Making Sense with Sam Harris - #134 — Beyond the Politics of Race

Episode Date: July 29, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Coleman Hughes about race, racism, and identity politics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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Well, this is the kind of conversation I've been wanting to have about race for quite some time. At the end of these two hours, I think you'll recognize that you haven't heard people talk about race this way in a mainstream forum. And there's a reason for that, because this is just a minefield. Now, as I made clear at the beginning, I'm sure there are other ways of interpreting some of the data we cite on economics or crime, for instance. And I'm aware that there are other sides to many of these points. But all you've heard in the mainstream media are the other sides, and often the most tendentious and sanctimonious and bullying versions. There is an orthodoxy on the issue of race, and it's taboo to question it. And it's growing increasingly clear that the orthodoxy is leading us in the wrong direction. Now, after the atrocious podcast

I did with Ezra Klein, and all of the poison I wound up drinking online in the aftermath, I realized that I had a choice. I could avoid the issue of race entirely, or I could continue to speak about it honestly. I've made my choice, apparently, because this is an important issue. In fact, it's one of the most important issues we have because it is so divisive. So I've been wanting to have a discussion like this for months, and I found the person who could best walk me through this minefield quite by accident and in a somewhat unlikely place. My guest today is Coleman Hughes. As you'll hear, Coleman is still an undergraduate at Columbia, majoring in philosophy.

However, he's written some extraordinarily brave and well-reasoned pieces in the online magazine Quillette on race. So I brought him here to discuss his writing, and I also made sure he would be invited to the conference we're doing at Lincoln Center in New York in November. Anyway, I really appreciate that Coleman has had the courage to tackle the subject head on. I felt like I was talking to a person from the future, or at least one possible future. A future where there's no such thing as identity politics, and people of goodwill can just talk about social problems without feeling

like they're walking a tightrope. But in this world, in the year 2018, we're still on that tightrope. And throughout this conversation, you'll hear me periodically look down and marvel at how far there is yet to fall. And the truth is, I expect a fair amount of malice to be directed at both me and Coleman from the usual suspects, for what we say here. But that's fine. I used to be operating under the delusion that that was avoidable. I no longer am. So, without further delay, I offer you Coleman Hughes. Today, I offer you Coleman Hughes. I am here with Coleman Hughes. Coleman, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me on. So, let's get into your background for a minute because, you know, I actually don't know anything about it and it may be relevant to this conversation. This is something that I have remarked on on social media and as have others. You are still an undergraduate at Columbia, which, given the quality of your writing, is incredibly annoying. What are you up to? What are you studying, and how did you get where you are now? Well, I'm studying philosophy. I have two more years to go, where you are now? Well, I'm studying philosophy. I have two more years to go, but I made my way to Columbia. Actually, it took me a little while to get there. Right out of college, I went to a music conservatory. I went to Juilliard. I was in the jazz program there, set on becoming a professional musician. And I ended up leaving

after around a semester when I had a death in the family and took about a year and a half off and then started college properly at Columbia when I was about 20. So I'm 22, and I have two more years to go with my philosophy degree there. Hmm. And what are your interests in philosophy? I like philosophy of mind. I think that was initially what got me into it. Books by Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained. I remember reading that and thinking that philosophy was something that was interesting enough for me to do for four years. Yeah, well, so this is the irony here is that we probably won't talk at all about the philosophy of mind, even though it is my primary interest.

And, you know, this is going to be a conversation that is framed by the path that we have both taken here that is a path that I've continued to think about as the path of opportunity costs. Because, you know, the place where you're currently making your mark and where your voice is being recognized as indispensable is on a topic that I think you probably find intrinsically boring, or at least not among the most interesting. And because you're having to endlessly spell out arguments that probably, in most cases, shouldn't even have to be made. And yet it's absolutely vital that you make them, given how incentivized people are to remain confused on

some extremely important topics. And I've done this in a similar way with respect to religion and the conflict between reason and faith and science and religion. I consider almost everything I've written in that area to be a kind of opportunity cost. And it seems to me you're probably doing a similar thing on race. But again, it's very important that you do it because, you know, you have written these four articles in Quillette. I think it's four, right? Yeah, I think four in Quillette, yeah. Which I'll kind of treat as a single text for the purposes of this conversation. And they're among the best things I've read on the topic of race and the problem of identity politics now.

