Making Sense with Sam Harris - #182 — Unlearning Race

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with Thomas Chatterton Williams about the reality and politics of race. They discuss his book “Self Portrait in Black and White,” race as a social and biological construct, the prospects of achieving a “post-racial” society, interracial marriage, and other topics. 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content.

And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today. Jumping right into it. Today I'm speaking with Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas is the author of two memoirs. The first is Losing My Cool, and the second, the book under discussion, is Self-Portrait in Black and White, Unlearning Race. And Thomas is a wonderful writer. He has written for the New York Times Magazine,

Harper's, the London Review of Books, and other journals. And here we talk about the reality and politics of race and cover many aspects of that question from his unique point of view as someone who is both the product of an interracial marriage and in one himself. Anyway, his take on the topic is fascinating and quite refreshing. And now I bring you Thomas Chatterton-Williams. I am here with Thomas Chatterton-Williams. Thomas, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. I have to say that my French mother-in-law is going to be extremely impressed. She's a huge fan of your meditation practice, but she doesn't even know that you do this other work. A wonderful memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White, Unlearning Race.

And I think we'll just use that as the focus of our discussion. Before we dive in, how do you summarize your career thus far as a writer and your interests? What have you tended to focus on? Sure. I studied philosophy in undergrad, and then I got a master's degree in cultural reporting and criticism in the journalism department of NYU. And I came out of grad school with a kind of coming-of-age memoir I was working on called Losing My Cool. And I thought that that would just be the only memoir I'd ever write. And, you know, I started writing magazine journalism and essays and criticism, literary criticism. But here I am with a second memoir, and I've kind of, maybe I've put myself on a track to become a serial memoirist without having meant to. But I kind of, I always write about race and class and culture and identity through the prism of personal experience. I try to use my own personal experience to get at something larger. Yeah, well, you have a happily a very, I guess it's fairly unique personal experience, which allows you to dissect the strands of what's perhaps at least perceived to be the most

prevailing social problem of our time. And it's been that way for a long time. Perhaps I'm speaking somewhat provincially as an American, but the problem of race and everyone's reaction to it, and it's, you know, the legacy of it. How old are you, Thomas? I'm 38. Right. So you're 38 and you've written your second memoir, which is... Which to my father's chagrin, yeah. Which is hilarious, but appropriate because it's a great book and has a lot to offer it by way of informing our discussion as our listeners are about to discover. So perhaps summarize how you view your own

racial identity, how you viewed it. It's obviously an evolving self-concept, which you talk about a lot in the book, but how have you come to this question and perhaps summarize the dynamics of your marriage and fatherhood? Because there's some surprises. I guess I'll tee it up for you by saying that you at one point published an op-ed arguing essentially for the durability of race in your case and the unequivocal fact that your children will be black no matter what else might be true about them. How has your thinking along those lines been revised? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I was born in 1981. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey in the 80s and 90s. My father is a black man from the segregated South from Texas. He was born in 1937, so-eyed daughter of evangelical Christians from Southern California.

So I grew up in a mixed-race household in New Jersey, but very much with a black identity and with the understanding from both of my parents that we were a black household and that there's really no such thing as being partially white, that you're either white or you're not, because whiteness is a kind of constructed identity, but it's very real in the world we'd have to learn to move through. So people wouldn't perceive us as white, and we'd need to understand ourselves as black in this racialized world and embrace it, not just accept it, but embrace it. And it wasn't even until the year 2000 when I got to college that you could even check more than one box on the census. So I didn't really think of myself as mixed. I didn't know a lot of people. I didn't meet anybody who defined themselves as biracial until I got to college, even though I knew black people of all variety of skin tones

and hair textures, but no one who would define themselves as something other than black. And is that true regardless of someone's appearance? I mean, if someone, no matter how fair-skinned someone is in the end, and no matter how much they, quote, pass or can pass for white, that you, in your experience, people don't take the other side of that identity and say that they're white or they say that they're biracial or mixed race? Well, there's a couple of things that had been my experience, but also things were changing already in the culture. So I came up, I sometimes think that I'm probably the last generation for which the logic of the one drop rule of hypodescent, that a single drop of black blood necessitates that you are only black, that that really kind of is compelling on

