The Glenn Show: The Unraveling | John McWhorter

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
[MUSIC PLAYING] GLENN LOURY: Hi. I'm Glenn Loury, The Glenn Show at BloggingHeads.tv. I'm with John McWhorter. We are the Black guys at BloggingHeads.tv, Glenn and John. I've been doing this since 2007. That would add up to 13 years. Y'all get used to it yet? You like it? You like it out there? I hope so. Keep watching Glenn and John. John is branching out on his own, catching with Brett Weinstein at the Dark Horse podcast. Catch John on Lexicon Valley where he talks about linguistic issues. He's a professor at Columbia. I'm a professor at Brown University. We're in the Ivy League, OK? Now get used to it. [LAUGHTER] And so we're here, man. What is it? It's July 2. July 4 is right around the corner, Americana and all of that. We're the Black guys at BloggingHeads.tv and we're in the midst of a real firestorm in American culture and politics over the issues of racism, anti-racism, and so forth. And that's our beat. So I'm happy to be talking with you again, John. Thanks for giving us some time. JOHN MCWHORTER: Me, too. Me, too, Glenn. GLENN LOURY: What's on your mind? JOHN MCWHORTER: Well, you know, it's funny you mentioned the 4th of July. And I always think of-- we haven't done him in a while. And so I think I'll just say it, Ta-Nehisi Coates' [INAUDIBLE],, I mean, it's really one of the best things he ever wrote in the literary sense, where he says that he doesn't like watching people scarfing down their hotdogs on the 4th of July without thinking about the complicit of this nation with et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Whenever there's a 4th of July, I think to myself, I look around at all the people around me, and I think, am I waiting for them to be thinking about slavery and Jim Crow and redlining? What does that mean? And I think partly I'm thinking of that because, have you ever actually read Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility? GLENN LOURY: You've got to be kidding me. That's torture. I have only read reviews of it. I'm sorry. No, I haven't read it. JOHN MCWHORTER: But now I have an assignment, so to speak. So I've actually had to read it. That is one of the worst books ever written. I knew I wouldn't agree with it. I didn't it was bad. I am astonished. GLENN LOURY: It's interesting that you use that phrase. Because that's exactly what Mike Taibbi says in his review of the book, "literally, this is the worst book ever written." JOHN MCWHORTER: It really almost is. I mean, you could write that book, about how all whites are complicit in the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You could write that well. You know, it's not a crazy point. I don't agree with the implications of it. But you could write it well. But what bothers me is that everybody's reading this now. GLENN LOURY: I know. JOHN MCWHORTER: All of these smart-- many white people I know-- I'll bet in this building where I live, there are people probably reading that book. And so much of it makes no sense. So much of it is based on utterly faulty assumptions. It's smug in a way that neither you nor me you could ever get away with. And yet this is being received as a primer on how to be a good person? GLENN LOURY: What's this got to do with the Coates? I'm sorry. I lost that. JOHN MCWHORTER: Because it is a book where you will come away from it thinking it's not right that people on the 4th of July aren't walking around thinking about they're complicitness in a society that's founded on white supremacy and flashes white supremacist messages in it's warp and woof in every single way possible. And you need to always walk around feeling guilty and sinful about that, although those aren't the words she uses. And I just find myself thinking, could there be a society like that? And I'm really trying to think, could that work? What do people like that mean in terms of how you're supposed to walk around feeling about yourself? What are you going to tell your kids? Like, it's one thing for you to pull off this equipoise. Would you actually teach this to your progeny? What does it mean? And I'm not sure I quite understand. GLENN LOURY: I think you've got your finger on something important. Because if you don't have the confidence of your civilization, of your order, if you don't believe in it at some level, I mean, if the widespread presupposition is that it's illegitimate, if it's myths are no longer even mildly resonant with anything in your heart, if the values to which it purports to be committed are all thought to be hypocrisy, how can it survive? No one's going to die-- no one will metaphorically fight and die for a republic which is thought of in such a manner. So you could be seeing it early signs of the end times for the republic, which is the United States of America, to the extent that this sensibility of iconoclasm were to become widespread. I would just try to counter a little bit with saying, you know, what happened in the 20th century? So there was World War I, American expeditionary force and whatnot. There was World War II, Naziism, Mussolini, Tojo. There was the Soviet Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, armed to the teeth, et cetera, Cold War, et cetera. Now where does the United States figure in world history over the arc of the 20th century? We're the good guys, OK? I am aware of Vietnam. OK? I'm aware of Vietnam. We're the good guys! OK? So now you get 20 years into the 21st century and the main chroniclers of American life cannot affirm the virtue of the American experiment. You might be looking at end times. You might be looking at the unraveling. JOHN MCWHORTER: Yeah. You know, and-- ooh, Glenn. This is something. I've been meaning to ask you this anyway. So for example, Charles Blow teaches us-- and to be honest, I didn't even read his editorial-- I just saw the headline. And I knew the argument. GLENN LOURY: This is the piece, he says, yes, Washington, too, where he says we need to take down all the frigging monuments, including George Washington. He was a slave owner. Excuse me for interrupting. JOHN MCWHORTER: You talk about the 20th century, World War I, what do you mean about Woodrow Wilson and pulling down Woodrow Wilson's monuments? Because to tell you the truth, you can imagine I think that all of this goes way too far. Robert E. Lee, yes, I get that. Elihu Yale, however? No, Ross Douthat was quite right about that. Just leave Elihu Yale alone. But you know, I don't like Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson