culture is a structure as well and if you want the best for ordinary americans working class and poor americans you'd again give them not just these economic structures that are supported but also these cultural structures that will help support them in making better choices in life everything to add to that in terms of what we can do to better communicate these values and norms as well i i love to have an answer to that but but i don't but there are complexities in this that i i would just want us to appreciate and and and chew on and these make me hang my head because i'm guilty of some of these things um have any of you here ever watched uh those reality shows um hip-hop atlanta atlanta hip-hop or the basketball wives of whatever okay yes okay and and what throws a monkey wrench into this is that these are generally wealthy people you know these are rappers that are making millions these are hip-hop artists tattoo people whatever but i look at five minutes of that and i just want to throw up i mean their values are reprehensible to me yet they are rich so is this a black thing or is it a class thing or what but but these are values that that i you know i don't agree with now at the same time and i'll be honest with this um most people here are familiar with the comedians chris rock steve harvey bernie mac airy spears you know these are popular entertainers and and each one of them have a routine uh this is how white people do this and this is how black people do this now now i will laugh at that i mean it it'll strike me as hahaha and i will but then i step back and and think is this something i should be laughing at or is this something that we should work to change but but there's an element of truth there that i respond to now if you gave me a microphone and said what you know what are the cultural differences between blacks and whites you know i i wouldn't know what to say but i would laugh at these comedy routines because i see an element of truth so so that creates a tension in us as to you know can i say this is good bad or or is this something you know we should just accept um in in the academic world there there's a lot of nonsense and i'll kind of share a little bit what i see particularly in psychology and multicultural education among black progressives there's this idea that there's an african way of doing things and there's a european way of doing things and they have all of these comparing contrasts and it sounds but it's nonsense this is nonsense on the other side on the right side i've i in you know gathering data for this there are a lot of white advocacy sites who don't have black people's best interests in mind but they will invite their readers to submit data on what they've experienced interacting with black people and i'll read some of this stuff and while one part of my brain says this is terrible another part of my brain and i'm kind of ashamed of says i've witnessed this stuff so there are white advocacy organizations that talk about this all of the time if if whites write about this they will tend to write under a pseudonym and so i i can name you a lot of books and you know one one author paul kersey i think is he's written a lot of books on black crime uh black misbehavior in schools but he has to write under a pseudonym because if people discovered who he really was he would be he would be harassed but he writes this stuff and he has data after data after data that journals will not publish because they're afraid of the backlash of we're identifying uh black suspects doing x y and z but he'll write about it in detail and i read the stuff and i just have to say well that's you know there's there's truth here so all of these things are happening and then finally there are academic studies that have actually uh construct a laboratory experiment and then i'll have black kids and white kids and they'll see differences in one one experiment for example the experimenter will call a black child in and he'll have two candy bars one's a short candy bar the other is a long candy bar and i'll ask the child you can have this short candy bar now or you could wait an hour and get the long candy bar and he saw racial differences there more of the white kids were willing to wait an hour to get the larger candy bar a huge majority of the black kids wanted to take the short candy bar now they weren't allowed to wait so like that's where you have a lot of this this data and again the the challenge for us is do we agree that these differences are real and if so do we want to put a judgment on them and if so do is our job to try to convince our brothers and sisters that this needs to change and that's the challenge for us great we'll take we'll take questions next so feel free to i just wanted to jump in there a little bit i i think it's important to just sort of to make two points um in conversation with you uh one of course in terms of talking about racial differences that you mentioned the sort of ten commandments example it's also important to acknowledge that actually african-americans do attend church you know more than whites and hispanics and asians so if you sort of take the you know the importance of you know giving god his due that would be kind of run against you know your point uh there and in terms of the um the other points you're making i mean it's important just to acknowledge that um when you look at a lot of these issues you know class is a is a major vector here um and a lot of concerns we've been talking about over the course of the last two days are being manifested in important and powerful ways among working class and poor americans who are who are white for instance um so we can't kind of lose sight of of that class dynamic in this conversation um and i guess also just mentioned too that when it comes to sort of looking at the intersection between race and family what we see is that african-americans who are growing up in intact families you know attend college and graduate from college more than whites growing up in single parent families are less likely to be suspended in school than whites and single-parent families you know are less likely to be poor than whites and singaporeans so there's there's a way in which we can't lose sight of the fact that that family structure is an important kind of uh variable in all of this and that