Racism: Getting to the Truth | Coleman Hughes | POLITICS | Rubin Report

joining me today is a writer and columnist at Colette magazine as well as a philosophy major at Columbia University call me news welcome to the Rubin report thanks for having me on dude I had to change my shirt because your shirt looked so pressed and starched and professional sigh Ronnie cuz I normally dress like a complete slob we're the same black hoodie every single day yeah but I thought Reuben report you have to bring a game let's do it I should have worn a tie but here we are alright there's a lot of reasons that I want to talk to you you were sort of I think put on put on my map and put on sort of the the IDW map and the map of all of the people that that care about the issues that we talk about here about what was about five or six months ago something like that something like that your piece I want to get the exact title right was the high price of stale grievances and that was in kulit and you know I just had Clara on the show last week so we're gonna talk about a lot of things you've been writing that I want to talk a little bit about what it's like to be a student at at a university these days especially one that leans pretty far left and all sorts of stuff first just tell me a little bit about yourself where you're from how you grew up well that kind of stuff from Montclair New Jersey just 30 minutes outside New York City nice suburb you know I had a pretty typical middle upper middle class upbringing and great parents and out of out of high school I I was going to a music school actually I was dead set on being a jazz musician and I still played Josh trombone nice but along the line I ended up shifting paths and going into philosophy and enrolling at Columbia where I have two more years how do you go from jazz to philosophy there's probably some through-line there right I don't know that there is honestly I think I think I just loved both of them and realized at a certain point that just going to school for music was limiting so yeah yeah so you said middle class or upper middle class yeah you have did your family have any particular political beliefs where you guys political at home any of that my my mother was nearly a Marxist um she I remember her talking to me about marks and Durkheim when I was three and four years old well she came from the South Bronx immigrant Porto Rican family very very poor in the 70s when the South Bronx was the picture of crime and just decay and she she was very smart woman ended up getting a trying to get an anthropology degree but she passed away of cancer well while she was getting it but no sheshe I was I was exposed to two marks and Durkheim and some other other Marxist thinkers when I was I could have told you their names when I was five years old Wow my dad is bit of a libertarian but I got less of his his he was working much at the time so yeah so that's a real mixed yeah household of politics no did you sort of lean one way or the other yeah I always leaned heavily left if I if I leaned anywhere at all yeah I mean as early you know my the beginning of my political identity was definitely anchored around identity politics and especially black identity politics yeah I was you know 24 it was at 2013-2014 when black lives matter started cropping up I was at that point very much enthusiastic about that movement I was posting on Facebook having seen a police shooting to the effect that this is this is proof that the system is rigged against black people so that that's more or less what I was politically as of maybe five years ago so yeah that was very much in my upbringing it was in the water in my and my social environment and intellectual environment growing up how much of that is part of the whole thing of just being around a certain set of young people that believe a certain thing so that you all sort of believe it together whether it's ultimately true or not yeah I think I think we're social animals and and we're heavily incentivized psychologically to not break ranks with the norms of our social group so if if those norms are that you have to believe in the god vishnu shiva then most people are gonna grow up believing those things and it takes a kind of a rare personality to be a contrarian in that context and if the norms are you have to believe in systemic racism you have to believe that america is a unique evil then people will grow up believing those things and and likewise if the norm is you know a abortion is murder and there is only one God and it's the Christian God and homosexuality is a sin then most people in that context will will end up believing those things so yeah I mean my as far as my upbringing I think I can remember meeting precisely one Republican and he was my fifth grade history teacher and he was such a good history teacher that you know in this public school that it kind of made up for the fact that he was a Republican because all the parents who want their kids to get ahead wanted them in his class right huh so you know there's something there there yeah yes yes but I guess yeah long story short it was very much of an echoed very much an echo chamber very ideologically siloed yeah okay so so far your story I think sounds pretty consistent with a lot of what's going on with with young people how well how old do you know 22 22 okay so you said in 2013 so only about five years ago you're 17 you're sort of in this thing this is the beginning of black lives matter when did you start realizing that perhaps it wasn't as much of a positive as it had sort of been laid out to be well I think it's it's hard to reconstruct one's own narrative after the fact but I remember one thing being significant which was when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson I remember being in my first year of college taking taking a class at Julliard and we were talking about this killing and it was just obvious from the point of view of most in the class including the professor that this was just another in a long line of examples of black men being brutalized in the country that fundamentally does not want them to cease to succeed and I don't know what like what it was it may have been because you know either out of roommate who was from from Arizona from a very different kind of political climate who was skeptical of this and I didn't even know how one could be skeptical of this it was so jarring to meet a person I liked that or many people I liked that were skeptical of the things I took for granted yeah were you guys able to get into it because that's always one of the big problems that people can't do this stuff with their friends anyway yeah well the thing is I think we were such good friends at that point for a political reasons that you know no amount of politics was gonna was gonna destroy that but I think I just spent one night reading the complete testimony from from from Michael Browns friend and from the police officer and I came away thinking well if the police officer is telling the truth then that was a justified shooting if his friend is telling the truth then it was unjustified but I don't know who was telling the truth and no one in my class knew either but everyone had the same opinion so that I mean I remember that being significant I remember remember speaking up about that like when was the moment that you were kind of going right I gotta say something about this I'm not sure I'm not sure that I spoke up about it I'm not sure I would have had the confidence yeah to speak up about it yeah were there are a couple other things after that because I find it to be one of these things that once you see this thing for what it is that then it sort of happens very quickly I think a lot of people that watch this show and acknowledge that because I think it's a lot of former