Join Robert F. Kennedy Jr for a brief civil rights history lesson with Kevin Nathaniel and Keith Hylton in this special episode.
Keith Hylton is an American law professor, focusing in antitrust law, economics & law, employment law, intellectual property and torts, currently at Boston University. A prolific scholar widely recognized for his work across a broad spectrum of topics in law and economics, Hylton has published five books and more than 100 articles in numerous law and economics journals. Kevin Nathaniel Hylton, a Yale University graduate, as a Scholar in Fine Arts, is an artist, performer and multi-percussionist, who specializes in the ancient African mbira. He spent 16 years mastering the mbira as an apprentice to Zimbabwe’s mbira master, the late Ephrat Mujuru.
We have two fantastic guests, and I know that you're going to enjoy.
They're twin brothers, but they have two different names.
We're going to find out why that is.
One is Keith Hilton, an American law professor, and one of the top tort scholars.
He is currently the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University Law School, a prolific scholar, widely recognized for his work across a total spectrum of topics in law economics.
Hilton has published five books and more than 100 articles in numerous law and economic journals.
And Kevin Nathaniel is a celebrated world music artist who was toured internationally but was forced into becoming a medical freedom activist in New York City.
When the COVID crisis shut down the entire entertainment industry, Kevin connected and worked with New York City activists, resisting lockdowns and mandates, including the New York Freedom Rally, Teachers for Choice, and Children's Health Defense.
These two twin brothers took radically different paths in life, but today find themselves converging in agreement with many of the things that we've been fighting for in this campaign.
And welcome both of you to the show.
Thank you.
Tell us first, why are you twin brothers with two different names?
That's up to him to answer.
Right, and that's nearly my fault.
First of all, where am I talking to you from?
I'm in Japan.
Okay, you're in Japan.
And Keith, I'm going to say where you are.
I'm in Boston.
Okay.
Go ahead and explain.
You must have changed your name.
Yes, and I didn't change it at all.
I'm in Japan exactly for the reason, some of the reasons you mentioned, for music.
I was just playing in Kyoto last night, got up early this morning.
I use Kevin Nathaniel basically as my stage name.
So all the music I produce and all the music events I do and performances are under Kevin Nathaniel.
I keep the name Kevin Nathaniel Hilton, but I don't use that as my stage name.
So I just in general use Kevin Nathaniel.
That's why.
And are you in Kyoto right now?
I'm in Shiga.
I was in Kyoto only a couple of hours ago.
Because I was there, I guess it was about six months ago, Cheryl and I. And over to Kyoto, we stayed 10 days there because I got surgery there on my throat.
Special surgery they invented in Kyoto.
That's the only place that they do it.
And it helped me a lot.
My voice probably sounds really bad to you, but it sounded much worse a year ago.
And both of you, your dad was deeply involved in the civil rights movement in our country, correct?
Yes.
That's true.
As we know, there's a picture that surfaced of my father with Bobby Kennedy Sr., and it's from a picture from the Jefferson Jackson dinners from 1967 in Detroit, in which Bobby Kennedy came to Detroit.
My father at the time was very active in the Democratic Party.
He was Vice Chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party.
He was doing a lot of work in politics.
Of course, he was in constant contact with the heavy hitters in the Democratic Party.
So, of course, when Bobby Kennedy was coming through Detroit, he was spending time working with him, talking to him, I imagine going places wherever he was going to help and assist.
And he was definitely a strong supporter of Bobby Kennedy in 67, and I delved into all the reasons why, and believe me, I know why he was a strong supporter of Bobby Kennedy in 67.
Yeah, my dad was first as counsel in the Senate, but more importantly during his role, he was Attorney General of the United States, was leading the Kennedy administration's battle, civil rights battles in Alabama, Mississippi, and other parts of the country.
And twice sent federal troops to integrate Ole Miss and the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.
The first two Black students at the University of Alabama were Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood.
And in fact, I was with the other day, I was with the children of some of those students, Malone and some of the other students who were, you know, who integrated at the University of Alabama.
And so what was your path?
To where you are today.
When you say my path, to where I am today, which is sitting here in Japan.
I began going into really great educational environments.
My father was very strong and very big on education.
So he made sure that we were doing very well in school.
And my mother, too, they made sure that we were doing very well in school.
I credit them for that.
