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April 26, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:06:55
Why Reparations for Slavery Are a Crazy Idea
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Thank you for joining us, Jared.
I appreciate you getting on the virtual horn with us and talking to us a little bit about reparations.
It's my pleasure.
Thank you.
So, first of all, I wanted to get, you know, different people when I was talking about you and what you do with American Renaissance, and I was wondering how you would describe yourself.
And I think, you know, I was joking the last time we spoke and I said, you know, are you a white supremacist?
Are you a white supremacist?
You said, I don't want to be over anybody.
How would you describe what your philosophy is?
I would call myself a race realist, and by that I mean that I think policy with regards to race relations has to be based on the facts as we understand them, not on some kind of ideology that ignores the facts.
And I think that's frequently the case in the United States, that ideology ignores the facts.
And so being a race realist, what sort of policy do you then advocate as a race realist?
Well, I certainly do not propose that reparations be paid for slavery for all sorts of reasons that we'll get into later.
But I think that one of the things that we should recognize is that racial diversity is not generally a strength for any society or any institution or any country, and that generally people are happier living with people like themselves.
The United States is based, at least currently, on the idea that simply the fact of mixing together people who are as unlike each other as possible is a source of great strength.
I would argue, on the contrary, that it's a source of tension and weakness.
And so do you advocate a particular course of action for the United States along this line about, you know, a resegregation?
And it's funny because, you know, I've known you for a while and I don't think we've ever had this direct conversation about what exactly you and American Renaissance and the other groups that you're associated with are advocating.
I don't know what any other group advocates, but I believe in complete freedom of association.
That is to say, when people are left to their own devices, generally, as I said, they prefer the company of people like themselves.
And if the United States government was simply to recognize this as a natural and healthy thing, then there would be policies that did not stand in the way of doing so.
On the other hand, If people do wish to mix in a racial or cultural or linguistic or religious manner, they're certainly free to do so.
But I think we should end this current disapprobation of people who prefer to live in a more culturally or racially coherent society.
Is that why I live in the heart of New York City and you live on some sort of idyllic cul-de-sac somewhere in Virginia?
I've made a choice, and you've made a choice, and many Americans make a choice, and I would say that the majority of them reflect a choice to live among people who are similar to themselves.
In fact, the people who decry segregation are always complaining that there seems to be so much of it left.
Well, why is so much of it left?
I believe that's because it reflects the natural preferences of most people.
If you ask most blacks, would they prefer to live around other people who are black, most would unhesitatingly say yes.
Whites would be loath to say that, whereas if you look at what they actually do, you find that that is the way most of them live their lives.
In fact, one wag, a fellow named Joe Sobrin, used to say that in their mating and migratory habits, Liberals are a little different from members of the Ku Klux Klan.
So is the community that you live in, is that mostly white?
It's a typical suburban community, yes, it's mostly white.
So I wanted to, you know, this conversation that we're going to have is going to be mostly focused on reparations.
So I guess the first question is, do you believe in reparations for formerly enslaved, for the descendants of enslaved Americans?
Or are you for it, against it?
And if so, why or why not?
I'm against it for a whole host of reasons.
First of all, there's no person alive who was a slave, and there's no person alive who was a slaveholder.
If you were going to make some kind of narrowly tailored solution, Whereby, those who were slaves would be compensated by people who had held them as slaves.
Presumably, you would track down the descendants of slaveholders today, and also the descendants of those slaves, and work out something between those parties.
But there is no legal theory whatsoever.
To seek compensation for an act that took place between private parties many years ago, in some cases 100, 200, 300 years ago.
If, for example, it turns out that your great-grandfather killed my great-grandfather, presumably murder is worse than slavery.
I have no claim on you.
Likewise, the people who are actually descended from slave owners, and that's a tiny majority of the people of the United States, there is no legal theory whereby they can be made to compensate the descendants of the slaves that their ancestors may once have owned.
And what about immediately after emancipation when there was, you know, Special Order 15 and there was, you know, there was talk of compensating formerly enslaved Americans.
Do you believe that the formerly enslaved Americans who were, you know, who were freed from slavery in 1865, that they should have been compensated for slavery?
You could make an argument to that effect, but that did not take place.
And as you know, the precedent that many people calling for reparations point to, which is to say the payments by the federal government to the people who were in the camps, the Asians who were in the camps during the Second World War, That was made while those people were still alive.
The payments did not extend to the children of those people.
Only the people who the government itself, in an illegal act exercised by the government, only those people got compensation.
Relatives, descendants, they got no compensation at all.
So you could argue by that standard that the statute of limitations is finished.
And so, but I feel like you hedged a little bit on that answer, Jared.
Do you believe that it would have been appropriate for former slaves to receive compensation for slavery immediately after emancipation?
The question was, should compensation have been paid at the time of emancipation?
I have never studied that question in any detail.
It is certainly true that when there were proposals for emancipation, the idea at the time was generally to compensate the slave owners for their property that was being freed.
I don't believe there was ever any much consideration, other than the 40 acres and a mule proposal, to somehow compensate the people who were enslaved at that time.
That's, of course, a debate that should have been had then, and I'm sure it was.
And it does us no good now to talk about that, because that's something that we cannot go back into the past and change.
And what do you think about, I'm sure you probably know about the Georgetown story when you said that people who, if you could track down people who had enslaved other people and their descendants that they could make some deal.
Do you know about the Georgetown story, how they sold?
Yes.
Yes.
And what's your thoughts on whether Georgetown should have compensated, should be compensating the descendants of the people that they sold?
That is entirely up to Georgetown.
If Georgetown wishes to do that, it's free to do so.
Nobody's going to stop them.
I think that is a rather strange debate insofar as, again, do they really owe a debt to the distant descendants of people that they may have owned at one time?
If you, as an individual, believe that blacks deserve compensation for the fact that their ancestors were slaves, then there is nothing stopping you from starting up a 501c3 organization and seeking donations from the general public,
and seeking out the descendants of slaves and giving them money directly.