former lefties or whatever you want to call it that kind of see one moment like you just laid out and then they start looking at other things and going wait a minute maybe that's not how it is maybe that person's not racist just because I disagree with them on this or whatever the yeah I guess I could I can point to two other quick moments one was once I once I arrived at Columbia I heard of this guy John McWhorter who I had no reason to believe anything about at the time but I just went I don't know on a whim I went to the library and just searched his name and pick the first book I could find and it was called authentically black and it's a series of essays he wrote in the early 2000s about the fact that it's viewed as authentically black to can constantly point the finger at white people for any given problem in the black community whether or not the evidence bears that out and because it's viewed as authentically black there's this incredible taboo on anyone who thinks differently and I was reading these essays and I remember thinking oh my god this is this is right and I've never heard a black person say this out loud but it's it's obviously right and I didn't know you could say that I remember that that moment being significant but still the I mean these subjects are so hard to talk about I do remember doing at some point doing MDMA and this is where the most people have their break yes I guess this maybe makes the the red pill analogy a little too literal there you go but I do remember I mean because you know I I don't I don't enjoy being the black person at odds with most black people around me are getting accused as I sometimes do of being self-hating or an Uncle Tom like I don't enjoy that that's that's very much a cost of what I'm doing psychologically but I remember remember doing MDMA and I was talking to a black friend of mine about race issues and you know if you've ever done MDMA you know it just puts you in this totally clear headspace where you love everyone around you so much and you love yourself and I remember we were talking about race issues and I was articulating more of the kind of points of view that I articulate now and I felt so silly that I had ever had a hang-up talking about these things in any other context and you know after that I just I felt like like there's no reason I can't try to approximate that more and more often of course it's it's much harder when you're sober but yeah the analogy though or the metaphor of the red pill really has some value here how did that conversation end up I mean an MDMA laced conversation at all I feel like ace all MDMA laced conversations go well yeah I mean something has to be yeah it is I just yeah I think I think if we had more and more enter conversations with a mindset of the person I'm talking to has reasons to believe what they believe and they're coming from a good place then a lot of conversations can go well that said I've had a lot of conversations with people since then that have gone extremely well I sorry extremely poorly yeah and have ended quite bitterly yeah and I want to get to some of that and some of the things that people call you and all that so you have these you know a couple of successive moments of waking up when did you finally start talking about this stuff you know I think I had talked about it here and there with with friends and family but and I had been trying to write about it a bit for the school newspaper and just writing on my own but not publishing over the past year but I think what what what did it was when Kanye tweeted I like the way I love the way Candice Owen thinks mhm when he tweeted that something about that moment was so inspiring to me to see someone who nobody on earth would question their quote blackness because in many ways Kanye is viewed as as the picture of blackness however one cashes out that term - just to see him bring cranks to see him break break the taboo even though he did it in a way that even though he's not an intellectual he said crazy things about slavery that that aren't true and endorse someone who I don't I don't see myself as having very much in common with namely namely Candace just the fact that he was willing to the taboo at all someone of his platform was so inspiring to me that that that's when I started writing for Colette yeah so what was was this the first piece you put out for Claude I think that was the very first it was a very first piece okay so the the title of the piece as I said was high price of steel well yeah this one was different this one was on this one was about Kanye and Candice this was oh right right so thank then this one got more traction the one you're sorry okay so I think this is so I don't think I was you were on my radar from that one although that probably that whole thing the whole Kanye thing just sort of broke in such a crazy way yeah there were so many pieces written okay but so let's back up then so then when you write this piece about Kanye and Candice now you know Candice is a friend of mine yeah she's been on the show I like her she has some tactics that are that are not my thing but that that's her thing and I can disagree with people and all that your basic feeling though this was a net good no matter what are there risks though in you know taking somebody like a Kanye and having that be the moment that wakes up people because you don't know where he's ever gonna go with things or was just the action itself enough I guess time will tell I think it is inconvenient that Kanye I love his music and I've been a fan for a long time but he clearly has some narcissistic elements to his personality he's clearly not someone who deeply researches the subjects that that he sometimes talks about so he kind of took a very blunt sledgehammer to a taboo which I appreciated but there are there are serious downsides to that namely when he says that slavery was slavery was a choice something that ignorant seems to discredit his taking the sledgehammer to the taboo when I do think they're separable in principle I also think when he said you're talking about when he said that on TMZ right yes and his counter-argument to that was that he means that it's it was sort of a mindset yeah I think was his counter right yeah right yeah so just that that soundbite reads so awfully because it seems so uninformed regardless of what his his intent was there that it can it can seem discredit that he did a good thing on the net on net balance yeah and yeah I I also I you know I have reservations about Kent Candace Ellis as well I've seen her reason in ways that I think don't make much sense although I have some points of agreement with her too but like I said I think I think there's a taboo that is incredibly strong right there there are lots of black people who agree with some version of my takes on race and are absolutely mortified to say so because there's this massive taboo yeah and that's also why for again whatever my disagreements are with Candace it's like I see her as someone that's trying so desperately to break something the very thing that you're talking about so it's like if she's using tactics that maybe I wouldn't use or you know tweets in a more hostile way of people or whatever that I wouldn't do it's like I don't know that I I'm the one that should be telling you how to behave in that regard yeah does that make sense to you not so much only because I feel like there are a lot of people who might like what Candace says on race for example so when Candace says you know to go goes to a college and says and sees all of all of these black students reminding her of the history of Jim Crow which they didn't even experience and using that as as a rhetorical weapon and Candace says listen you were born in 1990 right I completely agree with that that is that is a