So both Keith and I went to, at the time, the top schools in the country.
Of course, went to Harvard.
I went to Yale.
Well, so of course, I was interested in arts and music.
And so I went really quickly into music, and that kept growing.
And when I came out of school, really, that's when I found my passion in the world of world music and African music.
And I began to build and make instruments and create music and work with some really interesting music groups.
Music projects, which has led me all over the world, which kind of, you know, is a constant progression to lead me to where I am today.
That's part of my path.
And part of it was sort of a, in a way, a rebellion to my father's constant pressure for me to be a lawyer like him, but in a way, a sort of a desire to find what was in my heart.
And that effort to find what was in my heart led me on this path.
And Keith, you took a more conventional path through...
You could say it's more conventional, though I remember having a conversation with a colleague, and I think there were other people in conversation, and so I mentioned, well, my brother is a musician and artist, And here I am.
I'm studying law and economics, writing in the area.
And one person said, oh, wow, you guys went in such different paths.
And another person said, well, no, actually, I think it's the same thing.
So the other person, I guess, had, I think, the better answer.
Because what I see myself as doing is, although I'm writing stuff about the law, antitrust law, tort law, when I'm working on something, it is not very different from, I hate to say it, an art project.
I mean, it's like I have a canvas in front of me, and I'm thinking about the different things that I could say.
And I'm concerned about a lot of the same things that an artist would be concerned about in producing an art project.
So in some sense, we haven't done things that are that different.
To some extent, we both, I guess, departed from what my father wanted, because my father wanted All of his sons to come practice law with him in Detroit.
Kevin went off to music.
I got a PhD in economics.
On the other hand, I guess I should mention my father departed from what his parents wanted.
Exactly.
His parents wanted him to stay in the church because my father grew up in the church.
His father was a pastor.
It was church 24-7 in his house.
And he went on to become a lawyer and, you know, did business deals and, you know, worked at all sorts of litigation, even civil rights litigation, you know, criminal cases, civil cases.
You know, many of his family members in Roman, Virginia were upset with what he did, were upset with his decision to leave the church because they thought that was such an important role that their family, that the whole family had been involved in.
And they thought it was...
It was just an extreme departure from what was expected.
I want to add, Keith, you're absolutely right.
I remember at the funeral for our grandmother, there were several family members that criticized our father for his choice to go into law and business at the actual funeral.
I remember that.
So yeah, I agree with what you're saying.
In fact, I've said that to people too.
I said, well, I chose the path of art, but Keith chose the path of going sort of one step further with the whole legal idea, with the whole idea, going into the theoretical realm of it.
But I think my father...
Go ahead.
I think my father's growing up in the church had a big impact on his approach to the law, how he viewed the law, because he grew up in the black church.
His father had worked in the railroads and then became a pastor.
This was at a time where his father, my grandfather, had become a pastor.
We weren't that far out of slavery days, maybe a generation at most.
And so the moral messages that they were dealing with were of a very serious nature.
The lessons they had to impart were very important.
And I guess I had the sense, looking back, that the largely men of the church at that time felt that they were doing something extremely important.
I could see how my grandfather would be upset with my dad's decision to leave that.
Yeah.
Well, they also, I mean, he grew up in the height of Jim Crow because I was, you know, born in Virginia, raised there to live there until I was 13 years old.
So that would have been 19.
Well, I would know.
I left Virginia in 68, the year my dad was killed.
I was 14 at that time.
You know, Virginia.
What part of Virginia?
When I was in McLean, you know, McLean at that time was not a suburb.
It was a rural kind of horse and cow country.
And, you know, we were raised on a farm with cows and horses and chickens and everything else.
But it was also at the height of Jim Crow.
And, you know, it was illegal for a black man to marry a white woman or vice versa in Virginia.
Public parks were segregated.
Our schools were segregated.
The prisons, mental institutions were all segregated.
Drinking water fountains were segregated.
It was illegal.
And of course, public transportation, public restrooms were all segregated.
I, you know, I've told this story before.
There was a Black man who worked for my family who had served in World War II during the Seabees.
The Blacks weren't actually allowed to fight until the end of the war when Truman came in.
But there is a lot of them serving in the military and other roles, including the construction brigades, the Seabees.
And he served in the Pacific, which was for hazardous duty, building airstrips as they jumped across through the Japanese islands toward the mainland of Japan.