And I mean, this is all very much of the moment, post-Trump. And it's just amazing to have you again as an undergraduate making sense like this. So before we dive in, there may be a few caveats and warnings to issue, but just one question by way of background is how much pushback have you gotten for your views? So I guess I should spell out what may or may not be obvious for anyone coming to this conversation. You're African-American, right? Are both your parents black? My mother's Puerto Rican, but most people saw her and assumed she was black. Both my parents are people of color. My dad's African-American.

So have you gotten a lot of pushback for what you've written? I've gotten a lot of pushback on Twitter, especially for the most recent one. The first few were, you know, there was good comments, bad comments, but this last one, it was like nine to one negative comments. I've gotten some pushback in real life from people who disagree with me, but I always find disagreements in real life face to face tend to go much better than on Twitter or wherever else online. So yeah, I've got plenty of pushback. I can imagine you have, and I think I noticed it more for the last one as well, but I, you know, if the pushback I get for retweeting you as any indication, I think what you're doing is highly controversial. I mean, and it's the pushback I get just crystallizes the problem for me. So in my world, when I retweeted your last article, you know, I was sincerely praising a person who I had never met,

whose writing I admire. And yet on Planet Left, you know, I was uttering racist dog whistles and, you know, probably worse, promoting an Uncle Tom who, for some reason, is producing highly cogent arguments that a white supremacist like myself finds useful. This is the problem, because if in my world, retweeting the article of an African American that I agree with, that I think is amazingly well written, is further testimony to my racial bias, there's just no way to dig out from there. And yet, there is a slight irony here, because the color of your skin is relevant to this conversation, because only someone with the color of your skin is relevant to this conversation because only someone with the color of your skin could do what you're doing right now. And so a white guy can't be

writing the articles that you're writing now. And that's not a good thing. I mean, the purpose of this conversation is to figure out how to get to some possible future where all of us can talk about race and try to find some way forward that doesn't leave any of us open for just this reflexive smearing and character assassination that's coming from predominantly the left here. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. And the other irony here is that when you actually poll Black people and ask them what they believe on any given topic, whether it's racial preferences or the influence of rap on society, you sometimes find astonishing results, which would be astonishing to some people, right? We can get

into these polls, but for example, Gallup did a poll in 2016 that found that over 50% of Black people said that race should play absolutely no role in college admissions, the clear majority. Another poll back in 2008 found that 71% of Black people said that rap was a bad influence on society. And I'm sure if you disaggregated that by age, you would find my grandparents' generation virtually unanimously hating rap and my dad's being lukewarm and then my generation being a little more positive. But nonetheless, none of these views can be racist if the majority of Black people hold them, right? And it's like, when I go to my family reunion, there is plenty of disagreement on all of these topics. There's clearly a way in which decrying and rehearsing the history of racism has become a sort of sacred value

in the Black community. But poll results show that there's plenty of room for disagreement here just among Black people. And it can't possibly be racist for white people to happen to have the same views as many Black people. Yeah, well, that's a fantastic point. Just one big picture caveat before we dive in, and we'll start there with opinion in the Black community. But we'll cite statistics at various points of the sort that you just cited. And let's just acknowledge at the outset that many things here are debatable. We can cite data that can be, I'm sure, counterposed by other data. debatable. We can cite data that can be, I'm sure, counterposed by other data. We might interpret data in ways that are open to criticism. But the reason why I'm having this conversation is that

one thing seems to me to be not debatable, and it's that if we want to get to a colorblind society at some point, and this would be a society where people are actually judged by the contents of their characters, we can't care more and more about race. Clearly, the path forward at some point has to be characterized by caring less and less about it. And that's why identity politics seems like such a dead end to me. But I think we have to acknowledge that, you know, one of the downsides of our having this conversation now is that you and I are both guaranteed to be smeared by the left for allegedly having an agenda that's bad for black people. Now, I don't know why you would have such an agenda. I know why I would, will be accused of having it, because I'm not Black.

