Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse Podcast - Black Intellectual Roundtable
A special roundtable edition of Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse podcast.Glenn C. Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University. He holds the B.A. in Mathematics (Northwestern) and the Ph.D. in Economics (M.I.T). As an economic theorist he has published widely and lectured throughout the world on his research. He is also among America’s leading critics writing on racial inequality. He has been elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association, as a membe...
We have for you today a roundtable of some remarkable public intellectuals, many of whom you will know, some of them may be new to you.
We have Glenn Lowry, who is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University and the host of The Glenn Show on Blogging Heads TV.
We have John Wood Jr., who is the National Ambassador of Braver Angels and a contributor at Quillette Magazine.
We have Coleman Hughes, who is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
We have Chloe Valdary, who is the founder of Theory of Enchantment.
Thomas Chatterton-Williams, who is contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper's.
And we have Camille Foster, who is a partner at Freethink and an unindicted co-conspirator at the Fifth Column Podcast.
And John McWherter, who is professor of linguistics at Columbia University.
Thank you all for joining me.
We have quite a situation on our hands here in the U.S.
and in the West more generally, and to be honest, I'm not exactly sure how to start this conversation.
For one thing, the conversation is obviously in large measure about race, but I don't even feel comfortable asserting what anyone else's race is, and I'm not even sure I know what mine is supposed to be.
Forgive me for having invited you here on the basis of having some African ancestry.
I believe that that fact is sufficient to set the conversation in motion, and at some level that makes me the token white in this conversation.
So, I guess, is that some kind of progress?
Technically, you also have African ancestry.
All of us have entirely African ancestry.
Thank you, Chloe.
I probably should have said recent African ancestry.
And I guess I should ask, recent African ancestry, is it fair to say that, you know, I'm an evolutionary biologist, so recent to me means something like the last thousand years.
Is it fair to assume that each of you traces your ancestry to Africa in the last thousand years?
Okay, fair enough.
All right, now I should also probably warn you up front that my sense is that we are involved in a renewed racial conflict in the U.S.
and that it is very badly cast and that in fact it is a distraction from a much deeper issue which has to do with long-standing and extensive political corruption which has frozen citizens out of the well-being that is produced by their labor in our markets and that we are in effect being misled into fighting each other when there is a much more obvious enemy.
So in light of that, I will, at some point during this conversation, want to talk to you about what solution might lead us out of this catastrophe.
But before I get to a discussion of Unity 2020 and what it might have to do with our situation, I'm very interested to have a different conversation with you all.
In essence, I invited you because I know you all to be incredibly courageous and to be very deep thinkers on many issues, including race.
My hope is that one thing will strike people who see this podcast, which is that we have assembled here on our screen an incredible group of courageous public intellectuals who are also African-American in part or in whole, however it is that you define yourselves, and that the fact that the African-American community, or is it fair for me to say black?
Is that an acceptable term?
I prefer it.
Good.
I do too.
It's the one I grew up with and it feels right to me as well.
What I know from my own life and from interacting with many of you is that for some reason, and I confess it's a reason I do not know, the black community has produced more top flight public intellectuals than any other population I know of.
I don't know the cause, but the fact that that is the case is striking and I hope people will notice and start thinking about what may be going on.
One hypothesis is that it has something to do with adversity.
I'd be interested to hear what you all think.
But before we get there, what I'd like is each of you to give a sense of where you think we might be.
Given the George Floyd protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the national conversation, I just want to have an idea of where you think we might be headed as a nation.
So you're all in different orientations on each other's screens.
Why don't we go with the orientation on my screen?
Glenn, are you willing to start?
Sure, I'll start.
I don't want to stand in the way of the brilliant observations I'm sure will follow.
We're in deep doo-doo, man.
I mean, we're in the grips of something, I think.
I'm not sure I can give all the parameters and I don't want to take too long, but that I think is a very serious problem for the country.
I think we're out of touch with reality.
I think demagoguery is afoot.
I think there's a lot of sophomoric reflections about social A problem in organization that has just consumed all the air in the room.
And we're boxing as shadows and whatnot.
And I'll just give one illustration of this and I'll stop.
There's supposed to be an epidemic of racist police killings of black people.
I don't think that's true.
I think that's literally false.
I don't think these events that we're observing are even properly classified as racial events.
I think the unreflective imputation of racial animus to people who happen to be in one group or another and who find themselves in conflict is a deep problem for our society.
I think we're losing our way.
But like I say, I'm just the first of many people who will make much more important observations, so I'll desist.
Thanks, Glenn.
John Wood?
My feeling is that this is...
Let me go ahead and say something optimistic to try and counterbalance, I think, some of the justifiable pessimism that people may be feeling at this moment.
I think that this is a moment of extraordinary opportunity and extraordinary danger, and I think that we can focus on the opportunity in a way that calls forth some things that need to happen.
Right now, I think, there is this zealous pursuit of an ideological victory in favor of a certain version of social justice, which is calling for the sort of vast condemnation of the white supremacist state.
It gives the impression that America is irredeemable because its whiteness is something that imbues it with a certain guilt that can only be removed through a sort of mass atonement and capitulation to a series of demands.
My feeling is that America is not a fundamentally racist nation, but that Black America faces problems that are complex and systemic.
Both of these things can be true at the same time.
And I think that a moment like this is a moment in which the nation is paying greater attention to the plight of Black America.
And if that happens in a way to where those energies can be diverted towards sensitive listening and an appreciation of the nuances that govern our reality, then we can make the space for genuine progress to occur.
But we have to move past the demagoguery and the demonization that has characterized the conversation so far that is so heavily invested in this sort of tribal vilifying of certain groups.
If we can get past that, then we can use the attention of the moment to actually break through to something better.
Great.
Coleman, you're up.
Yeah, so I think we face many serious problems as a country.
Foremost at this moment is the fact that policing is a difficult job.
And we have, you know, the way the police are structured, Often doesn't provide incentives for police to be at their best.
We face tricky problems.
We face problems that are much harder than I think would be suggested if you listen to the dominant rhetoric coming out of the left-wing activist movement right now.
We live in a country with more guns than people, where when police pull someone over, they have To some extent, rational fear that the person might have a pistol hidden in the glove compartment.
And certain police officers deal with that as well as it could possibly be dealt with.
And other police officers are horrible at their jobs.
But that's a uniquely American situation because of how much of a gun country we are.
It's a situation that there is no pat or easy solution to.
I think I'm more optimistic about the prospect of never seeing a George Floyd or Tony Timpa-like incident again where a cop just has his knee on someone's neck or upper back and essentially kills them in that way.
I think it's possible to Come to a place where we never see an incident or almost never see an incident like that.
I'm not at all optimistic about getting to a place where we never see an unarmed American of any particular race getting shot by a cop.
But the problem is, I think, you know, the media has prepared black people to think of this kind of event as something that only or overwhelmingly happens to black people and therefore to react as if Our people are being hunted by selectively omitting all the cases where this happens to white people.
And I see lots of what seem like purely symbolic fake solutions to these problems being offered.
Reparations?
How does that help police brutality?
You know hiring more black people in C-suite positions at corporations.
Where's the link between that and fixing broken public schools?
So I see lots of fake solutions being offered to real problems and that worries me because they appear in people's minds to be real solutions.
Great.
Thomas?
Hi, yeah, well, to pick up on where Coleman left off, I actually do think that That something, some sort of reparations might go a long way towards repairing or healing some of the divisions in our society.
I start from the premise that race isn't real, but racism is, and that a specific group of people that have been in this country since the collision of Europe and Africa 400 some odd years ago happened, have been failed by their government in this specific geography.
And that a lot of the kind of Inequality could be fixed with some type of solution that I don't have right now to go off the top of my head with, but that the idea of reparations might do something towards helping racial division.
I also think from where I sit in Europe, just looking back at America, it's extraordinary once you leave to realize how violent a society it is and how extraordinarily violent the police are.
Towards all American citizens compared to other wealthy societies.
So the police kill upwards of a thousand people a year Over 500 of those thousand will be white Ten out of every million of those of those thousand will be Native American it's the the proportion is six out of a million for for blacks 2.2 out of a million for whites And Asians are very rarely killed by police.
So there is a problem, and whites get the bulk of the numbers, but blacks are disproportionately killed, not in the worst situation compared to Native Americans.
You can imagine a situation where a widespread call for policing reform should be something that all American citizens are invested in.
And so I think that part of the rhetoric, as has already been said here, part of the rhetoric that this is a uniquely or specifically black problem does more to hinder a lasting and important solution than trying to find common ground and common problems to deal with.
Excellent.
John McWhorter?
I think what we're seeing right now at this moment is that a certain radical strain of anti-racism that's been present for a long time.
It's been present for decades.
It's intellectually mediocre, but it's extremely frightening to other people because one of its main tenets is that to not agree with it makes you a racist.
So, we're in a society where to be called a racist is essentially equivalent to being called a pedophile.
And you have this minority of people with this frankly half-cocked notion of how we should deal with race in this society that entails burning everything down and starting again, policing language in a way that would make it impossible to say anything.
The whole philosophy is based on paradoxes that don't make any sense.
It's all quite a mess, but there's always been a certain kind of person, many of them white, many of them black, who subscribe to this.
Where?
Because of What happened to George Floyd and the response to it, which I think was conditioned actually somewhat fortuitously by how everybody has been feeling after quarantine.
And it's been a really interesting series of happenstances.
Because of that space, I think that these new anti-racists sense this as a moment where they can actually take over.
They sense it as a useful time when they can make America believe what they believe.
And I don't want to make it sound like they're evil.
Most people like that are very nice people who sincerely believe that what they're thinking is correct, because frankly, a lot of them have been trained not to think very hard about race.
It's all very intellectually mediocre, but they're not going to let go of it.
And so the point that we're at right now is that these people are threatening to tear down any institution that matters and create this kind of Orwellian America.
They don't know The evil that they're doing.