He's about 6'5", incredibly brilliant man and dignified.
And but when I started hunting and fishing when I was very, very young, and he'd drive me across the state, and I would have to go into the restaurants and diners, buy the food for both of us, we would eat it in the car.
He asked me one day to buy shoes for him, because he wasn't allowed into the shoe store.
So I went in and picked up the shoes, then he tried them on the curb on the sidewalk.
And if they didn't fit him, that was too bad.
But anyway, you know, your dad grew up in Virginia at that same time or lived during that same time.
And I'm sure that that was, you know, one of the central gravities of his life.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
In fact, I'll let you go, Ken.
Okay.
Yeah, I want to support that, too.
What you're saying is that, oh, yeah, just to tell you one of the stories my father told me about when he had first day In college, he met my mother at Talladega College.
The first day they landed in college, the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, Talladega College was a Black college.
It still is a Black college.
At the time, Blacks who wanted to go to college would go to Talladega.
That was one of the Black colleges.
Because, of course, they weren't being allowed in other Other colleges, largely.
But the first day they got on campus, the Ku Klux Klan rode through the campus to basically scare and frighten all the college students.
That was the first day.
And I want to mention, too, that shortly after he got out of college, he told me a story about him going out with my uncle, whose name was Pop Foster, and they had had some drinks and they sat on a stoop.
This was somewhere in Alabama or Georgia.
They sat on a stoop and were talking.
And it was at night and they saw a cop car pull up and they saw the cops get out of the car and they looked at each other and literally said goodbye to each other because it was commonly known that if you were Black Caught out at night.
And if you were sitting by yourself in some southern towns, that if the cops pulled up on you at night, you might not be going home.
It was a very serious time that he grew up in that way.
I want to take that and thread that to a story that I heard about your father and your uncle Going to get Martin Luther King out of jail in, I believe, 60, it was before your uncle was elected president, and that Martin Luther King had been arrested and given a very stiff sentence, a stiff prison sentence.
And your father and your uncle literally ran To get Martin Luther King out of jail.
And really, for someone to hear that and read it in Google, you don't really realize the environment that was happening.
You don't realize the gravity of what happens when Martin Luther King was given a stiff prison sentence at that time in the South.
The gravity of it is he might not be coming out of that sentence.
So, and I believe that's why your father and your uncle ran to get him out.
This is before many of the, you know, much of the work that Martin Luther King was able to really do after that time.
He did a lot of it while your uncle was president, but they ran to get him out.
When he was given that really harsh six-month sentence, which probably would have meant chain gang.
Let me give you an addendum to that story.
My father grew up in Boston and then in Brookline, and they just didn't have any contact with black people and had no knowledge of the civil rights movement.
But he had a couple of things happen.
When he played football at Harvard, there was a black member of the team.
And when they toured in some of the Southern states, he was not allowed to stay at the same hotel.
And my father at that time protested that and made it so that they would all go to hotels that they all could stay in.
And then when my father was at University of Virginia, he invited Ralph Bunch, who was a secretary of the United Nations and was famous for international leader who had been flirted with the Communist Party.
He invited him to speak at the University of Virginia.
And at that time, it was illegal to have integrated crowds in Virginia.
And Ralph Bunch, when he got there, he stayed with my father in his house.
The Klan protested outside and burned a cross outside their house.
And my father and mother just got married.
And this is the first that they'd seen of that.
But my father was indignant about it.
University of Virginia originally said, you know, we can't do it.
It's illegal against the law.
He wrote a brief and he organized a student petition and they ended up It was the first integrated group in the University of Virginia, but still, when he was running, it was not an issue that was prominent on his mind.
He was concerned with the mafia and a bunch of other issues that he'd been with.
And then Coretta King called And said, Martin is in prison in Alabama.
They put him in jail.
They pulled him over for a traffic offense.
I think it was like a tail light out.
And like you said, I think they came in a six month sentence.
And Coretta was scared that it being Alabama, he might not come out of the prison alive, the jail alive.
And she asked my uncle to intervene and ended up with my father, who was running his campaign, his campaign manager.
And my father at first said, the first voice in him was the political voice that said, it's better not to get involved with this issue because we'll lose the solid Democratic vote in the South.
It was all white at that time.
You know, Blacks at that time were voting Republican.
