#763 - Coleman Hughes - Bringing An End To Race Politics
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is common hues is a writer, an author and a podcasts. Ter, the state of race relations in amErica seemed to be improving for decades, then crashing, burned over the last five years.

What's going on? Why is everyone obsessed with race game, and how can we move beyond race politics? Expect to learn why anti racism is just neo racism, the difference between being colorblind and actually being racist, why your social class is more important than your ethnicity, whether me too hurt women more than helping them, if there is a realistic case for D.

I, whether any race space policies have worked and much more. Coleman is a legend. I love the way that he communicates. He is incredibly thoughtful and IT also happens to be a phenomenal rapper and jazz musician, so just a full stack, competent human. In other news, you might have been hearing me talk about some big projects that we have done recently.

Last week, I did the most expensive, most complex shoot that we've ever done with four guests, and you will get find out about that next week. It's very exciting. Uh, this is breaking new ground.

I think actually for podcasting overall, I think this is a world first that i've been done. And IT, I haven't seen the edits at all, may look IT may look totally kind of crap and and not be very fun, but IT was something new and very different and pretty exciting. And I hope that you love IT and we'll be telling you more next week.

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What do you think about the state of race in amErica now? What's your meteo logical weather report?

yeah. So you know, the reason I wrote this book is that this idea of color blindness, which means you try to treat people without regards. I see obviously that you're a court on cold White guy. You see that i'm a court on called black guy. But i'm going to treat you like Chris Williams in knowing everything I know about you as an individual.

And I ask you to treat me like common hues, knowing everything you know about me and we don't regard we don't give weight to each other races when we treat each other and my book is is advocating not just for that but also advocating for getting race out of public policy in amErica we have all kinds of policies that use racial discrimination um explicit and people have various reasons for this to fight racism, to combat the legacy of slavery and so forth and in my book I want to argue instead for a color blind philosophy let's get raised out of public policy. If we want to correct for disadvantages, let's do that on the basis of basis of service economics in class. And uh, in my view, this is a much healthier path towards the ideal of a color blind society.

IT used to be in common sense, on the left and in liberal circles, that that's what you wanted to do in in the mid sixties, you had mart luthor king writing and speaking to to this effect. But in the past fifty years, and particularly in the past ten, with the explosion of black lives matter, social justice, wooliness, D E. I, critical race theory, whatever you want to call IT, this idea of color blindness has come under attack as nai ive at best, or as Whites to provinces at worst. So so in the book here, I really try to rescue this idea of color blindness because I think it's the the wisest way to actually navigate a multiple multiethnic society in the long run.

Explain to me the difference between being color blind and not seeing race, because that kind of became a mean, I don't see rice because, I mean.

what is there a difference? I think there's a huge difference because the truth is we all see race, right? When someone says I don't see race, I understand what they're getting at, but it's actually a lie is not true.

I could you know everyone watching this can see that you're right and that that i'm not right. So when people say I don't see race, they're putting up a very convenient target for the critics of color blindness to say, look, they're just being naive. They're pretending not to see race.

Uh h and IT allows people to dismiss the deeper philosophy of color blindness. Ss, without giving IT a fair consideration. So in my book, I I advocate that people just stop saying that IT IT gives enemies of color.

Blind is far too easy at target. What you should say instead is I try to treat people without regardless. Now that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as quickly, but it's it's much closer to the truth, it's more accurate.

And so um you know I think we should all admit that we see race, all admit that we are theoretically capable of being race. All of us are so this is not a book that's telling you to be naive or to pretend that racism doesn't exist. It's a book that says we should treat people without regard to raise both in our personalize and in our public policy.

He mentioned before about this abandonment of the conversation around class and this focus on the conversation around race. This is something that i've not, especially coming from the U. K, which is still a super classic society. I have a party trick that i've been a couple of times over the last year since moving to america. If there's me and another british dude or goal in the room, i'll say, don't tell me anything about you just let let's have a conversation for sixty seconds about something that isn't you in your origins and i'll trying to work out where you're from, what sort of school you went to, what level of education you've got, what your parents did, what what class you would be considered from, and the ability to do that. I don't know if that's a skill set that the americans have to be able to just x rain on someone's class background, but just accent of presentation of british people do notes so much about the background.

right? Yeah, they know that makes sense. I mean, you can sort to do that in america, but not putting not quite to the same extent.

So talk to me about this abandoned the conversation around class and this prioritization of race instead because classic left leaning policies were about class they weren't about rice yeah so during the .

civil rights movement um the the policy of the civil rights movement. And you can anyone can read this in martial for king's book, why we can't wait from the mid sixties he says here's the plan. We are going to have a anti poverty program.

He called IT the bill of rights for the disadvantaged. It's gonna benefit the black power. It's gona benefit the White poor alike on the, on the basis of class.

So IT will benefit black people this proportionately, because black people are this proportionately poor to begin with. But IT won't be a race space policy. It'll be a class space policy. And we're going to get rid of jim crow, get rid of all race space policy, and proceed with a kind of war on poverty and disadvantage that is color blind in nature. Everyone agreed ah I mean, for a brief moment the elites, at least the people in power, agreed past the landmark civil rights legislation of the one thousand hundred and sixty which made IT the case that, for instance, my grandfather and grandmother could vote and so on and so forth, sit whether they wanted on a bus, go to whatever restaurant they wanted, go to whatever school I want him.

And then in the late sixties there was a series of destructive riots, over one hundred fifty riots in in american cities around this issue of race and policing um and what happened is everyone who had just agreed to this colour blind principal lost faith in IT because they said, if we just agree on color blinds is past all this legislation, how come there's all this writing? Clearly we must need to do more. We must need to do something else. And the only thing that I can compare this to in year and I, the lifetime of most of your listeners, if not all of your listeners, is the summer of twenty twenty, when George floyd died in minneapolis and you had riots all over the country in most american cities and and you had politicians and everyday people, uh feeling enormous pressure to put racial identity on the front burner to do to do all kinds of things. Every other institution was in some way trying to uh promote black people to high levels of authority, to show how much they cared about black people uh to require black people to be on the boards of publicly traded companies to you know, change the categories that the grammar awards Operate under just everything right everyone felt this enormous pressure to colon quote center race something very similar happened in the late sixties and that's where the impetus for race bed affirmative affirmative action came from and the whole sweet of race space policies that have become Normal uh, in american society so that's really what happened with a pivot away from color blinds.