That would be a voluntary undertaking.
The kind of reparations that are proposed now would be to require the United States government
to make those payments, and that, I believe, would be entirely unjust.
Now, do you believe...
We're talking about, you know, first, it's sort of very direct to talk about slavery
and how, you know, people who were enslaved were injured and whether they should or should not
receive something at the time of emancipation.
But are you, do you believe now there's no barriers to success for black Americans in the United States?
Oh, I think you could describe certain barriers, but I think they are vastly, vastly diminished.
Certainly, compared to the past.
In the United States, in fact, you could argue that American blacks are the richest, most long-lived blacks, not only in the world, but in the history of the world.
You could also make the argument that Zora Neale Hurston made, the black poet.
She said, slavery is the price I paid for civilization.
In other words, she was In effect, grateful for the fact that her ancestors brought to the United States and she grew up in the United States rather than in Africa.
Compared to Africa, for example, the life expectancy of American blacks, although it's shorter than that of American whites, is 10 years higher than the average life expectancy in Africa.
And so if you want to look at it on strictly a cost-benefit basis, the descendants of slaves living in the United States today are on a material basis vastly better off than if their ancestors had stayed in Africa.
Well, I mean, that's a hard question to actually, you know, that's a hard, I guess, hypothesis to draw.
I mean, it's hard to know if you're, when you've, it's an experiment that you can't actually run the other direction and see, I guess is what I'm saying.
Because in a... No, you cannot, you cannot, but you can look at the way Africans live today and the way American blacks live today, per capita income, life expectancy, All of those things, by all of those standards, blacks who are living in the United States, whether their ancestors were slaves or not, are vastly better off than blacks living in Sub-Saharan Africa.
So what do you attribute the huge disparity in wealth, education, health outcomes, life expectancy, education, home ownership between American blacks and American whites?
I think that one number that's been going around, and I think that it's You can adjust it a little bit either way, but it's pretty significant.
I think that the last thing was that the average household net worth of a black American family is about $11,000, and the average net worth of a white American family is about $160,000.
And wondering, do you think any of this comes from the fact that this group of Americans were formerly enslaved?
No, I don't think any of that differential comes from the fact of slavery.
As a matter of fact, if you do a study of the consequences of emancipation, if you compare at the time of emancipation, those free blacks living in the United States and those who are emancipated, You'll find that, yes, in 1880, the children of free blacks were much more likely to be literate, to go to school, and also to have well-paid jobs compared to those who were the children of slaves.
In two generations, that differential had almost disappeared.
To the point that if you were to do a study now of the descendants of free blacks and the descendants of enslaved blacks, you would probably find almost no difference whatsoever in their per capita average outcomes.
So you're saying that there's no residual effect of, and it's not just slavery, we're talking about generations, you would also, I don't know if you would, but we admit that there was institutionalized segregation, government sanctions, segregation and discrimination that black Americans couldn't access the resources of this country for generations after slavery, you know, for over another hundred years, and that you believe that there's no impact left from that institutionalized and structural discrimination?
There is probably some impact.
I think it would be difficult to argue that the effect has been zero.
However, if you compare the black economic or social success since the civil rights era, we're talking about more than 50 years now, more than half a century.
And you compare that to the boat people who came to the United States with really absolutely nothing in their pockets.
Or you compare that to Hispanic immigrants who have come to the United States.
Many of them also with nothing in their pockets.
The boat people, as well as Hispanic immigrants, as well as immigrants from Haiti, Africa, they are doing much better than American blacks.
And if you argue that the problem is some sort of structural white supremacy in the United States, it's difficult to argue why some of these other non-white groups are doing so much better than blacks.
At the same time, as you know, Asian Americans, on a per capita basis, do vastly better than whites in terms of average income, likely to get bachelor's degrees, any kind of advanced degrees, likelihood to be in jail, likelihood to have illegitimate children.
On all those standards, they're doing better than whites.
If the United States is somehow structurally set up to advantage whites over people who are non-white, it's certainly not working very well.
So, are you making the argument that someone who has The fortitude to come as part of a community that's incredibly driven to that you're driven to whether it's walk across the desert sail across an ocean to start a business join a community here their success and how they've entered into American society is the same as that a group of people that were forcefully kidnapped brought over here and then any sort of
Any sort of entrepreneurship, any sort of independence, any sort of trying to actually establish something was effectively stamped out of that community.
And every time a community, whether it's Tulsa or Wilmington, started to create an economic thing, the white community essentially attacked it and destroyed it.
How can you compare the experience of immigrants with the experience of descendants of slaves?
That to me, you know, you're an educated man, Jared.
That doesn't add up to me.
Sure it ends up.
As you point out, there were blacks who started entrepreneurial undertakings in Tulsa and many other places, just because in the case of Tulsa, and that's the one that people love to count on, love to talk about, because essentially a part of that city was destroyed by whites.
Somehow, did that fact snuff out the entrepreneurial enterprise of blacks?
Did that mean it was eliminated?
No, it wasn't eliminated.
That spirit, to the extent that it was to be found in blacks, moved someplace else.
And the idea that blacks are somehow, hundreds of years later, mentally shackled by the fact that they came as enslaved people makes no sense at all.
They, the blacks living here today, were born here.
Their ancestors were born here.
And somehow the idea that there's some sort of hereditary mental paralysis that comes from the fact that their ancestors were enslaved, that makes no sense at all.
Whites who are born here today, yes, their ancestors came freely, but they were born here.
They had no particular choice in being here any more than blacks do.
So that is an unfair and I think fruitless comparison.
And so you're feeling now is that white Americans have zero debt to black Americans.
And I think kind of what you're saying is that black Americans should be grateful to white Americans that their ancestors were kidnapped and brought over here and enslaved.
I don't ask them to be grateful.
What I'm saying is that it is completely unfair for them to expect the United States government to make payments to them.
And that's the form that almost all proposals for compensation or reparations take.
