[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.