It's looking back on twenty twenty IT was almost like a collective apology from people that didn't really know what was going on. We feel like maybe someone's been racist somewhere. Maybe this George flowed thing is indicated of some huge big underlying problem.

Oh my god, I don't know that makes me such a piece of shit. I'm not, I don't have my finger on the pulse empathetically sympathetically. I'm not a good person.

What can we do to not only signal that are not one of them, whether they are, but also to make reparations to fix this problem? And I need to make sure that these poor minorities are OK. And let let's bring a bunch of impetuses along, a bunch of procedures, a bunch of a bunch of initials that people can do.

yes. So the the one of the reasons people had that sense is because. Because the media, the national media in amErica does not report when there are police incidents with White americans.

IT just doesn't become news. And it's partly because of the media. It's partly because there's less of an audience for IT.

So for example, there is a guy named tony timper who died in a way extremely similar to George floyd within officer's knee on the top of his back for about thirteen minutes. And they are cracking jokes as he's losing consciousness, saying, wake up for school, tony. Just really a terrible behavior for A A group of police officers.

And he died. Whole thing was caught on video. You can look at up on on youtube. Almost nobody to this day knows or or or cares about IT because he didn't catch fire because he happened to be White. This was just a two, a three or four years before before George floyd.

So when you have immediate ecosystem where those stories are unseen now, when you see that happening to a black person, everyone assumes that this kind of thing only happens to black people because they're black. And then IT becomes an example of racism that ties into the whole legacy of the slavery, legacy of racial inequality and really infuriates people. And so people in two and twenty, they lost all reason.

They didn't ask whether all the policies they were implementing had anything to do with helping black people. Um the kinds of black people that are poor and from poor backgrounds like George floyd. Instead, they promoted black people to the heads of a board, boards of publicly traded companies as if those are the same kinds of black people that need help like George floyd.

Essentially, they made the black elite even Better off than IT was before, while at the same time a defunding the police for neighborhoods where black people need them the most. Okay, at the time of the summer, twenty twenty gallet poled black americans with three simple questions, do you want more police in your neighbor od, the same police presence in your igher hood or less? Eighty percent answered the same or more.

Only twenty percent wanted less police. And that was the position, a very minority position within the black community of the black lizer matter movement. Defund the police movement and so forth.

Police were defunded in many cities in amErica and then later refunded um in many cases by popular demand within the black community in certain places and the end result was that twenty twenty represented the single greatest increase in homicide from year to year in amErica in the past hundred years. Oh, that is A A shocking fact that most people don't know. And he was a direct result of the reaction to George floy's death, the d policing, mass retirement of the police, the general sentiment of anti police. And they hurt nobody more than the black community because those homicides were not equally distributed in nice neighbor ods and less. They were highly concentrated precisely in communities that are this proportionately black and this proportionately poor.

I taught joro gan yesterday on his podcast about luxury beliefs from that been recently repopulating ed by rob henderson. And defined police is patient zero for this. I mentioned that I was walking through Austin and saw a house that has a defined police, uh, packard in the garden and a private security stick next to the front door in .

the window yeah the fact that people like that don't see the irony is really depressing to me. I mean that there are literally people that have their own private security detail, kay, who supported def on the police. There are people in gated neighborhoods who pay a premium just so that strangers can't come near their house, not even in their house, but near their house, who want to want to gut police forces in that you for poor neighbor ods.

This is amazing. And that's what that's what happened in twenty, twenty. And more importantly, that's what can happen in particular in amErica on the left, when people, when people only obey their empathy towards the video and suspend the rational thought that should come with that.

Okay, this video is horrible. Let, let's all agree that what is actually the best way to move forward? Let's not just rage. Let's actually think, uh, look at evidence and not be so hasty with supporting policies that might backfire for the very people you're trying to help.

I think IT would have been very difficult during the summer of twenty twenty to have put out a realistic crime impact statistics, what the actual polls are saying from mostly black nights hoods. I think anyone that posted that IT would have been very quickly lambasted as some White premises race denial. You don't care, you don't understand, you don't know.

I that would have been the smart thing to do. But the incentives all aligned to not how, I mean, who who was going to be the person that does that. If IT was a black person, they're accused of being an uncle tom. If IT was a White person, theyll be accused of being racist. There was no vector in which that narrative could have inserted itself.

I don't think yeah I mean, sam Harris tried to I think he released like a ninety minute yeah, pull back from the brink.

which was very good. One of the best for the people haven't listen to IT even now. IT is IT is one of the best like monologues I think that i've ever heard. That thing is phenomenal.

IT was bought on in my view, and i'm sure he took a lot of flag for IT as as my friend can meal Foster like to say, people like me and camel have the melon in force field, which is, you know, no one is gonna call me a racist. They make, as you say, they may call me uncle time or a trader to my community and so forth, to which I would respond. What what could be more of a betrayal to your community than not speaking out when you know that policies are being adopted that are going to lead to potentially hundreds of thousands of excess deaths for black people? Because that's what happened.

The internet is obsessed with the prioritization of looking good over doing good, completely obsessed with that because the between our opinions and our needs have never been greater.

So it's very easy to hide behind words that sound Carrying and and just and forth ride and charitable and understanding and the implications of IT what actually happens kind of no one really ever fact checks, that is, he was the guy, and i'm sure he had good intentions, who could have have seen that defunding the police would have negative be impacted. Black people? Well, no, if if you'd use a little bit of a little bit second order of thinking.

a lot of people who saw IT, a lot of people talk about IT at the time, me included um but mostly we were ignored because of the the frenzy around around the moment I mean it's very interesting to live through a moment that I think we will be written about um by historians yeah uh were fairly close to the same age。 We haven't gotten too many of those think but IT will you know the summer twenty twenty we have to acknowledge what happened.