They're not evil people.
They don't understand that their ideas won't work.
But it is the time for all good men and women and humans to face this mob down.
And that hasn't been happening before.
Generally, the ordinary person who knows that all that stuff is nonsense goes along with it because they want to keep their job and they have kids to raise.
They have bigger fish to fry.
It's completely understandable.
But that's not going to work this time.
I'm wondering whether the ordinary person who knows that all of that stuff is a new kind of Stalinism is going to have it in them to start saying no.
They might not, in which case I really do fear for what's going to happen.
On the other hand, I see signs that they might.
There might be a way of keeping this from going any further than it already has.
I'd like to see what happens This calendar year, as we go into the fall, how many people are going to be capable of standing up to this sort of thing?
Because after a few people did, after a few organizations did, then there would be a copycat phenomenon.
Once people start to see that the sky won't fall in, if somebody says, you're a racist, and you just stand there and say, OK, once they realize that the world will keep spinning, that'll start happening more.
I hope it does.
All right.
Chloe?
So I would say to piggyback on what has already been said, that for me this looks like a crisis of meaning in the country.
So I think that we are as citizens increasingly atomized and isolated both socially, certainly due to COVID-19, but we've been isolated prior to that.
And I also think that there's a spiritual malnourishment in the country that manifests itself in certain ways, one of which is racially.
I think that the way in which this idea of anti-racism has been proliferating over the past few months is a direct product of that spiritual malnourishment.
And so without addressing that issue, we will continue to have these issues pop up every so often.
And I agree that this will be able to be sort of kept at bay if the average person is able to stand up for themselves and say no.
But I'm not sure if the average person actually has that fortitude and that confidence to do so.
I will say that I have been approached specifically because of Theory of Enchantment and the way it actually teaches Texts by a lot of the traditional African-American scholars of, you know, the Harlem Renaissance movement and such.
I have been approached by people looking for alternatives to some of the anti-racist programming that's been promoted by Ibram Kendi in the workplace and in corporations and in schools.
I have been approached by people, so in the name of diversity and inclusion, You know, asking me for an alternative through the Theory of Enchantment lens.
So that is very, I think, hopeful, just to see that people are actually looking for alternatives.
And it's possible that the rise of folks like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo is actually very going to be short-lived.
I don't know.
We shall see.
But I also think, on a more hopeful sort of point, that The people writ large, the American people, in the same way that we are susceptible to being sort of whipped into a frenzy by the media and susceptible to being polarized and sort of turning against each other, again because of that spiritual malnourishment, because we gravitate toward politics as a form of religion now, I think we are also
I've seen encouraging signs that we're also tired of a lot of this being whipped into a frenzy and tired of, you know, tearing each other apart at the seams and are really hungry for something that would actually be unifying and bring us together.
So I think that that is cause for great hope.
Great.
Camille?
Um, I do like batting cleanup in a situation like this, because so many great things have already been said.
And while there is some disagreement in a couple of specific places, I think I am in broad agreement with the general theme.
I will say that I think it's important to pay some attention to the context we find ourselves in.
I mean, the country is in a very vulnerable position.
We've just had Actually, we're still in the throes of a global pandemic.
We're at the very beginning, I think, of a pretty profound economic crisis that might play out over the course of the next decade.
And the specific manifestations of concern, like the waves of it, the paroxysms of it, Are important, but interestingly, I don't know that race is so central to it.
It's a piece of this conversation, but it isn't all of it.
Just as policing is a piece of the conversation, but it isn't all of it.
We've seen ourselves sort of careen from a place where people are particularly concerned about an imagined genocide against all Black people, to tearing down statues and monuments, to reallocation of wealth, to the
The inculcation of these new ideas, like the notion that individuality itself is somehow a retrograde notion that should be condemned and that we should be instituting new corrective curriculums in our workplaces and in our schools to try and introduce new ways of thinking.
A lot of those tendencies The interest in sort of re-education and realignment.
It'd be one thing if they were happening under normal circumstances.
I think the fact that they're happening under these extraordinary circumstances makes the circumstance all the more disconcerting.
So I do think it's important to have these conversations about race and identity.
I think it's important to engage on conversations about structural racism.
And yes, historic injustices that have perpetuated certain kinds of inequality.
But I also think it's important not to lose sight of that broader context and the degree to which rectifying any one of those problems probably doesn't get us out of the bind that we find ourselves in.
Great.
All right, so I want to tell you a little bit about how I'm seeing this and what I think we might do about it in particular right here in this conversation, or at least starting there.
So, my sense is that race is simultaneously central, and for a good reason, and a distraction.
And that that is confusing us, because you can sort of see one version of the story in which race has somehow been artificially elevated, and another version of the story in which it's the problem that has to be solved.
And by dodging back and forth between those two perspectives, you don't get anywhere.
There are several things I heard you all say.
Coleman was talking about false solutions in particular, and I think I said to John McWherter in the podcast I did with him, That I believe we have an overarching problem which has to do with the absence of leaders.
And maybe it's not even the absence of leaders.
It's the conversion of the idea of leadership into the idea of influencer.
And influencer to me is a very much weaker position.
And so I know that I'm looking at a screen full of people that are capable of leadership at every level.
You're capable of understanding what a leader must do, you're capable of marshalling the courage necessary to do it well, but the roles you are playing
Are ones in which the people who actually need your insight are Functioning in the role of consumer rather than citizen and that this is just an unhealthy dynamic so what I'm hoping is to figure out how we can restore the We can restore leadership to the place in our minds that it should exist and then figure out how to populate it with people who can handle the responsibility and my guess would be
We have the ability to do something here.
We can all say things that many will resonate with about race and it's being a distraction or it's being a key problem that has to be addressed once and for all.
But the other thing we could do is we could steer the ship directly into the storm.
Right?
By demonstrating that it is possible to take all of the features of the conversation of race that people are afraid to have and they are afraid that if those pieces of the conversation are raised that the conversation will go out of control and modeling that in fact we can do it well and that the result of that conversation is not itself frightening That we might be able to indicate to people that there is a way out of this, which is really the question John McWhorter was asking.
What will happen?
Are we going to see people figuring out how to stand up or aren't we?
And if we don't, then what Glenn said is right.
We're in very serious trouble.
So are you willing to steer the ship into the storm and deal with the hardest questions about race and just let the chips fall where they may?
Yes, let me suggest three questions.
Good.
Welfare, affirmative action, and crime.
I'll be succinct.
Reparations is a terrible idea.
Mobilizing a trillion dollars through the politics of the state on behalf of a program of racially defined redistribution is a terrible idea.
Very bad for the country.
South Africa-like Categorization of its citizens, very bad for black people.
Sapping us of the possibility of dignity.
It won't solve the problem.
The issue here is differences in the capacity to generate wealth.
If you don't address it, any wealth disparity will reemerge, even if you reshuffle the deck.
It's a terrible idea.
Welfare of the 60s and 70s destroyed the black family.
Welfare of the 20s and 30s will destroy black dignity.
Affirmative action.
It's a fraud.
Black people have not penetrated the venture capital industry, the code writing industry in Silicon Valley or whatever it is, because not enough black people have exhibited the skills necessary to succeed at those tasks.
The old idea of mid-20th century that black people are being kept out by animus, bias, and discrimination is false.
Development of African American people lags.
Affirmative action is a band-aid.
Crime.
The reason that you have so many incidents is because there are so many black people breaking the law.
The police are operating in these cities, as Coleman suggested, In the face of a reality, an outsized level of violence committed by Black people against each other.
If we can't be honest about that school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration and systemic discrimination, if we cannot be honest about what's happening in our communities, African American communities, with the violent criminal behavior that makes life unlivable for most of the people there, we're not going to get anywhere.
So, could we begin?
I want to go deeper than that.
I hear what you said, and it's not that I disagree with any of it, but I also think it's not the root.
The question is, why is there disproportionate crime?
And I would argue that we have a systemic problem that is not fundamentally about race, but the race problem that we genuinely have plays into this economic disparity problem in a way that those who have not reached the bottom rung of the ladder, of course, more likely to engage in crime.
It's what anybody would do, right?
If you don't have legitimate opportunities, you will.
I'm sorry, Brett.
I'm sorry, Brett.
We excuse me.
I don't want to know.
Is it really?
Is it really not patronizing a community to say of their criminals?
It's what anybody would do when you just got through saying or someone did that.
There are almost no Asians being killed by the police.
Good.
All right, so let's take this apart and figure out what we actually are saying, what we actually believe.
And I, of course, am open to be convinced that I have it wrong.
But my point would be, you have a very different history for people of African descent who arrive in the New World, and you have a different history for Native Americans in the New World.
And then those two populations have had unique dysfunction as a result of the fact that their origin stories are different than the other populations that are here.
And so the only point that I'm really making, it's not that anybody would do any of these crimes, it's that when you don't have legitimate opportunities, you seek opportunities that are higher risk.
Nobody wants to go to prison, and you don't choose to engage in things that will tend to get you sent there if you have good opportunities, but if you don't, You may engage in behaviors that are likely to run you afoul of the police.
And so, all I'm asking is, I think one of two things would have to be true.
Either there's something about the black population that is more prone to be criminal, or there's something causal that results in that population ending up in that category more frequently.
And I believe strongly it's likely to be the latter.
I've seen no evidence that this is endogenous.
Well, I think all of that is true, but I think you're missing one part.
And if we're talking about deep dive, this is deep, and it's very hard to quantify.
And it's partly why many people refuse to think about it, which is that there's a cultural issue.
And it's not about Black culture going back centuries.
It's not about Black culture even going back 50 years ago.
But there was a turn in the mood in the 1960s where In ways that fascinate me, how this percolated from a small radical group into a general mood in a whole community really fascinates me.
But something happened between 1960 and 1980 that taught an awful lot of especially young black men that black authenticity involves checking out, that black authenticity means that you get a pass because the man doesn't like you.