And people go after the government because, in fact, it has the deep pockets.
The federal government never owned a single slave.
Slavery was a private practice.
And slavery began under British rule.
If you're going to go after a government for this, slavery existed under British rule for 157 years, only for about half that time, 89 years under US rule.
If you're going to blame a government for it, you might as well blame the British government.
No one's even thinking of doing that.
Furthermore, if you're going to blame people in the past for having done this, you should blame the African tribes and African kings who actually did the slave catching and sold Africans to European slave traders.
No, the idea that the government is somehow to blame, that is the aspect of it that's quite absurd to me.
Again, if private individuals in the United States think that black people are owed some sort of compensation, then by all means, reach into their own pockets and make those payments.
But somehow to punish all taxpayers for something for which they had absolutely no responsibility, to me, is completely wrong.
Well, I mean, you know, let me make this argument to you, then, is that essentially that, you know, value is like energy.
A dollar of value that was created in the 1800s is still circulating in the American economy in some way, passing the hand-in-hand, accruing value, accruing interest.
And so essentially we have A huge amount of value that was created by people who are not compensated for it that is still accruing value in this country.
Is there under no way that you can sort of see the way that some of that value should be passed back to the people who created it?
I suppose you're making the argument that the United States is wealthy because of slavery.
Yes.
And that blacks should be compensated for the wealth they created.
Well, if slavery was such a huge source of wealth, you would not expect the United States to be particularly wealthy compared to Brazil, for example.
Brazil imported 19 times as many slaves as the United States did.
We imported only about 300,000 slaves out of the 12.5 million that crossed the Atlantic.
The British Caribbean, Jamaica, Barbados, and a few other islands imported 11 times as many slaves.
Why isn't that place vastly more wealthy than the United States?
Likewise, the Dutch colonies in the New World I bet most of the people who will be listening to this can't even name one.
The Dutch colonies in the New World imported more African slaves than the entire number that went to North America.
That's the Dutch Antilles, Dutch Guiana.
So the idea that somehow the presence of slaves was vastly enriching certainly doesn't hold up under international comparisons.
At the same time, look at the South compared to the North.
In the South compared to the North, you could argue, and I think you could argue correctly, the presence of slavery meant that the Industrial Revolution skipped the South.
The industrial production of the South was only 10% of all national industrial production.
Rhode Island, just before the Civil War began, had as much industrial production as the entire South.
You could make a strong argument that slavery retarded the development of the entire United States by retarding the development of the South.
In 1860, there were 321 public high schools in the whole United States.
Do you know how many there were in the South?
Just 30.
And Frederick Law Olmsted, who was the fellow who laid out Central Park, he spent five years in the South studying antebellum society.
He was appalled by the misery and the poverty of white Southerners.
He also argued, as many abolitionists did, that slavery was economically extremely inefficient.
He argued that a hired hand on a farm in the North probably worked about three times as many hours As a typical slave in the South, many abolitionists were looking forward to applying proper and efficient labor tactics to slaves once they were freed on the assumption that the labor practices would be much more efficient and the nation as a whole would be richer.
And so even after up until up until the Civil War, And for generations after the Civil War, those parts of the United States that had the largest number of slaves were the poorest parts of the United States.
Again, if slavery were such a source of wealth, that would not be the case.
Well, I think that, I mean, you know, I'm not familiar with your numbers.
The numbers that I've read and sort of that slavery was this huge engine for economic and And also like, you know, just technological development.
No.
Developed banking structure, yes, and developing, it was shipping, and I think that one of the things, if you look at one of the things, one of the most interesting things is that I think that the cotton gin was developed just in the early 1800s, but an actual cotton picking machine wasn't developed until the 1920s, I believe.
And if you look at the, and when you talk about how hard field hands work, if you look at I think that the average field hand at the turn of the 18th century, I mean the 19th century, was picking something like 60 to 70 pounds of cotton a day.
By 1865, some of them were picking over 400.
And so the squeeze point, the whole, was they could process as much cotton they could do, they were building larger ships, they were creating bank instruments that allowed people to mortgage their slaves, mortgage their land, to buy more land, to produce more cotton, and the pinch point is the ability, how fast a slave hand could actually pick.
And the only way that you can increase that pick is through torture, and if you've read, You know, if you've read any sort of the literature, whether it's slave narratives or the documents, I've spent a lot of time looking at the various financial documents in the Schomburg Center, how that actual banking structure, the idea that slavery was not an economic engine, just is, I've never heard anybody with remote credibility who's actually studied this stuff hard make that case before.
Well, would you consider Eugene Genovese?
Do you know his name?
He is a Marxist?
I don't know Eugene Genovese, but I'll write it down.
Write it down.
He is a Marxist historian of slavery.
He certainly did not approve of slavery or slaveholders.
He also wrote that the slave system drastically slowed down the development of the South.
Furthermore, cotton exports in terms of US GNP were a tiny amount.
A tiny amount.
The Southerners had a vastly exaggerated understanding of how important it was.
They thought that the British, for example, were going to recognize the South if they cut off cotton exports, of which the Yankees cut off exports.
That didn't happen at all.
They simply found another source.
Cotton was by no means some kind of jet engine that propelled the United States economy forward.
And in fact, By 1870, just five years after the end of the Civil War, the South was producing just as much cotton as it had before the war, but with hired labor, not slave labor.
Furthermore, the idea that you could extract a tremendous amount of labor out of slaves is simply wrong.
All of the people who described slavery from any kind of objective point of view realized
that driving them in this ruthless, cruel way only made them rebellious, only made them
more likely to run away.
And as I said before, the observation by Frederick Law Olmsted and there are others like him,
was that they seem to think that black slaves worked in a very, very leisurely way.
It was a common expression among southerners to say it took two slaves to watch one slave do nothing.
Also, as far as any kind of industrial production was concerned, It was impossible to get slaves to work in factories because they invariably broke the equipment.