A man died in police custody in a city. A mini apple is not one of the cities, Frankly, that is known by non americans. And there were protest not just in amErica all around the world.

london, very little days to the U. K.

In and even more surprisingly, in non english speaking locations. I think as far japan, if i'm not mistaken. Um so this is this was obviously had something to do with the pandemic in the fact that, uh, everyone will stuck at home um you know I I don't know you you recall this, but I do remember just a palpable sense of I don't get to move my body every day. I don't get to go out. And when they when you finally have an outlet for that, I think the flood gates kind of opened.

Do you think that these same outcome would have a cured .

had IT not been recovered? No, no, I think I think IT would. I've struck a cord, no doubt but I think IT would have been like one tenth as as crazy um but you know the other thing that many people have pointed out is just how quickly the principles of the medical establishment disappeared and buckled.

So what I mean by that is in early cover a, there were all of these protests by right wing kind of activities. And citizens around lockdowns, right? There were protests outside where people didn't want to be locked down and and they went outside. And I I can't remember whether they were wearing masks or not, but those were roundly denounced by every important medical institution in the country because they were jeopardizing, uh, heard immunity. They were killing grandma.

Yes.

absolutely yeah mass mass can take mass reading events or whatever the yeah yes.

And and then literally weeks weeks later when you had thousands or tens of thousands of people marching in the streets, shoulder to shoulder all over the country, the whole medical establishment just turned around and said, yeah, it's okay because it's for racism, right? And even some of them said, when you when you think about IT, isn't racism a kind of pandemic also? And people watch this, uh, understanding that elite institutions are capable of such hypocrisy of such, you know, is such a loose relationship with their own principles and lose faith.

Talk to me about the relationship between racism, anti racism and neo racism.

So over the past ten years, there's been A A real upswing in what many have called anti racism. I'm talking in particular, if your listers may have heard of people like e from Candy, tanna, hossy coats, Robin, the Angelo, these are people that got a big in the case of Candy and the Angelo got A A big boost by the atmosphere of twenty twenty. But they've been around in writing for longer than that.

And they have a kind of philosophy around anti racism that comes out of critical race theory. And their philosophy is that a White guy like you should be more less constantly thinking about how your White ness has uh, given you privilege, how you how your White ness blinds you to the realities that a black person like me can see. And on the Angels account, you are supposed to be constantly different to to black people in conversation.

So SHE literally says in her book, if you and I are talking about race, you as a White guy, me is a black guy. You are not supposed to disagree with what I have to say about race. You're not supposed to argue back.

You're not supposed to remain silent. You're not supposed to get defensive. So if you cross everything on the list of the list by process of elimination, what's left is to vocally agree with whatever i'm saying.

Now I don't think you and I could have A A meaningful conversation, meaningful conversation as adults. If the rules are, you have to agree with everything I say and simply differ to my superior epidemic authority. That can be, that can be what that can't paint the path towards a healthy multi racial al society where we try our best to get along despite our differences.

IT has to be a two way street. IT has to be that you can learn things from me and I can learn things from you based on our individual experiences. You may know stuff I don't know. I I may know stuff you don't know. And ultimately, there is an objective reality out there independent of our perspectives like I, there are facts in the world that don't depend on your skin colour or my skin colour and so uh, that's been the style of anti racism that's been promoted. Now I I view that as in fact racist. It's in fact races to suggest that different races of people should live by different sets of books um and and so I I call IT instead of anti racism I all IT I call IT neo racism and I substitute my own form of anti racism which is your race does not matter your race says nothing about who you are doesn't say whether you're smarter dumb IT doesn't say whether you're kind or or mean uh IT IT doesn't speak to any of your deeper values. And we have to be uh in shining that and teaching people to think that way if we are if we're going to, you know, have success in the long run.

Why did that particular narrative spread so effectively? What what made IT? So maybe ticals contagious? Yeah, that's a great question.

So I have a whole chapter about this in my book. The interesting part is if you go back only to twenty twelve or twenty thirteen, just uh, eleven years ago, the majority of americans, black, White and his panic, all believed that race relations were good, right? That that that may shock people.

But very recently, the majority of of americans of all colors, thought that we were in a good or somewhat good place. Then in two thousand thirteen, if you look at the polls, suddenly IT just takes a nose dive. And IT had been steady or or getting Better for for many decades.

So something happened in two and thirteen that has yet to reverse. And that has literally cut in half the number of americans that think work in a good place with respect rate hypotheses. One, racism suddenly increased, and everyone noticed IT.

Well, we have ways of measuring that in is just not the case. There is no evidence that racism suddenly increased in two and thirteen. However, way you look at IT, my hypothesis, and the only one that actually makes sense, is that twenty thirteen is around the year that a critical, massive people had two pieces of technology, camera enabled smart phones and social media.

If you go back to the pre twenty thirteen world, is something happened between A A cup, say, a White cop is trying to arrest a black suspect, and IT went sideways. The only way you'd know about that is if your local newspaper covered IT, IT might make your local a paper the next day. Perhaps that would make the six o'clock news.

If you were watching IT, there is unlikely to be a video of IT. And when you saw, I would be surrounded with journalistic context. The journalists would have asked the police for their point of view, would have asked the family for their point of view, and would be packaging IT to you.

And with some kind of journalistic ethos in the post twenty thirteen world, what happens is in that same situation, police trying to arrest a suspect. Someone has probably pulled out their smartphone within two minutes, begun filming and A A video, which is now out of context of how the interaction started. And they've uploaded IT to facebook and twitter and instagram.

And IT gets millions of views as raw footage before anyone puts any journalistic or fact checking context around what IT is and what that means and what that happened. That's a fundamental change in the way that information spreads. And so I make an analogy in the book.