And as vague as that sounds, The difference between black culture in 1970 and black culture in 1950, even among the poorest, is stark and unmistakable.
Something happened.
And we still have the legacy of that.
And so to the extent that, you know, living in New York City, this is something that nobody ever wants to say out loud.
You'll read in the Times or you'll hear on NPR, you know, seven youths killed last night at a barbecue.
And you don't even need to wonder.
Always, always black people in certain neighborhoods.
Now, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with the people, but the question is, why aren't any poor white people doing that?
Why isn't that happening in poor Chinatowns?
Why isn't that happening in many towns in India?
You know, poverty alone doesn't explain that.
It's partly what came to be seen as normal in the wake of the black power mood and also The expansion of welfare with black people in mind starting in 1966, which was pernicious for family relations, although nobody knew that's what was going to happen at the time.
So I think you're, you're right.
Poverty is one thing, but to the extent that anybody here is bristling a little bit, it's because there's more, there's a black thing and it's a very hard thing to talk about, but it's there.
I don't know if all of you agree with me on this.
That's my, my take on it.
I'd like to, I'd like to offer an analysis of, um, Of this period.
I think that, and by the way, I'm going to say all this with a great deal of humility because there are several people on this call who are going to know more about specific aspects of what I'm going to lay out here than I do, but this is my sense and it is up for correction.
I think that John McW, as opposed to John W here, is right to pin our attention to the couple of decades that followed after the end of the Civil Rights Movement in the 70s and the 80s.
My sense is that for most Americans on either side of this, well for many Americans there is a sense that or at least there was a sense that the Black experience in America was something wrought with state-sponsored oppression and institutional racism Right up until the moment in which Dr. King was killed and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and so forth.
After that, however, after the success of the nonviolent movement, the major sort of barriers to meaningful equality in American life and black opportunity have been eliminated.
And at that point, it simply became a question of our own cultural commitments and personal responsibilities in terms of our ability to, you know, live up to the opportunities before us.
And that sadly, the black community has failed to do that since then.
On the other hand, you have this other narrative that says that racism went underground, it wound up being baked into the operations of our institutions and our systems, but it remained just as pernicious and the white American majority remained just as committed to it.
And so now we have to pull the structures of society down to get at the rotted sort of marrow of that.
And that's the narrative that you see proliferating on the left.
I think that there is truth enough in these perspectives to arrive at some clarity at what really happened, but it's very complicated in my view.
This is how I look at it.
In the 1960s, you had a number of things happen that set the cultural and the structural sort of preconditions for the sort of development of a Black culture They'd wound up becoming self-destructive in many ways that it was not self-destructive before, but that has to be seen in its interrelationship with structural aspects of American society.
So to go down some examples, hopefully quickly, economically speaking.
You know, I live in Los Angeles, Southern California.
Blacks used to dominate the agricultural sector and the service sectors in California, and I suspect other parts of the country.
With the Great Society program and the opening up of immigration policy, what they called chain migration, right, you had many immigrants coming from Latin America in particular who came in and dominated the agricultural and the service sectors, thus pushing African Americans out.
At the same period of time, You had manufacturing opportunities begin to go over, go overseas to places like China and elsewhere in the late 60s going into the 70s.
You had many working class opportunities for African Americans begin to contract.
That's point number one.
Point number two, the advent of the Great Society program, the, the welfare programs, the great victory of the great, of, of welfare and the Great Society was that it eliminated hunger for a good many people, right?
The Heritage Foundation would concede that Point was successful in that way.
What it did not do was provide an avenue for social mobility.
It provided some discretionary income to African Americans as economic opportunities were contracting.
Point number two.
Point number three, and it also became a disincentive for family formation.
And that's a very important thing.
Disincentivizing two-parent households because you get more benefits when you're a single parent.
Point number three.
Eventually, as we move past the assassinations of major black leaders, you have the, as we go into the 70s and certainly into the 80s, the advent of heroin, the advent of crack cocaine,
and a drug-based economy that winds up being serviced by gangs that initially arise to replace the sort and a drug-based economy that winds up being serviced by gangs that initially arise to replace the sort of black militant leadership of the community who saw themselves as defending the community against rogue police officers but wind up becoming the distributors of highly profitable narcotics in a way that in the absence of economic opportunity and social mobility, but in the presence of discretionary income and systematic policies that are already undermining family formation in the black community, become an economic center in the black community that is self-poisoning and pushing of this substance
become an economic center in the black community that is self poisoning and pushing of this substance in a way that further decimates the black family, further decimates black men, but that also restructures much of the cultural foundations of the community.
And that emerges in interaction with the police response to that epidemic.
And so you have the expansion of the police state, you have the beginnings of mass incarceration that accelerate in the 70s.
In the 80s, you have a failing educational system in that moment, you have the flight of black middle class and black professionals into integrated communities but leaving many folks in the inner city.
All of this is the immediate ancestor to the anger and the vitriol we see erupting out of Black America right now, but that nobody is able to positively identify for what it is.
It really is a cluster of systemic forces interacting with our culture in a way that has pinned us into self-destructive behavior.
And the most anybody can say about this is that, well, this is systemic White supremacy in action, or on the other hand, this is just Black people not living up to what they should be doing for themselves.
There's some grain of truth in each of those things, but they are both wildly simplistic to getting at the truth of what actually happened to us in the late 60s, in the 1970s, and the 1980s.
And even though most of those problems have improved since then, as a matter of policy, within the black community, the memory of these things are people my age as parents and so forth, or aunts, uncles, the memory of all of that has been passed down in a way that makes it seem, particularly for people still living in Watson, Detroit, the memory of all of that has been passed down in a way that makes it seem, particularly for people because for many of us, we are living with the inherited legacy of the interaction of these forces.
So if we could analyze this in a way that can allow for a conversation of clarity to take place around these issues, and disenthrall ourselves from simplistic cultural explanations on the one hand, or wildly alarmist and radical imputations of racism to just the nation broadly speaking on the other, I think we could actually get somewhere.
May I make a suggestion?
I would like to make a suggestion about how to do that.
I have watched this debate unfold between people who are focused on personal responsibility and people who are focused on systemic causes, and I find a great deal of truth in both of them.
But I think we haven't gone back far enough in history in order to understand what's really going on.
And when I mentioned the special origin story for people of African descent in the New World and for Native Americans, The point has everything to do with what John McWhirter was saying with respect to culture, which is in both these cases, you had a systematic disruption of inherited culture and a replacement of that inherited culture with something that was full of malware, in other words, designed to serve the population that did the installing.
And so, in some sense, we are dealing with the outgrowths of that that do not manifest simply as white supremacy as it is now defined in the minds of white people.
But it does leave people with the impression that the structure itself is unfair.
And so, I really don't want to dominate the conversation.
We've got a ton of intellectual firepower here and many different perspectives, but I want to point out one way in which this unfolds.
Why is there a cultural problem in black America?
In part, it has to do with something several of you have identified, which is a glorification of violence, which has something to do with the absence of fathers, which has a hell of a lot to do with the rate of imprisonment.
So, I just want to point out to you, I never hear this said by anybody else.
It's a biological demographic fact.
If you take men out of a population, it disempowers women in negotiations and mating and dating.
Men who have lots of sexual opportunity because they're in high demand are hard to pin down, so they don't play the role of father, which means that to the extent that fathers are necessary to address questions of why you should restrain violent impulses, for example, their absence then manifests as increasingly violent crime, which goes to explain some of the patterns that several of you have mentioned about an increased propensity for blacks to kill each other.
So, What I don't understand is why we aren't having that discussion, right?
Something causes incarceration of black men and that has a bunch of predictable effects.
It's very straightforward.
Um, all right.
Can I say something?
Yeah.
I think, um, you know, what I've noticed talking to friends about this issue, uh, is that it has become a kind of political chip that is used, um, sometimes cynically.
So, you know, Homicide is the leading cause of death for black men in their 20s and even their early 30s.
That's not true of Hispanics, whites, Asians.
That's a central problem.
I'm fairly sure I could persuade someone that it's one of the biggest problems facing the country.
A problem that we should have a national movement to solve.
There's a difference between raising that issue on its own as something one should care about in itself and raising it as a reason to dismiss the arguments that Black Lives Matter is making.
And I think when it's raised in that second way, people just stonewall the conversation fully.
That said, even when you raise it on its own, people still stonewall it, which is very depressing, but I think
I do think we have to be, the issues obviously are related in certain key ways, but I do, I think there should just be a conversation in itself about the first order and second order consequences of crime, not just for the victims, but for the cycle of poverty and unemployment that it causes, disinvestment, any issue that, almost every issue that you will be tempted to care about related to poverty is made worse by crime.
And sometimes You know, mainly caused by crime.
So there's that.
And the second thing I wanted to say is that sometimes I feel that these questions are posed backwards.
So people ask, why is there such a big difference in crime between blacks and whites, for example?
Or why do black people commit so much crime?
And I want to just insert, you know, Steven Pinker's thesis in a book that I admire greatly.
Which is The Better Angels of Our Nature, which is about the enormous decline in violence over the past several hundred years of human history.
And his thesis is basically that the question you should ask is not why does a certain group of people commit so much crime, but why do low crime populations commit so little crime?
Because It could just be true that the natural state for members of our species is for young men to get together in groups and be ready for violence.
There's nothing in human history that says that behavior is so pathological that it needs a special explanation.
Really, what needs to be explained is the fact that we now have societies where young men don't behave that way.
And as for crime disparities, If you look in the early 20th century and compare how much crime Irish immigrants were committing compared to Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, you find disparities every bit as large as between blacks and whites today.
If you look at the crime disparities between Southern whites and Northern whites, to this day, it's rather large.
So what I want to say is there's nothing strange or cosmically unusual about two groups of people with very different histories, different cultures, different circumstances, committing very different levels of crime.
And in a way, it's the wrong question to ask to get to the bottom of why it is.