The idea, again, that if slaves were such a tremendous source of value, why isn't Brazil so many times more wealthy than us?
Why aren't Jamaica and Barbados, where they had far more slaves, why aren't they fantastically wealthy?
Furthermore, the way slavery worked in those places, why did they have so many slaves?
Because they imported Grown slaves.
Worked them to death.
And so, unlike in the South, they did not look after slaves when they were unproductive children, nor did they look after old slaves after their productive lives had ended.
They did not have that problem.
And yet, those societies that imported vastly more slaves than the United States did, how come they didn't turn out to be remarkably wealthy places, if what you're describing is correct?
Well, first of all, the idea that slaves weren't abused.
I mean, I think that they were treated well.
I think, I mean, I'm having a hard time wrapping my... I'm not, look, I'm not saying they were treated well.
What I'm saying is I'm not trying to defend slavery at all.
I'm simply trying to view it from an objective point of view.
Slavery was a terrible thing.
I wish it had never happened.
But I think you can make a very strong and convincing case that the United States would have developed in a more profitable, more widely industrialized way, certainly would not have had the Civil War if black slaves had not been brought to the United States.
And just what you were talking, I just looked up, I think that we produced in 1860, 80% of the global cotton supply.
So the idea that's a fraction of our GDP.
I think that when slavery was abolished, slaves represented the largest single asset in this country at the time of... In the South.
No, no, no, in the country, in the country.
Look it up.
So the idea that somehow this largest asset of the country had no, didn't have any,
had a very insignificant economic value, I don't think is accurate.
I think that...
Well, but look at the results.
Look at the results.
Why was the South poor?
Why was the South poor?
Why, in the South, even afterwards, before the Civil War, after the Civil War, the more blacks you found in the United States, the poorer the general state of living.
And furthermore, the fact that blacks took up so much capital, that was capital diverted From what would have been a much more profitable and productive enterprise, namely industry.
Again, I repeat, the South had only 10% of the industrial production in the United States.
That's one of the big reasons it lost the war.
It had hardly any, hardly any railroads.
Practically, there was not a single factory in the South that could build a railroad locomotive.
The arms production in the South was terrible because they didn't have that kind of industry.
No, it's all very well to say slaves were valuable and companies made money by ensuring the lives of slaves.
But to then look at the actual product, the actual output of slave owners, you come up very, very short.
Besides, look at Canada, look at Australia, look at New Zealand, look at Scandinavia, if you wish.
All of those societies never had slaves, never had empires.
They are By many standards wealthier than the United States today.
The idea that slavery somehow produced all of this enormous wealth and we must therefore give it back to blacks.
It just does not hold up no matter how hard you want to make that argument.
Um, let me sort of switch tracks a little bit here on just the moral case for it.
Do you, do we have any moral obligation to, um, I mean, I think, I think a lot of, a lot about this, Jared.
I mean, I think about what is our moral obligation if we look at the way that, um, black Americans, you know, in my, you know, from, Have been treated and how they've been excluded from so much of Participating in the American dream.
Do we have any moral obligation to make this right?
I Think if you personally or other people personally feel a moral obligation There's absolutely nothing stopping you for most of us though most of us Even if we are descended from slaves, we had nothing to do with all of those bad things that were done Black people.
And again, I made the argument to you earlier.
If it turns out that your grandfather or great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather had murdered my great-great-grandfather, I have no claim on you.
No claim whatsoever.
Therefore, the kind of sin being visited onto the next generation and the seventh generation, all of this sort of biblical attitude is one that I assure you, most white people will completely reject, especially because so many of them are descended from people who never owned slaves.
So many of them came here after slavery was abolished.
I think that if you turned around and you said, okay, white people, your taxes are going to go up because we're going to tax you more because we're going to give money to blacks.
Do you think that would improve race relations in the United States?
On the one hand, you will never get an answer from black people saying, yes, OK, finally, we've been made whole.
The black reaction will invariably be this isn't enough.
And what do you think the white reaction is going to be?
Poor whites in particular, if you are working in Appalachia, if you just got an ordinary middle class job and your tax are going to go be paid.
To the children of Barack and Michelle Obama, because they're descended from slaves?
How do you thank white people or other people, Hispanics, Asians, anybody else, who feel absolutely no personal involvement in slavery, no sense of responsibility for it?
Is that going to help raise relations in the United States?
Absolutely not.
It will only make them worse.
Again, for those who have a personal feeling of obligation or guilt, by all means, and I'm sure you could get set up a 501c3 to which contributions would be tax deductible.
Go right ahead.
But the idea of forcing people who feel absolutely no responsibility to reach deeper into their pockets and compensate people who may be living better than they themselves do, That is going to make relations vastly, vastly worse.
Let me just take your murder analogy from generations ago.
What if that family that murdered your great-great-great grandfather generations ago, each generation they came in and murdered the next male descendant and stole their money?
And so all for the next eight generations they're coming and they're murdering the head of the household and they're taking the money.
And then when it gets to your generation they miss it.
Now meanwhile they've taken all that money and invested in real estate and whatever they've done and they built a huge amount of wealth with it.
Do they have any obligation to you if they've actually systematically preyed upon your family for generations?
Show me.
Any legal theory that would give me the opportunity to launch a civil lawsuit for that purpose?
There is none.
And if you take that analogy, then you could find dozens and dozens of examples of people who have been dispossessed, maybe even partly exterminated.
What about all the North Africans who died?
When the Muslims came roaring through and converted North Africa to Islam, what about the many millions of Europeans that were captured and enslaved by the Barbary pirates, the entire North Africans?
What about all the black Africans who were transported across the desert and enslaved in the Middle East?
If you start looking back into historical wrongs, there is no end to it.
What about, I mean, even in more contemporary terms, Homosexuality has been illegal throughout the United States for almost all of its history.
It's now legal.
Should we compensate homosexuals who were punished or suffered discrimination, which was legal at the time, but is now illegal?
What about the people who got arrested and imprisoned for marijuana in those states where marijuana smoking is now legal?