to me really is significantly racist in terms of who he was at the time. He was a bigot for the time, really didn't like Black people at all, didn't want them around, kept them out of the government when that had not been the case before. Now there are other things about him. But for me, he was such a dedicated bigot, and a college professor on top of it, that I would take his name off a building. What do you think? GLENN LOURY: Nah. I wouldn't do it. It's done. The Woodrow Wilson School is no longer the Woodrow Wilson School. It's a fait accompli. No, I would have been against it. I would say let there be racists in American history. I would say even honor them. I would say racism isn't the worst thing in the world. It's not, actually. Human beings are racists. You don't think there are Black racists? There are Black racists, OK? Martin Luther King was a misogynist, every bit as much a misogynist as Woodrow Wilson was a racist, if those things are comparable. I don't even know how you measure that. OK? You're going to take down his monument? You're not going to take down his monument. I'm not going to let you take down his monument. Because notwithstanding the fact that he was a misogynist, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera, OK? Moreover, millions of Americans see him as a hero. Martin Luther King, Jr., OK, the guy who blah, blah, blah. Now you're going to fill in the blank. Now do you respect those millions of Americans who see him as a hero? Are they a part of your country? Can you forgive them for liking this racist? He was the President of the United States for eight years, or mostly, because he was [INAUDIBLE] or whatever for the [INAUDIBLE],, the League of Nations, et cetera. I mean, he was Woodrow Wilson. I'm not trying to make a brief for Woodrow Wilson. I'm trying to accept the fact of Woodrow Wilson. I do not need to go back into the record book and put asterisks next to the name of every racist baseball player. How many of the ones who were in the Hall of Fame were racists? How many of them. A whole lot of those-- JOHN MCWHORTER: Probably most of them. GLENN LOURY: Most of them. They didn't want to see Jackie Robinson succeed, et cetera. You going to take them off the Hall of Fame? You can. I mean, we could go down the list of such things. Let me finish. Just let me finish this. This is weakness, not strength. The iconoclasts don't have any cards to play. They are throwing a tantrum. JOHN MCWHORTER: How do you feel about a beautiful statue celebrating Robert E. Lee? I think that should come down. Let's say I'm sure. I'm sure you understand that. Do you feel that it's only Jefferson Davis who needs to come down and, beyond that, we need to be more nuanced? GLENN LOURY: OK. JOHN MCWHORTER: [INAUDIBLE] some people. GLENN LOURY: So I said I wouldn't take Wilson's name off of the Woodrow Wilson School. And I wouldn't take his statue down. What would I do with Robert E. Lee? And I'd take it down, OK, because these are questions, at the end of the day, about judgment. We have to actually decide what statues we put up, what statues we take down. I'm not saying you can never take a statue down. Now what's the case against Robert E. Lee, too? He was a treasonous rebel who tried to destroy, by the compact on which the country was founded, he was fighting in a war of rebellion against the duly constituted order. So he was treasonous. The other thing is he was fighting on behalf of the Confederacy. And the Confederacy wanted to enslave people. JOHN MCWHORTER: Right. And that was the main reason for the fight. Right. GLENN LOURY: Now in the early aftermath of the Civil War, there was a need to bring the country back together again. Can we agree on that? Can we agree that the defeated South had to be reincorporated into the republic? The year was 1870, 1880, 1890. Now if you put him up in 1910 or 1920, trying to say states' rights, Negroes, stay in your place, OK. No brief for that whatsoever. But if you felt that the romantic idea of the Confederacy was something for which your father and your grandfather gave their lives, and you want it to be respected, I can understand why you put the statue up in 1890. OK? We're now in 2020. You want to take it down, you want to put it in a museum? I get that. I'm not going to Charlottesville with the tiki torch guys to protect your statue. [LAUGHTER] OK? I get that. But we can't smash all the monuments because of slavery. JOHN MCWHORTER: No. I mean, and you know, John C. Calhoun was really a serious, dedicated racist, and a very accomplished and very intelligent-- and I've got sirens, East Elmhurst Hospital-- very accomplished man. And so you have to decide was bigotry his main legacy. In his case, I think it was. I think [INAUDIBLE]. GLENN LOURY: Take American society in 1840. OK? So we're only 25 years from the end of the Civil War. And abolition was a ripe cause. And Frederick Douglass was beginning his career, et cetera. A lot of people stood on, quote, the wrong side of the issue about slavery. Are we going to take them all out of the history books? Are we going to retroactively dishonor all of them? I want you to think about what that mission means. What are we doing when we do that? Because we could be doing something else. We're going through the record book? I'm watching this TV show, The Tudors, about Henry VIII and whatnot. It's very well done. The costuming is amazing. It's dramatic. It's a really great TV show. And so I'm thinking about England. And I'm thinking about-- Andrew Sullivan made this point recently in talking about iconoclasm. I'm thinking about the fact that there were Catholics. It was a Catholic country until it-- into the-- you know. And so there was a lot of remnants of the Catholicism of the English people, which then, in the aftermath of Cromwell and the revolution and the Reformation and whatnot, got smashed away. It did actually use to be a Catholic country. We used to be a slave republic. We, as a matter of fact, I'm talking about the United States of America, my country, which I love, used to be a slave republic. The flag that will fly in front of my house, momentarily, my great wife notwithstanding-- [LAUGHTER] --was a slave republic. We were born as a slave republic. We're the greatest country in the history of the world. OK? I know that's a little-- you know? But it's my country. It's our country. It's the only place that we have, man. Goodness. And it was a slave republic. That's right. You not going to love it? JOHN MCWHORTER: Well, no. You're not if you try to put yourself in these people's