Unless, of course, you're solution-oriented, which I am.
I'm very curious about how we can lower crime rates, violent crime rates.
And I'm dismayed that that conversation is either only used as a way of dismissing police violence or just seen as synonymous with racism.
We're going to keep seeing all of these problems play out until the end of time, unless we address that central problem.
Great, I know there are several others of you who are wanting to jump in.
I'd just like to make a couple points.
The first is that I certainly agree with what John McWhorter was saying about culture.
I mean, John's first book, Losing the Race, was really influential in my own thinking when I wrote my first book about the ways in which ideas of black authenticity can be tied up with ideas of street authenticity.
And I want to tie that into saying that Glenn is one of the most compelling arguers that I have ever come in contact with, and so I hesitate to I disagree with him, but I do think that there are ways in which a conversation around reparations would make a lot of sense and would not be demeaning or have anything to do with anything like blood or skin or what we think of as race, but would have to do with a specific population that suffered a specific harm in a specific society.
So I don't want to beat that drum again, but it's not about repairing black people.
It certainly has nothing to do with repairing an immigrant of Nigerian origin or Jamaican origin has to do with a specific set of people who can trace themselves back to American slavery and have been identified and haven't passed out of blackness.
It can be identified on official documents as having been black.
And those people, usually you can find people that are still walking around who have been harmed in certain ways by government policies, whether it be redlining in their neighborhoods or what have the employment opportunities.
It's pretty straightforward to me that that might not involve all of the dynamics that John was talking about, which are the ways in which oppressed people can Find themselves contributing to their own oppression through their own choices, but I think that it certainly couldn't be worse than doing nothing.
I'd like to add something to that, if you may.
I agree with Thomas's last point.
I had a conversation with a man whose full name I forget, but he goes by Sandy, who wrote a book about reparations specifically for the descendants of slaves and would not apply to those who were simply part of the African diaspora.
You would have to prove that you were You actually identified as African American for the past 12 years.
It would not be in the form of giving out cash, for example.
It would come in the form of giving out trusts and actually set up in a way so as to generate wealth in the black community.
It would also come with programs to promote financial literacy.
I see no problem with this.
I don't think that the argument That it would be somehow condescending to Black Americans to do this really holds water, especially when you consider that this country has given reparations, for example, to Japanese Americans, and I don't think it was condescending to Japanese Americans to do so.
That aside, I'd like to comment a little bit on this issue of mass incarceration.
I volunteer for an organization here in Bed-Stuy called Children of Promise.
Which mentors kids whose parents are incarcerated.
And I can tell you that there's a huge dichotomy between the rhetoric coming out of the quote-unquote anti-racist movement and the way in which you are forced to mentor kids whose parents are no longer in the home.
And I think it's just worth mentioning that if you were to take some of that rhetoric that is being promoted in so-called anti-racist spaces and put it in a place like Children of Promise, you would cripple those children and you would continue to perpetuate mass incarceration and violence and not end it.
So I think just to add that we need to think about the psychological
Affects of fatherlessness in Black America, not only on a mass level, but also just in terms of, you know, how do you actually ensure that a child or mass amounts of children are instilled with a confidence enough and a sense of self-worth to actually overcome these cycles of poverty and the cycle of violence that we're talking about, especially if they're looking up to their parents, on the one hand, because they're their parents, but on the other hand, they're also like,
And I've heard this being said by these children, you know, why did this person leave me?
Why did this person neglect me?
Was it something I did?
Is it my fault?
So we have to really think about, in terms of, again, breaking out of the cycle and overcoming some of these cultural trends, how to create that kind of psychological healing within our own community, but also as Americans writ large.
I just piggyback one point very quickly.
White people are in terrible shape in America, by many measures, as well right now.
And you know, Charles Murray's book Coming Apart has tons of statistics about this.
All of the things that people used to say specifically affected black people and were so bad about the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the Moynihan Report, white society has come to do the same thing by those numbers.
And we don't have a conversation about how bad, or we're not having enough of a conversation about how bad Americans in general are doing.
When it comes to out-of-wedlock births, the lower classes across the board struggle with this.
Marriage is something that's increasingly an upper-middle class prerogative for the educated, well-employed.
Let's not just, let's not, I mean, I'm as much of a critic of self-defeating culture as anyone.
Let's not pretend these are uniquely black problems.
America looks crazy from the standpoint of many other wealthy societies.
Let me piggyback on that.
Let me piggyback on that.
I'm back to my reparations point, you guys.
Here's what I'm saying about the dignity point.
Exactly.
There are a lot of poor white people.
There are a lot of white drug addicts.
There are a lot of white people struggling.
There are a lot of broken white families.
There are a lot of white kids who have lost their way.
Why can't we black people lend our weight to the real justice problem, which is constructing a decent society?
Why do we have to carve out a separate settlement?
Why are we carving out a separate settlement?
Point one.
Point two.
Once the settlement has been reached, don't come back here talking to me about America's racial legacy because you Negroes will have already been paid.
You take a sacred obligation Rectify the consequences of our history.
You commodify it into a chit, and I don't care what number you put on the chit, then you discharge the obligation by passing the chit across the table.
That is the wrong kind of politics for America and for Black America.
I still disagree.
I don't think it's a Zero-sum game when it comes to reparations.
Again, and I raise the issue of the Japanese-Americans.
I don't understand why, I don't understand the argument that it is somehow an insult to the dignity, or it was somehow an insult to the dignity of Japanese-Americans to give them reparations for a wrong that was done by, that was state-sanctioned.
And I don't see why that is, that necessarily has to be- Cases are completely different.
Completely different cases.
It wasn't merely state sanctioned.
It was actual state action.
And I think that makes it fundamentally different.
It's also the case that for the most part, we're talking about reparations that were paid to specific people for a specific injury perpetuated by the state.
It's certainly true that slavery and various other sort of egregious things that have happened to black people.
In some instances, you do have the state that's the actor.
With Jim Crow, it's the state that's the actor.
I don't know that permitting the existence of an institution like chattel slavery, for example, which is older than writing, is something that really sort of fits the same bill, but I'll take it a step further.
I think there's a fundamental principle that is perhaps somewhat undermined by taking culpability and making it something that is intergenerational, and taking even the injury and making it something that is intergenerational.
The notion of rule of law is something that is not merely a good goal or even a sufficient goal.
It is a pretty extraordinary thing that has evaded most people throughout most of history.
And to the extent that instituting some regime of rewarding people for things that have happened to their ancestors on account of their being black, essentially, I think that that might actually impair that fabric.
And I know one thing I would say, while I've got the mic for a moment, is I suspect there are people who will watch a conversation like this and will immediately think that, oh, these are the folks who talk about culture as the fundamental problem.
It's certainly the case that there are many unenlightened conversations that take place around these issues.
Lots of thoughtless people who invoke culture as a response and just talk about black-on-black crime in a sort of flippant way.
It's certainly not what's happening here.
I think the vast majority of the conversation that is happening in this country now, with the ascendancy of the anti-racist movement, tends to focus narrowly and specifically on these structural problems.
The fact that the folks in this particular conversation are interested in the Complexity of the origin of those problems and the complexity of what's required to actually address those problems, whether or not we agree on the appropriateness of reparations as part of that solution, I think is very, very telling and important.
And that is what's happening here, as opposed to a sort of flippant emphasis on culture.
Yeah, I'd like to pick up on that, Camille, and I really appreciate you sort of distilling that at the end there, because I think that, and while I appreciate the perspectives that everybody's offering on reparations, and I, you know, I have sympathy with so much of it, I don't think the question of reparations is the fundamental one here, because
Whether we do or don't initiate anything like reparations eventually, anything we do or don't do there is going to succeed or fail on the basis of whether or not we have a larger framework for the conversation over race and Black America specifically, its relationship to the structures of our larger society that is actually able to salvage what is true or what has a root of truth in the different perspectives that are on offer in these sort of simplified narratives.
The question is, can we, you know, on this call and folks like us, can we help build out a frame that actually captures all of that in a way that can sort of emerge as a coherent narrative?
That's point number one.
Point number two is, how are we able to grow that frame, that narrative, within the larger American conversation and within the internal conversation?
Um, in, in black America, where the social sort of volition towards, uh, you know, a particular type of, of activism, uh, is, is gained momentum at a, at an incredible pace for reasons that are understandable.
I think that a frame such as that needs to sort of find a way to reconcile sort of the, the, the proper or the real relationship that exists between, between three things.
I think one is the role of culture in, in, In society and human populations generally, but certainly in Black America.
Two, is the interaction between culture and structure.
And three, it's the interaction between structure, maybe structure and culture, but the variable of whiteness, right?
Because that is something that people are looking at as a tangible sort of thing here.
What is the relationship between these things?
My sense, again, is that culture is sort of the fundamental question within Black America, but that interacts with a pattern, a history of systemic evolution that achieves a sort of critical formation in the 70s and the 80s, I think.
And that because of a longer arc of history and the way in which that history has moved, you have a lot of people who look at whiteness as having animated this sort of perverse kind of evolution of those systems.
Precisely as you come out of the 60s, during a period of time where we're from another lens, looking at the cultural impact of Martin Luther King Jr., the nonviolent movement, the integration of our popular culture changes that took place in the South and the integration of our popular culture changes that took place in the South
America became visibly less racist in terms of how we presented ourselves to the world, really the reality of the evolution of racial attitudes in the minds of the majority of Americans coming out from that period of time.
How did racial attitudes really shift in white America?
They shifted, I think, in a positive direction.
But when we account for whiteness as animating the systemic oppression, Then you get a very different frame for understanding that.
So if we can lend clarity to those three variables, I think, you know, what is it people mean by whiteness?
How did white attitudes change or not change?
What is the relationship between systems and culture?
And what is the cultural relationship between culture and success in Black America?
Then we can begin to build out something that is actually coherent, that can bring in a coalition behind it.