But we should just acknowledge that this is, I mean, we're having this conversation because we think it's important to have, and we're trying to find a path forward that's good for everyone, Black people included. And we have a vision of what that future would need to look like. And the path forward, you know, you and I haven't spoken yet, but I can only assume based on having read what you've written, we both agree that the path forward can't be this continual shattering of the political landscape into competing victim narratives. So anyway, that's just, I'll flag the masochistic pain we're walking into at the outset. And then let's jump in where you just started, this diversity of opinion in the black community, which, frankly, those poll results were surprising to me. were writing. But I'm amazed to know that on many of these questions, like the question of whether affirmative action to get into college is good, you can find a majority of Black people who think,

no, you shouldn't be considering race at that level. Yeah. Well, there's a framing effect here too. So if you ask the question, do you support affirmative action? And you ask it that way, you'll get majority support among Black people. And you ask it that way, you'll get majority support among black people. And if I'm not mistaken, you'll get a slight majority among white people too. But if you ask, if you just phrase it a different way, which is to say, if you just give a straightforward definition of what affirmative action entails, you get minority support among blacks, which is to say majority dissenting, right? So the 2016 poll I just cited, I think the way they phrased it is race, ethnicity, quote,

should not be a factor at all in the college admissions process. So that seems to me an utterly clear definition of what affirmative action is. But if you just ask, there's a poll like one year earlier or one year later, I can't remember, that just asks it as affirmative action and gets a totally different result, which suggests to me that affirmative action has a kind of political halo around it, where when you actually drill into the details of what that is, most people are uncomfortable with it. And indeed,, most people are uncomfortable with it. And indeed most black people are uncomfortable with it. But when you just package it under the political label affirmative action, it becomes

unchallengeable. There's this phenomenon of black conservatism that is surprising to people and is just regularly ignored in the mainstream media. First of all, how would you describe yourself politically? Did you consider yourself a conservative or not? I've never considered myself a conservative. I've only ever considered myself either a liberal or a centrist. I voted for Hillary. I'm fairly sure if I had been old enough to vote, I would have voted for Obama twice. So I've never seen myself that way. It's just the way I see it on the topic of race, the political spectrum is like a frame shift, three notches to the left, where what would otherwise be a reasonable center-left opinion kind of reads as a center-right opinion.

What would otherwise be a pretty reasonable centrist opinion tends to read far-right. So no, no, I don't think of myself as a conservative, but I'm certain that I've already been labeled that way, and I don't invest too much in any of these labels, so I'm not going to fight it too hard. Right. There's that frame shift. And the people who are regularly described as conservatives or even gateway drugs to the alt-right in my world, including myself, are almost uniformly liberal. I mean, there's this whole intellectual dark web idea that has recently been popularized. There's probably one true conservative in that whole group of people, and yet we are described as far right by many people on the left. But this phenomenon of Black conservatism to some degree is mingled with the religiosity in the Black community, because the Black community

tends to be more religious than the white. Is that largely part of it? Yeah. I cite this poll in one of my pieces from, I want to say his name is Theodore Johnson. He wrote a piece for the Washington Post. I believe that's his name. He found that, well, 47% of blacks identified as liberal, 45% identified as conservative, which is almost identical. And my sense is that that conservatism is more of a social conservatism. Like you mentioned, blacks are disproportionately religious and on many social issues would tend to be more in line with a center-right perspective. And Johnson's opinion about why it is that Blacks vote so overwhelmingly Democrat, despite

being evenly split between liberal and conservative, is that there is a sense that the Democratic Party is the party that stands up for civil rights. It could be as simple as the fact that Lyndon Johnson happened to be president during the 60s, but I don't think it's just that. My gut tells me it's also just the fact that if you put a true neo-Nazi in front of me and just asked me to bet on who he voted for in the last election, I could win money all day betting that he voted for a Republican. And that proximity to the truly racist fringe of the Republican Party at least seems to sully that whole half of the political spectrum as far as many Black people are concerned. You know, understandably so. And also the fact that there's on many issues,