Imagine if the a if if, if the speed limit on the highway in amErica were so suddenly went from, you know, eighty miles an hour to two hundred miles an hour, not all cars would be able to take advantage of that change. So like a heavy Spark has a top speed of what, maybe ninety miles poor, but a mclean that can go up to two fifty is is it's gonna be suddenly a lot different to be a mclean driver. This is analysis to what happened when we got smart t phones in social media.

The speed limit on the information highway doubled, tripled, quite pled or more, and certain kinds of information on that new highway were able to take advantage of that speed limit change. And others were not the kinds of things that spread insane in the age of social media algorithms IT. Turns out in america, in the west at large, are videos that tapped directly into, uh, the the us.

Forces them historical guilt, White guilt, a black outrage. This is uh somehow at the core of the american and western european psyche in a way that leads videos that that evoke that that pushed that button to just spread like wildfire. And they spread much faster than the fact checking in the journalistic context can spread because those things appeal more to reason than emotion. So there are so many of these incidents that uh, people just experience the initial outrage of seeing and learning about what happened, that they don't experience, uh, the fact checking and that that's in a dutch show what happened IT created a false perception that racism was on the rise when in fact, racing was in decline.

This is reflected in a ton of surveys and polling data as well. Yes, do you think what is the number of black people per year that are killed by police? What is the number of black people that are shot by other black people are shot by White people? Or how many people would have a problem with their son or daughter marrying a percent of the opposite race?

Yeah, absolutely. So you point out a really important one because there are a lot of people that would like to say, okay, call when I understand what you're saying. But isn't IT just that social media and smart phones exposed us to all the racism that .

was out there finally window into what was going on?

Yes, finally, we just see IT, and that's what people are reacting to. Well, if that we're true, then you would expect people who are online to have an accurate perception of how much racism and how much police violence is out there. That's an easily testable proposition.

And I hasn't tested, and I said one study in my book, which in twenty and twenty, and asked americans of different political persuasions, but in particularly very liberal americans, who are the most on social media, and therefore on this theory, should be the most educated, how many unarmed black americans are killed by the cops every year? And the answer, on average, was about a thousand. The true number that year was twelve. So that should put to rest the notion that social media is making us all smarter and more informed on the on these kinds of issues. It's not it's doing the .

opposite is social media and videos of black people being mistreated enough to go vanities and sustain the change in perception of race relations like that. I'd can totally see why that would be the inflection point two thousand twenty thirty. But IT has been an awful long time of this compounding.

You would have expected that someone we've been able to come in with counter examples that everyone sites on the scope would have had have been adjusted by. Well, here's some actual data about what's going on is that IT? Is that in a nutshell, that's all what what else has caused .

this to perpetuate? yeah. Well, it's a good question because I do think that, that is the main cause and in the trigger um but there are some background facts that I think are also important that allow american society to be more vulnerable to division today than I would have been in the past.

One is the cold war ended ah we no longer have had a really scary external enemy that unites the country. Maybe I in putin was close, but not we're kind of a divided on putin now I mean, tuck her calls and clearly likes him. We're not really united against china because china is not as obviously our main geopolitical rival as the soviet union was.

Um and so no, I forget who was I might have been actually kissinger that said this uh, someone else or someone else that war unites countries in peace divides them so the the united states is as a side effect of being a country that's perpetual at peace even when we're at warn far away places our homeland and is never threatened, almost ever that allows us to focus more divisions and then secondly, I think the the the war on terror, losing its psychological hold on people also once again allows us to turn inward more and focus on our own divisions. This is a pretty big effect because you look at a society like israel. Israel was in one of its deepest divisions that has ever been in in its country's history.

Prior to october seventh, over judicial reform, IT was completely split. IT was IT was a ety, almost traumatized by its splits ness. You had people predicting civil war, even over this stuff.

The second IT gets attacked like all of that IT doesn't matter. No one even talks about IT, right? The whole country units around the war that they have to fight. So amErica as a side effect of being so generally at peace um is quite inward looking and inward obsessed.

How has this changed or impacted the way that people behave into? Personally, I think before twenty thirteen.

and certainly in my child, hod, I grew up in a multi rational, multi ethic town. I had friends of every race, and I did not think of them as belonging to a race. I thought of them as their individual names and their individual characters um I made innocent, racy jokes with all of my friends and I was something held very loosely, not very deeply as IT should be in the in the new age of race.

Subsection sion. I think there is there are many situations that have introduced paranoia and tension into the relationship of people with different races. I mean, just the fact that say i'm meeting a White person for the first time, they don't know anything about me. They just see that on black because of everything they see on social media and the the cancellations of people for saying the wrong thing and the ubiquity of concern about racism. They may think to themselves, you know, i'm not gonna risk saying what I saying, what I think about, you know, this this new policy we have, like around this black eye, why would I, why would I even risk IT? And he's probably little do they know that I might agree with them, and that might be the opening to a really interesting conversation.

but disagree with them, but be very interested in having a conversation and bean offended.

That's right. That's right. And so I think the self censorship and and and and you know all of IT is I mean, I I can tell you how many employers i've talked to or have very shot to me that said, yeah, I mean, I don't even know if I want to hire a black employee because if something if something happens in this day and age or if if I fire them for a genuine cause, which has to happen all the time um the possibility that they claim on a racist and spread IT all over social media could be ruinous for me right? This is this. These are the things no one talks about that actually do change, uh, change the on on the ground reality for race relations in in ways that are really, really negative. I think .

there was a study that I looked at about how me too hurt women's careers. Women's productivity fell post me to largely due to fewer collaborations with men. A study of research collaborations involving junior female academic economists to show that they started fewer new research projects after me to. The decline is driven largely by fewer caborn with new male coauthors at the same institution.

The the dropping collaborations is concentrated in universities where they the perceived risk of sexual harassment accusations for men is high, that is, when both sexual harassment policies are more ambiguous, exposing men to a large variety of claims and the number of public sexual harassment incidents is also high. The results suggest that me, too, is associated with increased cost of collaboration that disadvantaged the career opportunities of women. Me, too, was important to raise awareness, but the intent was not to impose costs on women's careers.