message that needs to be hammered home which is that histories in the past and we have to be getting past history but you know when she says that you're on the Democratic plantation mm-hmm I think that is a kind of exaggeration that is not useful because people with a different set of intellectual priors will just hear that and be immediately closed off to whatever else she says and you know I've also heard her just reason in ways on Joe Rogan for example when he pressed her on climate change kind of appealing to a sort of feeling over facts kind of way of thinking which is actually quite characters of the far-left but she I think she also gets treated unfairly and she gets assumed to be a sellout which i think is is ridiculous ridiculous assumption to make about people in general unless they make it absolutely clear that they are so I've you know she's she's someone I would be happy to talk to at some point but I'm happy to set that up if you'd like to make it happen okay so you write this piece now this is the first public piece that you've written about this stuff did you have any idea what kind of reaction you were in store for no no II threw that moment yeah I think it got retweeted by christina hoff sommers and jordan peterson and sam harris and and some other people and it really really blew up and yeah that was psychologically distressing because you know I'm a normal person so when I go from having 50 Twitter followers to 10,000 and in a week or something like that that is a pretty life deranging moment and it was it was just kind of physical stress a low-level physical stress all day and not sleeping as much but you you get I think you get you'd be surprised what you can get used to so we were you shocked where you were getting defense from and where you were getting outrage from or I assume you expected it at least at some level yeah no I don't think I was shocked by that I mean I knew at this point I knew at this point exactly who would be very pissed off by by my my opinions and at this point I had to resign myself to being it to those people being pissed off at me and no I'm not I mean I'm not surprised that the quote IDW types liked my work because I like a lot of their work so no I guess that wasn't that wasn't so surprising yeah so when you then wrote the piece the high price of state the high price of stale grievances which was also Inquilab you started with a quote from felonious monk that I thought it was was sort of worth diving into here they tried to get me to hate white people but someone would always come along and spoil it there's something about that quote that strikes me as so relevant to what's going on right now that we are not looking at people as individuals and that every time you do you will be pleasantly surprised because most people are not walking around in this state of hate yeah yeah no I think it's striking I mean and I I I'm juxtaposed that quote with another from the New York Times from a New York Times op-ed published last year which argued that black children should be taught to fear white children based on the history of racism in this country and the quote was as against our gauzy national hopes I will teach my boys my black boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people as possible right so that got published in the New York Times in 2017 you know Sarah John got hired having having written incredibly nasty tweets about white people in 2018 by the New York Times right it's it's it's disturbing to me that you can't you can't really find at this point on the left even on the mainstream left just the simple articulation that a person's race does not matter to their moral worthiness to their intellectual worthiness it is it is an irrelevant character you can't find the language of of appeals to colorblind humanity virtually anywhere on the left at this point that that is disturbing to me how shocking is it to you because I think people are still kind of shocked you know I've been banging this drum for quite some time and I think I see people waking up to it now and I'm like man how didn't you see this you know these these last couple years because it's so obvious to me that we've gotten here ya know it is SH I mean III do remember growing up you know in the public school system in my town we would have Martin Luther King Day assemblies is very diverse town maybe twenty-five thirty percent black and sixty percent white and we would we would get the you know that I have a dream style ethic around what it means to be a human and how important rather unimportant one skin color is and it seemed like such a seems like you're such a good argument to me and it is the best argument with regard to people's you know the assumed I guess what I mean to say here is that I've been in spaces at Columbia for example or conversations where my being black it was obvious to me that there was an assumption of of moral worthiness or of a kind of heightened moral knowledge that I would have as a black person that a white person wouldn't have and you know I think I think I'm not the first to make this analogy of course but the religious analogy and the analogy to original sin is pretty apt because it I mean the way though this has a lot to do with black history also because the way I oh the way I see it they're kind of two ways to study history there's the conventional way which is you know you study World War one you study the causes and consequences read different takes on on on the significance and once you've studied all you need to know you move on to the next topic but then there's a religious way of studying history which is I mean it's not enough to know the facts we have to go somewhere on Sunday and you know every single week and learn talk about the same stories over and over again so this is you know it's it's the difference between how an atheist learns about the life of Jesus and how a Christian learns about the life of Jesus and relearn's at every week for the rest of their life in my view how we're looking at the history of race relations in this country the history of racism we are more and more putting it in the religious category of history where you know I can read a piece about the history of lynching in the new york times almost you know once every two or three months right well I mean lynching is a decade's old crime at this point and Abhiyan sheezus right obviously it was a Hey stain on this country's legacy you know but then the number of deaths that that is is the highest amount quoted in New York Times with regard to how many black people were lynched in this country is around four thousand right every single year twice that many black people die of homicide and I you just don't even hear about that in the New York Times so what do you make of the fact then so this is something that like a Sean Hannity will talk about he'll say that exact and now if you say and then people say that somehow that makes him racist because he's focusing on black on black crime or something like that so how do we have that conversation then because I think partly what's happening is the outrage you know someone mentions it he happens to be someone obviously on the right I don't know what his intentions are I don't know the guy but he yeah he's at least talking about it what I just said people aren't talking about yes but then pays a heavy price to talk about it that then has the chill effect that it's like people are like alright I'm not going to talk about it so we can look at the crime statistics in Chicago every week and you you should care about these statistics where the people are white or black or whatever but people are just like I don't want to touch it because yeah I don't want these labels yeah it is it is decidedly I mean this is one of the reasons why you know I'm I don't