They were still the party of Lincoln.
He got the message when he was at Hickory Hill, which was about 10 minutes from National Airport, which is now Reagan Airport.
And he got in the car and he started driving to airport and he started thinking about it.
And it was, it started irritating him.
Just the part of it that was the bullying part, because he hated bullies.
And when he got to the airport, he had flipped and he went to the payphone and put a bunch of times in and he got the White House where he got the Senate, you know, the Senate switchboard to get that sheriff on the phone.
And then he read that sheriff the riot act saying, you know, my brother's going to be president and you better make sure that nothing happens to Dr.
King.
And they ended up releasing him.
And the public didn't find out about it, but Coretta knew about it.
And Daddy King, who was Martin's father, who was a preacher himself, very influential in the Black movement.
And it's one of the reasons that my uncle won the Black vote, which put him over the edge in 1960.
He had the lowest margin, the slimmest margin he won of any president in history.
And it was Black votes in the South that put him over.
I was going to just add as a footnote about my father's experience, because it's connected to all these things, that he grew up in Virginia, Ronald, Virginia.
He could not go to UVA at the time, because UVA was a white institution.
So he got into Boston University.
That's where he went to law school.
And so he had the experience of Living in Boston and going to BU and then going home to Virginia to segregated train stations, segregated drinking fountains, all the things that, you know, you're talking about.
That was during his law school time.
Yeah.
So then he moved to Michigan.
That's right.
Well, there was an army.
He went to the army for a few years in Clean, Texas.
You know, they're married.
Our oldest brother, our older brother, was born in Clean, Texas.
Then they decided to move to Detroit, Michigan.
Yeah, and actually there's a big difference between moving to Michigan and moving to Detroit.
At that time, Detroit was a boomtown.
It was in good shape.
Detroit was a boomtown, but Detroit in many ways was, and I use this word clearly knowing that it's a delicate word to use, but in many ways it was a mecca for Black people all throughout the United States.
That's where Motown Records was there.
Yes, and it was also a place in which the Klan was not in full swing.
The Klan was not working in Detroit.
And even on my mother's side, there were relatives, my mother's uncle, that left the South to come to Detroit because they were threatened by the Klan.
Exactly, exactly.
So the uncle, and you're talking about J.S. right now.
Yes, yeah.
He brought a lawsuit to enjoin the, I think, Attorney General of Georgia from barring teachers who were part of members of the NAACP from working as teachers.
He was successful.
He enjoined the Attorney General of Georgia, and he immediately got phone calls from the Klan saying, you have 24 hours to get out of here.
And that's what sent him to Detroit.
Wow.
And what happened to you during COVID, Keith?
Because your brother ended up becoming an activist.
Right.
Well, you know, I mean, I just did my thing, just complied with all of the requirements.
I got vaccinated.
I came to the office when I could.
I wore the mask at times.
And so anyway, that's how I muddled through that whole COVID. Did you guys talk to each other about it?
Oh yes, yes.
We were in touch a lot.
Yes, we talked all the time, you know.
In fact, the funny thing about it.
A lot of families got divided, you know.
I joke about this all the time, but so Kevin and I were in touch with each other a lot.
And I remember Kevin telling me very early during the COVID lockdown period, very early, All of the stuff about this is a lab leak out of a, you know, a lab in China.
That's what it looks like.
And at that time, I was thinking, oh, you know, this sounds ridiculous.
That just can't be true.
This was early.
So then, what do you know?
Years later, I find out that it seems to be exactly what happened.
Yeah.
You guys ever look at each other and say, I wish I had that haircut?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, sometimes I wish I had a little laugh wrong.
You're the two most different identical twins I've ever seen in my life.
You know, and we're actually very good friends.
Kevin has dreadlocks and glasses and kind of a, I don't know what, like a Doc Holliday facial regalia.
And Keith has a very conventional haircut.
They're both good looking guys, but I've never seen two identical.
I would never place you guys identical twins.
That's true.
I don't think anyone would now.
20 years ago.
We were little kids.
Yeah.
20 years ago, we were identical.
Go ahead.
What were you going to say?
Yeah, what I just wanted to say was that the connection is very clear to me, actually your work too, because I feel like your father was so strongly connected to the civil rights movement that actually the civil rights movement and a lot of this actually flowed into a lot of exploitation.