If you want to go back and find people who got the short end of the stick, you're welcome to do so.
There's an infinite number of them.
But this kind of thing is not going to sit well on people who had absolutely no part in that and feel no obligation to make those people whole.
Well, I think that, I mean, I think that whataboutism, I think, is not a, it seems to be, you know, sort of the refuge of not, of, I just don't go down the road of whataboutism.
We're talking about a specific thing.
Well, why not?
Because I think whataboutism is usually this idea of, like, deflecting, actually, the idea of the question, saying, well, what about this?
What about that?
We're talking about something that's very specific, and just to address your idea about, Because I think reconciliation is something I would imagine that, I mean, you haven't said it, but I would imagine that you would like there to be better relationship between white and black Americans, or is that something you don't care about?
No, I think I'm all for improved relations between black and white Americans.
Whataboutism is a question of consistency.
If you're going to compensate blacks, why not compensate Indians?
You could argue that their situation was vastly worse, and it went on for longer and longer and longer.
They have never been compensated.
I think whataboutism is an entirely legitimate point of view.
You have to be consistent.
What's so special about blacks compared to Indians, for example?
Or the Chinese, who suffered all sorts of legal legal circumscription of their lives in the United States.
And again, as I say, even more recently, people who are living today, people who suffered under marijuana laws, people who suffered under anti-homosexual laws, why not compensate them?
Look, once you start saying, okay, this particular group, this particular group has some sort of special hold on us, even though slavery ended in 1865, a long time ago, Then certainly that opens the door to some kind of logical and consistent thinking, and to dismiss that as whataboutism is, I think, just a rhetorical flourish.
Well, you talked about this idea of making race relations worse.
If you offended me or you've injured me in some way, let's say you said something horrible about me, Jared, though I can't imagine you doing that.
I feel like I lost you.
Did I just lose you?
No, I'm back.
Okay.
And you decided that, you know, I've done this horrible thing to Whitney.
I wanted to make amends with him.
And you come to me and say, you know, Whitney, I'm terribly sorry I did this.
You know, I just want to let you know that I'm sorry for it.
Is my accepting of that apology, is you making amends with me conditional on me accepting that apology?
It depends on the reason I'm doing this.
I suppose if I really do feel bad about something I personally did to you, and I want to apologize, I would probably feel better if
you accepted my apology.
Now you might then turn around and say, okay, compensate me.
That might or might not be a legitimate demand.
But this argument only is one that would support not some government form of
compensation, but privately decided compensation, voluntary compensation.
People who do feel that maybe their distant ancestors wronged people who lived long ago.
And if they want to make an apology, if they want to compensate, that's fine.
That is their business.
It should be entirely voluntary in my view.
So I mean, because I would say, I would argue that if I had offended you, I would make an apology and you accepting that is not why I make the apology.
I make the apology to you because I feel I'm a moral person and I want to make amends with you.
To me, it's about me, it's not about you.
It's me making the apology to you and then I move on.
I feel like whether or not you accept it or not, it doesn't really matter.
Now I can move on freely with my life without feeling in the back of my head, God, I did this really horrible thing to Jared.
And that's sort of what I'm trying to get out about race relations.
I don't feel that like, Whether it makes relations—as a white person, I don't feel making a recompense for the exploitation and the discrimination against black people, that's not about whether it makes it better or worse.
It's what makes me feel—makes me more of a moral human and makes me able to move on with my life.
And so the idea that I don't think of it in terms of, well, this is going to make things better for worse.
I feel that's a secondary question.
I'm just, my job is like, okay, I've done this thing.
I want to move on.
This is a way to move on.
That's what I was trying to get at.
Wow.
I don't think black people would find that satisfactory at all.
I don't think black people would feel that they were compensated simply because white people run around making themselves feel better by saying, I'm sorry.
I think they would be quite contemptuous of that.
What good does it do to them?
That's simply a way for white people to feel better about something that I believe they had no responsibility for.
Why would race relations be better because of that?
I think black people would far prefer that white people feel guilty, feel obligated.
Simply by saying, I'm sorry, if white people are then relieved of some sort of sense of guilt, I don't think that would necessarily improve race relations.
Why would it?
Do you believe, are you hopeful for some sort of reconciliation between black and whites in America, or do you think it's something that's possible, and what do you think could actually bring that about?
I think the possibilities of reconciliation between blacks and whites, of some sort of completely colorblind society in which we all live as if race can be made not to matter, I don't think that's possible.
I think the record of the United States shows that it's not possible.
Ever since the Civil Rights Movement, I believe whites, more than any other group in the United States, have tried to set aside any sense of legal, I'm sorry, of racial solidarity.
If anybody in America has tried to live the idea that we're all Americans, let's set race It's white people.
It's black people, in particular, who have been most resistant to that, who said, no, no, no, we're not just Americans.
We are blacks.
We have a chip on our shoulder.
Society owes us something.
It is blacks and to a lesser degree Hispanics and now increasingly Asians who think in terms of racial identity.
They are the ones who are promoting this idea that because I am a member of a group, I have certain politics, I have certain demands on society, and you better meet them.
White people have tried very hard to say, no, no, no, we're all just Americans.
We're in this together.
Let's work as individuals.
But as blacks in particular, and as I say, increasingly Hispanics and Asians move in the other direction, it's going to force whites, if only out of a sense of self-defense to say, well, wait a minute, everybody else is operating on a great basis of racial identity.
We better do the same.
That is the future I see for the United States, especially given the remarkable degree to which liberals today are ramping up the whole idea of white guilt, white supremacy.
People used to talk about discrimination.
Then they talked about racism.
I guess that's not wild and provocative enough.
Now it's all white supremacy, white guilt.
All white people are racist and no non-white person can be racist.
When you tell that to people over and over and over again, they're going to develop a racial consciousness.
They're going to say, wait a minute, this is the way non-whites are acting.
This is the way certain white people tell me I'm supposed to act.