the, you know, it really makes sense out of something other than like a kind of solidarity level. That makes sense on a scientific level or something like that. I didn't really question that on a biological level for most of my life. I don't think that that's where the culture is exactly anymore. I think that we're a lot more familiarized with mixedness than we were when I was a kid, certainly. But I never met so-called black people like my children. So I don't know if in the culture that I grew up in, to answer your question, I don't know if my daughter and son would be perceived or would have a plausible route to self-identify as black appearing as they do. Right. I mean, so it's like if, for instance, you had, and we're kind of giving away the punchline

here in terms of your own experience of fatherhood, but if you had looked like your children, do you think your father would have been as adamant in defining your identity as black? My father's an interesting guy. So I have wonderful recollections. He's still alive. I have wonderful memories of him saying with a straight face to me that my mother's not white. She's light-skinned because she's got black consciousness.

So my father could kind of probably, he probably could wrap his mind around my kids being black. Because one of the first things he said to me when he came to Paris, when my daughter Marla was born six years ago, he held her and I said, well, you know, she doesn't really look so black, does she? And he said, she's just a Palomino. You know, I went to school on the segregated side of town with, you know, with more than one person who was colored similarly. So this is nothing new in the black community, he said. So I think he actually could deal with it. He could accept it. He could integrate that into his understanding of blackness. But I don't think

that as soon as anyone stepped outside of the house, that that would be how the world would accept us or perceive us. I think that there would be an enormous amount of pushback were you to look like these children and to walk out into the world kind of proclaiming the sense of yourself that I advocated in the New York Times a year before my daughter was born in the op-ed you were referring to. Right. Okay. So fast forward to your own marriage and progeny. and progeny. Yeah, so I lived 30 years of kind of unexamined life from a racial perspective. I accepted that great harm was done through the imposition of racial identity and the construction of blackness and whiteness, but that, you know, it was how the world was. And, you know, and it was really nothing to push back against. And in fact, there was a kind of moral duty, I felt, for mixed-race blacks to adhere to a kind of racial essentialism, because I felt that people who could break away, if they broke away from a historically oppressed group, it would weaken the group. So there was a

kind of moral reasoning that I tried to lay out in this op-ed. But in retrospect, I realized that that op-ed was really written to convince an audience of one, and that audience was myself, because I was already married to a woman who was colored very much the way my mom is. And I was, I think, on some level understanding that I would very likely have children who would not read as black to anyone but me. But, you know, I even convinced my wife, this is not really a very European way of seeing things. Europeans who grew up in societies that never had slavery within their national borders don't have this idea of the one-drop rule at all. Alexandre Dumas was a much... We're using these words unscientifically, but he was a blacker looking guy than my children are. But, you know, his identity wasn't defined that way, the way that it would be in America. You know, W.E.B. Du Bois was certainly we don't have here in Europe. But I prevailed upon my wife to kind of accept this way of seeing things. And so for the next nine months after she got pregnant, we just accepted that we were going to have Black children and be a Black family, kind of

reproducing the identity that I grew up with in my household. But when my daughter was, when I was standing in the delivery room and the doctor started calling out, I can see the head, she said, she described it as a tête d'oreille, which is, you know, I was sluggish. It was the middle of the night, but I realized she's saying that there's a golden head protruding. And when my daughter, you know, opened her eyes and was out in our arms, I realized that whatever I thought I knew about race, she was shaking it to the core. She kind of thrust what I call the fiction of race into my consciousness for the first time. Her physical presence in my life made me question these categories in a way that my own kind of

contradictory childhood upbringing never forced me to think through the same way. Yeah, yeah. Well, the variable of nationality is incredibly important here. The difference between how this all looks in America as an American and how it looks in Europe, given the different histories, it's huge. And so it's almost like when you're insisting to your wife that your unborn kids will be black and the revealed inaccuracy, if not absurdity of that, when they come out looking Swedish, really Swedish. Yeah. Yeah. Black and African-American are used as synonyms in America, right? It's ridiculous to use African-American outside of America. Right. But it's almost like you were insisting, you know, our kids are going to be African American, right? Because you're insisting