And oppression flows into what we call corporate capture.
And so really, I feel like you are a direct progression of your father's work.
Some people, I don't know if they see that that way, but I see your work as a direct progression.
I would say so too, frankly.
I would say so.
My reason for saying so is that Your father was a dissenter on the Vietnam War at a time when that kind of dissent was difficult to do.
And I think...
You know, what I would want to spend my time on is making sure that we start rebuilding equity in Black communities, which have been systematically stripped out of African-American communities during the 2000s, by many, many, by redlining, which have been systematically stripped out of African-American communities during the 2000s, by many, many, by redlining, by, you know, just
You know, like Wall Street is one example, systematically closed, but the redlining, 2008 mortgage crisis, which, you know, those exotic instruments were tried out first in the Black communities.
And, you know, the Black communities that did have a lot of equity in their homes in Harlem and Bedstein around the country lost that equity at that time.
And then COVID, 41% of Black-owned businesses will never reopen, and a lot of them had Three generations of equity in them.
If you don't own a home, if you've got a whole community that doesn't have a high home ownership, they have no access to capital.
A lot of small businesses will mortgage their home and get enough money to start a business, but if you don't have access to capital, you can't start a business.
Yeah.
In the whole...
You know, later in my father's life, a lot of his activity was in the banking industry and basically small business banking.
You know, that's a major issue there because the way banking regulation has worked, it sort of choked off or choked out a lot of the small businesses, small banks that might have dealt with black owned businesses in the cities.
You know, that avenue of economic growth has sort of been made much more difficult to work nowadays.
And so that would be an ideal area for change, for trying to change the banking regulations so that small community banks with a focus on development and Black urban neighborhoods could actually thrive because they have the information on who the people are who are starting businesses, What kind of risks are involved in lending to them?
And that information isn't there, isn't locked up in the big banks at all.
The big banks, they have all their algorithms and they don't have that kind of information.
So that would be a major way in which we could change things, which would go in the direction No, I agree.
That and education are the two things we just need to flood right now with effort, with money, with innovation to try to figure out how to...
You're never going to get rid of the efforts to get rid of, you know, racism is kind of ingrained in human behavior.
Tribalism of all kinds are always looking for differences in each other.
And it's always going to be part of the human society.
So what you want to do is equip people and make them strong and confident.
Young Black men and women should have the strength and confidence and know that they're going to run into these kind of impediments in their lives, but that they have opportunities That they have wealth and equity.
That's a base that provides them a strong base so they can go forth in the world and encounter all of these difficulties and the biases or whatever impediments that all of us have as human beings and overcome them.
But if you don't have a good education to start with, you're not going to be able to do that.
And if you don't have that access to capital, you can't do it.
And the way that the Fed operates with quantitative easing that floods the economy with money and then strips it out and encourages people to borrow and to put their assets on the line and then makes money hard, makes money more expensive, and then everybody goes bankrupt and the big industry and then everybody goes bankrupt and the big industry comes in or the big BlackRock, State Street Vanguard come in and
I saw a specific example.
recently I went to Lee Harvard, which is a black community in Cleveland.
And it used to be a booming community.
All the businesses are now boarded up.
It's like the apocalypse there.
And there's two or three businesses that survived COVID.
We met with the business owners.
They're all now going bankrupt because they cannot get access to capital from the little banks because the little banks, which are the only ones that will loan to black people, they now, because the The price of money is so high that with the interest rates are up at 7%.
So their treasury bills, which are their reserves, have been severely diminished in value.
And the banking rules don't allow them to lend or make it very hazardous for them to lend when their reserves are low.
They're now hoarding their liquidity.
And this one woman who survived, she has an 80-year-old sausage business that provides employees.
And, you know, and pride for this community.
She needs some capital to change some of the machinery that she was using, and she cannot get access to capital, so she's closing the business.
And all of them had stories like that, that we just can't, you know, we have a thriving business, but we cannot, as Black Americans, cannot get access to capital because The big banks won't want it to us because they don't care about small business and they don't want a loan in our neighborhood.
And the little banks that were the only ones that would make capital available, you know, now are being destroyed through the high interest rates.
Through high interest rates or through regulations that they really can't manage to deal with.
I mean, what do you think the path forward is?
You know, the priorities should be...
Do you want to take that or do you want me to start, Kevin?