not all that much difference between the two parties would just increase that effect. So it's interesting that it comes back to this issue, which you dissect out very much in the spirit of an academic philosopher, that it is at minimum strange to accuse a white person of racism for holding views that on any given poll a majority of black people can be shown to hold. I'm looking at this one passage in your article where you say, for example, if a white person were to say, I don't think racism holds poorly educated blacks back, it would mark them on the left as woefully ignorant of systemic injustice, if not downright racist.

But a 2016 Pew poll found that 60% of blacks without college degrees said that their race hasn't affected their chances of success. If a white person were to say that rap music is a bad influence on society, it might mark them as subconsciously prejudiced in the minds of many on the left. But according to a 2008 Pew poll, 71% of black people agreed with this statement. So, again, I mean, it's possible to hold, I guess, any view, however correct, for the wrong reasons. But the litmus test for racism can't be holding any of these views, which leads me to ask, how should we define racism in your view? What is the appropriate indicator of racism?

When can we be sure we're correctly diagnosing it in other people? That's a very interesting question. One perspective on that is to take what I perceive to be a linguist's perspective and say every word evolves over time, and language is a bottom-up distributed phenomenon that we can't control. So if it just is the case that people nowadays want to define racism as something Black people by definition can't participate in, then who are we to say that that definition is wrong, right? Because words are only what they mean to people at a given time. But then there's another perspective that would say, listen, we need this word racism to mean

exactly what it means. It's too important. And my biases are towards the latter. I have met, I have people in my extended family that I could only describe as black rednecks in the same way that white people have white rednecks, right? Just people with, usually older, with just totally retrograde views about how you view other races. So I just, it seems silly and a little bit condescending to suggest that Black people can't possibly be racist. Although, you know, I'll grant that if you define it that way, then it's just a circular claim. But, you know, I guess racism is defined as, in my view, the belief that kind of essentialist characterization of a whole population of people who happen to share ancestry that holds

that they're inferior, unfit for friendship and relationships, and just unfit to co-mingle with your race. I guess that's how I would put it. Well, let's make it even simpler. What would you consider to be white racism with respect to blacks? What's the bright line there? And how do we know we've crossed it? I guess on some level, you have to go by somebody's behavior. So if somebody walks up to me on the street and calls me the N-word in a tone that makes it totally clear that they are denigrating me, that person's obviously racist. And there's just no reason to mince words about it. But if someone behaves in a way that I find objectionable, but hasn't said anything racist, I think people tend to make these kind of subconscious claims

about other people's motives. They tend to mind read a lot. And instead of attacking what you say, they impute motives onto you. So what is the bright line? I guess it's just behavior that is clearly racially skewed. I mean, you could look at an instance like the Starbucks fiasco recently, where two black men were arrested for going into a Starbucks, not paying for anything, for going into a Starbucks, not paying for anything, asking to use the bathroom. And it just seemed like it was too quick. The fact that the worker at Starbucks called the cops on them, it just seemed too quick to not have been racially motivated at all. And on some level, we just can't know. So it's hard to actually be agnostic because the incentives are just to have an opinion, right?

If you go out on Twitter and you say, well, I don't know. I actually don't have an opinion on whether that was racist. Then you'll be accused of equivocating about racism, downplaying it. I think in many instances, it's just wiser to actually be agnostic until you know the facts. Yeah, well, I totally agree there. With respect to that case, I simply don't know enough of the details. I mean, so much of this is based on people's behavior and just the kind of crime that has been suffered in that neighborhood and, you know, the awareness of all the people involved.