heads. And to be honest, I think there are two comments. If you're Black and you've decided you can't love the United States because of that past and even the racism that still exists in the present, but if you can't love the United States because of the nature of its founding, one, you're being willfully unintellectual. I mean, I think anybody can think more complexly than that. But if you want to pretend that the past is never past and pretend you're Faulkner, OK. If you're going to reject the country on the basis of that, you don't like yourself. I honestly believe that if you're thinking they owned my people. They looked down on my people. And therefore, all of what's happened since then and the 99% of the rest of the country other than that is irrelevant, because they didn't like me, well, it means you don't like you. I mean, frankly, a normal person brushes themselves off, thinking about how Jefferson Davis felt about them, thinking about how Woodrow Wilson would have felt about them. You've got more going on than that. And if you're white and you've jumped on this bandwagon, you're trying to feel good about yourself. It's one thing to seek justice. But it's another thing to pretend that all this thing that we're sitting in is the fact that slavery had an awful lot to do with the economy and that everybody was a racist until about 25 minutes ago. If that's all you can see, you are willfully turning a blind eye to the basic richness and complexity that you use your brain to process whenever you're dealing with the rest of life. And it means that, in a way, this is what these people don't quite get, in a way, you're a racist. If you've decided you're going to reserve one part of your brain to think in that dumb, Milton Bradley board game way, only when it comes to Black people, and you think that that's somehow an advance, it's not. You're treating us like children. A lot of those people really don't understand that. I read these people on Facebook. And I think, you think I'm a child. I don't want some white person sitting around and studiously worrying about the fact that their whiteness privileges them over me. Shit. I have a very privileged life. And nobody can tell me that I'm some rare bird. Being middle class and upwardly mobile since 1965 as a Black person has been quite common. And anybody who wants to say that that's not true, cannot get up and defend affirmative action the next time the Supreme Court threatens it. If you want to say that my life has been so rare, then you can't say affirmative action has benefited Black people so much. Uh huh. So these ways, I'm thinking about the white privilege book again. These white privilege-- GLENN LOURY: Yeah, I know you are. JOHN MCWHORTER: ----[INAUDIBLE] bigots. And they don't know it. GLENN LOURY: I'm thinking about a different book, but it's very related. Because I'm thinking about this identity thing. And you know, my ancestors were slaves. Slaves were badly treated. Slavery was an abomination. And therefore, I deploy myself politically. Therefore, I'm invested in certain symbolism and certain narrative and whatnot. Now of course, my ancestors are not only Africans. My ancestors are also Europeans and a little bit Native people in the bloodline. And I'm thinking about Albert Murray's book, The Omni-Americans. You know this book? I mean, I know you know of it. You know of it. It had a huge influence on Stanley Crouch, a huge influence on Stanley Crouch, for example. JOHN MCWHORTER: Yeah. GLENN LOURY: And it's largely a cultural argument. But the argument is, the Negro, Black Americans, is uniquely, in terms of an ethnicity, it's an American phenomenon. Yeah. I mean, you should, as a student of pidgins and creoles, you get what I'm saying, right? I mean, it's an organically created phenomenon within the context of America. All this stuff, you know, America must come to terms with 1619. It's all framed within the American narrative. It's not an African story. There are remnants, of course. There are efforts to reach back and to try to incorporate some sense of whatever, the drum. The drum will always be there. We hear the drum, right? We know the rhythm, the beat, the whatever. I mean, we are an African people by some remove, Pan-African or diasporic African or whatever. But we're Americans. This is a uniquely American phenomenon that we're talking about. Now what is that? Are we therefore alien to or are we central to the project? And when I say this, I know that I'm, in a way, echoing some of the motivation for The 1619 Project, which was to say their story is the central to the American, the Negro story, the Black story, the story of the African-Americans, the story of the slaves, our strivings, our suffering, our exclusion and oppression, our domination. That's central to the American story. But that is not the only thing that's going on. Domination, defeat, suppression, possession, being raped, that's not the only thing that's going on. You don't think some Black people fell in love with some white people? You think all of the misogyny-- I mean, not misogyny. What's the right word here? JOHN MCWHORTER: Miscegenation. GLENN LOURY: Miscegenation, exactly. Thank you very much. You think it was all rape? Come on. Come on. It was not. It was really, really complicated. Charleston, South Carolina was really complicated. Man, New Orleans, Louisiana was a really, really complex human dynamic, all on top of each other. This is the kind of thing that Cornel West would wax eloquent about for a long time. Because it's true. It's carnal. It's organic. It's humane. It's intimate. It's a whole lot of stuff. Not every story was a story of domination and oppression. Our story is more than a story of surviving domination and oppression. Our story is an American story, not only because, or even mainly because our ancestors were slaves. And you could go on in this vein. The Emancipation is a part of that story. And the Emancipation is not merely the grudging recognition of African-American humanity. It's the culmination of a certain kind of political dynamic that begins in the middle of the 18th century and actually does extirpate slavery. That's a world historic achievement, man! JOHN MCWHORTER: I don't get it. GLENN LOURY: Who can do it? What society, what democracy, what political tradition, what nation has done it? JOHN MCWHORTER: Mhm. GLENN LOURY: I mean, you're hard pressed to give any parallel. Anyway, I'll stop. I know I'm going on. The African-American story is the American story. The American story is the African-American story. Yes, some