So I would like... That's an interesting... I think that's an interesting proposal, but In my mind, it actually underscores the degree to which race actually pollutes so many things, and the degree to which the aspiration to make progress on all of these really, really important, incredibly complicated problems is compounded by the flattening that the indication of race requires.
The thinking about groups, the thinking about culpability as something that can be ascribed to one group or another, the thinking about dysfunction as something that can be ascribed to an entire group.
The reality is that there are particular behaviors, perhaps even particular pathologies that we want to address.
And those pathologies and behaviors exist in all manner of groups.
I think that we perhaps almost concede too much when we only have the conversations in terms of these disparities, the fact that blacks are overrepresented in certain categories, and not have specific conversations about particular concerns that we have, about particular kinds of dysfunctions in our society that need to be addressed.
That because the solutions, the remedies, again, setting aside reparations for the moment, are generally things that are going to be race agnostic.
If children ought to be reading more, if schools aren't functioning properly, if literacy rates are too low, if hunger is a fundamental issue, then the actual consideration of race in most of those contexts May not be all that illuminating.
It may only offer friction.
And that is, I think, a really important point for us to at least consider.
Can I just jump in quickly here?
A, I don't think the problem is complex.
I think it seems complex because we stand in the wrong place.
And until you stand in the right place, you don't see that it's actually more straightforward than you would imagine.
And the reparations question is a perfect one in order to reveal this.
So I would argue we should separate it into two different questions.
Is a remedy justified?
And is reparations the correct, that is to say, most likely to succeed remedy available to us?
In my case, I would say I absolutely believe there is a justification.
I do not believe, I believe very much what Glenn said, that what you will get if you use monetary reparations is you will get white Americans discharging a real debt without having solved a problem.
And then what?
Right?
That is going to be a disaster.
So, the real problem, the place that I think we should stand, is that race becomes an issue when the structures that are supposed to cause us to cohere as a multiracial society break down as a result of artificial scarcity.
When you have scarcity because something is hoarding opportunity and well-being, we turn on each other.
That's natural, biological, predictable.
And so what we are seeing is a symptom of that hoarding.
Right?
And we can talk about the details of how that functions within each of these populations, but the real question is, why is opportunity being hoarded?
How are we allowing that to happen?
And what do we suspect about each other as our reason to cohere breaks down?
So, Chloe, I interrupted you.
Do you want to jump in?
Well I was only going to say that to this day I have no idea what whiteness is.
And I really I have no idea what that means.
I agree with you that that we should be looking at it sort of as like a scarcity slash abundance model and ask the questions why does scarcity exist and what are the Policies, both legislative and cultural, that we can enact to rectify this issue of scarcity.
I don't think that, you know, to Glenn's point, I don't think that any reparations bill should be, if it were to pass, should be in isolation or set apart from the cultural question or other conversations that have nothing to do with you know, a legislative imposition.
But I do in general agree, Brett, with your point that the question has to be asked, why is American structure so inadequate that we are tearing each other apart?
What are the areas of scarcity that we can actually rectify legislatively or otherwise to help heal that?
And I do agree that this exists across the board and this is not merely a matter of a racial category.
If I can just add one bit of nuance.
What I'm arguing for is that we have an artificially high level of bad luck.
That the good luck has been hoarded, the bad luck is more widespread than it should be, and it disproportionately falls on some communities more than others.
So it's not randomly distributed, which causes the impression that we have a race problem.
And we do, but the race problem isn't driving this.
What's driving it is the fact that there's something that doesn't want to share, and you know, we can talk about redistributing wealth, but that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about opportunity, and any decent patriotic American ought to be interested in opportunity being as widespread as possible.
I've literally never heard an argument that opportunity should not be widely distributed.
You can make arguments about wealth, but not opportunity.
And so that's the problem, is if you're going to hoard opportunity, And the lack of opportunity is going to fall very heavily on some communities that have a cultural problem that has a long, that is to say, multi-century history, and a history that is largely understandable.
Then that's where we have to go in order to address this so that we don't continue to have this boil over every 50 or 100 years.
Can I ask you a question, Britt?
Excuse me.
Sure.
The question is, Okay, there's inequality of resources and there's inequality of opportunity and it's partly plays out across racial or ethnic lines.
The question, here's the question, are the groups that are on top culpable?
If the groups that are on the bottom are themselves in some sense or another being victimized by society, are the groups that are on the top vulnerable?
If we fixate on groups, In terms of the inequality of opportunity or access to luck, don't we have to somehow implicitly indict the successful even as we offer up our support for and our concern about those who haven't done so well?
Aren't there too many Jews?
Aren't there too many Asians?
Aren't there too many etc.? ?
Do you see where I'm going with this?
Oh yeah, I would say the answer to the question is this is the thing that is special about America is that it aspires to allow us not to do that and we must not do that because this is this is a very beautiful structure potentially and a very fragile one if we start seeing each other in through that lens and so what I'm arguing is The villains are not a group of people.
It's not Jews.
It's not Asians.
It's not whites.
It's rent-seekers, right?
And some of the rent-seekers don't even know that they're doing it.
Some people get to the category of rent-seekers through the production of something that spreads like wildfire and makes them rich, and then being rich allows you to get richer, and you start hoarding opportunity because it is natural to want opportunity.
But, I guess my point is, the villains are self-defined by virtue of the fact that they are interested in shielding their own children, for example, from competition from other people's children.
Right?
It's an un-American thing to do.
And, I don't know how successfully I've answered your question, but the thing we must not do is try to figure out which population is guilty.
It's A, a bad question, and B, it is the route to rapid disaster.
This is that, I'm going to be really quick, is that let's say that you are correct in this analysis, and I really mean let's say that you're correct.
The problem is that the people who talk about this the most and with the most authority are highly unlikely to have that clinical view of this sort of thing, because there's a different cultural problem, which is that the American intelligentsia is complicit with encouraging the black segment of that intelligentsia to have a noble victim complex.
The idea is that being a victim is the bedrock of your identity.
It's what makes you interesting.
It's what makes you special.
And so that means that even if the opportunity here were offered, and Chloe, I'm with you to an extent on reparations.
I get it.
I see it as, you know, there's very similar to the Japanese case.
My feelings always been reparations and before and not too much happened, but I could get on board with the idea that we do it again, but the problem is that the kinds of people who talk about racism, other than a very few, wouldn't be placated by the racism.
If opportunities were granted, they would see it as their responsibility to pretend nothing significant happened.
And what I mean is simply that I'm going to pick somebody because she's in the news a lot lately and because she really gets around.
I'm not choosing her because I think she's ridiculous.
I'm just choosing her.
If reparations were granted, think about Nicole Hannah-Jones on a podcast or on a TV show.
Think about her general demeanor, which is that of being a warrior against a major tort that has been leveled, a major injustice that's been leveled against her culture.
Think of her facial expression, and I'm not making fun of it, but that facial expression that she often has, which is kind of similar to mine, actually, represents something.
Would it change?
Would it change?
Can you imagine somebody interviewing her in, say, five years after reparations happened, with her having a different facial expression?
And because this is going to seem like I'm attacking a woman, I will say the same thing about Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Think about his facial expression in interviews.
The facial expression There's a reason you can't imagine it ever changing.
There would always be that sense that the battle is still on.
And unfortunately, that kind of person has such an influence that I think we need to look at more than just these cold figures that you, Brett, the biologist, understandably are trying to see these things in.
Because the people who talk about this with influence will never be placated, including if reparations were granted.
Yeah, but I just want to...
I think that actually Coates...
Yeah, I was going to mention...
Sorry, Thomas.
It's changed since he got really paid and he's an optimist now.
Yeah, I was going to say Coates is actually interesting because he, you know, when Obama was in office, he had this very long interview with him in the Atlantic Magazine about reparations where Obama was specifically saying he actually wasn't for reparations.
And just the fact that he was able to have that conversation with him without necessarily...
It was in print, but without that sort of very rigid, you know, facial expression, I think is maybe telling, but I think the larger question would be, so how do we disincentivize that...
Kind of a response culturally.
And I do think it's possible because I do think we have, you know, you might not like the term influencers, but I do think we actually have a lot of influencers culturally in the black community that are willing and able to have a much more nuanced conversation about this.
I brought this up at a talk that Glenn, you were at at the Manhattan Institute two years ago, when I spoke about the Breakfast Club for all of its problems.
That was you?
Yes.
There are, you know, there are serious conversations of the caliber that we're having right now from influential folks in the black community that talk about the problems with our culture, that talk about the proliferation of violence, that talk about the proliferation of incarceration as caused by us.
And so this idea that there is just none of that happening and that we can't somehow incentivize that, I just think is Not laid out by the facts.
So, again, my question, and I agree with you, John, but my question would be, then, how do we disincentivize that from happening?
And maybe, Camille, I saw you shaking your head, maybe you don't think it's possible.
But I do, so, but I would love to hear you guys' thoughts on that.
Yeah, and Chloe is asking the right question.
That is the question that highlights the limitation of the conversation that we've been having up to the moment.
Brett, I think that your frame about the hoarding of opportunity being a major, major part of what leads to the cultural and other issues that we're seeing, I think that's spot on.
I feel like that overlaps with my analysis and the analysis that others are are given here.
But I think that the communicative potential of that analysis is only made viable if it is deployed within a larger context that begins to sort of address the kind of intercultural and internal cultural conversations that are already taking place, right?
Because Glenn and John, in different ways, you guys are both sort of highlighting the fact that the empirical arguments are just not enough, right?
And so if we're going to talk about what does a solution look like for moving the community forward, it can't be a conversation strictly over what the material solutions are.
What is the best version of reparations?
Should we do reparations X, Y, and Z kind of way?
It has to be a conversation that actually joins with the narrative currents that are flowing out of the black community and other parts of society at present.
The reason I mentioned the idea of whiteness is not to lend, is not to amplify an already sort of, you know, Somewhat toxic kind of concept in the way in which that idea sort of engaged.