on the American view of the durability of race. That's right. Which doesn't have the same logic in Europe. And there's also this level of confusion that exists in America, which is what I was doing actually without realizing it was I was conflating something biological with something ethnic, with something cultural, with something based on a, you know, a tradition and a loyalty to a historical oppression. All of these things were combined in my mind with a very abstract color category that actually doesn't apply to most so-called African Americans' actual skin tone. Yeah. But the skin tone issue is the variable here because had your daughter come out looking black, you would never have discovered the conversation that you're having on the other side of this experience, right?

You just was, okay, well, my kids are black, just like I thought they would be. I wonder, even if she didn't have blue eyes and really blonde hair, if I would have been, you know, I wonder. It doesn't make me question the fundamental discovery or the truth as I see it now, but it makes me wonder if I would have just... I hope that you don't have to actually see racial categories fall apart in your own intimate life for these kind of insights to really feel compelling. I would like to think that I could have arrived at the conclusion, but I'm just not sure that I was the person that would get there without being prompted this way. Well, my own experience of the power of America and American history has been brought home to me in many contexts, but the place where I first discovered it and where it's still most vivid to me is when I'm with my friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Do you know Ayaan?

I've never met her. Right. So Ayaan is Somali, for those who don't know her. And, you know, she looks Somali. So she's, you know, to look at her, she's more or less as black as anyone. But she's Somali. She's not African American. She's, you know, she lived in Europe. She's incredibly cosmopolitan, speaks half a dozen languages, and she's never had the African-American experience. She lives in America now, so maybe she's belatedly getting a taste of it. But the reality is that she doesn't think of herself as black the way most African Americans think of themselves as black. And she manages to communicate that lack of identity, just, you know, it's coming out of her pores, right? So when you're with her, there's something that's not happening for her that is communicated, right? It's like,

she just does not see the world in those terms. And the conversation doesn't even have to be about race. It may never touch race. But I realized, to my surprise, that it basically never occurs to me that she's black, apart from the fact that it's useful to talk about her experience in conversations like this. I know that a racist would view her as black. you know, white supremacists would view her as black. And many anti-racists would view her as black too. They would say that she, whether she likes it or not, whether she has different experiences or not in America, she is confronted with white supremacy in the same way that other black bodies are. That's kind of what can unite racist and anti-racist actually,

is this kind of essentialist... Exactly. And that's something that I've complained about a lot on this podcast, and I'm sure I'll complain about it here, is that the only people who are as fixated on the significance of race and its permanence as white supremacists are the irretrievably woke on the left who insist that this is a concept we're never going to get beyond. But in the presence of someone like Ayaan, you feel yourself to be beyond it. You feel yourself to be living in a post-racial world because of how she's living. And it's just, it's so clear that, it's clear to me, and it seems to be clear to you from what I've read, that the goal Adrian Piper points out. And I'm really fond of quoting her on that because the imposition of this perceptive error doesn't allow me to

interact with you or engage with you as an individual. There is all kinds of history and stereotypes and myths that kind of come between me and you. So as long as we code people into racial categories, that's going to necessarily imply all types of value judgments and hierarchical implications. So we have to find a way to get beyond this. I'm not so naive as to think that my book is going to, you just buy my book and suddenly we solve the problem of race and we get to a post-racial world. I don't even know that I, I think that word, that term has been irredeemably corrupted, post-racial. Now people can't say that in an unironic way. On the left, I mean, it's just obviously ridiculous on the left, and it's been

spat out so many times that you actually can't reclaim that as a useful phrase. Probably not. But, you know, I want to stay with the idea of someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali a little bit, because this is actually something that I think makes a lot of sense. Are you familiar with like ADOS, American Descendants of Slavery, this kind of hashtag movement that's become popularized on Twitter? No. What's the kind of grassroots movement, descendants of American slaves who advocate for understanding American descendants of slavery as a distinct ethnic group, and that monolithic blackness actually doesn't make sense. Because a woman like Ayan Hirsi Ali or