of my ancestors were slaves. They weren't only slaves. And those weren't all of my ancestors. JOHN MCWHORTER: You know what I don't get with this sort of thing is that we know there's a certain kind of person who's listening to us, and you and I just don't get it. And they're going to stick to this idea that American history is just slaves and whipping. You know, talk about miscegenation, the reason I'm the color I am is because of a very complicated relationship between a white shopkeeper and a Black woman who ran the store and who helped him run the store in Atlanta about 125 years ago. And they had two children, both of whom could have passed as white and didn't. And one of them was my grandfather. And that is pretty much why I'm this color. And if anybody wants to say that all that relationship was was rape, well, they just don't know. That's not the story that's been passed down. It was something-- it wasn't a beautiful thing. But it was complex. But a lot of people are just going to walk around with their brows knit. And so it's all about this hideous history. And anybody walking around now is complicit in it unless we devote our lives to decrying it and blowing up American society and starting again in some way that's never specified. But the thing is, don't these people realize that if you spend your life approaching history like that, then the white man wins. Yeah, basically, a lot of these people seem to think they're going to live 500 years. You're going to spend from when you're about 19 until you're about 79 with your brow knit, angry, dealing with this cartoon version of history out of some sense of duty. And that's all you're going to do instead of being interested in other things, instead of embracing the real thing? I wonder sometimes if some of these people know the joy, and I've said this on the show before, do they know the joy of finding out new things? Do they know the joy of being interested in anything? And if they don't, with a lot of them, I wonder, what are you doing in academia? Or frankly, what are you doing highly placed in journalism if nothing interests you for its own sake and all you have is this glum, oversimplifying mission? It's a kind of mind that I pity in a way. Because they're going to go to their graves never having known the joy of being a person. One of them which is that you find stuff out. If you're a smart kind of person, you like studying, go learn some stuff. Don't just devote yourself to this manufactured personally-based anger. It's such a disappointing way of being an intellectual or an academic. And I've been dealing with it ever since I came into-- there's a lot of this in certain areas of linguistics, too, where I just think this is all you're in this for. But we're just kind of stuck with it. GLENN LOURY: We're not stuck with it, John. We're well-advanced, man. JOHN MCWHORTER: But economists like this, I assume? GLENN LOURY: Economists like this? Oh, the whole economics profession is being overwhelmed by this wave of woke, anti-racist sentiment. JOHN MCWHORTER: Oh, also Sandy Darity. I know you consider him a friend. He doesn't like me. But I imagine he's one of these. GLENN LOURY: Well, Sandy is someone I've known since 1974, '75, when he came to study at MIT. I think he came in '75, actually. I had been there for a couple of years. So I mean, we were Black American graduate students in economics at MIT at the same time. That's a person that you're close to at some level-- JOHN MCWHORTER: Sure. GLENN LOURY: --going back over 40 years. But I wouldn't call us friends. JOHN MCWHORTER: OK. GLENN LOURY: I mean, he's said a few nasty things [INAUDIBLE].. In one tweet from Darity about Glenn Loury and Roland Fryer is that we are thick with self-hatred. We are vile. We are vile. This is a quote. Loury and McWhorter-- I mean, Loury and Fryer, "vile and thick with self-hatred." [LAUGHTER] JOHN MCWHORTER: I didn't know that he was that bad. I think-- GLENN LOURY: Well, not often, not often. I think-- you know, Sandy is a serious scholar. He's on the reparations thing. And you know, he's at Duke. He was at UNC. JOHN MCWHORTER: He called you and Roland self-hating? GLENN LOURY: Yeah, man. This is something that he tweeted. [INTERPOSING VOICES] GLENN LOURY: So the quote is "thick with self-hatred." And I'm sure there are people out there listening to us at this moment who agree. Exactly, Professor Darity, you've got Loury and McWhorter. JOHN MCWHORTER: What sort of academic is that? How is Roland Fryer self-hating? What a cheap, stupid thing to say. GLENN LOURY: OK. JOHN MCWHORTER: The man is in his 60s. You can't even call it immaturity. That's just disgusting. That's just-- I didn't know that he was that mean. That's something-- GLENN LOURY: Fryer has worked on some issues where he and Darity disagree about the thing. So Fryer thinks he has evidence that acting white is a real phenomenon amongst adolescent African-Americans. JOHN MCWHORTER: And he's right. I read that paper. GLENN LOURY: You know, Fryer thinks that charter schools work. Fryer thinks that police violence is complicated. JOHN MCWHORTER: Right. GLENN LOURY: Fryer thinks that, you know, whatever. But you know, there's another dimension to it. OK? Dare I say it? I'm going to say it to the world, man. I'm actually going to say this. So economics is a meritocracy. [LAUGHTER] Everybody out there is now going ballistic because there are gatekeepers and there are white males and economics and racism and sexism and whatnot here. I'm just going to say it flat out, it's a small world, people. I can talk to the brother in Australia instantaneously. OK? So we are all competing to get into The American Economic Review. We're all competing to get into Econometrica. The guys in Beijing, the guys in Seoul, we're all trying to get in, OK? Some of the smartest economists I know are from South Asia. They're Indians. They're Pakistanis. These dudes are smart, men and women. They know a whole lot of math. They know a whole lot of economics. They know our whole history, a lot of philosophy, a lot of psychology. They're some smart people. It's a small world. It's a global profession. Half our graduate students are born someplace else. Half our faculty, or a lot of them, are coming from someplace else. They speak a lot of different languages. It's a meritocracy. This is economics. OK? So in the scope of the meritocracy, guess what? The people who win the prizes happen to be more conservative than the also rans. The ones who actually ask the question with data about whether or not acting white is real