You're going to get more and more white people who are fed up with that and say, the heck with this.
We have to have white organizations to defend white interests.
So no, I am not optimistic, certainly the way things are moving today, that there can ever be any kind of All hold hands and sing kumbaya kind of racial reconciliation in the United States.
Do you consider yourself a racist?
Not at all.
Whatever a racist means, a racist is someone who has some kind of morally reprehensible view.
I don't think my views on race are morally reprehensible at all.
I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.
And if I say that I don't see a possibility for racial reconciliation, does that make me a moral inferior?
No.
I believe that makes me a much more objective and realistic analyst of what contemporary American society is all about.
Well, I think that this is someplace we probably agree.
I don't see the possibility of a true reconciliation, and I don't necessarily see that that's important even, as I said before.
But it's not important?
No, it's not.
I don't think it's.
I think that as a white person, All you can do is do what you believe is right and move forward.
I don't think that the idea that we're somehow going to reach a reconciliation... I am like you in that I am pessimistic having looked at history.
Well, if that is your view, if racial reconciliation is impossible, should we not work towards some kind of mutually agreed upon separation?
If it's going to be a constant source of tension, if half a century after the civil rights movement, we still have race riots.
We still have all of this racial conflict.
Isn't it perhaps time to say, well, maybe this experiment has failed.
Let's declare it a failure.
And let's try to engineer some way of giving black people more and more autonomy for their own destiny.
for their own policing, their own education, and let whites have autonomy for their own destiny as well.
If you really do believe that reconciliation is impossible, why go on with this myth that diversity is somehow a great strength and that we need more and more and more of it when, in fact, conflict is inevitable and people, as I say, by and large, prefer to be separate.
Why not recognize that and try to move forward in a productive way rather than continuing down this road to nowhere that has led to, in your view, perpetual conflict?
Well, you say like, look, I'm about 10 pounds overweight, but that doesn't stop me from going to the gym and trying to lose it.
So I, you know, and if I didn't, I might become 20 pounds overweight.
So I think the idea that because something is inevitable doesn't mean that you don't think something is necessarily achievable.
You shouldn't necessarily work towards it because you think it's the right thing to do.
Well, it's going to be a futile undertaking and I don't see how you're going to have your heart in it if it's never going to work.
In fact, why can't we just cut the Gordian knot and let people do what I believe they by and large prefer to do?
You have had many cases in the past of groups separating.
The Czechs and the Slovaks, they are very similar people, but they decided that their destiny was to be separate.
You had all the former republics of the Soviet Union.
They were forced to live together under the Soviets.
Now they're happier because they're separate.
There are many cases of this, and I think the idea that setting off to undertake what is ultimately futile, that will never succeed, this is a bad mistake.
At the very least, I certainly wish that our rulers would adopt your view and say, okay, chances are this ain't gonna work.
Chances are there's going to be conflict forever.
Then what should we do?
Shouldn't we have a discussion on the basis of that rather than, as I say, continuing to have this crazy idea that somehow racial diversity is a great strength when your admission, in effect, is it's not a source of strength.
It's a source of conflict.
Why don't we admit that rather than continually lying to ourselves?
It's a couple more things.
First, I mean, before I move to the next part that I want to talk about, I just want to talk about this idea of the opportunities and what's happened since the Civil Rights Movement.
I feel like it's a little bit like playing poker with someone for, you know, a couple hundred years and they're cheating.
And at a certain point you catch them cheating.
And they say, okay, you got me.
I cheated.
And going forward, I'm gonna, you know, I'm not gonna cheat.
But you better not cheat too.
Either.
Neither one of us can cheat.
We'd have to both play by the rules.
But meanwhile this person has amassed a huge bunch of chips.
And this other person only has a couple of chips.
Is that then a fair game?
A fair way to move forward?
There are people who have long argued that that's not a fair way to move forward.
You can go back to, I believe it was 1965, Lyndon Johnson gave the commencement address at Howard University.
And he says, look, what we need is equality of results.
We can't just have equality of opportunity.
He made exactly the same argument you did, back in 1965.
That's quite some time ago.
And since then, there have been, in effect, compensatory programs in the form of racial preferences for blacks.
Now, how far do you want to go with this?
I recall that during one of the Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, it was Sandra Day O'Connor She said, well, you know, maybe 25 years from now, we should be able to get rid of racial preferences.
That was, as I recall, oh, nearly 15 years ago.
But 10 years from now, are we going to get rid of racial preferences?
No.
How long do we go on with this stuff?
I remember Eric Holder said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Racial preferences haven't even got going.
We need to get going on that because we haven't had nearly enough.
Well, ever since the 1960s, there's been affirmative action.
How long is that supposed to go on?
And of course, for how long?
are white people who feel as though they're being discriminated against.
For how long are they supposed to continue and support this idea that, well, yes, with SAT scores considerably lower, a black person can get into Yale or Harvard, or you can be sought out by major employers because they think diversity is a great thing.
This also, this idea of compensation by means of preference, that too, I believe, drives a terrible wedge.
between people of different races.
Furthermore, the people who benefit from these compensatory schemes are almost never poor blacks.
They're middle class blacks.
They are, in fact, the children of people like Barack and Michelle Obama.
Is this really the way we want to solve the problem of racial differences and achievement in the United States?
None of it has worked out successfully, and I don't believe that people are People are going to support this for all that much longer.
The Supreme Court may end up saying you can't do that either.
You know, I don't believe in a guaranteed outcome.
I do believe in equal opportunity, and I would say that if you're sitting at a poker table and somebody's amassed, you know, hundreds of thousands worth of chips and you have a couple of hundred, then that's not equal opportunity.
And so I'm not saying, so that's what I'm saying, is that the game was rigged, the game was now, we're supposedly de-rigging the game, but you still have the asymmetrical relationship in place.
That's what I was trying to get at.
All right.
You can certainly make that argument.
At this point, the net worth of Asians is higher than that of whites.