Yeah, is very interesting. I remember that result a IT just shows you how in every cultural phenomenon changes incentives in a way that has downstream consequences. And that doesn't mean it's bad.

You know in perhaps that was a necessary cost. I don't know. You know i'm also i'm curious if if the medium movement had a similar effect on unlike dating a and approaches by men .

in general IT has men report approaching xi, increasing because of fear of being meeting right.

And I and I wonder if women, I wonder, i'm curious of women, report wanting more approaches than their they're getting they are getting in the past.

That's that's that's also true. But he's the other thing, almost like a kind of bizarre psychological stock home syndrome, are that women are also more afraid of being approached. They want to be approached. But their sensitivity, that trepidation about being approached, has also increased because what are you seeing you're seeing when memetic reaches, we look to others in the behavior and the patterns that they show as an indication of how we should behave. 嗯 哼 and if what you're seeing is that a this guy isn't to be trusted and a tweet that when viral a couple of weeks ago about how a guy paying you a compliment is a red flag because he's love bombing。 So so basically, this refers posing of any kind of male behavior or any kind of White behavior, any male behavior toward women or any White behavior toward black person can be interpreted in A A way that fits a narrative of perpetrator and victim.

right? It's kind of similar in a way to, uh you know remember in early twenty twenty, I think um this is after a mod arbery was killed in an attempted citizen's arrest gone wrong while he was out on a job and this was a this was a tragic incident and he was an example of just why you should never try to do a citizen's arrest unless for some reason you absolutely have to.

But you article saying you know the dangers of of of of jogging while black， right? You had you had you literally had a near times a beed, which was you know uh a guy saying that he fears for his life every time he leaves his house to take a job, right probably a guy that you know like from the suburbs and no one's died. No one has been killed taking a job in that town probably for one hundred years right um and and the odds of getting killed by cop on a jog are probably lower than the odds uh of getting struck by lightning okay, let's be perfectly clear about that.

So but what happens when you have near times articles saying that when you have you know just a whole narrative that plays up the risks of as a black person getting shot by the police, even though they're infinite asm, what happens is you get every day Normal black people if they get pull over for speeding or whatever, actually now fearing for their lives right, and bringing all of that fear with them to their interaction with the cops you have just uh um and i'm sure cops you've seen this. You just have people freaking out when there is almost no chance that sometimes is gonna go left in this interaction because you've done nothing wrong. They are got both hands on the steering wealth. They're freaking out because they've this narrow .

yeah ah did you see the data t scar experiment? So they brought people into a lab and said that they were going to put scars on their face and then get them to go and take a job interview. And as they're about to leave from the makeup room to go into the job interview, they say, sorry, we just need to touch IT back up to make IT a little bit more obvious.

And as they did the touch up, the participant wasn't aware of what they were doing. They actually covered them over. So sitting down opposite the interviewer, the interviewer didn't see anything. There were no scars on their face.

And then afterward, they asked the study participants, so what did you notice with their any tale, tale signs? Do you think that we were being discriminated against? Yeah, I could tell that they they just couldn't stop looking at IT.

So you are able to create a narrative in someone's mind where the particular activating system is so obsessed looking for a thing. The added that this is what they should be looking for. IT was the same. IT was the reason why I think this is dude killed joye swell who is a fitness influencer I guess on tiktok and he was kind of like the vanguard pushing back against these videos of girls um videoing themselves and then voice covering about a do gLances over and saying, I feel and and safe in this game there are a bunch of videos that my viral maybe years ago something like and he was basically saying this is out of order like that I didn't do anything wrong he came over, tried to help you unload twenty five killer dog shit form glue bridge exercise we were doing or something whatever um but that was really important because I think people, especially on the internet, they look to other people's behavior as a proxy or an example of how they should behave and if that hadn't been pushed back against a whole swath of girls that saw those videos online would have said, oh yeah.

If a guy gLances over three times in the space of one ninety seconds while i'm doing globrix, that is something that I should be scared about but the internet sort came together and the collective judgment was actually that kind of a bit ridiculous. And that then becomes the new matter, right? That is now the new trend. Oh, okay, so I four times in, ninety seconds or five times in, I don't need to worry about IT as much. So this, so that safety ism culture doesn't make people safer IT just makes them more fragile and more .

oh yeah I think the whole you know generation of people, roughly my age and Younger and a little ader than me too is is just measurably more anxious about everything. Uh and I actually just had a bogle share on my podcast who has a new .

work and SHE talks .

about this you know just this notion of exposure therapy, which is one of the few kinds of therapy on her account that actually works if you have some kind of a phobia. Really what you have to do is just do the thing you don't want to do over and over again until IT sucks a bit less, right? You you're what you're afraid of dogs.

Well, you're petting a dog today, sorry, and you're going to keep doing that until you're no longer. Afraid of IT and IT turns out that that works really well. Um it's very simple and very unpleasant but IT works and I asked her I think he agreed with this point. Exposure therapy the lesson of exposure therapy is generalizable to anxieties, most anxieties in general, the more at bats you get in uncomfortable situations on the first day asking a girl out um meeting someone for the first time, public speaking, whatever IT is uh even for some people making a phone call is anxiety inducing um going to the post office whatever IT is that people are makes uncomfortable. You precisely have to do that thing just over and over over again. And what's happened, I think, on mass with the Younger generation and this can be seen inference g gene twenty research on generational differences is that gene has just gotten less experiences around the board on every conceivable kind of thing, less sex, less hanging out with people, less all of IT. And so it's not exactly surprising that Jenny has more anxiety about all of those things.

Talk to me about affirmative action. You mentioned this early on. Is that useful? What about all of the corporate diversity and inclusion efforts beyond the ones that trying to get more black people on boards? What they're not, you know, drives to get people into high paying jobs or or or to fast track them into education institutions? What's your post modem on that?