It is rather to sort of set the stage for a conversation that allows us to understand that the good news in American life is that people generally have gotten less racist over time.
And we can look at that and lift up that truth in a way that perhaps can set the stage for some sort of reconciliation here, but the other part that has to be acknowledged is the fact that the systemic, the reality of systemic problems, even if, and I myself don't prefer the idea of it being, you know, I don't like the phrase institutional racism, I don't prefer it, I don't prefer the phrase white supremacy, but to acknowledge the fact that there are systemic problems.
that are interacting with the legacy of racism, even as Americans in general have become less racist over time, it sets the stage for us to have an intelligent policy-based conversation while also being able to arrive potentially at some deeper sort of reconciliation in terms of our personal communal feelings across these cultural divides of black and white, left and right, and the ways in which they
I want to mention a book.
John?
You're getting a lot of air time, bro.
So I'm going to be very concise.
Everybody should read this book.
Everybody should read Rogers Brubaker.
Ethnicity Without Groups.
He's a theoretical sociologist.
It's an obscure book.
It's theoretical sociology.
What's his first name?
Rogers with an S. Rogers Brubaker.
He says, ethnic groups don't just exist, they have to be called into existence through the actions of strategic actors in the press, in the academy, in the organizing community, in the economy.
And we need to think about how it is that we frame issues and how it is that they, that's what I'm taking from this conversation for the last 15 minutes.
Critical institutions matter.
The universities are absolutely fundamental here.
What's taught in our universities to young people who are going to end up being strategic, professional actors in all of the key venues.
They're going to end up manning and womaning the newsrooms.
You know, they're going to be the young professionals.
What's taught in our universities is absolutely critical.
So, the press is absolutely critical.
I'm appalled sometimes when I pick up the newspaper and I look at the tendentious way within which events that are very complicated are framed in simplistic black and white racial kind of framing.
So, anyway, I just wanted to make my point.
Take it as a footnote, John Wood, to your long disquisition.
You can read some academic sociology and advance the conversation.
Before you jump in, Coleman, I just want to say it's ferno.
Go ahead, Brett.
Well, I just want to say, before you jump in, very frequently we've got a problem where we've got two things that have been fused together in our minds and they have to be pulled apart.
In this case, is it the pointy-headed intellectual discussion that needs to be had, or is it the visceral narrative thing?
And obviously it's both.
You've got to figure out what's actually going on.
But the only way it's going to reach anybody is if you get it into poetry or music or narrative or something like this, which is obviously Chloe's specialty.
So anyway, I'm not arguing that let's get this intellectually right and then share the good news because nobody's going to listen.
But if we can get it intellectually right and then figure out how to say it so that people understand, actually, there's hope down some road other than attacking the nuclear family and taking apart STEM and all of this other nonsense, then, you know, maybe we can go in a good direction.
All right.
Yeah.
Brett, I'm curious how you know it's the case that our racial tensions are caused by Well, A, this phone call is a pretty good demonstration.
All right?
scarcity and the implication being if there were more opportunity, our racial tensions would lessen.
I'm not convinced of that.
I think it might be too optimistic.
How do you know that?
Well, A, this phone call is a pretty good demonstration.
All right.
We're doing all right.
But so is the New York Times op-ed page.
So are all the college-educated black activist class that is at the forefront of the misunderstandings on this issue.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
That's not what I mean by doing all right.
I mean that we are reaching each other, hearing each other, making points, concessions, all of the things that are necessary for people to collaborate in a non-race-first way.
But let me flip the thing on its head because here's what's really... I don't understand.
Okay, let me just, I'm going to go the analytical route for a second.
Until the last five minutes of history, there was only lineage against lineage competition, right?
People competed with each other on the basis of who was related to whom.
There is another mechanism that unfolds, which is a collaboration based on reciprocity, right?
Where one puts aside relatedness and collaborates based on the fact that it is profitable to both parties to engage in collaboration.
Now, that has ancient roots, but at the level of the scale of nations, in general, you have a closely related population inside of a border, and it may compete with a different population across some other border, or sometimes they're within one border and you'll end up with a genocide every now and again.
But a structure that attempts to stabilize our collaborative instincts with each other and sideline our lineage level relatedness questions is novel.
What we know is that it can work because the best moments in our history it has worked and in fact you can see that moments of productivity are ones in which we actually make progress on this front and then you get a contraction and suddenly we're at each other's throats.
All I'm getting at is the scarcity in this case is artificial.
We know that there's plenty being generated and we know that it's being very badly distributed.
And if we're careful, we know that it isn't just the wealth that's badly distributed, that it's actually the opportunity.
And in part, you're watching what we're calling the anti-racist movement attack many of the solutions.
This is a conspicuous tell, right?
The idea that you would attack the nuclear family when having two parents is actually known to be a very positive factor in terms of pointing kids in the right direction.
The fact that it is attacking Academic study, the fact that it is attacking science, all of these things are an indicator that in some sense it is declaring that it has given up on the structures that work rather than tried trying to acquire those structures for populations that need them.
So did I successfully answer your question or did I just muddle it?
Not really.
I mean I agree with many of the points you made but I'm so like what I'm looking for is like this seems like a very interesting hypothesis to me which is that What we think our racial tensions are actually caused by something totally different.
It's something I've actually heard a lot of activists say, that they want us to fight each other because if we're fighting each other, then we're not fighting them.
Where them is defined as like, you know, the 1%.
It's something actually a lot of Marxists think.
They think a lot of the racial issues are actually just class issues in disguise.
And if we solve the former, the latter will at minimum be lessened.
And I'm curious whether it's true.
Have we looked at the past hundred years of history and seen that when race relations are worse, it's always during economic downturns or that Like, have we done a rigorous—this is the kind of thing that sounds like it might be true, but it also just might not be true.
So I'm looking for, like, the rigorous evidence.
Well, so first of all, if we can take this out of the American context for a second, and actually take it out of the Black context as well, think about anti-Semitism, right?
Anti-Semitism is a recurrent theme in history.
Why?
Have you ever heard an explanation?
From Thomas Sowell, his middleman minority that people don't understand what they bring economically and resent them was pretty persuasive to me, but I haven't studied it rigorously.
Well, here would be my argument.
I think his argument is right, but that there's a deeper level.
And the deeper level is this.
Jews live as part of a diaspora.
It means that we're a minority population inside the borders of other nations.
And when times are good, people collaborate with us.
When times are bad, they find an excuse to eliminate us or to steal stuff from us.
Not because there's any justification for this, but because it creates growth for the population in a position to do the stealing.
And the population that's in a position to do the stealing is the majority population by its very nature.
So all I'm getting at is When times are good, one can afford to collaborate because it's not a zero-sum game.
It's a positive-sum game.
As things go into zero-sum, or worse, negative-sum, you can actually create the appearance of growth to one population by robbing a different one.
And in some sense, what's going on in the U.S.
is that the black population is continually being robbed, right?
And so, the thing that I'm having trouble with is I'm watching this movement of And it is motivated by something that I think is very, very real, but it has misdiagnosed it.
And because it's misdiagnosed it, it's about to botch the policy level.
And in fact, it's going to botch the policy level in a way it's going to take down the entire experiment, rather than doing something that would positively address the real issue that has caused the anger.
Which obviously has a racial nature, but isn't entirely racial, right?
People are suffering in a very general way.
So, again, I feel like I haven't perfectly answered your question.
Yeah, I don't want to take up too much time, but the Federal Reserve recently, I think last year, did its economic well-being report.
It polls Americans and asks them, are you doing better financially than your parents?
And something like 70% of black people answered that question, yes.
And that percentage was higher than for whites.
And I feel I'm, you know, I'm not sure I buy the idea that this is a, I think this is its own problem, is what I'm saying.
I think it's a problem that's generated by ideas, by social media, by, you know, by coverage bias, covering certain instances and not others.
I fear that your analysis might be too optimistic in pinning it as a consequence of this other problem.
Very quick thing, Brett.
I would have to agree with Coleman here in that I suggest a heuristic.
I say this all the time on the Glenn Show, but I think this is important.
Whatever you're trying to come up with about the race problem, whatever analysis you're trying, you have to always keep in mind this very simple thing.
Every summer in big cities across the United States, black Teenagers and 20-somethings start killing each other in alarmingly high numbers over nothing at all.
Now, whatever explanation you have based on the economy, or opportunity, or who has more of the chips, the question has to be, why that?
Because I don't think anybody would say, I don't think you would say, that those boys are killing one another because They don't have enough to eat because they're not making as much as their dad.
There's something more going on.
And it's not to say that these are pathological individuals.
There are reasons for this.
It's a tragedy.
And you want them to stop this.
But what's going on, among many other things, is that.
And so your analysis has to cover that.
Well, of course it does.
And I mean, look, there's a really bitter pill that comes with the analysis that I'm trying to foster.
For one thing, I don't think very much depends on the precision of it, right?
Which I think is what we're arguing about.
The question is, is it in the ballpark?
Is it accurate?
The problem is that so much of this is deep enough that the solution is not quick.
There is nothing that you could deliver that would solve this in less than a generation.
You could start to make it better very quickly, but you can't.
You can't solve this because the problem does involve a failure of the culture of fatherhood, for example.
You have to resurrect the nuclear family, not attack it.
Right?
You have to resurrect a respect for meritocracy, for achievement, and achievement, in order to resurrect a respect for it, it has to be possible.
So, the question is, if people don't see that there is a way for them to get ahead by being personally responsible, they don't engage in it.
And so, there has to be something to shoot for.
You might see it and still not do it, though.
That's true, too.
That's quite true.
Is it your position, Brett, that there is not a sufficiently meritocratic system in place today?
When you talk about this deficit of opportunity, is it a function of just a lower productivity during the period that we find ourselves living in?
Or do you think that there is something that is broken?