And also, you pointed out, what's the median household net worth of whites?
About $170,000?
Yeah, yeah.
Really?
Well, how much?
How much does each individual white person Inherit from his parents.
How much of a leg up does a white person have because he's white, because his parents are better off?
You can make some argument that there is a difference.
But I have I certainly didn't get a leg up in any kind of substantial monetary sense just because I'm white.
I think most whites would argue that they did not.
And so, OK, yes, whites do start off wealthier.
But is that really the decisive difference in terms of what one achieves in the United States?
The whole American mythos is from rags to riches.
If you work hard, it doesn't make any difference whether you're a brand new immigrant.
It doesn't make any difference if your parents were wealthy or poor.
If you work hard, you can get ahead.
And in many respects, that's the case.
And It's all very well to say, okay, the people who immigrated, people who came from El Salvador, some of them, or Central America, a lot of them don't even speak English.
And yet, Central Americans have a higher per capita income than black Americans.
What are they doing differently?
Is it somehow the legacy of slavery that keeps blacks poor?
No, I don't think you can make that argument.
Well, we've seen over and over again that, you know, these studies where the people send out resumes with identifiable black names and, you know, names that they don't get called back, they don't get... There's been so many studies that shows there's still plenty of discrimination in the system.
Would you think your life would have been different if you were born black, Jared?
Of course it would have been different.
My life would have been different if I'd been born a woman, born a girl rather than a boy.
And people often cite the fact that when you ask white people, well, okay, how much would it take?
How much money would it take for you to accept to be black in the United States?
And black people then sometimes say, oh, well, 800,000, a million, whatever it is, it's common to make that argument.
Well, what if you were to ask black people, how much how much would we have to pay you in order for you to be white?
I bet a lot of black people would say, hey, you couldn't pay me enough to be white.
This argument never works out in the other in the other direction.
What are the penalties for being black in the United States?
It's impossible to calculate them.
And, yes, there are some cases in which a black person, a black-sounding resume, does not get called back as often.
But there are many, many cases that we know about in which a black person who is applying for a job or who is certainly applying to university gets preference over a white or particularly over an Asian.
Yeah, but I think that, I mean, one of the things is that that black person, someone who's born into, you know, a complicated economic system, a complicated family system, by the time they get, you know, I was actually just, you know, reading this thing earlier about college and low-income people, and how this idea that if you identify these sort of high-achieving minority students When they're in high school, you've already missed the boat, that the complications of growing up in poverty, especially in inner city poverty, are so prevalent that if you don't identify them by, you know, fourth or fifth grade, you actually can't... that you lose them to gangs, you lose them to disintegrating families, you lose them to all kinds of things.
Is that the fault of...
What I was going to say, so the idea of that, whether they get, you know, once you get into college, once you get to that point where they're applying to a college, there's actually a really small pool of qualified, you know, minority kids, because so many of them who would have been with the right support system would be flourishing.
And so, yeah, and so I know your next question is, is that the fault of white people?
Yes, and after all, don't forget, we have had this massive government program called Head Start that was supposed to make up for those differences.
It doesn't seem to have had that effect.
Also, is the fault of white people that 75% of black children are born to unmarried women?
Is that the fault of white people?
Is that a fault of white society?
I think it's very, very difficult to say that it is.
It also makes no sense to call it the legacy of slavery.
Because back in the early 1900s, the black illegitimacy rate was vastly lower than it is today.
To keep harping on slavery as the cause of all this, I think, really, is to dodge the question.
And invariably, it places the blame on whites.
What was your life like growing up?
What was sort of the arc that you...
That led you to this place where you believe in I mean it sounds it sounds a little bit like white like white separatism not necessary I don't know if it's white nationalism or white separatism that you're sort of you let you what was that?
Did you grow up in a family of?
Academics you grew up in a poor family You grew up and then I say know that you went on to an Ivy League school and various things What was the arc of your life that led you here?
Well, I grew up in Japan.
I live in Japan till I was 16 years old and And my parents were very liberal.
They were missionaries to Japan.
They believed that all humans were equal in the sight of God and should be equal in the sight of the law.
And so I was very much a liberal and I clung to my liberal views probably until I was in my 30s.
It was with great reluctance that I adopted my current views.
I would much rather believe it's all going to work out, that our government has our best intentions in mind, that our society is based on a correct understanding of human nature and of history.
And it was, as I say, with great reluctance that I gave up those views.
It came about as a result of studying, of traveling.
In 1970, I spent a lot of time in West Africa, and I got a very different sense of what What Africa was like, from what we'd otherwise be led to believe.
One of my awakenings, I suppose, was a conversation I had with a Liberian college student.
I had just crossed the border from Ivory Coast.
Ivory Coast was flourishing at the time.
It was very heavily influenced by the French.
The French had many bureaucrats working in the Ivorian government, making sure that the country was run properly.
I crossed the border into Liberia and everything was a mess.
And I went to Monrovia, which is my custom to do, go to the capital city of any new country I visited, go to the university and talk to young people.
And I asked a guy, I don't mean to be rude, but why is Liberia in such a mess compared to Ivory Coast?
He says, that's a very easy question to answer.
We did not have the benefit of being colonized by the French.
That was, to me, an absolutely staggering reply.
But he was not casting the responsibility on whites.
He says it's up to us black people.
And that, to me, was a brand new perspective.
To say I was horrified by that answer.
But over the years, studying things, observing American society, reading history, that has brought me to what are, admittedly now, unfashionable, but I believe, correct views.
Do you believe that you've received any benefits or privileges from being white in America?
From being white?
Look, if the United States was an all-white country, let's imagine that.
I don't think my life would be the least bit different from what it is today.
The fact that there are non-whites, does that somehow give white people privileges?
The idea of white privilege, to me, is quite absurd.
If you go to Iceland, at least until recently, there were no non-whites in Iceland.
Did whites have, did they have white privilege then?
No, presumably not.
But, if all of a sudden you brought in 200,000 Somalis, would Iceland be better off?