Nigerian immigrants that come into America, to conceive of them as having the same experience and facing the same hurdles is demonstrably false. And also these groups don't... Nigerian immigrants, for example, that's one of the most successful ethnic groups in America. But when it all gets talked in completely different cultures, but it's specific to the American experience. And slavery is the founding sin, which we're still paying mingled with the problem of class, and teasing those apart is difficult. you know, how can an affirmative action slot for someone who's undergone slavery in America, how can a Nigerian immigrant be swapped into that? Because they don't, there's nothing genetic about whatever that program is supposed to repair. There's something that happened to a specific group of people in a specific place at a specific time. So for me, one of the main problems of moving through the world with racial language and categorizing people into abstract color categories is that it just obfuscates all of these complex things that make us who we are

and that impact our lives. Yeah, yeah. You make one move in the book, and it's not clear how fully you make it to me, so I want to talk about this, but you seek to undermine the concept of race rather completely as a fiction. I mean, at one point you just call it a fiction, and you say that it's a social construct, it's not a biological one. And in some ways that's true, in some ways it's not true, though. And I feel like you're making a potentially dangerous move in disavowing any relevant biology here because it's not an accident that you can know something about a person's ancestry based on just looking at them, right? I mean, I can look at someone whose ancestors spent the

last thousand years in China and say, that person looks Chinese to me. And I'd never be tempted to say that he looks like he came from Norway. And so obviously that's just the surface level. Then you talk about susceptibility to various diseases and any other trait that would have a genetic explanation in whole or in part. So there is a biological story here around race. It's just it doesn't align with the social construct in every case. And in certain cases, it completely breaks apart so that, for instance, the place where there's the most genetic diversity at this moment on Earth is on the continent of Africa, right? So if you're going to take the white racist view of Africa, well, just, you know, everybody's black, obviously, but that doesn't track the actual historical isolation of various populations and the genetic diversity that's there. But the reality is that genetic diversity does produce consequences that people can find interesting,

whether it's in susceptibility to disease or various traits. And I think the place we need to get to in transcending race is not to deny that these biological facts exist and may yet surprise us. It's to deny that they have any political significance for us. I mean, we just don't, we shouldn't care about any of these things rather than commit ourselves in advance to remaining unaware of them or denying that they exist. Well, there's a few things that I would say to that. The first is that, first of all, with things like diseases, sickle cell is often brought up as a black disease.

But in fact, it seems that that's a disease that groups that are, that populations that are exposed to malaria develop. And you can find many Greeks who develop sickle cell traits. And the idea that it's an inherently black disease doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. But I do in the book quote David Reich, the Harvard geneticist, whose op-ed really impacted my thinking, his op-ed in the New York Times a few years ago, where he basically just cautioned us all to have a lot of humility because the only thing that's probably guaranteed with the increasing knowledge that we're getting in the field of genetics is that we're going to find out a lot of things that surprise us and a lot of what we think we know now as a fact can be

overturned. So I take that seriously. But what we think we know now as a fact can be overturned. So I take that seriously. But what we talk about when we talk about population groups is not exactly the same thing as what we talk about when we talk about black and white. Yeah. I don't understand. And I've never seen somebody or heard somebody, encountered somebody explain to me where a white person stops and a black person starts. And I think that these things get very tangled up in a place like America, because the average African American, the average black American, however you define that group, has something like 20 to 25 percent Western European, usually Anglo-Saxon, genetic makeup. And there are millions and millions of white Americans walking

around who have no idea, and until recently wouldn't be able to know that they have sometimes significant African, West African DNA. And then because that's the whole history of rape and passing and lots of different things that have happened in this society. In another time, you know, people colored like my children, they might choose to hide the fact that they have a Black grandfather and just move into white society. That happened many times. We are a mongrel nation. We're a mongrel society. What Leon Wieseltier said that really means a lot to me is that, you know, the achievement of America wasn't to create a multicultural society. It was to create the multicultural individual. I take that seriously. I struggle to understand how we can ever find a definition of racial groups and divisions that is coherent enough to make sense. Because I was