Oh, you start, because you're...
Okay, so for priorities, well, what issue would you want to start with, with priorities?
I mean, you know what, if you were president, what would you do to reinvigorate Black communities around this country?
Well, first you mentioned education, which I agree with you completely.
And I'd be open to all sorts of suggestions.
I happen to be a big fan of school choice.
I have to say that people ought to have the freedom, ought to have the same freedoms that wealthy people have to go to whatever school they want to.
In fact, there's a very interesting video where Milton Friedman is making that pitch to an audience in Harlem.
And it's kind of amazing how that whole event goes down.
I think that's sort of a base, a sort of starting point.
School choice strikes me as a very important factor in there, both to give people options And also to put pressure on the public schools to improve because they, you know, they should improve if they see they are at risk of losing funding through students choosing other places.
And also, I think there's a matter of freedom.
You know, I think there are all these complaints about what's being taught in the schools nowadays.
And, you know, as long as you have certain things that you expect of students that, you know, you can implement it through exams, then students ought to be free to sort of learn the things that they think They want to learn, their parents want them to learn, subject to the requirement that they meet competency exams in certain areas, English, math, etc.
But subject to that requirement, if you want to study, if you want to go to a school that emphasizes a particular thing, you want to go to a school that emphasizes religion, you know, if you want to do that, then we ought to allow these things.
But the big objection is that you're going to be robbing the public schools that, you know, badly need this money, that you're going to be robbing them of their revenues.
Right.
And so, you know, by that argument, the public schools could become infinitely bad and students would have to stay in it.
We're not running the system to make sure the schools keep captive students.
We're running the system to make sure that students are educated.
And to me, if the school choice plan helps in that regard, which I think it would, then that's the argument for it.
And hopefully, instead of causing the schools to disappear, it would cause the public schools to improve.
Well, there is an argument that would say that public schools have shown a trend of becoming worse and worse.
Over the past, say, couple decades.
And I think that anything that would put pressure on them to actually try to improve the situation and make it more of an educational environment.
Because right now, I've been into some of these public schools and I've seen some very kind of horrific situations.
So yeah, I have to agree with you on that.
The Institution of Examinations, I mean, so that was one of the innovations here in Massachusetts.
With the MCAS exam.
But it's been another state student.
New York has had its regents exams for some time.
And some people don't like examinations.
On the other hand, they're a good check on making sure the schools are doing their jobs.
And I don't see any other way around that other than to have students.
You want the examinations to be rigorous enough that they would force the schools to educate the students.
And what was your reaction to the Harvard case, the affirmative action case?
Well, I disagreed with the majority because, and maybe I'll just admit, I'm a good friend of David Evans, who was running, you could say he was running Affirmative Action at Harvard for 50 years.
He just resigned a few years ago.
And he's a very thoughtful person.
You know, there were so many falsehoods about how Affirmative action was being implemented by Harvard.
They were adopted wholesale in Justice Roberts' opinion.
So that struck me.
That gives just a base of sort of falseness to the opinion to begin with.
And so they were trying to do something that...
It was addressing and solving a social problem in sort of an intelligent way.
Evans was working with a lot of people.
Most of the decisions were entirely sensible.
And I think the district court found that in the Harvard case.
The district court got to look closely at what people were doing and persuaded.
And so I disagree with what the court did.
I mean, I think actually...
Keep saying I wrote a paper on that one, too.
I wouldn't side completely with the arguments of the dissent.
I think the dissent in that case makes some arguments that I wouldn't side with.
On the other hand, the majority's arguments, you know, I certainly disagree with.
And I think there is a very sensible, I would say even conservative, argument for affirmative action.
In fact, when you say the term affirmative action, it's such a loaded term That people have different interpretations of it.
People run in completely different directions once you say the term.
But let's just say taking race into account in the admissions process, I think there are some very conservative arguments for doing so.
Let's hear that argument.
Well, okay, let's take the case that everyone seems to agree with.
So many of the people who oppose affirmative action have said things like, Take the case of a kid from Appalachia whose parents are in bad shape.
A white kid from Appalachia.
A white kid from Appalachia who pulls himself up by his bootstraps and gets himself into a position where he can get into Harvard or look like he can compete in Harvard.
Harvard takes him, which of course happens all the time.
And then the argument is, but race.