and who do the careful statistical analysis to get the paper published in the referee journal and who end up getting the Clark Medal and who end up being professors in the Ivy League and who end up being distinguished fellows of the American Economics Association, they have the respect of their peers. How do you think they got it? They got it because they played the hard ball game in a global meritocracy and they came out on top. Now there are a few Black people like that. And they are despised by a whole lot of other Black people. They can't bear it. They think white gatekeepers are favoring Negroes like Fryer and Loury by patting us on the head. When as a matter of fact, have you checked out the appendix of my Econometrica paper on intergenerational income dynamics? It uses asymptotic theory from stochastic Markov chains. It uses complex mathematical analysis. And it passed by three, I want you to count them, three really tough referees who didn't give a damn what color I was. JOHN MCWHORTER: Glenn, can I ask you something? [INTERPOSING VOICES] GLENN LOURY: A lot of people have a lot of problems with the success of certain people. And when that success combines with the fact that those people have contrarian political views, they go absolutely insane, including 64-year-old professors at Duke University. [LAUGHS] JOHN MCWHORTER: You're going to catch it in the comments. GLENN LOURY: I don't give a damn. I don't give a damn, OK? Compare the CVs. JOHN MCWHORTER: [INAUDIBLE]. GLENN LOURY: Count the citations. JOHN MCWHORTER: Because there's some of this in my world, too. Except I think it's different in yours, because we- don't-- well, linguistics is now becoming more about numbers. But it didn't used to be. And this issue of who gets those prizes and who doesn't, what do the detractors you're talking about say about the fact that you've got the numbers? The numbers can't be gainsaid. I assume that they understand that. GLENN LOURY: They have different numbers. And they say-- there's a whole lot argument about methodology. [INTERPOSING VOICES] GLENN LOURY: They have different numbers. They have different numbers. JOHN MCWHORTER: They think that your arguments are faulty. It's not just that they're saying white people are patting you on the head. They can say, white people are putting you on the head, because my Markov chain says, you know I don't know anything about that. But they have a substantial argument against your argument, too? The Markov jargon was just to show that I have chops. That's not really the issue. [LAUGHS] JOHN MCWHORTER: Whatever. GLENN LOURY: The real issue is about personal responsibility and the extent to which the disadvantaged condition of African-American reflects anything that's wrong with us. JOHN MCWHORTER: And you can prove that with numbers. And they say that you're not doing it right? GLENN LOURY: Anything that you-- if you say culture matters, Darity has a whole paper where he argues that-- well, what does he call it? The Harvard-Washington consensus, because he ropes William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson into this with Roland Fryer. And they are the kind of equivalent in race studies of the neoliberals in global economic studies. You know, of the people who like the World Trade Organization or the people who believe in the International Monetary Fund and who think there should be open markets and whatnot. They are the Larry Summers, the Larry Summers of race studies. OK? The Harvard-Washington consensus-- why? Because you might say something like welfare makes people dependent. Now I'm not saying that Roland is saying this or that I'm saying it. But you might say it. But that would be the kind of thing they'd say, you might say something like people respond to incentives in the area of law enforcement. So that if you want less violence, you should implement penalties. You might say something like revising the way you deliver educational services to kids, through innovative transformations of the mechanisms of education as they are affected by some charter schools is a good thing. You might say something, like-- you might say seven in 10 kids born to a woman without a husband is an absolute catastrophic circumstance of social organization for any community, full stop. You might say stuff like that. Or if you're William Julius Wilson, you might say stuff, like, you know what? Race is important, but it's not the only thing. The larger dynamics of economic class competition in sorting things out will have secondary consequences for people, which will exacerbate racial inequality and which will only have remedies that can be achieved through social democratic politics, which requires bridging racial gaps. And therefore, we should look beyond race. If you're Orlando Patterson, you might say it's impossible that slavery would not do cultural damage to a people. It's just impossible. It's impossible that 150 years of domination and enslavement will not leave a people, in some way or another, scarred. And those scars could have very long consequences that might help to explain some of the common pathological social problems that you see in African-descended populations in the UK, in the Caribbean, in the US. This is Orlando Patterson, not Glenn Loury. I'm gesturing at the thing. But all I'm saying is, any of these things, IQ matters. I didn't say it was genetic. I'm not a eugenicist. What I said was, people differ with respect to cognitive functioning. And differences in cognitive functioning are structurally connected to differences of success in life. That's what I said. There's a tremendous amount of evidence that that's true. There are differences on the average in cognitive functioning between racial groups. That's just a fact. If you say it, and if you say it's related to anything that's not discrimination, then you're going to be in this [INAUDIBLE]. So this is not about econometrics at the end of the day. This is about the political implications of serious work. And I just think it's interesting. Fortune magazine had a piece where they said who are the Black economists? And they had a list. And they had a list of names. The list the names did not include Kerwin Charles, who is Dean of the School of Organization and Management at Yale. The list did not include Cecilia Rouse, who is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson, formerly Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. The list did not include Susan Collins. These are all Black people, Black economists, who used to be Dean of the Ford School and is now