really thinking about all these things in the conversation that you had with Charles Murray. And I find that it's really important to, when we think about these things, does this population group have, on average, a different IQ than this population group on average? First of all, what are the bounds of the population group? And second of all, I understand your point, which is, how does that affect the individual? We live our lives as individuals. I don't understand what it means to be dumped into, or not dumped, but lumped into some enormous group like monolithic whiteness, what links a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant with a Sicilian or a Spaniard, or for that matter,

with somebody who comes from the Caucasus mountain regions? What does it mean to say that these are all whites? It defies, I don't understand, how do we define these groups? How do we then compare these groups? And also, how do we take these measures like intelligence? And we've never even lived in a world where we really have seen what parity looks like. So these things kind of, to your point, what's the purpose? Yes. But also, even if there were a purpose, show me first how we can measure these things. Right. Well, so there's a lot in that I agree with. I think the definitions of these things, the concepts like race, where's the bright line between a white person and a black person in America?

There may not be one, right? I mean, in my view- Cory Booker has over 50% European ancestry. Right. Okay. You know what I mean? And then there's just, in the case of someone like yourself or someone like Booker or- Right. Okay. You know what I mean? black or decide to call yourself white or mixed race. And it seems to me to be a deeply uninteresting and probably politically toxic project to try to give a genetic answer to the question of

self-identity in those cases. But it's also very arbitrary where we decide where do groups start and stop. I mean, Cheddar Man, 10,000 years ago and living in what's now the United Kingdom, had blue eyes and black skin. I mean, these groups are fungible. People are fungible. We will continue to change and mix. So the idea that we can just take a freeze frame of how people look today in groups that we've been calling white, black, Asian, which is a very vague term, you know, that people will always be like this. I mean, we've only been saying people have been like this for four or 500 years. I mean, I have actually,

I've eaten at restaurants, I've drunk at taverns in Europe that are continuously operating. I've slept in a hotel in Weimar that's much older than the concept of race and the way that we think of it today, you know? Yeah, no, I totally agree. But it's one thing to acknowledge all of those facts. It's another to doubt whether there are differences between groups, however we define them, and that those differences can be, in the wrong hands, can be made to seem to matter. And so the only response to that that I hear many people advocating for is to deny that such difference, that it's coherent to allege that such differences exist or that they could conceivably matter. And I just think that's

a fear-based counsel of ignorance of certain facts. I mean, just to take it in a politically uncharged case. Before this conversation, in reading your book, you're encountering the issue of what your ancestral background is, and you talk about having looked at the various websites, 23andMe and Ancestry.com. And I realized I had an account at 23andMe, and so literally like an hour ago, I checked my ancestry. And there's a few things to observe about this. First, I'm 51% Ashkenazi and 32% British, Irish, I think 6% French, and then there was some other, like 9%, you know, Northern European. So it was, I knew the gist of this, but I mean, one thing that's interesting is that, you know, I've had these data for, what, at least a decade. I mean, I think I

subscribed to 23andMe the moment it was born, right? So that could be 15 years, I don't remember. I find these facts about myself so utterly uninteresting that I have never, you know, I'm sure I checked 10 years ago, and I knew, I mean, I knew I was, you know, half Ashkenazi and, you know, the rest, you know, European in some sense. But these are facts about me that have no relevance at all. And I, you know, I have an aunt who is obsessed with ancestry, and she's constantly trying to get me to take an interest in this. And I just have, I've never had, even if I could meet these people in person, I wouldn't be interested, right? Like, the truth is, I don't even much want to talk to this particular aunt, right? So it's like, on some level, this is all an expression of my, quote, white privilege.