Because certainly when I look under the hood of what we call Black America, And we look at the various cohorts that exist there, the different immigrant communities.
There are lots of successful people there.
And I think that's also true across the United States.
When you tick off certain boxes and when you have certain characteristics, you actually tend to do pretty well in this country.
And you can have attained some of that upward mobility.
I think there are things, certainly prior to the pandemic, That we're working.
There are other things that weren't working.
And one concern that I have is the degree to which we imagine that we can engineer better political systems that will give us better societal outcomes.
And I think a lot of the political fixes, like the affirmative ones, that we often imagine putting into place to try and uplift people out of poverty and to better distribute opportunity,
They tend to fail in ways that are pretty profound, and for reasons we don't understand, because the mechanisms that actually allow us to create prosperity are... they're distributed, and they're very difficult to actually try and game, and they're way too complicated for most of us to actually understand.
Well, so this I think is where this dynamic between conservatives who tend to favor personal responsibility solutions and liberals who tend to favor systemic solutions tends to go awry.
Because there is clearly, if I was advising somebody who was in an oppressed population, I would be full-time on the personal responsibility issue, right?
Why?
Because you have a very good chance of improving your well-being by being personally responsible.
Whether it's fair or not, you have a very good chance of getting out of your situation if you can keep your head down and do the right sorts of things.
So if I was advising an individual, That's the only game in town.
The problem is if it doesn't adjust how much there is available, then if you succeed through personal responsibility, somebody else fails.
Somebody whose name you don't know, right?
And so my point would be it's not one or the other in this case.
From the point of view of individuals, We don't want this de-individuated anti-racist movement that basically turns people into, you know, just a mob.
We want people to recognize themselves as individuals and to recognize that they have agency and that's important.
But to the extent that the problem is, at the end of the day, If there is enough to go around, it isn't available to most people.
That's an issue to be addressed at a different level.
And I am not, I was, decades ago, a believer in these architected, top-down solutions.
I am no longer a believer in those things.
That's not what I'm advocating.
But I am advocating that we recognize the degree to which bad luck, for example, is non-randomly distributed.
And we say, look, that's just an unacceptable phenomenon.
Right.
It is our obligation.
There's going to be bad luck, but it should be evenly distributed based on race and zip code and all of these things.
And until it is, we've got a problem that can be addressed at a different level that personal responsibility does not have any impact on.
Yeah, but how can it be addressed on a different level?
Because as you were saying this, I was thinking of the recent spate of shootings in Chicago.
And I was thinking, we're talking about bad luck, right?
I was reading some of the bios of those individuals who were killed, who were doing, you know, personal responsibility, who were taking care of their families, who just so happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and were shot by, killed by a stray bullet.
And what is the piece of legislation That's going to effectively change that bad luck.
Well, so first of all, there's a deeper problem, and you're right, the focus on culture in this conversation is, I think, key.
I want to tell you a very brief story.
I was on a subway in Harlem last time I was in New York, and there was a group of kids, they must have been 13, 14 years old, seemed like interesting, good kids.
They were black, and they were horsing around on the train.
And one of the kids, a girl, sort of looked a bit bookish.
And the other kids that she was with took her knapsack and they started making fun of her for studying and giving a damn about school.
And they literally turned her backpack upside down and spilled out.
Her notes just spilled out across the floor of the train.
And she was embarrassed picking them back up because it demonstrated that she gave a damn.
Right?
That's a deep problem.
That's a serious problem because it means that even somebody who is interested in the kinds of things that would allow them to deploy personal responsibility and lift themselves up by their bootstraps faces something else, which is that if other people around you don't have the same capacity, they may even resent your doing it.
So, this is deep stuff.
It's not just legislation, but if you were going to do it legislatively, what would you do?
I would think, instead of reparations, we'd be talking about massive investment in these communities.
It's not like we don't know how to build a good school, right?
They just don't happen in certain neighborhoods, and they do happen in other neighborhoods.
And it's not an accident which neighborhoods have the good ones.
And if you really wanted to solve this problem, and you were willing to invest 20 years to do it, Then placing the things in the locations where the tools that are most useful are accessible is at least a prerequisite.
I see a shake in your head.
It's not a racial, white kids that I grew up with, white Italian Americans that I grew up with do the exact same thing.
They throw your books on the ground.
We have a problem of discussing class in terms of race in America.
This is not inherently black behavior.
I know.
But no, the idea of acting white is something that affects, you know, I've experienced that, but it's not a fundamentally black thing.
It's a corp thing.
J.D.
Vance talks about.
It's in hillbilly-ology.
You know, we need to find a language that... this was...
We have to find a language that doesn't occlude the problem by this kind of hocus pocus talk of race.
I hope you don't think that that's what I'm saying.
It happened that the kids I was looking at on this train were black, but that's not what I'm saying at all.
And in fact, I think what I said earlier in the conversation is that as soon as we start seeing these things as racial, we lose sight of what's actually going on and we default into this ancestral mode.
I'm on the same page with that.
It's a subtle problem.
Excuse me, Thomas.
I just want to make this point.
It's a network phenomenon.
It's about individuals embedded within a social structure of interpersonal contact.
Now, those tend to be racial, given racial identification and racial organization in society.
They're not intrinsically racial, but they are, in their manifestation, de facto, often racial.
Exactly.
Brett, the reason I was shaking my head Was because whether that phenomenon is racial or not, and that's a very complex question, I think it's worse and more dangerous in the black community than, say, Thomas Among, working class Italians, because there's the whole issue that that girl with the glasses is supposedly not black, not just a nerd.
But nevertheless, let's just call it anti-intellectualism.
The sad fact is that when that kind of culture is entrenched in a school, you can put money into it for a generation.
And you go back in a generation and the place is still a mess.
That has been shown.
And there's this tragic case in St.
Louis.
And then there was another tragic case just in New Jersey.
Pump money into those schools and have telescopes and people learning how to make sushi and all of that.
And if the culture is such that school is seen as alien, the problem It's not solved.
And I wish that were true.
I agree with this.
Let me just say, you would find it funny if you saw the classroom that I ran before the evergreen meltdown, because the classroom that I ran didn't look like school for exactly this reason.
I was not a good student.
And so I'm not suggesting we just duplicate some good school in a bad neighborhood.
I think we have to re-envision what school looks like so that it's fun and engaging.
Well, I actually like that a lot, and I would say that there's something you said a moment ago, we know how to build good schools, and I'm not so sure about that.
We know where some good schools are, we know what the qualities of those good schools are, but those schools tend to fit in particular contexts.
They fit the particular, they have cultivated a culture over time, perhaps some mechanisms for inculcating that culture within the professor, The leadership and the students themselves, they're complex.
And the actual mechanisms that get us to better institutions are likely to be the same things that get us to better goods and services.
It's probably greater competition.
It's probably greater choice in the context of education.
And it is most certainly an environment that encourages innovation, which is something that we have not seen in K-12 education or in higher education.
Neither one of these things has changed materially in the past hundred odd years.
And with K-12 in particular, it's not even like the material that we're teaching is much different.
Yet, we still see falling test scores in certain contexts for whole swaths of the population.
And we still have these incredibly inefficient circumstances where we used to anyways, fill classrooms with 30 kids, Give them textbooks and sometimes laptops and calculators.
And it's not terribly different than the way it's from the way it's worked over the course of the past century.
Anyplace else in America.
And I do think that we need to break that old model and find new ways of educating students.
But I also think that this process is hard and it is likely to be something that needs to actually grow organically in order to work.
Last point on this is that It is very clear to me that the most beneficial thing that's happened to any student who's been trapped or who ran the risk of being trapped in an underperforming school over the past 30, 40 years is the advent of school choice and the charter school movement.
And we need more programs like that to actually improve their circumstances.
And here again, we're having a narrow, specific conversation about a particular aspect of the problems that are often
Thrown in to this bucket of things that are viewed as the challenges facing black America or you know, the the repercussions of structural racism in this country and I just think that those conversations tend to be a lot more productive and they tend to yield a lot more in the way of remedies and I I'm I am at least a little bit pessimistic about the the broader global projects to try and
Create a new language for us to talk about these things.
And as much as I engage in some of the intellectual aspect of this routinely, I do think that it's the practical mantras.
It's the simple slogans that end up getting it done.
It's Martin Luther King's assertion that he has a dream.
And the specific idea in that dream being that we would all be judged by the content of our character.
Like that resonates with people.
That has legs.
And I think that is To the extent you're uncomfortable with the current moment and the wave of anti-racism and the degree to which it essentializes us, you're uncomfortable with it because of that idea, that piece of software that travels really, really well.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean I'm uncomfortable with it.
I'm concerned that we are about to uninvent America and that the horror that will replace it is something that ought to frighten us all.
But I agree with you completely about what you said about school.
What I should have said is we know how to make better schools.
We don't know how to make good schools.
And it's very important that we figure it out.
And it should look radically different.
But... Can I say something, Brett?
Just quickly.
I'm struck by the contrast.
So there are two big areas of public service provision which have Massive impacts on Black communities.
Policing and education.
Both of which are unionized, both of which are provided by public employees and so forth and so on.
And both of which, it could be argued, have failed the community.
Look at the discourse within the community about the failure of public institutions to measure up to the needs of the people.
With respect to police, we've got defund the police.
We've got throwing bricks at cops.
We've got what we've got.
We've got Black Lives Matter.
With respect to education, you have the left-of-center politics implacably opposed to doing what Camille Foster just said needed to be done.
Fighting to the last man to keep it from happening.
Now, my point is not about them.
I expect them to defend their interests.
My point is about us.
Where's the criticism of that for people who think that black lives matter?
Can you say what exactly the criticism, what is that in that sentence?
That is the failure of conventional public educational services being provided to black people to convey to them the opportunity in this life to which they are entitled.
So this is why... Which can be remedied, Camille suggests, by expanding educational choice, which policy is implacably opposed by the Democratic Party.