a distinguished professor of International Economics at the University of Michigan. The list did not include Roland Fryer, who is the winner of the Clark Medal, the only African-American who have done so, the junior Nobel Prize. And the list did not include your humble servant. Because we're not evidently Black economists, as far as the journalists who end up writing pieces about Black economics in Fortune magazine are concerned. And let me just say this, it's complete bullshit. It's completely disconnected from reality. Let me just say this again. The people who really matter in economics know the difference between second rate work that is tendentious and ideologically motivated on behalf of proving a point, or better yet, making a [? whine, ?] they know the difference between that and serious social science. The people who I just listed, and I'll exclude myself from the list, none of whom were mentioned by Fortune magazine as Black economists, but all of whom-- Caroline Hoxby, who has a chair at Stanford, these are Black people. OK? None of them were on the list. Because they're serious scholars whose results will sometimes come out in favor of school choice. That's Hoxby. Sometimes come out not finding that the police are using racially disproportionate lethal force against Blacks. JOHN MCWHORTER: Right. GLENN LOURY: May come out saying that affirmative action can be patronizing. That's Glenn Loury. And people think that they can cancel you by simply refusing to acknowledge your professional achievements. And I'll just finish, because I've been going on for a long time about this. Black youngsters at Howard University, learning economics at Morehouse College, learning economics, Black youngsters, Black youngsters at Tulane who might be encountering African-American mentors, who are trying to learn economics, will not be able to discriminate between the noise and the real deal. If you can't hold up people who have made the accomplishments that some of these people have made at the hardest kind of intellectual work in the social sciences that you can imagine and extol them as models for your young people, you're always going to have mediocrity stalking you. [HEAVY SIGH] JOHN MCWHORTER: You're making me think about myself and whether I've had analogous experiences. And not that bad, and it's partly because people don't think of linguistics as as sexy as they do economics in some ways. But I find myself thinking that, not that I ever tried to do this, but I've now written 2 and 1/2 books about Black English. I talk about it in the media quite a bit, always in defense, always explaining that it's coherent speech. And I've, by accident, become something of an expert on it. It's not what I went to graduate school for. But I always thought of it as kind of a duty to represent it. Now 25 years ago when the Oakland school board proposed that Black English teaching materials be used as a bridge to standard English in schools where Black kids were having trouble, I was very naive. I didn't understand the contours of these debates. I didn't understand the anti-racist [INAUDIBLE] yet. And I just said that there are other ways of teaching kids like that how to read. Black English is not the problem. And here's why. And I explained it. That got me in really hot water with a lot of my Black linguist elders and many of their white fellow travelers. And in general, of course, I have what people call my politics. And I'm supposedly this frothing at the mouth right winger. And I notice that these days, it's not that I ever planned it this way, and I don't walk around thinking about it, but in terms of the general public learning about Black English being a good thing, the person who had a book on that subject that was reviewed at the same time in The New York Times and The New Yorker, whole article just about me and my book in The New Yorker a few years ago, it's me. I've done my job. And yet, it's interesting. The people who study Black English, the linguists, they're a crowd. And they're individuals who vary. They're individuals in that [INAUDIBLE].. But it's interesting. They have little mini conferences and things. And like everybody and their mother is invited to those conferences, but not me. As if I don't know anything about the subject. I've written various academic articles about the subject. Somehow I'm just not invited, never invited to give a keynote at anything like that. And to be honest, fine. I don't particularly like traveling. I'm quite busy. This doesn't bother me in itself. But the principle of the thing is interesting. I'm persona non grata because I came to the wrong conclusions, quote, unquote, about ebonics 25 years ago. And in general, because I'm supposedly a conservative Republican. Even if I was, the issue is, if I'm a conservative Republican-- GLENN LOURY: You? A conservative Republican? [LAUGHTER] JOHN MCWHORTER: That's what they think. I don't get to join [INAUDIBLE]. I don't get to join. And therefore, there are all these undergraduates who are at those mini-conferences and at those kind of retreats and things, who are sitting at the feet of all of these scholars of Black English. Well, they don't get to sit at my feet. And they don't meet me. Because I'm never invited. And I hope none of them see this because I'm not saying I want you to invite me. I'm an expert, one of the world's experts on African-American vernacular English. And the people who study it have no interest in having anything to do with me. And it's because they think of me as politically unsavory. That's a shame. That's not how academics are supposed to go. But it just does. GLENN LOURY: Now I hear that you stepped down from the Board of The National Book Critics Circle. And I'm wondering if you want to talk about it. If you don't want to talk about it, it's fine. But I'm just curious. JOHN MCWHORTER: Oh, no. It needs to be talked about a little bit. The people on that board are great. I have no personal issues with anybody on it. I was not very impressed by the person who basically set flame to the whole thing. And I'm not going to name her. You can find out what her name was in the media. GLENN LOURY: Yeah. JOHN MCWHORTER: But it started with a Black woman who made a charge. And the charge was that one of the older white guys is a racist. And what she called him a racist for was that, when asked-- he wasn't going to say anything-- but when asked, he said that her charge that publishing is rife with racism is inaccurate. And he wasn't abusive. But he was very straightforward, very flinty. He wasn't doing