see myself as a natural ally to Candice Owens for example because there's so many other things that she says that you know that I don't agree with and I guess it's the Sean Hannity problem too because if you can't criticize a Sean Hannity or a Candice Owens for all of the things that that they're saying that are unjustified by the evidence mmm-hmm you know it's Candice Candace's case it might be climate change or or whatever it is for Sean Hannity could could be other things then I guess you just have to be able to make these subtle distinctions but at the end of the day homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men aged 15 to 34 according to the CDC it is not the leading cause of homicide for any other race or age group can we talk about that that I mean is it the case that we're we're so close to white people turning the hoses on us again to the Sean Hannity's and and they're supposedly deplorable you know followers that that were just so the threat of white supremacy is so ever-present of resurgent white supremacy that we can't talk about the leading cause of death among young black men that that that is not sustainable I mean the the fundamental problem I see with how the left in general thinks about race is that the concerns about race and racism are totally unattached to the degree to which black people are suffering on any given issue right so we're talking about the leading cause of death for young black men and I I never read about this in the New York Times mm-hmm and I and I know that I won't write so this is this is a problem that is central it is it is bigger than the problem of police violence it is bigger than you know then the problem of microaggressions it is bigger than the problems of systemic bias and yet there is there's virtually no concern for this on the left because the the way I see many progressives think about race issues is a perpetrator side concern which is if the perpetrators of the problem are white that it's worth talking about if the perpetrators of the problem happened to be black and it's not we're talking about the problem with that is that it's untethered to any concern for the level of suffering on this side on the victim side do you think it's a fair estimation to say this is the new racism in a weird way like it's it's almost uncomfortable to say it but I had an educator in the UK here in the summer Catherine verbal saying and that's basically what she said that these people are now the racists that the racist ideas of the day are actually coming out of the left now I don't want to use the same tactics right I don't want to sit here and be like they're all racism blah blah blah cos we know that that doesn't really get us anyway the general idea of that do you think that that's a fair way to frame things I I wouldn't frame it I mean the way I would frame it is that there is a kind of racism on the left and it's the kind of racism where the New York Times hires a writer who says that who celebrates the idea that white people stop breeding right and doesn't apologize for it yeah no concern with how that how that's going to translate to you know white people in this country who have vastly less privileged than you know the tech writer at the New York Times and what about that statement that they issued defending her yeah you saw that where it said something about the hate she gets as a young asian woman it's like what that that's now yeah that you can that you get to be racist because you've gotten trolled online right well you know I mean that so coming back to the question that is that that is I'm happy to call that a kind of racism for sure it's the only reason I would say there I wouldn't go as far as to say they are the new racist is because they are still racist on the other side and I fully expect there to always be some amount of races in society and some amount of racist incidents like the way this is another problem with the way many on the Left think about race is that they tend to view the problem of racism kind of like we view the problem with smallpox which is to say something that can be fully eradicated down to the very last person who has it and then we can put a date on the time when smallpox isn't no longer a problem forever whereas I and I would argue anyone who's really thinking rationally about this problem should view racism as more more like a problem like murder right like murder in New York City used to be ten times higher than it was today just 20 years ago it was it was absolute carnage so the the rate is it's come down tenfold New York is notoriously safe at this point he's something like 200 murders two or three hundred murders last year right what would it take to get the murder rate down to zero to the point where there was not a single murder in the city you'd probably murder everybody yes but you have to I mean you have to embrace a totally totalitarian yeah vibe from the top it could be done but it would not be worth what it took to get there you'd hit diminishing returns so I view the problem of reducing racism reducing racist incidents against black people as a problem like homicide rather than smallpox which is to say you can certainly reduce it and we have massively but there is a point at which in a country of 350 million there will always be enough people who are racist to justify a certain amount of races incidents and to fight it beyond that endlessly you hit diminishing returns yeah and also that it's depressing and it kind of sucks but people can be racist like privately you can be racist you know you can't discriminate against people and and there's all sorts of reasons that you can't bring that into public life but in your own mind in your own home you can be it I would prefer people not be but that they're trying to eradicate like something that's actually just part of the mind yes you want to you want to educate people enough so that they hopefully won't hold those views but that is the diminishing returns because you're literally going to be in people's houses at that point right yeah I mean yeah it's it's a it's a question of not yeah I guess is a question of what your view of human nature is this comes down to very fundamental pillars of one's political ideology which is do you have a kind of utopian view of human nature where there's nothing tragic about us nothing flawed about us and all of the flaws come from bad ideas in the culture and humans are naturally poised to be just perfectly selfless until we get ruined by society see that that I think there's no reason to believe that at this point right chimpanzees murder mmm-hmm and like we're we're animals in the animal kingdom it's not to say that where our human nature is fundamentally evil either it's it's clearly there's a there's a wide range of potential there but there's no no reason to assume that we're evolved to be not racists or that were evolved to be woke perfectly woke or that it's possible to get to a point where everyone in society has been fully purged of every ounce of evil in their heart I mean that is such a utopian outlook and like I said the the to the extent that you're fixated on that goal to the exclusion of the costs of your fixation once you hit diminishing returns you will be fighting a fight that is a net bad for society all right let's talk about systemic racism or at least the idea of systemic racism so I think you've seen the video of me about two or two and a half years ago with Larry elder and I brought up systemic racism larry elder proceeded to commit a hate crime on me a white man he beat me senseless with statistics yeah and I came to a fight not ready to to fight basically and that was definitely one of my red pill moments so to speak I was not prepared I heard new information I did research after that subsequently I've had many