But no, race is a different thing.
You know, race should be irrelevant.
It shouldn't be part of it.
And I think all of the people who are in favor of using race into account are simply saying, look, race is an important statistic in making an inference about the difficulties that someone has overcome to get to that stage.
It's often a very powerful statistic.
It's often pretty darn good in helping you I figured that out.
And we could talk about different ways.
You know, one is race combined with zip code.
And you know as well as I that there are plenty of zip codes where students are going to come out with a big disadvantage or have to labor under a big disadvantage to get themselves at a level where they're getting into the Ivy League schools.
But then I guess the position of a Justice Roberts would be, okay, fine, that's just the zip code.
But if someone grows up in the suburbs, it's a black kid who grows up in the lily white suburbs, why would you take race into account in that case?
And here I would say, sure, there is a weaker argument for taking race into account.
But even then, a lot of the black kids who've grown up in the lily white suburbs have dealt with Obstacles that their white counterparts haven't dealt with.
I can give you an example.
So I actually have a son at Harvard right now.
And he had a 4.0 and his test scores were pretty darn perfect.
Pretty darn perfect.
He's had a few of his high school teachers who would say this kid would have gotten into any college he applied to, even if his color were green or blue or whatever.
So he's a good case to talk about because I don't think there's an argument in his case that he benefited from any kind of relaxed policy or anything like that.
I think he would have gotten in whatever color he was.
But he doesn't even know some of the things that happened.
There was a teacher in his grade school.
I pulled him aside and tried to teach him some extra math one time.
He came in and tried to use that sort of new math in a class.
A teacher of his discovered that and just went nuts about it.
Just went nuts that His dad would try to teach him some math that wasn't in the curriculum.
Now, I don't know if that had anything to do with race, but it certainly made me wonder about it because I did wonder, well, if this had been a white kid and a white father and the teacher discovered that the dad had taught the son some additional math, would she have gone berserk in the way that she did?
She went nuts and she threatened to remove him from an advanced math class that he was in.
Which, in the end, she did not do.
But I'm just offering that as one example of the sorts of things that happen that in many cases are correlated with race.
That's why, although the question is how much weight you give to it, it's certainly a relevant statistic in determining what kind of obstacles people have to deal with and overcome.
And it's not a solution.
What the Supreme Court said in the case, which is, oh, you can talk about it in your essay.
It's not a solution because a lot of these kids are young kids who don't even know What sort of obstacles they've overcome.
You know, it's only the obvious cases where they would know that.
So I would say that, you know, again, I think this is a fairly conservative argument because I'm saying whatever you think is right about the Appalachian case, you can certainly make that argument using race instead of Appalachian because that's just the reality.
I think you'd agree yourself that race is still a relevant statistic in inferring whether someone has had to put up with Yeah, I think one of the most interesting arguments is the legacy arguments, which I don't know how much of a Harlan's class gets because they had a legacy there, meaning they had an ancestor there.
But, you know, legacies, I would say, are probably 99.9% white.
Right.
Well, you have legacies, you have the team, the sports teams that are recruiting and taking in a fair amount of students and those aren't the minority students who are taking, for the most part, who are taking advantage of that because you have a ton of teams and they're all recruiting their people.
So legacies, sports teams, you have all sorts of ways in which sort of special advantages are given to some applicants.
And if you in the end, if you ask, you know, how important is this issue?
Well, it's a tiny problem.
I mean, it's a molehill of a problem because there's so few cases, you know, the sort of the vast majority of black students in Harvard today are quite competent and would get in affirmative action or not.
And so we're talking about a relatively small, small, surgically applied tool.
The Roberts opinion sort of makes it sound like it was a check the box thing where, you know, if you just check the box and said you're black, you got in, which is just an absolute falsehood.
And the other absolute falsehood that the Roberts opinion relies on is a theory that race is kind of irrelevant in making an inference about the obstacles that someone deals with in today's world.
It's not irrelevant.
Yeah.
Well, it's a pleasure meeting you guys, and this has been a really, really enjoyable discussion.
Thank you so much for sharing your day with me.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
It's been a real pleasure and a real honor.
And by the way, I was very close to Dave Evans as well.
Oh, really?
Okay.
He's a fantastic, fantastic guy.
He is.
Well, guys, thank you so much, and I hope you'll come back and join us again.
