Dennis Prager & Charles Murray on Resisting the Lockdown
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Believe it or not, even though I live, it's nearer to Pasadena than L.A., but it doesn't matter.
I live in this area.
And from the first day of the lockdown, I comported myself exactly as I had the day before the lockdown.
I went without a mask.
I went anywhere I wanted.
I was with...
Numerous friends.
I am an observant Jew.
I had Shabbat dinner every Friday night with 15, 16 other friends.
There was not one Friday night missed.
And I lived a different life because I chose to.
So while I'm not in Burkittsville, I lived as if I was.
Yeah, it's possible.
Yes, and I encouraged others to do so.
Back, or not back, but to your book now, Facing Reality, Two Truths About Race in America.
Okay, we're all ears.
Well, it all came about because of last summer.
And I listened to the just unquestioning acceptance of the systemic racism narrative by everybody in the mainstream media.
Nobody would mention the unmentionables.
There are two of them.
When it comes to policing, why is it that you have problems with policing in low-income black communities that you don't have elsewhere?
Okay, there are some racist cops.
That's true.
It is also a statement of fact that the environment in which professional, well-trained, responsible police officers operate is much more dangerous in low-income black communities than it is in Bel Air.
No, it simply is.
And that when police are operating in that kind of more dangerous environment, they appropriately use more means to establish their authority, and they appropriately call for backup quicker and a variety of other things.
Dennis, this does not mean that I'm excusing the egregious examples of police misbehavior that have been caught on video.
I'm saying these go viral.
And nobody sees the body camera footage of the tens of thousands of cops doing a wonderful job every day in the face of great difficulty and danger.
So they ought to have mentioned that.
They ought to have mentioned it's different in terms of cognitive ability.
Why don't we have enough senior-level black managers in the IT industry in Silicon Valley?
Well, there is a difference in mean test scores that is persistent and real and substantial.
Between blacks and whites, and the reason this is important, no matter what you think of IQ or psychometrics or any of that, the reason it's important is those differences in test scores are predictive of differences in classroom performance and differences in job performance.
And so when people in industries that would love to have more senior black managers are trying to find them, the pipeline is not feeding into their employment interviews.
The number of people they need.
And that is an important explanation for the disparities and outcomes in the labor market.
In both cases, I am not trying to paint a picture of a blameless America.
I'm asking for realism, understanding the degree to which differences in groups, mean differences in groups, affect these social outcomes.
All right, so the second is obviously controversial, and I have questions about it.
One obvious one is, why do African, black African immigrants, sub-Saharan, so we're not even talking about North African Arabs, sub-Saharan black immigrants in America do better than whites in America in terms of science, technology, engineering, and math degrees and income?
I don't think that's correct, Dennis.
Well, I just read it in queue, so I can't comment further.
But go ahead.
No, and I will, you know, we can't pull out the books on this.
I think the correct statement is that they had much better outcomes than a lot of native-born blacks.
Not that their outcomes are better than white Americans.
But let me make a broader point.
Suppose that your statement were true.
But that statement, and this is an essential part of the book, I don't want to talk about causes, and the reason I don't want to talk about causes, which people obsess about all the time, is because we need to start focusing on what is.
Suppose that your statement was just true.
That does not affect the reality of nationally representative samples of blacks and whites and the differences in test scores.
It's a very interesting observation, if it's true.
It'd be worth exploring for all sorts of other reasons.
It doesn't affect the state of affairs in June of 2021. The same thing goes for all the many explanations for the causes of crime.
These are important.
I'm glad people look at them, but that's all they look at to the exclusion of the reality of what is, for whatever reasons, in violent crime rates.
Okay, and the disparity between Asians and whites, does that account for anything in the society?
Oh, that's one of the more interesting topics.
The Asian advantage in test scores is now quite clear, and it is not insubstantial.
It's pretty good size, and where that really has an effect, Dennis, is at what we call the tails of the distribution, which means...
But you can have a difference in means that isn't very big.
And it has a much bigger effect when you say, well, what about the people in the 99th percentile?