I mean, I don't know who the barista was and how street smart they were or not. So you can imagine two extremes where it's just straight up racism based on the conscious racial prejudice of the person working at Starbucks, or it could have been a totally plausible judgment call based on a thousand cues that are very difficult to describe consciously, but which at a glance people can take in, you know, when they're feeling afraid of other people. And there's just no generic solve for all those situations. And it's not even the case that skin color is never relevant, you know, or race is never relevant in those situations. We'll talk about crime in the Black community at a certain point and no doubt receive

some punishment for even having that conversation. But, you know, there are many cases where being a white guy looking a certain way should put other people on their guard for a higher possibility of crime. And as you know, the example I've used before, which is by no means far-fetched, is if you see a couple of white guys with shaven heads and the appropriate tattoos standing in the parking lot of a black church, right, those guys suddenly become very interesting because of their race and because of their haircuts, merely to be standing where they're standing from a crime prevention point of view. To tell anyone, you know, who's working in a store or just living their lives that they can't

use those kinds of intuitions, which are driven bottom up by the statistical reality of crime in our world, it's enforcing a kind of dangerous stupidity on people. And yet, given the environment, I'm sure we're there where people are feeling like they can't act on intuitions, which in the moment can be totally valid. Yeah, I agree. I think the brain is a pattern finding machine and it is a highly politically incorrect pattern finding machine. And if in your personal experience, you find statistical regularities with regard to what types of people look a certain way and how they tend to behave, look a certain way and how they tend to behave, you will form a kind of alarm in certain situations,

whether you want to or not. It's really not up to you. And there have been some interesting cases where, for instance, Black people have themselves admitted to, if they live in a certain high crime area, let's say, where they just notice that the people who tend to commit crime tend to look a certain way, right? They tend to be Black. Let's just stipulate that in this particular area, that is the case statistically, right? If you heard someone had just committed a robbery in this particular city, you could win money betting that that person was Black over someone who was just betting by chance. And we could just say 100 years ago, you could have said the same about the Irish and the Italians. You could have won money all day if you heard that there had been a murder betting that that person was Irish, for example, rather than German, American. So these trends change over time, but it's nevertheless true that we tend to form

impressions and biases and situations not based completely out of thin air. Although some stereotypes are totally out of thin air. Others are just rooted in observations, right? So there have been instances where prominent black leaders have admitted to having a fear, right? If you're walking in a certain neighborhood at a certain time. Jesse Jackson, that famous Jesse Jackson quote, which is among the more honest things Jesse Jackson has ever said. And there was also virtually the same quote by a former president of Spelman University, a Spelman College, whose name I'm blanking on, who said virtually the same thing. Do you remember the quote? No, I don't remember it off the top of my head. But the thrust of it was that essentially, I sometimes fear black men.

Yeah, I don't have it verbatim. But just if it was, this is the Jesse Jackson quote. He said, I'll tell you what I'm sick of. I'm sick of walking down the street at night, hearing footsteps behind me, feeling the fear, you know, the feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck and turning around and seeing that it's a white guy and feeling relief. That's basically the quote. And I'm sure he got a fair amount of pain

for having said that. But I mean, the reality of, I mean, maybe we should just touch on the reality of crime in the black community just so that we don't sound delusional here. But the statistics on black-on-black violence, which is almost the totality of the crime problem there, in large measure, it's the totality of the crime problem there, in large measure, is the totality of the crime problem in many urban areas that have high crime problems. I can pull up those specifically, but do you have some stats off the top of your head? Yeah, I have the FBI crime data here, just the national data. I think the latest year for which it's available, 52% of homicides were committed by Blacks. And that number has been relatively stable over the past two decades.

It's hovered right around half basically every year. And you could just state it in reverse too. 50% of the homicide victims are also Black. So it's a problem perpetrated primarily by Black people, and specifically Black men, and specifically young Black men, and also suffered disproportionately by young Black men. For instance, there is data from the CDC that shows that if you look at black men ages 15 to 34, the number one cause of death is homicide. And even that slightly understates it because you might say, I'm sure the majority of that is in the younger half of that age distribution.