once you kind of address that family issue a lot of these racial differences become you know much more minimized and so if we were living in a moment you know like in 1940 for instance when there weren't big racial differences in american family life a lot of the issues that now are you know occupying our attention and and rightly so um might not be so you know so important yeah i think i think you know one one thing that i've done in terms of the messaging is to actually talk to people on the ground in the community right i think uh conservatives often live in the world of ideas from messaging but we don't actually get involved and love people touch them hug them talk to them we need to do more of that had a kid in harlem had a kid in harlem who who's we're walking we're walking and i and i he there was a uh a young girl she had a she had a baby and i said hey you you want to get married first before you have a child and he said is that a thing i was like yes that is a thing marriage then child he was like oh okay right and so i i think i think that's that's part of it as well is is getting involved people on the ground let's take a few questions yes sir here in the green shirt just ask robert who's worked in new york was unbelievable i mean i've toured the offices with him they were amazing and the staff loved him too great leader they don't at ai i'm kidding but i'm wondering in addition to the messaging how many does it matter charles murray made his name with losing ground by talking about the the ins disincentives the incentive to go on welfare and compared that to the income you would earn working how important is it to continue to tweak programs brad referred to the what the economists call the notch effects of medicaid in his example i in my own my own hobby horse which is housing policy the average tenure in new york city public housing which is of which blacks are the largest group 20 years yeah there's no time limit on public housing right earned income tax credit i know are there other tweaks like that that in addition to this to the messaging we really should be still looking at well yes i think there are but i always think that the number one and prerogative has to be that work always has to be better than non-work that's the key incentive that their income level will be higher and you can make that possible not only by from pushing and encouraging people to get into employment through the way you run the program but also by rewarding work and by having those wages be topped up by various forms of work supports which could include housing but you can't allow them to be available absent the work in my opinion that's the key thing it's fair to say that it's it's it's you don't necessarily can escape from poverty by work alone for some families in some circumstances but you can't escape poverty from assistance alone it's the combination of both that can work and the way to tweak them is to make sure that the the incentive is always more work leads to greater income not less income so i would say that's one and the other is to just constantly be saying that that's part of the game we're not gonna we're not gonna converse with you we're not gonna engage with you on your situation unless uh you're also willing to make an effort to get into the labor force uh so going to your point and i've worked in local government for almost 15 years um and one of the observations i make is that the government is an unfaithful husband and an absent father because it just has too many households to support yeah um so but but i have a question about and i love the fact that professor frisbee talked about morality yeah um i think we're losing the ability to talk about issues big issues and moral terms and i'll give a personal example i don't do this often because i've talked to some people let them know i work for local government in washington dc um but that's not why i'm here and i don't talk about it publicly because i like to keep my job but i'm gonna i'm gonna do that here because we're all among family um right now in d.c and a lot of the cities they're dealing with gun violence and their responses are based on the notion that not that shooting a person is wrong it's that if this person had all of their material needs met they wouldn't shoot a person and at the same time me as a as a civil servant i get a notice from dc from hr saying you must take our shot for this particular virus if you don't you'll get fired so we we give jobs to the shooters and we fire civil servants who don't take our shot and i wonder if conservatives realize that the political response to covet has given us an opportunity to speak in moral terms because that's what's been done for the last two years if you don't take this medicine you're a bad person you're going to kill your grandmother and you're going to kill your kids but i think we should be able to say you know what if the left is going to moralize which they do white people if you don't say black lives matter you're racist you're a bad person from every level of government from every cultural institution from every sports league i'm wondering do conservatives realize that we have this opportunity and will we have the courage to take this opportunity without feeling like we're going to step on people's toes or offend people because obviously the other side has no problem doing that to us any any response anyone that's mine yeah i mean i think it is the case that you know times are changing and we're seeing you know a new movement in the republican party um that's willing to articulate issues the way that you just did and including down in florida so i think it's time for republicans to be more forthright in articulating the importance of these values and not backing down because they're correct on these issues and by not talking about these issues we are keeping a whole class of people back from realizing their best lives and living the american dream as well yeah great yes sir so i was glad you brought up the ninth commandment but i want to broaden it uh i'm firmly convinced that the whole country is drowning in a sea of lies right left and center and i'm also convicted that one of the problems is the people who are in the same right and the people who are in the same left refuse to stand up and call people out for lying if they happen to be