So I believe the problem is both parties, that the parties have effectively got a stranglehold on power, right?
And that stranglehold on power means that policy does not serve the public, and it hasn't for decades.
This is why I started where I did.
I believe if you were to get anywhere, if Camille is right about what the solution actually looks like, then what you need is a governmental structure that actually gives a damn what the consequences of its behavior are, rather than parties that are cynically pointing us at each other so that we don't notice the corruption that they're involved in.
That, I really think, is ultimately the only route out of this, because if we let the parties continue to play their role, they're going to start a race war.
I mean, very predictably.
That may be true, but you don't mean to be saying that the Democrats and the Republicans stand in the same place vis-a-vis school choice.
No, no.
Because that's not true.
No, I think the Democrats are basically cynically toying with partnering with this so-called anti-racist movement, and that that is going to back whites against the wall and cause them to start seeing things racially in a way that they haven't in more than a generation, and that the net result of those two phenomena is that we are going to be headed to a conflict that nobody knows the way out of.
And what's more, unlike our first Civil War, there's not even a geographic description of a solution, right?
I'm not sure about that, though, because you have quite a lot of whites that are no longer interested or exhausted in their own identity who are not going to be taking up that war, so it gets a lot more complicated than white versus black.
I agree it's more complicated, but do you see a way that it ends acceptably?
I mean, you have a well-armed rural white population that is now correctly understanding that it is being targeted by a mob that claims it's guilty of all sorts of things that it actually isn't guilty of yet, and threatening to redistribute the opportunity that it has.
It's a catastrophe unfolding in slow motion.
Although the segment of the population that is so well-armed, generally speaking, is probably not the same segment of the population that is enjoying all manner of privileges and opportunities.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
The people who are the rent-seekers, who I believe are the self-defined villains here, the rent-seekers would rather that we fight each other.
They would rather that people of average means, both white and black, I hear the argument and I understand what you're advancing.
fight each other and that we not notice where the opportunity actually went.
That's the game.
I hear the argument and I understand what you're advancing.
I do wonder though, So I don't have to suppose any kind of cynical or sinister motive on the part of the lawmakers in Detroit who've continually failed the people who've elected them to office to try to improve their circumstances over the course of the last 50 or 60 years.
And it's possible they've even instituted policies that people want there to the best of their ability.
And those policies might still fail.
I don't know that most people have a very good sense of what works and what's likely to yield the best outcomes.
I'm not certain that, you know, democratic outcomes are even necessarily going to give you the best outcomes.
I think a lot of people would like to see someone take all of the money and give it to the schools and engineer a good outcome.
It's just not obvious to me that that is actually consistent with getting, let's just narrow this to education again, Competitive, innovative, choice-driven educational system.
I think most people are far more comfortable with something that is universal and is equitable in the sense that you at least, you know, you know you're getting a token and it's funded corporately by all of us and perhaps is consistent with the status quo.
I don't think you're hearing what I'm saying.
I don't think the Democrats have the solution.
I think they've gone stark raving mad, right?
But I do know that the way you would discover the solution is you would have to eliminate the conflicts of interest and then have a discussion in which the proposal that you're making is on the table and it's defended in terms that are, you know, analytical.
It is necessary to eliminate the corruption in order to figure out how much we know about what to do, and to discover that which we don't yet know.
So, that's really my point.
It's the corruption that is causing the problem, and until we deal with that one, we don't know how much solution-making is readily possible.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but are we thinking of concluding soon?
Because I only allowed two hours for this.
I think we have to do that.
Do people have five more minutes?
Yeah, I do.
I want to very briefly say I said St.
Louis.
I meant Kansas City for anybody who wants to check up on that case.
Thanks for the correction.
So how should we use the last five minutes?
I can talk about corruption and what I think we should do or we can continue the discussion and you guys can wrap up what you've heard and what you think it means.
I just want to add to support what Camille just said.
I'm not sure that the corruption is merely top-down in the sense that like I it could be that we the citizens have not we don't have this like Internal feeling of actually fulfilling our duty as citizens and holding our politicians' feet to the fire.
And so that plays a prominent role in terms of stopping the corruption that you are referring to, Brett.
And that's not something that's easily solved.
Who's up?
Yeah, in my mind, the cultural question in terms of the larger narrative question really is what's key.
I mean, Camille mentioned Dr. King, the simple principle of us being judged by the contents of our character, but King engaged in a larger narrative project that challenged both the narrative coming from the racist establishment, but also
The narrative coming from the militant establishment of the Civil Rights Movement, and basically the whole spectrum of dehumanizing perspectives in a way that shifted the conversation in America, but bore fruit in the actual cultural lives of Americans, left, right, and center, black, right, etc.
To me, that is the key question.
That is the key project.
And that's what I hope folks on this call will focus on.
Great.
Who's next?
I'll just say that I think that in America, we live extraordinarily segregated lives still.
And the only way that a lot of these problems are going to be solved is how, is if we figure out how people can meet each other on more equal terms.
So I come back to, I think I'm agreeing with what I think you were getting at, Brett, is that there has to be some form of material equalization going on before we'll ever figure out the racial division that still plagues us.
Great.
Coleman?
I can't help but feel like there are various ways of trying to say that this problem is actually another problem in disguise, whether that's political corruption or lack of economic opportunity or economic inequality.
And I'm left feeling unconvinced by those.
I'm left feeling that this problem is hopelessly self-generated.
And will outlive and persist in spite of our being able to potentially solve or make progress on all of those other issues.
I think it's a problem of perception.
It's a problem of beliefs that often have no other cause outside of the inherent appeal of the beliefs themselves.
Beliefs about Um, what it means to be of one race rather than another, beliefs about what you inherit by virtue of being one race, beliefs about how much racism there is in society.
Um, so I, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, um, I, I, I think it's very interesting to consider the possibility that they're actually caused by something else that we can focus on some root cause of these issues, but I'm, I'm left feeling that they're hopelessly self-generated.
Before I ask someone else to step in, let me just say root cause is one way to look at it, but basically failure mode is another.
That a lack of leadership and political corruption are two sides of the same coin.
And that, in effect, until you have solved that problem, you're navigating blind, right?
Or worse.
Some interests that are above the public interest are steering, and it results in failure after failure.
And so, I hear your hopelessness, but what I want to convince you of is, you know, to the extent that somebody has hooked up the controls in the control room backwards, solving that one thing actually immediately has downstream consequences that are very positive.
I want to identify with Coleman.
And I'm not sure I agree with you, Brett.
And here's why, and I'll be very concise.
Shut down STEM.
Okay?
So, the problem here is an intellectual identity problem.
It's not a resource problem.
It's not people being poor.
Who are the people who are saying shut down STEM?
They're graduate students in biochemistry at Stanford.
They're some of the most privileged people of color on the planet.
Their beef, like the beef of every newsroom that has a plurality of African American journalists who will fire an editor if he runs the wrong op-ed piece, is up here.
It's not in their belly, it's in their heads.
They have the wrong ideas.
I don't think, at the end of the day, materialism is going to get us to where we need to go.
I would have to agree with Glenn.
And, you know, Glenn and I, Sometimes do that and sometimes don't.
But yes, I think that this question is not primarily about resources and that's what makes it so damn hard.
Because I think modernity and diversity bring with them unusual frames of mind that I think psychology and sociology are just beginning to catch up with.
There are ways of thinking that seem counterintuitive from the outside.
And yeah, we have to think of, for example, the affluent black kid at Stanford who's saying, shut down STEM.
They're not hungry.
They haven't been denied anything.
It's an ideology.
It's a peculiar, self-serving, comfortable, and destructive ideology that you wouldn't think a group of human beings would embrace unless you think about The fact that it can only often emerge when resources are distributed relatively effectively.
That's the challenge that we have.
These are very, very modern people.
They are, but I would just point out, Shutdown STEM, which was particularly galling and frightening, is not Organic it is a demonstration of power getting people to say shut down stem getting scientific establishments to say shut down stem was a demonstration of the amazing power of this movement and you can't necessarily Assume that the people who are saying it are saying it because they believe stem doesn't work.
They're saying it because they're serving They're trying to get out of the way of a mob or they're trying to they're wrong-headed and they're trying to serve that movement and so they're saying things that make no sense, but I I guess what I would wrap up with is I would just say, look, I have moments of hopelessness too.
And I do see a problem that's going to be very difficult to solve.
However, the ability to think clearly without conflicts of interest is a prerequisite to solving it.
It's not sufficient, but it is necessary.
And so I would urge you all to consider what do we lose if we solve the corruption problem?
And it turns out not to be sufficient.
We have lost nothing because we're headed for a disaster anyway.
If we solve the corruption problem, and it turns out that it is causing us to be unable to think about what good solutions might be, what they would look like, unable to innovate, as Camille said, then we potentially have a bright future ahead of us.
So I would just say, I hear your doubts, I share them, but Holy hell, we're headed for very, very dangerous waters, and we might as well do the one thing that makes obvious sense, which is restore our ability to think without conflicts of interest.
Yeah.
I will say, maybe perhaps building a bit of a bridge, that I do find your observations about leadership and the interesting development with respect to the role that these leaderless political movements are playing in society That combined with the way that we're communicating with one another now, it does strike me as something that is more than just a little novel.
This is a pretty substantial development and it may very well be that a lack of having a significant personality in the intellectual landscape that can actually help to direct some of these energies is a real deficiency, perhaps even a danger, that we might want to try to deliberately rectify.
So I think that's very interesting.
All right.
So I would just point out, we all know, we all know that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden has the answer here.
And I think we all know that we don't necessarily have four years to wait for a solution that makes sense.
So I would ask you all to consider something like the Unity 2020 proposal for rising above politics and fixing this problem directly.
OK.
Take a look at it.
Appreciate that.
Really do.
And I appreciate all of you.
I appreciate your courage, your generosity of spirit, your willingness to engage in a very dangerous exercise and your patriotism.