people on this show in many conversations that have led me to more of Larry's original premise so I guess first when you when you saw that moment was that the first time you had ever seen me do anything because that's a little tell me and I'm like oh I don't think it was the first time but I think I mean I don't and envied anyone who's debating Larry elder on anything yes he's pretty devastating it's been kind of refreshing though when you saw this moment where he laid it out yeah you know there was no counter because there is no counter right well yeah he he what he did with you there is he he went through each specific venue in which supposedly there is this big systemic racism problem where the system is rigged in such a way that it doesn't require any individual in the system to be racist in order for the system to spit out racist outcomes that's essentially the idea of systemic racism so he went he went with you through he said just name name a place in society where you think systemic racism exists and he just did basically destroyed each one the specifics of of the case and I'm not gonna do a better job than he did there yeah he's capable of doing but there's a bigger picture way to test the systemic racism hypothesis which is to take two populations where it's it's a very messy crude science experiment but to take two populations where you're holding systemic racism constant namely black Americans like myself and black immigrants especially black immigrants from the West Indies and their children we're talking about immigrants from Jamaica Barbados other places in the West Indies and specifically their children they're american-born children so these are people you could not tell apart from black like you couldn't tell if I didn't tell you that I wasn't the child of a Jamaican immigrant or something right and you find that the thing about these is that these two populations differ in many ways some some some ways are very hard to quantify but they differ culturally they differ for all kinds of reasons because partially because the kind of immigrant who gets out of a Jamaica differs systematically it's going to be disproportionately intelligent disproportionately hardworking whatever the traits are that get you from Jamaica to New York say that's a cluster of attributes that that makes that population differ but there's there's one thing that is not different which is they are subjected to whatever level of systemic racism exists so Thomas ol has done good work on it back in the 70s he showed that second-generation West in the West Indians living in the same city as black Americans were earning 58% more right so they're they're both being treated to whatever degree badly by white people they're whatever this whatever system you want to suppose is holding black people back is equally affecting both of them the Columbia sociologist van tranh has a great essay in which the this this difference is brought out you find neighborhoods of of black Americans right next to Nate hoods of black West Indians in New York they're equally segregated from white people so it gets rid of you know this the idea that being segregated by a cell or living around people who only look like you is inherently a disadvantage it gets around the policing issue because these populations are being polluted the police can't tell the difference between the second generation West Indian end and a black person it gets around whatever level of systemic racism is or isn't in the pipeline with regard to schools and you find wildly different outcomes you find you know rate of high school graduation much higher for black West Indians of rate of enrollment in college much higher you may rate of real professional occupations much higher crime lower right so this suggests to me that there are that the role of systemic racism to whatever degree it exists is is minimal at this point and the the the there's a whole narrative built around the idea that this is the primary obstacle facing black people and it's worth noting I don't I don't think most black people actually believe this because I mean they're there various polls to cite here but there's there's one from Pew that that asked black people without without college education has has race how has your race held you back at all in life 60 percent said no it's a recent Pew poll another Gallup poll asked is bias the main issue facing you in jobs and housing 60% again said no the the Harvard sociologist Ethan Fawcett polling of the black community and found that disconnected black youth which would be a black youth without who aren't in schools and don't have a jobs the people on the lowest rung of society something something around 30 percent of them think the system is rigged and seventy percent don't so what we're getting is we're getting the voices of black people who believe the systemic racism narrative promoted to the to the most powerful media position in our country so we're getting the impression right this is a uniform view and it's not right so this is sort of the Jesse Jackson Sal sharp as they get moved up because they're given sort of simple answers so I guess it harkens the question that I could ask this either way what is it that the West Indian immigrants are doing right or what is it that the other folks are doing wrong yeah yeah I mean you can answer that in either directions on show first well part and part of it is just immigration selection factors that I mentioned right so the the kind of Jamaican or Barbadian who makes it off the island to New York did likely to be disproportionately hard-working disproportionately X for whatever X Factor is and so in that sense the direct comparison can be misleading but just analyzing why these two populations differ you find West Indian immigrants more likely to come from a two-parent home you know more likely to have had a more classically socially conservative upbringing which is you know you don't talk back to your parents parents are rather strict there are downsides of course to that style of parenting but it basically what I'm saying is that there are cultural factors that are important that differ between these two groups right you find if there are many I mean this is this is where the conversation for many people gets especially uncommon yeah right it's the idea that every culture every subculture is identical in the behavioral patterns that are inculcated and wherever there is some wherever there is a disparity in some outcome it's not possible that culture accounts for some or most of that disparity which i think is a very silly idea well completely nonsense yeah yeah cultures are different different people and different groups put different emphasis on certain things so more on family simple more on education simple more on sports or whatever the hell whatever the hell it is so when you hear larry elder make the argument you know something around until 1972 the black family had a higher rate of staying in marriages and then he lays out the reasons that he believes policies of the Democrats destroyed all that that that obviously resonates with you right because you're you're giving me some piece of this both answers I think resonate or went back to family rates of marriage and some sort of conservative ideals right well yeah I mean that that's a very complex people hate when you talk when anyone talks about yes about family people just absolutely hate it it is a fact that black the the rate of two-parent homes and marriages was pretty similar to the white rate until the sixties it is it is a it's a matter of scholarly dispute as to what was the cause that it I think it's certain at this point there was no one cause well first date may have had something to do with it but I think it may have just been changing norms in the culture what