Yeah so there's kind of an older, healthier a version of D E, I that I would support, which is let's say you a boss and you've got ten people reporting to you. Let's say you're a White man and. You might like fall into the habit of golfing with the other White men every other weekend and never really think to invite you know the history ic guy or the black woman or or whatever not out of conscious prejudice but just because what if they don't golf um and and you don't so you don't think to ask them and so you can fall into a pattern of like like non golfers .

yeah yeah .

of just yeah you can have some kind of magnetism with the people that are more similar to you without actually trying to exclude anybody. So a kind of innocent and useful version of the E I is just to have like corporate best practices with respect to including people like make sure you go to lunch with everyone one on one once a month, right? Have that be a policy .

golf neutral best practices?

exactly. yeah. So okay. So if that's what you mean by D E, I, then I think i'm all afford. Unfortunately, what most organizations mean by D E, I is we have to have a certain number or a certain percentage or at a certain vogue range, a percentage of non White people and women, or else a racist and sexist institution. Now that makes me completely uncomfortable because I know that IT IT is a sacred value to people.

I know there's, I mean, these people that would listen to this and just turn IT off half through the sentence to even chAllenge that. That is an important value, but I don't know about u kis. When I want to hire someone to work on my podcast, I don't give two flying socks what they look like. I want to hire the most competent person that is in my Price range.

Same thing goes for when you produce your music, which everyone should go and check out, by the way, cold x man on phenomenon, did I send you videos of me listening to IT in the car? But if it's the the guy that's mastering a track, so making your beats or helping you mix everything down or helping you film the music, video, what was that? ukraine? Did you go? ukraine?

I go to ukraine. Ah.

before this was prior.

I think I have a happened to visiting countries right before they into war.

I think I said that that you might be associated something that you could be the genesis yeah, you fill my music video in israel.

but I went there like ten months before the war. Blame on you. so. Uh, yes, so so D, E, I, right. So I think if I reserve that right for myself, how can I deny to a corporation? I I don't understand.

I think that people, uh, pay lots of lip service to the idea of diversity because a fur like A A Cosmopolitan globalized person, which I would consider myself too uh we we a lot of us are seen the files and we like diversity like, you know it's nice to have people of many different cultures inhabiting the same romance. It's it's enrich ing um but I think diversity is kind of like love. If you force IT, you've kind of missed the point.

But if IT arises naturally, it's awesome. I mean, you know look, there are a sub sub fields in the arts and music that are highly diverse with no quota or bending of of the merit principal necessary at the comedy world. Look at the music world.

These are highly diverse places and no one has to manufacture the diversity. That's great. But in this place where you don't have IT, i'm not sure that you ought to manufacturer.

Should we be reducing the number of black people in the M B A? Because it's it's so on diverse. I'm not sure I I mean, I IT may sound glib, but I give examples in the book.

Did did anyone think that the beetles, like, needed a person of color? Does anyone think that earth, wind and fire needed a White person? I don't think so.

I mean, the things can be, uh, groups of people can be excEllent and also a maginness. And who are who are we from the outside to say that that's a racist circumstance? Now I will give one exception, which is that. If being racially homogeneous prevents some institution from doing its job well, then by all means.

So for instance, if the N Y P D were one hundred percent like guys, I can imagine how that might make IT more difficult for the police to protect the community, because the community, and inevitably might perceive that as just a colonial relationship, as White people policing people of color. So, so that's a situation where they actually can do their job as effectively, unless they are racially diverse. So if you're in a situation like that, by all means pursue diversity.

But most of us are not at firms and companies that are in that situation. Most of us are in situations more like, you know, at least my my cartoon image of what firefighting is. It's like the fire doesn't care what color you are, right? So get the best people.

Have any of the race space policies actually worked with any of them actually helped in your opinion?

It's very difficult for me to think of any that have helped more than they hurt. Let's put IT that way. I'm not saying none have helped, but IT is difficult to think of any that have helps on more than they, whether it's pretty easy to think of ones that have hurt more than they helped.

Did you fascinated by what the what .

is .

like to be you talking about stuff? You know you had this this sort of incident with ted a little ago. I always that I have this um you know the peak Andreas .

and psychology 嗯嗯。

oh yeah yes yes people tend to remember the most um emotionally silent， sillier and the final experience of of one particular event um I kind of have a the peak hate rule um which describes content creators, individuals in the world that almost all individuals are known by the most egregious blow up and the most recent blow up I guess fortunate that of your over lap up over the top and Peter in france might be um he didn't want to call transport by their name twenty sixteen and he lost his license because he's a bigger on the internet or he has things to say about support illustrative models, you know like the peak one and then the the most recent one.

I always want the you like how many people like this is the last time that I love to step on the field of play， whether it's this is the thing, this is my crowning cancellation, or my crowning sort of moment of of feral or whatever. But yeah, you had this thing and that happens with ted. And I am am pretty fascinated by what the response is being to you talking about this.

You have just been on bill ma IT s and tons of exposure on some how is to show you've been on rogan show like as big as I can get with this? Yeah, what what do people say? What what's the response like to you on the negative side of the fence? The .

response to me is still mostly positive. And then there is a sort of concentrated stream of extreme negativity. Uh, so I M N A lot of people that ignore me that that might h that might not ignore me if I were seeing something different. But you would look over overwhelmingly. I I get a lot of support and i'm enormously grateful for IT and more and more as i've I think gotten Better at writing and speaking.

And as in particularly as we've gotten further and further away from the height of twenty twenty craziness, more and more people have seen in their own lives the cost of abscesses over race, the cost of suspending reason because of a desire to acknowledge racism. More more people have lived those costs over the past few years. And so more and more people, I think, have become sympathetic to my concerns, to to my message. On the other hand is as there always, husband, there's an an extreme concentrated ray of hatred told me by ama bus to vitreal yeah .

and IT doesn't give .

me superpowers, unfortunately or maybe he doesn't.