But it's actually the case that if you disaggregate it, if you just go from 15 to 19, number one cause of death is homicide. You know, 20 to 24, still the number one cause. 25 to 34, still the number one cause. And that's a fact that can't be said about any other combination of age and ethnicity. And I think the important thing to keep in mind here is that among the things that governments do well, lowering crime rates actually happens to be one of them. So there's every reason to believe that this could come down given the right policies. So it's not just gratuitous to talk about it. Like I said, the rate of crime commission among the Irish

used to be five times higher than the Germans in the early 20th century. Likewise, with the Italians, it's maybe three times higher. And so we know certain ethnic groups have committed lots of crime in the past. And we know that those crime rates can be brought down with effective policing, with more policing and with better policing. And obviously the whole challenge is how do we get there? But it's going to be very hard to get there if we can't even mention the statistics that describe the problem. Yeah. And they're actually a little arithmetic makes them look a little bit worse specifically for young black men, because African Americans make up about 14% of the population. And as you say, they commit and suffer at least half the homicides, but virtually all of this falls to

men rather than women. We're really talking about, you know, 7% of the population committing, you know, half the murders against, you know, largely the same 7% of the population. And when you see the crime statistics in a city like Chicago, the level of violent crime that makes America an outlier at the moment is largely driven by that phenomenon. And most people believe, at least on the left, that part of the problem is that now there's this epidemic of police violence against young Black men. We can touch on to what degree that's true or not, but the net result of that is that many people think that there's simply too much police focus on the Black community, whereas, and I think you cite this book in one of your articles,

is it Jill Lavoie who wrote the book? Jill Liovi, and that's how I've been pronouncing it. Jill Liovi, yeah, yeah, sorry. I remember Glenn Lowry recommended that book to me. And her argument was that what you actually find, and certainly in urban gang-ridden areas in America, in the black communities, that it's a failure of policing. It's the wrong kind of policing. It's under-policing of homicides. And we're talking about the consequences of the worst crimes virtually never getting solved, and murderers walking free, and everyone knows they walk free. And so you get this unwillingness of anyone in the community to cooperate with the judicial system

to put the most dangerous people behind bars. And then you get this over-prosecution of petty crime, which is obviously terrible for any community and has been especially bad for the black community. I mean, as you say, it's very hard to argue that just less police attention is the solution here. Yeah. The way I think of it is this way. If an alien from Mars came to Earth and studied the past 10,000 years of human history with regard to homicide rates specifically,

they would find the homicide rate in South Central Los Angeles and inner city Chicago and St. Louis and New Orleans, they would find that to be the norm. And they would find the homicide rate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or other places where it's extremely low, to be the exception to the rule. They would find that to be the phenomenon to be explained. I take Steven Pinker's line in The Better Angels of Our Nature that much of the way this is explained is the state monopoly on violence, which is the police coming into town. The stereotype is of the sheriff coming into town, and that's a

true stereotype, right? Homicide and retributive violence is just something that young men tend to do everywhere on earth until they can no longer get away with it because there's a police force that punishes crime, specifically violent crime, swiftly and effectively and reliably. What's happened throughout history is that we have to remember eugenics was a totally mainstream progressive orthodoxy in the first half of the 20th century. So the attitude towards policing Black communities was essentially to let them kill each other as an almost a form of population control, right? So what happens there is that a culture of honor is allowed to survive, whereas White communities got the benefit of

more reliable policing where black people if someone kills someone and you're their brother now you have to retaliate or else you know you lose face and there's just a never-ending cycle of retributive violence yeah and that was explicitly stated i mean i remember reading some racist material of the time that, yeah, I mean, just, you know, let them all kill each other was essentially the view of the white community with respect to black violence. And yeah, it's one of these painful ironies that the left is getting this part wrong to great consequences. It's not that, again, this is what's so toxic about this

topic. To even discuss the disparity in the crime problem is controversial. Your motives are impugned to even touch this topic, and yet, how could you possibly improve life for people in the Black community if you weren't going to squarely focus on this disparity? Right. Like I said, there's no reason to suppose that it has to continue on this way. If we just assume that in the year 2050, the crime rate has continued to drop, because it has been dropping, especially in the 90s, it dropped precipitously. And just ask, what did we do to get there? It certainly isn't not mentioning the statistics at all. That I can say for sure. for sure. And on the charge of racism, is it racist to notice in FBI data that whites are more likely to drive drunk than blacks and more likely to violate public drunkenness laws? I mean, you could wonder about why that is. I mean, you know, there could be a hundred different reasons why that's the case. And that could be an interesting research question. But if it's