because we're seeing the same thing happen in in in the white working-class as well now with the decline of of two-parent homes to a lesser extent than has happened in the black community yes so so I guess what yeah so I mean we could talk about some of the the most important behavioral patterns that are different between black families and white families and Asian families I mean there there are some statistics that I I just I don't see any way in which this could possibly be explained by systemic racism for example one is that if you ask thirteen year olds if they've had their first sexual experience yet you get nine percent of of whites saying yes you get twenty one percent of black people saying yes right so it's more than a two-fold difference there and that has everything to do with family dynamics with with their not being to parents in the home it is a development issue more than it is an issue of treatment by white people right I have another piece in Collette called black American culture and the racial wealth gap where I talk about spending differences and you you you know Nielsen the the marketing firm has done done research on this found that the average black woman is more likely to own a luxury vehicle than the average white woman despite the fact that the average black family has one-tenth the wealth of the average average white family spending patterns on on jewelry and an expensive clothes are very different in the black community whatever you want to say about these from an ethically this is not I mean I'm not but I make an ethical judgment right I mean I'm not finger wagging at people saying do X don't do y I'm saying there are there are entire books written by respected left-wing scholars about issues like wealth or income or that just don't mention a single one of these facts as if it's not relevant right so what's what's the through line then or the connection between all of this and the welfare state because the more that I've explored these ideas the more that I am starting to buy that that almost is the the real problem here that we've given a certain amount and then it's just human nature people don't want to stop being on the dole that has nothing to do with race you could give it to anyone but in this case we happen to be talking about black Americans but I can give you just one simple example which is my sister lives in in Manhattan not that far from you actually and she's in a building that's part subsidized so there's a lot of black people in the building that have been there for generations now that are they're subsidized my sister and her husband two kids they're not rolling in dough they're paying full market price but the people that are in the subsidized housing it's almost impossible for them to leave I don't even blame them because they're paying next to nothing and if they wanted to work more they'd probably and then get off the subsidy the subsidies they probably have to leave the building in the first place I think go live somewhere worse so we end up with this horrific catch-22 that again I don't believe I don't put this on race it just seems to be affecting people of a certain race more yes I think I mean I think it's clear that there was a point in in in the late 60s and 70s where the welfare state was clearly incentivizing counterproductive behavior disproportionately among black people I mean the yeah I I don't I think we need a welfare state I think there's there's really no free market there's no capitalist economy in the world that doesn't have one because they're just and and you know people's jobs are being taken by automation and that's only going in one direction and we clearly need a welfare state and we need one that doesn't incentivize you know counterproductive behavior and we haven't always had that and when you say welfare say you mean some sort of social safety net that's what I got yes okay because I think people would you say welfare state I think people have a different sort of connotation frapps yeah I mean it's social I mean something that catches people who can't really can't help themselves who can't trade their skills for money in the market yeah yeah I'm with you so so then how do we untether the issue of people that are now stuck in that machine where every time you talk about it you're called a racist no I mean this is it is extremely precious because I think it's clear that the welfare state the way it was rolled out in the 60s and 70s had bad effects for black people right it's it's it's hard to fully explain the decline in two-parent homes without noticing that a black mother in the early 70s stood to lose money by getting married to a guy right because of the perverse incentives of the welfare state that said it's not just because the welfare state was one of the causes of the decline of the black family doesn't imply that taking it away would repair it so I think I think that is something like charles murray for example groped the big book in the 80s that made him big losing ground which criticized the welfare state very much along these grounds but i think even he has acknowledged that at this point removing it once you set it all into motion it's not obvious that removing it is a cure which is which is tragic but true yeah it's it's a real tragedy because then it's like I mean this is where you would definitely have a difference of opinion with Candace where her argument is rip the band-aid rip the band-aid let the pieces fall where they may I don't know what her policy is on then helping like the poorest of the poor never like are you literally gonna be kicking people out of their houses right I don't know what the answer to that is yeah but I think there's there's a growing feeling I think at least a certain set of people that it's not working you're acknowledging why it's not working and these little band-aid fixes seemingly only make it worse yeah it's I think it's a very complex issue because there there are some there are some elements of the social safety net that I think economists agree are working like the Earned Income Tax Credit which actually incentivizes you to work it helps the worst off people in society without it basically corrects the the massive mistake of welfare in the Lyndon Johnson era but ya know it's it's a complex issue yeah I'm sure so I hate to talk about race this whole time it's like kind of annoying I know it's what you mostly write about what what else is kind of on your mind like what are the other issues that you care about I mean we can keep going on that but I always feel like it's like it's that's also a sort of tragedy of all of this it's like your whole worldview is to move past all this yes and yet because of that you get thrust into the conversation it's a weird weird psychological condition I suppose yes it is does that just drive you crazy in general yeah I mean I don't before we move on the race is not something I find inherently interesting yeah I think it is like when I have when I have a free moment to to read a book I'm not ordering the race book because but but at the same time it is a topic that's loomed so large in our politics and so much of what is said makes so little sense that I it it just gets to me so I have to say something but it's not something I enjoy I mean what I really enjoy is philosophy and science so so when I have free moments I tend to read things and those in those genres yeah well you're working for the right lady Claire oh yeah collect yeah that's what she cares about too so actually we can shift a little bit so you attended an event that there's an IDW group in New York put together it was put together in like two or three days it was me and Eric Weinstein and Faisel Matar and melissa chen and we're just kind of doing like IDW 101 stuff and you you asked me an interesting