the dance that one is supposed to do. He expressed himself as if it was about 1965. I don't quite know why. But I sat on the board with him for years. He is not a racist, even in the more sophisticated senses that we talked about. GLENN LOURY: Let me just interrupt for a minute. He said something, like, I don't know that many Black writers who have helped white acolytes coming along. But I know a lot of white writers who have helped Black acolytes coming along. JOHN MCWHORTER: Yeah. And that was clumsy. You know, why, given the nature of the history, why should Black people be helping the white ones? That's true. That's a clumsy statement. It's a little bull in a china shop. It was only one sentence, though, in-- it's typical for him-- a long piece of writing. And the fact is it's not racist. He wasn't criticizing Black people with that one sentence. Anyway-- GLENN LOURY: And she made it public. Is that what happened? JOHN MCWHORTER: He decided that this was racist. And she called on the board to quote, unquote, "address it," which is religious speak for excommunicate the heretic. And the president of the board did not do that. And the other person, therefore, got very upset. And so the whole issue was is this poor guy, Carlin Romano, a racist? And I say, no, he's not. And the reason that I had to leave the board was because a lot of people on the board were behind the Black woman in calling him having written something racist. Nobody called him a racist. But it's the same thing. They said that his message was racist. And I realized that I can't stay on the board, because I don't think that he's a racist. And if I don't think so, to a critical mass of people on the board, I am complicit with white supremacy. Nobody said that to me. And nobody would have said it to me. It's not that that was going to come out. But it was clear from the discussions that I was going to look like a bad Black person. And so I just decided, I can't imagine this working anymore and so I had to leave the National Book Critics Circle. Which is a shame, because I liked the people, and I sure as hell liked getting all those fresh new books all the time. I had, in this room, I had them stacked up. I got such good reading done. And now I'm not going to get all those books. [LAUGHING] You know? But it was a shame. Because Glenn, do you feel something creeping in, talking about the two viruses. But depending on what state you're in, you're past the worst of the virus. GLENN LOURY: Yeah, hopefully. JOHN MCWHORTER: But I'm getting scared. The National Book Critics Circle fell to pieces around me within 48 quick hours. There is a charge being lobbed at a certain linguist. And I really am not going to say who this is, because I want this to pass over. But I'm worried that the mob is about to come for him. And I'm in a position where I have to help adjudicate this. It's getting to the point where these people, brandishing their copies of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo's books are beginning to defenestrate people right and left. I do worry about myself. I have literally thought, what would I do financially if something I've written or something I say gets me kicked out of Columbia? And I think I could get by. But it could happen to us. I'm surprised, frankly, it hasn't happened to one of us already. I'm not one for walking around pretending to be scared of things. I think everybody knows that. But this is really beginning to worry me. I'm beginning to worry that all sorts of places where I sit are going to be pulled out from under me because I'm a white supremacist. Is this stuff beginning to make you nervous at all? I also worry for our colleagues. You and I know a lot of people who don't say the right stuff. And people are going to start losing their jobs. It's a virus. I'm really beginning to feel it at this point. GLENN LOURY: Well, you know, when you were talking about is your colleague, the gentleman who made the comment which upset the African-American woman at the National Book Critics Circle, which led to, ultimately, your resignation, was he a racist or was he not. In my mind, I kept substituting the word, "witch" for racist. Is he a witch? I think he's a witch. I don't think he's a witch. And I thought that because recently I went back and reread Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible. JOHN MCWHORTER: I've been thinking about that all the time. GLENN LOURY: Because I was driven to it by events, I mean, some of the MeToo stuff and the canceling has also had me thinking about this thing. So what do you mean by is he a racist? You and I disagree whether or not Trump is a racist. I'm not trying to ask you again about Donald J. Trump. I'm just trying to say, though, it's an ephemeral thing. You may say in Trump's case, it's not really all that ephemeral. It's very clear. And you and I might disagree. But that's a separate matter. It's pretty ephemeral, right? Because we're really talking about what was the motive of the guy? You know, what's in his heart? And the fact that he contravenes certain conventions about public expression, you don't question affirmative action. Suppose I thought the Black kids-- like Amy Wax thinks. The Black kids in my class, on the whole, are just not that swift. They're just not that good compared to what I'm used to at my school. This is affirmative action. And I say that out loud? You know, you're going to get canceled. I mean, you're basically a racist. Now you're a racist. And you're a racist. You know? And what do we mean? We don't really mean, do we, any kind of an elaborate racial superiority philosophy of a Nazi-esque sort. We really mean, in effect, you're an apostate, that you're a heretic. It really has that feel. And the other word that I would put in there is communist. JOHN MCWHORTER: Yeah. Yeah. GLENN LOURY: Or in our current time, socialist which, again, is not an effort to ascribe to anybody any fully-fleshed, well-developed, coherent worldview. It's a label. You're just attacking the person or whatever. So it's an effort to enforce conformity. It's tyrannical. And you ask me, if I'm worried. I'm sorry. I know you want to speak. No. I have tenure and. I'm in my 70s. And I'm Black. And I'm prominent. And I don't think I'm vulnerable. I mean, I may not get the raise that I want to get because the provost is mad at me because of something I wrote in the newspaper or something like that. I'm not saying I won't or I will or whatever. But that's the least of it. I mean, it may take a long time for them to respond when I ask a question about my