not racist to mention statistical disparities that seem to be unflattering towards whites, how can mentioning the same kinds of facts when they're the other way be racist? Well, so we'll talk about the origins of these problems and then the path forward. And the interesting thing is that understanding the origins may not actually indicate the path forward. And the interesting thing is that understanding the origins may not actually indicate the path forward, or in many cases may be irrelevant to finding the appropriate path forward. And this will be interesting and controversial. But there are two paragraphs you wrote in one of your pieces that summarize the political dynamic here that worries me. And I just want to read those two

to kind of frame this part of the conversation. This is you now. Given America's brutal history of white racism, it is understandable that the pendulum of racial double standards has swung in the opposite direction. Indeed, it is a testament to our laudable, if naive, desire to fix history.

But the status quo cannot be maintained indefinitely. Cracks in the reparations mindset are beginning to show themselves. And this is me now, the reparations mindset being the idea that because racist policies and systemic racism has created this problem, the remedy must come in some form of reparations from the government or policies or the white community to fix the damage here. Now back to you. Whites are noticing that black leaders still use historical grievances to justify special dispensations for blacks who were born decades after the end of Jim Crow, and many whites understandably resent this. Asian students are noticing that applying to elite

colleges is an uphill battle for them and are understandably fighting for basic fairness and admission standards. The majority of blacks themselves are noticing that bias is not the main issue they face anymore, even as blacks who dare express this view are called race traitors. As these cracks widen, the far left responds by doubling down on the radical strain of black identity politics that caused the problems to begin with, and the far right responds with its own toxic strain of white identity politics. Stale grievances are dredged up from history and used to justify double standards that create fresh grievances in turn. And beneath all of this lies the tacit claim that blacks are uniquely constrained by history in a way that Jewish Americans, East Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and countless

other historically marginalized ethnic groups are not. In the midst of this breakdown in civil discourse, we must ask ourselves, academics, journalists, activists, politicians, and concerned citizens alike, if we are on a path towards a thriving multi-ethnic democracy or a balkanized hotbed of racial and political tribalism. That just captures our moment perfectly, in my view. You and I are all too aware of what's happening on the other side of this conversation, this ridiculous and retrograde eruption of white identity politics, and in the sharpest case, identity politics, and in the sharpest case, white male identity politics. And it's easy to see this an amplification in other forms of identity politics to be thought on the left to be the only possible response to this. But again, coming back to the basic fact, if we want to get to a society where everyone is treated as an individual capable of taking

any opportunity they can take, at what point do you start treating people as individuals rather than as symbolic representatives of any given victim group? Yeah. One point I would say there is I totally agree that the identity politics of the left can affect an equal and opposite identity politics on the right. If you look at someone like Jared Taylor, for example, who I don't know exactly how to describe him, but I think white identitarian, perhaps white nationalist. If you just look at the argument he makes, basically his entire argument is, listen, look what black people get to do. They get to

organize around the variable of race politically. He'll say things like, the black congressional caucus vets every bill that goes through Congress, not for its effect on America, but for its effect on Blacks specifically. And then he'll just make the next logical leap. Why are white people the only one who don't get to do this? Now, that argument is based on a false premise, namely that identity really matters. But once you grant that false premise, the rest of the argument is pretty sound. And that's not good, because then it's likely to be compelling to some number of young white men. The other point you bring up is a point about history and blame, right? So if you take a white murderer and a black murderer, they just hold everything constant in their lives, right?