question during the Q&A so i'll let you present the question and then i want to hear your answer actually before i repeat my answer yeah so my question was essentially there are a lot of people who really don't like the intellectual darkweb I think it's just a bunch of cranks who are you know playing footsie with the alt-right in this objectionable way and totally dismiss the whole thing but then there there are there are many other people who think well you know I I like I like half of the people in the in the intellectual dark web you know I don't maybe like the other half but I think it's they have you know kind of knew wants to take on it but they're really what where one loses them is the fact that you know you've had Stefan Mullen no I don't know Molyneux right so this is this character that people view as objectionable to whatever degree I don't know I don't follow him so I don't know whether they should or shouldn't view him that way yeah but you know or sam harris has had charles murray on the podcast which you know many he just has a terrible reputation on the left largely undeserved yeah or Joe Rogan had Alex Jones oh we can do endless infinitum yeah and it seems like that is is the last place where people who might otherwise see this phenomenon as good get off the ship yeah or I've had I think I've had conversations with people where that was kind of the last trench to die in in terms of criticizing the phenomenon so my question was what do you like what do you think about this do you think I mean this is also a criticism that Barry Weiss raised in her and her piece about it so I mean I guess my answer to that would be I'm I mean well do you know this guy Darrell Davis he's a black guy who did a documentary coat remember the name of it where he met with the white super he met with Ku Klux Klan members yeah as a black person yeah and just hung out with them talk to them about various issues became friends with them right so imagine the psychological courage this takes to sit across from someone who literally thinks you are an inferior kind of human being and to put that aside and just expand your circle of empathy to include them preemptively incredibly inspirational so and he ends up getting over 200 Ku Klux Klan members to renounce their membership and he keeps their robes in his closet as a kind of trophy of having D radicalized them okay and then he gets harshly criticized from blacks black lives matter for having having done this which is which I found I find to be the most galling irony in the world because we're talking about a person who has done more to reduce racism in this society than almost anyone I could name in black lives matter right he is he has gone like you know many many progressive activists they attempt to go to the spaces that are actually the most progressive already and try to make them even more progressive so they show up on the University campuses already the most progressive places on planet Earth and then accused them of being systemically racist right so we're talking about a guy who actually went into the trenches yeah he was a belly of the beast exactly and was successful in D radicalizing people from white racism the point the point I'm making here is not not to compare obviously charles Murray or Stephon to to a Ku Klux Klan member my point is we ought to be expanding the range of people we're willing to talk to and disagree with and I think that insofar as you're able to challenge people or just expose expose people's ideas I think that in the long run as uncomfortable as it is and counterintuitive as it is tends to tends to be better yeah so I'll just repeat it quickly but that in essence that last portion especially really was my answer now first off some of us Rogan me and Sam particularly we interview people so we can't say we're for you know plurality of ideas and we want to talk to people we disagree with and all that and then only talk to people we agree with so that means we are going to talk to some of these characters without getting into any of the specifics of the people that I've had on the show of course sometimes somebody you may not ask the right question here or there I'm not even I'm not even saying that that's what I did or didn't do but you have like otherwise we're not taking any risks and the group of people that we'll talk to will become infinitely smaller and smaller and smaller and also we'll be sort of will be hostages to people that don't like us in the first place and that's what I'm more concerned about it's like I don't want people who don't want any conversation to be happening at all to have ownership over who I'm going to talk to yeah now on any specific moment could any of us do something a little bit differently sure but in essence yeah you're asking about the gatekeeping that that Barry was talking about yeah I don't even know that it's it's for me to say and as I said before you know we don't even have it's not like we're walking around with laminated cards and we go to a secret meeting so I'm right but I think the best sunlights the best disinfectant I just I just fundamentally believe that and as far as I know no one was hurt by any of the interviews that I've done and I think I've I've helped a lot of people that were maybe into some of those ideas you know that was the one that people were giving me a lot of it that's the dance that Darrell Davis phenomenon yeah yeah so yeah nobody's lost I mean that's what I really believe and maybe that's a little rose-colored glasses of me but I believe that you know when when people were giving me crap for doing Alex Jones it's like forget what he thinks about things for a moment clearly hundreds of thousands or millions of people are watching this I came on on a live show I said whatever I believe I didn't lie about anything I said the same things I say here and then I got emails from his people saying you know I never heard a decent liberal talk before now I watched your interview with Brett Weinstein it's like wow that's pretty cool man so I just think perhaps we and I mean you and I in this case we just have a little bit more tolerance for I don't think if someone hears something it's going to immediately infect them and then they're gonna take that infection and infect other people but I think a lot of people operate in that prison I think so I mean one of the reasons I asked this question at the event is I was glad you did by them yeah yeah it's because for example Charles Murray has retweeted some of my pieces and you know I've gotten into exchanges with some of my critics where I've I've kind of talked them down off of the ledge of me being a sellout or you know convinced them that I'm I'm operating in good faith and the trench they're dying and criticizing me is well Charles Marie retweeted you and he is XY and Z therefore I I think a that's just that's like two layers of ad hominem yeah ad hominem is attacking you instead of your belief but attacking someone else instead of your yeah that's a bit much yeah it's ad hominem twice over but we seem to be in this in this place now where people like lists you know the SPLC is making lists of people that are bad people you know there was this alternative influencer graph that you probably saw that I tried to link together I didn't even know probably 10 or 15 of the people on there and I don't you know and I looked at the list after where there including me in this like crazy whatever it was white supremacist Lester saying not only did I not know plenty of the people several of them I have muted because they hate me so it's like like you just come together with anyone that has walked past you oh you shook hands with that guy you didn't know he was too bad you're you're screwed man yeah that's it no I think I think I was telling this to you