So you you're able to make walls happen. A couple of rats safety. You attend different countries. Yeah.

it's a weird superpower. I'm not sure i'd be a member of the justice league with that. But a wall man, it's war. Man, yeah, war plus ten .

month delay. It's really fascinating man, to observe that that thing unfold I spoke to this stood a while to go on the show um who had researched the history of existential risk, of human understanding, of our own capacity to destroy ourselves and of the environment's capacity to destroy us to he taught me this idea called conceptual inertia just beautiful things that explained within the the concept as well that ideas take .

time to move and I kind .

of I think about cultural changes and and the uh acceptance ah and understanding and then propagation of ideas, new ideas. Kind of like a huge tanker that's moving across the sea that IT takes a fucking eternity to get IT to go left or right or even begin to nudged a tiny little bit. This is that I quote about whatever is like a science.

Science makes progress, one dead generation of scientists at the time. And this conceptual inertial thing is a perfect example. Even after IT was pretty widely .

accepted that .

the earth was no longer the center of the solar system of the center of the universe, IT took like two generations for that to be common. Poland, amongst people that we're talking about, IT, that even after IT was accepted to was still kind of this retton. So just this delay there was this innova that was Carried over from previously. And the problem is, you think, well, ideas that they literally travel at the speed of light, they travel at the speed of understanding. But IT turns out the speed of understanding is really slow and it's not just the speed of understanding.

So if I get this, I rejected well and there's a critical mass of of um information or justification that I need to be able to believe this thing is the case but then i've got it's not just me believing is everybody else because I don't just act in a vacuum and A A tendency for people to skew what they think or believe based on what other people think or believe or what they think other people will think or believe about them thinking or believing that and then it's you know it's just this so many it's is lumbering behemoth, this leviathan that takes forever to to move around and it's such a shame because people who are able to see, you know, I remember in twenty twenty hearing about the death on the police things, and I could, I was listening to people like yourself, like sam, that were highlighting the potential negative downstream externalities of these kinds of policies being implemented. And yet this still people now nearly four years hence that would say would deny that that is something that had a negative impact. And you know, you're right, living through history is a very bizarre scenario.

But it's even IT must be even more bizarre if you're cassander and you are able to your black CasSAndra and you are able to say, look, this was something that we didn't need to wait a decade to be able to work out that this was going to happen. We could have seen that kind of at the time, this, like I say, this sort of critical mass. This is very interesting time.

Yeah absolutely. I with respect to change you know changing people's or opinions in some sense were both in the business of this. You know I just in that we have podcast and and so on. But um you're right, your point about inertia at the same time, there are situations where I I think they I think they're called the availability casket or or something like this. I ve heard this guy cast on steam talk about .

these situations a book with the thinking fast and slow down .

your conomo ah sure, others have talked about this, but there can be situations where everyone is pretending to believe something, but no one really knows. Most people don't know that. Everyone else is pretending. Everyone thinks that .

there is the the ability paradox is name .

kay ah yes. And if you get an imperor emperor has no close moment where where a few people come out and talk about IT, there can be a sort of cascade where everyone realizes relatively quickly that they're not on board .

and fails full from the rise type thing absolutely.

Yeah and with with certain with certain beliefs in the in the belief cluster of woke social justice, IT at least seems theoretically possible that that that can happen. You know, I I would at least I would I would hope at the same time, I haven't really seen IT happen. So who knows IT .

somebody seems to be upstream and downstream in quite predictable directions. You, you, if IT allows performative empathy or toxic compassion, or if it's metics hydration, because there is a minority group, which is being pedestal zed, and there is a previously privileged group which is being demonized. You can prety reliably say that the stickiness of that idea and the a rapidity of its a uptake is gonna pretty quick.

right?

You had a strange, a very strange blend. What about this trend of revising american history? I was that played into everything.

yes. So in my book I talk about this, there is a trend, uh, not just in writing about history, but also in hollywood movies about history of playing .

up the .

sins of Whites supremacy and the sins of White people and doing playing uh any responsibility that that black people have. So for example, there was a movie called the woman king, which came out last year. I don't know if you saw this. I was viola Davis. Viola Davis was， uh, one of the kind of chief military officers in an african tribe called the dahomy, which famously had an all female warrior unit and that's actually true, they had a warrior unit of female and um in reality the dahomy tribe in west africa slave trading was essentially their uh their whole M O.

I mean he was a huge part of their M O was rating other african tribes, capturing them as slaves, using those slaves themselves, and also selling those slaves to the highest bitter, which in that case was europeans who would bring them to the, to what was then called the new world. So that to hold me tribe, you know, no boy know, as you would say, historically from a historical of perspective, just a lot of lave capturing a lot slave trading OK. So in the movie about the to homy, they portray IT as if uh the the homy generals had this great guilt about slave trading and and they get rid of the slaves I I think by if I if memory serves by the end of the movie or or at the very least the main character is like so conflicted by the fact that they're doing slave trading um and and I think they actually do end IT by the movie does those there's .

a redemption arc somehow.

Yeah, there's a redemption arc that ends with the slavery being then washington. No more of this. H uh, absolutely didn't happen.

They were. They were actually one of the most persistent in slave trading. unanimously.

IT was just accepted, right? So I I give that one example because the idea is like for hollywood, for the culture of hollywood, IT doesn't compute that a group of black africans would just be fully committed to slave trading as as an activity even though that's with the historical record shows. IT doesn't compute because slavery is something only White people do right.

Um I gave another example uh the the movie hidden figures which was about astronauts at NASA probably seven years ago. So astronauts at NASA there were a few black women in the one thousand nine hundred fifties that were that worked at NASA and helped then get to the moon. But they, at the same time, this is during segregation.

So they are living during segregation, but also working at NASA, helping amErica get to the moon. And it's kind of hero art of these, these black women, and one of the black women, and who is actually about, in an interview, said, I didn't feel any segregation at NASA. SHE said that in real life, but in the movie, SHE is portrayed as feeling an enormous amount of racial segregation and NASA, right? This is is another example. Whenever hollywood gets a chance, it's going to till history in a direction that plays up the the evil White person archetypes and plays up the suffering but morally superior black person archetype.

why?