on their side and so i would like to hear if uh people agree with me that one of the things whether you happen to be right of center or left of center here one of the things that we could all do is to be more brave and stand up in public and say that the people that you know belong to our party or our group are lying um because i i don't know if it's facebook or social media or the decline of american society but i think we're just drowning in it crazy nutty stuff on campus crazy nutty stuff about conspiracy theories and people don't seem to have the courage to talk about people in their own party or their own group and say you're lying um i'd like to address that on on behalf of the manhattan institute the hoover institution and aei that's one of the benefits of of organizations like that is because we are removed from the partisan fray to a large extent we provide our scholars independence and the resources to be independent and to be brave and i think to a large extent a really large extent we have been a place of where truth exists and where a willingness to call out uh you know the people that are lying and i don't disagree with you that there's a lot of misinformation in the public dialogue but in all three of these institutions and in the people here we have a people that are willing to call them out but i i i and that's i just i have to give that little advertisement for our think tanks because if they weren't there what would be there our universities are not stepping up um so i think that's a reason why uh ryhan and kandy and the people at ai need to be looked to and we need to play a bigger role and a more aggressive role in these discussions because we have the freedom and i think we have the the credentials academically and we should have the courage any questions from over here yes sir perhaps a point of fact a claim was made at the very beginning i think by you craig about at the very top level that there being these absolutes that we all share in common and at the lowest level another absolute is that we're all very distinct in the middle there you suggested that there were these sort of subgroup similarities that were kind of undeniable um i'm pretty confident that there is no characteristic that is universal to all people in in terms of the way that we practice race anyways of all people who are black beyond the fact that they consider themselves black that is exclusive to black people and i i do think that that maintaining some precision when we're talking about race is incredibly important i think that it we often run into this problem where we uh we presume the the sort of value and the efficacy of race as a mecha as a method a mechanism for evaluating things um when it perhaps isn't the best mechanism the the the questions that you posited but didn't answer earlier were when it comes to murderers like what group has the sort of highest rate of murder well that would be murderers what group has the highest rate of theft well that would be that would be thieves and to the extent that's true i think that there is actually far more in common between murderers of any particular race amongst murderers than there are amongst people of these different racial groups and to the extent all of these things are true then it kind of it begins to beg a different set of questions that i think we've been wrestling with here whether or not people who are definitely concerned with addressing disparity with not disparities but actual deficiencies in our culture um actual deprivation in people's lives ought to be fundamentally concerned about addressing themselves to differences and disparities um and to the extent we shouldn't be yeah even if other people are maybe there's an opportunity for us to to shift the ground underneath everyone's feet and have a more sophisticated conversation about these issues well the way that i would answer you would actually agree with a lot of the things that that you said and let me take what i said before uh really quick because we're out of time okay about sub group differences the point there was that all of us belong to a variety of subgroups at the same time so as we travel through life circumstances whatever that subgroup characteristic of me is that will come out stronger in some situations but in other situations another subgroup characteristic will come out stronger so like for example in this particular forum obviously our you know among the the african americans here we're we're talking about black issues and that comes out but then if i was in another situation uh with gender issues my my maleness would would come out or or my age characteristics would come out so we all have different characteristics that come out at different times we don't act on our blackness at every single situation we encounter and that's what what what makes us complex the other issue i wanted to say about murderers you're absolutely right you know research on criminals basically you know but by some of the best researchers comes to the conclusion that among all groups racial and ethnic there there is a specific group that have criminal thinking patterns and it's not correlated with with with race criminals think a certain way and you could find a criminal thinking pattern in this group and this group and this group so you're absolutely right there is a specific class of people called criminals they they are multicultural what makes them different is that they have weird thinking patterns about how they prey on societies and and and we can't conclude that because blacks may be poor or whatever they would have more criminals no criminals think like criminals they commit crimes because they like to commit crimes and that's across every particular group so so we can't stereotype and say that only criminals are in this group and if you're fluent or rich you wouldn't have as much criminal criminals among all type of of racial and ethnic groups join me and thank you mr panel i'll just grab this conversation thank you so much excellent thank you so much yeah

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 7,037

Keywords: AEI, American Enterprise Institute, politics, news, education, old parkland, old parkland conference, civil rights, nuclear family

Id: 9bR2Lf0GGEU

Length: 64min 38sec (3878 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022