before we film but I think we live in a McCarthy estera with regard to especially racism but also other other isms I mean I hope historians look back on it as that but you know we're getting we're getting people fired for you know for saying the n-word in an anti-racist context you know Papa John's for example yeah the CEO of that got fired for saying the n-word and there was no pushback on that the guy said it in the context of an anti-racist raises like recalling his the racist of his youth and the heinous things they would say yeah right and it gets fired it gets his name taken off the gym of his local hometown just gets his reputation deep sixed and right so like this is happening it happened a month later to to this executive at netflix who's in a meeting about offensive words in Netflix's comedy context so how do you have a meeting about offensive words without saying offensive words unless you're just gonna be talking like alphabets so he says this fired so these are no nobody upon reflection thinks that these people are racists it is completely it is it is analogous to McCarthyism in that sense and the word racism has been denuded so fully of of its of its moral valence and its moral charge at this point that you know people you know we're caring less and less about actual racism - that's a fear here right once you once you strip this word of all this all its moral charge then you have a boy who cried wolf scenario which ends up backfiring spectacularly and I would argue that that is happening we're seeing a surge on the on the far right as well all right so I think that that was also my concern I mean before the election I did plenty of videos about you got a stop calling Trump Hitler yeah because if he is not Hitler and for all the reasons that people don't like them the guy's not Hitler and it's like you keep doing that you won't even realize when the real bad guys go and the people that would be sympathetic to your views will no longer listen to you because they'll view you as the boy who cried wolf yeah and Bill Maher Bill Maher called himself out for doing this for calling Bush and Romney racists or well whatever it was right he said that Romney hated women yes yes and he called himself out for being hyperbolic so that when when trunk trump came along who actually has done clearly MIT has said clearly misogynist things is alleged to have said some things that if he did say them are clearly racist yeah people don't care anymore because they've been so sullied you know they've been called racist a thousand times by the pundits at MSNBC and it's it's been true maybe ten percent of the times but not true like for the funniest case of this to me was one when Trump called Omarosa a dog right and watched you turn on NBC MSNBC after this or read the New York Times it is just obvious to those people that this is a racist slur he's called this black woman a dog this is obviously racist and if you're defending it you're a racist too okay and then you just if you have an internet connection yeah you look at the other people Trump has directly called the dog you find Mac Miller before he passed away Morris you find David Axelrod you find Adriana Huffington just you find white person after white person that he is directly called the dog not said they did something like a dog because he likes that construction - right but he's called white person after white person a dog there's no reason to believe that this was a racist incident and yet every pundit at MSNBC is saying that it is and anyone who likes Trump and you know watches Fox News they're getting these clips exported from MSNBC seeing themselves called as racist by a called racist by implication or by Association and then seeing someone like Tucker Carlson who I have I have reservations about but seeing someone like Tucker Carlson make perfect sense about it just destroy the this view with with simple logic and facts and imagine how how refreshing it is to have someone like Tucker doing that and obviously like you're gonna get tired of being called a racist in when in cases when it's so obviously not true and there's just a lack of due diligence there's a lack of any concern for for facts and for logic and that ends up having a very bad effect on the other end because now Trump I mean there some things Trump has said for which racism I think is the best explanation I don't think he's a Klan member I think he's a very mild kind of New York racist of his era you know they're their degrees of racism in other words but the point is it's like the the reason that Trump voters I think for the most part excuse him on some of the things he said is is not because or not for the most part because of a random upsurge in racism that happened in 2016 but wasn't present the past eight years you know like there are counties that went for Obama twice that went for Trump it is it is I think it's largely because people are absolutely sick of being tarred as racists untethered to the facts of the specific cases yeah man now we've got just the match made in hell we've got a group that calls everyone racist the guy who you know is happy to fight them on every bit of it and use that as fuel to get his base going yeah so what do you it's somehow well I said we were gonna shift that race and we went right back to the rascal yeah all right we're gonna try to finish up a something else but what do you even consider yourself politically these days if I if I was trying to label you I mean I have a sense you know you're somewhere in that classical liberal situation but does that even matter to you do you do you think of yourself a certain way I think if you can be gender-fluid you should be able to be fluid at this point yeah I think I know a white woman I find your little things used to be quite appreciate is that I appreciate that um no but I think I mean it is it is strange that like politics is a social construct political ideologies these are fully social constructs and it seems like we're getting more and more rigid with the degree to which we take them seriously obviously once you take ideas seriously but I don't see anything to be gained from anchoring myself to conservatism or liberalism or libertarianism even though I find the wisdom in all of these three political ideologies so yeah I mean I think I think if I can if I can make politically fluid a meme that would be that would be great I will see what I can do all right give me one other thing besides race what are you doing for fun tough days man I'm reading a reading a lot about I'm taking metaphysics taking philosophy of language in mind both of which what are you doing passing on and reading metaphysics you got a political future in front of you oh god no problem right people often ask me that no I would never go into politics actually people assume that about me which I think is really interesting because I detest politics I hate it so much yeah no I don't I don't know I don't know why I give that vibe off but it's yeah I cannot see myself as a politician you're too sane that's the problem it's been a pleasure man likewise all right for more on Coleman follow them on the Twitter at cold x man [Music]

Channel: The Rubin Report

Views: 173,324

Keywords: rubin report, dave rubin, idw, current events, free speech, intellectual dark web, critical thinking, rubin, the rubin report, david rubin, us news, political news, us politics, political science, political, political party, coleman hughes, coleman hughes interview, coleman hughes testimony, coleman hughes congress, racism, race, quillette, reparations, slavery, coleman hughes ta nehisi coates, ta-nehisi coates, black conservatism, black politics, conservatism, systemic racism

Id: rdh8zPr_ZmI

Length: 67min 2sec (4022 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 12 2018