They've committed the same heinous crime. The attitude demonstrated towards the white murderer is not the kind of argument generally that someone like you might make about free will, which is to say they're not responsible for their genes, nor are they responsible for their upbringing. Just put all the mixture of causes that led them to offend in a box. You couldn't pull out a single one and say they really caused this, right? That's as true of white people as it is of black people. The problem, I mean, all of that's true, but it's just impossible to actually have a criminal justice system that is constantly operating in that frame. We have to at least entertain the pretense of things like blame and praise just to get around in life, even if they're not deeply true, I would argue. And at the very least, whatever attitude

we take towards free will and blame, it has to be consistent across the board. You can't just invoke slavery and Jim Crow to exonerate the behavior of a Black person who is causing, wreaking havoc on the innocent Black people around him or her, and not invoke those for other people, right? It's like, the reason we blame people in the first place, it can't be deeply predicated on the fact that everyone is deeply responsible for who they are because nobody is. We just need to be able to blame people in order to make society work. Yeah. And they're just these obvious comparisons, which again, are radioactive to even make. At one point in one of your articles, you say, you know,

Jewish people don't get to hate German people and get praised for it because of what the German people's grandparents did to the Jews, right? This is one of these disparities that you point out where in the work of an author like Ta-Nehisi Coates, you can see expressions of what would be work of an author like Ta-Nehisi Coates, you can see expressions of what would be recognized to be racism in anyone else, but in Coates, he's canonized for it. Let's table that for a second, because I think we probably need to talk about Coates in a minute. But to stay on this larger point, you write about something you call the racism treadmill. What is the racism treadmill? The racism treadmill is essentially a pair of two beliefs that, in my view, virtually ensure that many progressives will never admit, so long as they have these two beliefs, that substantial progress has been made on the axis of racism in America. The first belief is that whenever you see a statistical disparity

between blacks and whites, it's valid to reflexively assume that racial discrimination, whether it's systemic or overt, is the cause of that disparity rather than the hundred or so other things that can be the cause of disparities. So I'll just take two quick examples to make this vivid. One is the fact that in the year 1952, there were four different Southern states in which Black school teachers had higher salaries than white school teachers. That's fairly astonishing if you believe

that politics and the racial biases of politics determine every outcome in the economy. But economies are extremely complex, and there can be a lot of racism in the political sphere, but just bizarre trends with regard to supply and demand and various other economic forces can make it so that there is some disparity that can't possibly be explained by racism, because in this case, it favors blacks, right? by ethnic group, you'll find facts like for every dollar earned by the average white American of Russian descent, or by the median white household of Russian descent, the median white household of French descent earned 79 cents. So both of those households would just be viewed as white at this point and probably would view themselves as white, and you wouldn't be able to pick them apart. And yet you have the kind of disparity that if it were between blacks and whites would be presented in the pages of the New York Times and other respected outlets and reflexively ascribed to racism. And there are literally

all kinds of disparities of this kind between different Black ethnic groups. You compare Nigerians to Jamaicans to Haitians to African Americans. You find all kinds of disparities that are never talked about or rarely talked about because they're too deflationary of the idea that every statistical disparity can be ascribed to some kind of discrimination. And the second belief, which is closely related to the first, is just that every culture is identical in the patterns of behavior that are encouraged, in the values that are inculcated, in the kind of social incentive structure that leads people to behave one way rather than another, and that there are no relevant differences to talk about.

There are no differences that could possibly explain disparities. And there's just no reason to believe that that's true. And I'm sure we'll get more into that. But once you put those two beliefs together, then you're in a situation where we're going to continue to have statistical disparities until the end of time. It's rarer to find, I mean, I actually don't

know of a single example in which you take two ethnic groups and by every metric, they are close, whether it's crime commission or income or whatever it is, even if they're of the same race. So the idea that we should expect parity across the board in the absence of discrimination, all the evidence suggests the opposite, which is not to say discrimination can never cause disparities. It's only to say that you can't assume that. It's just an empirical question. So insofar as these two beliefs are ascendant,

then people will never recognize progress no matter how much progress happens, because we'll still have disparities, and those disparities will still seem to prove that racism is a major force in society. Yeah, well, so let's talk about Black culture here and the degree to which it may play a role. Because again, there are many disparities which are accidental. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support,

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