Because that fits their concept of history. The way that neo racist think about history is witness is evil. Black knight is good.

White people were slave owners. Black people were slaves. That's the whole story for them.

So they don't know that almost all the slaves that were brought to the new world were not captured by europeans. They were captured by other africans. They were slaves in africa and sold voluntarily by african tribes to europeans. They don't know that slavery, or they're not taught that slavery, has existed in almost every society, down through history, on every inhabited continent.

And IT would be easier to come up with a list of societies in the past ten thousand years that didn't use slavery then to come up with a list that did, because the list that did would be so long and you'd be on every continent, you'd be with the as text, you'd be with the chinese, you'd be with the koreans, you would be with the west africans, you'd, god knows, you d be with the middle east. You'd be with the slaves of europe, where the word slave comes from, because they were slaves, and so on and so far, to be with the russian surface and so on. And so for so from my perspective, history is a story of of every group and and everyone having some element of oppressor and oppressed. Not a story of the evil european White man versus the long suffering noble people of colour. Mean, this is there's no honest way to look at history and filter IT all through .

that lens. How is this perspective only about history, but about what's going on now? How is this by located between the elites and the non elites? Like is, is that the primary difference between who who views race in this way?

Oh yeah, that is a huge difference because it's mostly in elite te circles that you'll see people, uh, people that are really sympathetic to the White is evil. Uh, people of color, good kind of frame are also in the alley, is where you'll find people sympathetic to every trendy new way of signaling that you care about racism. And often the elites are clueless as to how much in an elite bubble we are.

And I say we because i'm as much as anyone. And the best example of this was with the word lateness. And this is a as as a half portal kon. In myself, I grew up speaking around a lot of speaking spanish in around a lot of spanish speakers.

And so when I got to college and people started saying later, next, I was like, now that's what because not only do like no, his band, that people actually use that word, but IT doesn't even financially make sense with the spanish ly language like IT. IT doesn't obey the typical rules of spanish structure, which are fairly rigid. So but people would know, people would use this word when I was at columbia university.

And and and you have major politicians on in the democratic party like Elizabeth Warren and so for referred to the latter next community. Finally, when pew did a poll and actually asked, american is spending people if they, uh like the word like next something like sixty percent had even heard IT. And then another something like another thirty six percent had heard of IT and did not like IT. And then the the percentage .

even leave .

for right four four percent roughly was the number of people who both to knew IT and liked IT. okay. So that is as good a measure of sort of what the elite is. The elite is, is the people in that four percent that all of them, no lin ex, so they assume everyone else knows IT, and they all feel comfortable with IT. So they assume everyone else feels comfortable with IT and they don't realize the extent to which that sort of four percent is living on IT, almost on a different plane of reality than the other ninety six percent of people in the country who either haven't heard of even their the language they are speaking .

or don't like IT got that funny yeah and tragic as well. What's your solution then? What what is a way you understand the incentive structure, you understand the media landscape, you understand how people are responding to wanting to appear compassionate and tolerance, upstanding and all the rest of IT. How do we .

move forward? Well, I think everyone has a responsibility to check in with their own personal lives and see if they are living by the ethos of color blinds with their friends and their family. Step one, and and something everyone can do.

Uh step two is is to a promote policies and politicians that that speak to your values. I think in amErica we actually have a lot of executive orders and judicial decisions that require employers and and and and so forth to discriminate on the basis of race. And these are things that could be overturned, right, that the next president, uh, could on day one, undo several executive orders that require affirmative action to be implemented in in the federal government.

And so there should be a lot more discussion and pressure aimed at those kinds of changes. Obviously, the supreme court overturning affirmative action last summer, I think, is a step in the right direction. But there's there's more that can be done on that front too.

And as a culture, we just have to insist on the ideal of a colour blind society as the only and go uh and and we have to I hope I can help people become less shy and less fearful in expressing their commitment to live in a world where i'm doing my best not to judge you by the color of your skin. You're doing your best not to judge me by the colour of my skin. And we're both doing our best to demand that the state, which has the monopoly on violence and sets public policy, does not discriminate against any of its citizens based on the colour of our skin, which is something we cannot control. So to recommit ourselves to that as a culture, to fearlessly stand for IT, that's what has to be done if we're going to make steps towards a coloured glands society. Delman.

you're all in man. And this must be the second of the d time we have been on the show. Did, did we do? We did the super two years ago.

And yeah, yeah, we did. We did. Yes, remember?

Yes, we did. Me, you, doug, as mary and Jordan Peterson, which is like the oldest and squad to watch a super bowl with, is very fun. Your music fantastic.

Your book is fantastic. I'm so happy that everyone should go pick IT up now the end of race. It's only I mean, how long I think there is uh, how how long is the audio book?

Oh, that's a good question. I should know how to talk my head. I read IT myself. I might be six .

hours or so yeah but it's it's .

a pretty like not too long.

easy read, do I I think it's great, and I think that you are fantastic voice for all of this stuff. Tell people where they can check out all of the other cool shit that you do.

Yes, so you can check out my writing at my sub stack commons corner. You can also check out my writing at the free press which is a great new publication I would highly recommend uh founded by barry wise um or i'm a contributor. You can occasionally check me out on CNN where I do political analysis and um you can check check out my podcast as well conversations with common.

And I want to just redirect the praise right back at you. You have one of the best podcast out there right now. I'd love, i'd love what you're doing. It's it's it's just fantastic tic. So i'm kudos to you as well.

Thank you. And everyone can go to list to your music to honestly just don't watch the video. What was the yeah but what was the video the first song that released the blue me blast for me?

Yeah, everyone can. Before you go buy the book a while, you're going to buy the book. Go and listen to blast for me by cold x man.

You're awesome. dude. thanks. I'm looking forward to catching up again .

the next time we through. awesome. absolutely.