research budget. And if the offices get reshuffled because of COVID, I might not have all that much leverage in the bargaining game about my corner office and [INAUDIBLE].. They could try to push me out by cold shouldering me. You know? But I don't feel that here yet. It would be too bad. I am pretty self-sufficient, in that I actually could probably get by. But I don't want to try. [LAUGHS] But I was moved [INAUDIBLE] to publicly chastise my president for one of these dear colleagues letters with all this mumbo jumbo in it about Black Lives Matter. She didn't use those words. But it was just boilerplate woke, anti-racism rhetoric of the DiAngelo type. And I thought, you know, you're the president of the University, if you have an opinion, however idiosyncratic, that's fine. But when you impose this on the entire institution by having everybody all the way down to the Dean at the School of Public Health and everybody in between sign off on it. And you put out a party line, we are standing in solidarity with whatever, I just object. And I have gotten three communications from my 500 or so professorial colleagues here at Brown about that letter, all of which have been positive. Thank you, Professor Loury. OK? JOHN MCWHORTER: Hm. GLENN LOURY: So I'm going to subtract 3 from 500 and I'm going to get 497. And my guess is at least 30% of them hate my guts. [LAUGHING] JOHN MCWHORTER: Right. Right. I guess actually one thing that's worrying me is this book, which is writing itself. I'm writing this anti-anti-racism book. GLENN LOURY: I'm excited, John. JOHN MCWHORTER: And you know, it's interesting. I get so much stuff from just people. Ever since I've announced that I was writing it, people are sending me all these snippets. Thank you. GLENN LOURY: Oh, yeah. JOHN MCWHORTER: The book is becoming a group effort. It's [INAUDIBLE]. And I should say, again, folks, I'm not going to take up too much time with this. Once more, I really appreciate all the mail. But I can't answer everybody anymore. So if you don't hear back from me, it's not that I don't care. It's just that it's now at the point where it's, like, 50 a day. And I know that will stop after a while. But I can't. I don't have a secretary. But the book worries me. Because when that book comes out, I'm not pulling any punches. And I'm beginning to realize I'm only one person. And the person who wrote that book, and I suspect it's going to get a certain amount of attention given the nature of the moment, is going to be the person walking around that campus and getting up in front of classes. And there are certain kinds of students who will loath me for that. GLENN LOURY: You'll survive it, man. JOHN MCWHORTER: Many, many professors will loath me for that book. GLENN LOURY: You survived losing the race. Something tells me you'll survive this. JOHN MCWHORTER: That was a long time ago, though. GLENN LOURY: That was John's first big book, I think it was 2000. JOHN MCWHORTER: It was different in the year 2000. I had people accosting me verbally on the street for that one. But even that recently, 2000, I wasn't going to lose my job. Now I had tenure. Maybe that would have gotten into it. But I had tenure and I knew that I would keep my job. Today, I really wonder whether there is some danger in that. It's not going to stop me from writing the book. But it makes me think, gosh, if I do this now, there's going to be a certain kind of person who genuinely believes that they're doing God's work to lose me my job because my book is complicit with white supremacy. GLENN LOURY: John, I just had a horrible thought. The horrible thought was there's a movie. And in the movie, there's a character like me. And in the drama of the movie, the character gives a speech like the one I just gave. I've got tenure. I'm Black. I'm prominent. And I'm well-published, blah, blah, blah. JOHN MCWHORTER: I like this movie. GLENN LOURY: And fast forward to the scene where he's impoverished and he's in a hovel somewhere. He's eating gruel. [LAUGHTER] [INTERPOSING VOICES] GLENN LOURY: And he's thinking back on the day, you know, before the cultural revolution wiped him and his family out. [LAUGHTER] JOHN MCWHORTER: That's what this is. You'd be selling pencils, no wife. And yeah, you never, never, never know. I just don't know. And it's funny, I think to myself, too, I've often thought, well, how many Black professors can they afford to fire, especially ones who are a little bit in the media? Would that do it? But things are becoming so crazy lately that I'm thinking that our skin color wouldn't help us. Which is how crazy this is. GLENN LOURY: Why don't we call it a conversation, John? I got to go on to the next thing. I'm sorry. JOHN MCWHORTER: Yeah. I have a thing, too. Come to think of it. [INTERPOSING VOICES] GLENN LOURY: There are unexplored items. But we'll come back on another day. JOHN MCWHORTER: Definitely. GLENN LOURY: Thanks, John. I'll talk to you later, then. JOHN MCWHORTER: Hey, Glenn, who is "we by the wall?" Who is that person? Why does he watch us? GLENN LOURY: I don't know who he is. I think he's a history professor. JOHN MCWHORTER: [INAUDIBLE]. GLENN LOURY: And I think he's a historian. And I think he's Black. JOHN MCWHORTER: He's Black. Yeah. GLENN LOURY: And he said that his specialty is colonial period history. So that's all I know. JOHN MCWHORTER: Well, why would he spend all that time listening if he hates us? GLENN LOURY: That was your point. That's a killer point. JOHN MCWHORTER: I don't get it. GLENN LOURY: He's obsessed. I mean, he's up-- it was, like, the thing had been up for 30 minutes before he had written a 500 word comment. He couldn't have even had time to listen to the whole thing before he was writing a comment. JOHN MCWHORTER: And the man has a job. GLENN LOURY: You know, I guess. And a family, too, I'm told. JOHN MCWHORTER: Probably children. I don't get it. Anyway, yeah. I've got a call. And so-- GLENN LOURY: OK, John. JOHN MCWHORTER: --I'll talk to you very soon. GLENN LOURY: I'm going to go get a massage. JOHN MCWHORTER: Enjoy. GLENN LOURY: I will. Take care.
Info
Channel: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Views: 30,540
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Watson Institute, Watson International Institute, Brown University, Brown u, Brown, Public Affairs, glenn loury, john mcwhorter, glenn show, race, racism, blm, white fragility
Id: e4fbp0w1vm0
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 51min 3sec (3063 seconds)
Published: Fri Jul 10 2020
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.