Would the Icelanders somehow have white privilege?
No, I think it would be absurd.
It would be terrible for Iceland to import 200,000 Somalis.
Likewise, in the United States, the presence of blacks is not a benefit for whites.
The presence of blacks does not mean that our lives are somehow better.
That kind of argument makes no sense at all.
Well, even though you think when you, when you applied to school, and if you look, obviously, if you look at the, you know, the, the structure of admissions to the, especially the elite schools, um, it's changed as, you know, as you've said, it's changed now.
But when you were in school, I think you were probably in the early seventies.
What percentage of your, um, of, of your class was, you know, was black?
I don't know the exact percentage, but even in 1968, when I went to Yale, It was well known among whites that you'd be much better off if you were black.
Even then, even then, people were saying, well, gosh, if I pretended to be black, am I more likely to be admitted?
In fact, the class that admitted, the Yale administration that admitted me, the fellow who ran the admissions program, his name was Inslee Clark.
And he was famous for trying to get diversity even then.
And I suspect that I was admitted to Yale not because I was such an impressive student, but because I was applying from Japan.
That was some kind of perhaps affirmative action for me that was not race based.
But it was part of this idea of getting people from the south side of Chicago, getting people from rural Texas, getting black people, getting Hispanics.
I was, in that sense, probably a beneficiary of affirmative action, but a kind of geographic distribution rather than racial distribution.
It's the first time I've heard that somebody said in the 60s it was better off to be black, but I'll take your word for it.
Believe me, believe me.
High school people, high school students took that for granted at the time.
You'd be much better off if you're applying for college if you're black.
Oh, yes.
In the late 1960s, oh, that was taken for granted, just as it is today.
But don't you think you have to put everything on the scales, Jared, like you say, well, I might be able to get, I might have a better, I might have a better chance of getting to a college, but if you put my health outcome, the fact that my mortgage is higher, the fact that I'm excluded from certain neighborhoods, which there was still redlining going on in 1968, as you know, that I'll put everything on the scale.
Is it balanced because I might get into college a little more easily?
Well, look, To come up with an accurate and precise accounting of all this is impossible.
All I'm saying is that white people in the United States, much as we like to talk about white privilege, have no advantage in life because there are black people living in the United States.
It is not advantageous to white people to have a society, to have a group within the population that is poor, more likely to be on welfare, more likely to commit crime, more likely to have illegitimate children.
No, it's not an advantage to whites.
Now, do whites have an advantage compared to blacks?
Well, it's often said that when a black person goes into a store, the store detective is more likely to follow him around.
Why is that?
Now, it is too bad for people who are black who are not going to be shoplifters, but the fact is the people that the store detectives are most likely to find shoplifting are black.
They don't follow around little old Asian ladies because they don't shoplift.
Is that an unfair advantage, let alone Asian ladies?
It is simply a matter of playing the odds.
So yes, in certain respects, whites have an advantage because people are less likely to assume that they're going to be muggers or shoplifters.
Is that the fault of whites?
No, it's not the fault of whites.
I would argue it's the fault of blacks.
Even Jesse Jackson, he said that one of the things he regrets most is that when he is walking down the street at night and he hears menacing sounds behind him and he turns around and he sees white people, he feels relieved.
It's because he knows he is much less likely to be attacked by a white person than by a black person.
Everyone in the United States understands that, no matter how unwilling they may be to admit it.
So in that sense, yes, whites have an advantage, that they're less likely to be suspected of being criminals.
But that is because there are statistical differences that everyone understands in terms
of who's likely to be a criminal.
Well, I mean, I think that everything you talk about correlates to poverty.
And I would argue that the economic position of black Americans is because they've been systematically excluded from economic opportunities in this country for generations and generations.
And so this idea that saying that they're more likely to do everything, as I said, everything you talk about correlates to poverty.
And so I think that If people are poor, yes, they have these negative things in their lives, but I don't think that it's because they're black.
I think it's because they're in poverty.
The correlation with poverty certainly exists, but if you control for poverty, you still find very considerable differences in behavior.
Chinatown, certainly in the 1950s, was the poorest part of San Francisco.
Poverty did not make the Chinese community more crime-prone.
Chinatown was poorest and the least poor.
Furthermore, the United States Depression, the Great Depression, threw a whole lot of people into poverty.
They suddenly did not become more crime-prone, not at all.
Furthermore, you find people like Rodney King.
Rodney King, he walked away with, what, about $4 million after the civil suit?
Did that suddenly stop him being crime prone?
No.
He went on to commit all sorts of crimes.
To say, OK, poverty is the problem.
No.
Poverty is not a good thing, but poverty is not necessarily the cause.
And again, this goes that we have come far afield from the idea that somehow blacks deserve compensation for slavery.
So, I appreciate how much time you've given us this morning.
I realize we've gone much longer than I originally thought, and I appreciate that time.
Is there anything that we haven't touched on, Jared, that you think that should be said in the context of a discussion about the pros and cons of reparations?
Well, I would just repeat a point I made earlier, and that is that I do not think that if non-blacks are forced to pay for compensation for something for which they do not feel responsible, That is not going to help race relations at all.
In fact, I don't think that Congress would even vote for that because even the liberal, Democrat-controlled Congress realized how so much opposition there is to this idea of being shaken down.
That was the attitude that most non-blacks would take.
They're being shaken down for something that's not their fault.
And so again, I would say that for those people, white or non-white, who think that they do owe something to blacks, then they should voluntarily make those payments and set up organizations to facilitate that.
That, I suspect, is what's going to be the future of compensation in the United States, no matter how much the media promote the idea that the federal government should be making the payments.
Great.
Well, thank you so much, Jared.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
I know that we're probably on the farthest poles possible on how we believe this, and I appreciate that you talked to me about it.
One last thing we need you to do, if you could identify yourself, however you do, say, you know, I'm Jared Taylor, and I'm the founder of...
I am Jared Taylor.
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