I haven't had to take an interest in any of this. I mean, I'm just imagining a criticism that someone could allege. This is not how I see myself. There's nothing about my pedigree that is part of my identity. about my pedigree that is part of my identity. And so from this point of view of just being totally uninterested in my race, I see certain potential facts as both true, undoubtedly true, and there to be found, and totally unthreatening. So for instance, you know, apparently I've got 32% British and Irish DNA. I am sure that if you tested every person on earth, you've got the total population of people who have more than 30% British and Irish DNA, you could find a dozen NVIDIA's comparisons to make

between them and people with a different genotype, right? So if we finally, you know, find the gene for being a jerk, you know, we're going to have more of it than the Swedes, say, or the Nigerians, or there's going to be a difference that can be spun as ugly. And it has absolutely no relevance to me as an individual, and need have no relevance to our politics. And yet, but it would seem frankly crazy for me to say there is no there there biologically. There's no possible line of inquiry that could turn up something that is true there because, you know, we're all homomo sapiens and there's just, there are no important differences among us. That's something that I'm not afraid of. If you were to find the

smoking gun tomorrow that proves that East Asians are slightly smarter than Anglo-Saxons and that, you know, that the comparison works against other groups' favor when compared to Anglo-Saxons. I would, if you show me how that's provable, I'll accept that. And I also understand that that has nothing to do with how I move through the world. I'm an individual and sharing genetic ancestry with LeBron James has done nothing for my basketball game. Unfortunately. Ron James has done nothing for my basketball game. Unfortunately.

I wish it did. You know, I've never understood. I've never really understood having enormous pride with your ethnic or so-called racial group or even with your nation in certain ways. And I've never understood having shame for these histories and deeds that have been done to and by people you're supposedly related to. I mean, human life is unequal. There's enormous inequality within a four-person household. It isn't hard for me to believe at all that there's enormous inequality writ large. The idea that everybody is exactly the same would frankly be unappealing to me.

There's a genetic component to this inequality, but there's also just a circumstantial component to this inequality. I mean, the fact that, you know, if you have a best friend who got into a car accident, you know, in childhood and has some deficit as a result, you're now among the privileged of people who were spared car accidents at crucial moments, right? And, you? And there's no fine-grained equality of circumstance ever, right? And so we've seized upon certain course variables as the crucial ones. And the goal has got to be to correct for disparities in luck, I mean, you know, privilege by another name, as much as we can economically and educationally and, you know, just as a matter of opportunity.

And so, and that political commitment is the only assertion of equality that I think we need to conserve all of our ethics here. I tend to agree with you, but I do think that there's something particularly insidious with insisting, and I'm not saying that you do, but in the discourse as it proceeds from both the racist and the anti-racist kind of advocate, there's something that is, there's harm done to society when we insist that these color categories are real and meaningful and that you can fit people into these boxes. I think that the term for me is what Glenn Lowry called transcendent humanism. I mean, life is lived on the individual level. We have to have values and ways of belonging to each other that unite us. ideas that have caused such human suffering over the past half millennium. I really think that you can't redeem the language. I think we need a new language. These terms, black, white, not only are they so vague and they fail to capture life as it's lived on the individual level, but they actually, we don't describe our reality. Our language produces our reality too.

So these terms produce the racism that's inherent in them that comes from this kind of collision of Africa and Europe through the slave trade. And I think that, you know, I think that it's really important that the language be much more precise than the ways that we speak about race allow for. I 100% agree with you there. So my conception of a post-racial future is one in which this notion of being black or white is so uninteresting that it would never occur to you to mention this about another person or yourself, because there's virtually no circumstance in which it's relevant. I think that has to be the goal. That has to be the endpoint that we want to get to. And I've been pretty surprised and dismayed that that is not an endpoint that is shared with many increasingly prominent voices on the left. So I made that same point last fall at Bard during a conference where Ibram X. Kendi was speaking, you know, he made, I forget exactly what he said, but he alluded to this idea of a kind of post-racial future where, you know, how you look tells me as little as possible about who you are. He said that that was actually the

white supremacist, the racist fantasy that race go away and that all inequalities become camouflaged and baked into the system. And I said, you know, respectfully, I think that's not at all the white supremacist fantasy. The real racist fantasy is everybody is in a separate box and kept far away from each other. In my reporting with the French far right, with these thinkers that had influenced Richard Spencer and some of these alt-right guys, Alain de Benoist and people like this. I wrote a long piece on this kind of thinking in France for The New Yorker a couple years ago.

These guys tell you straight up that they certainly don't want a post-racial future. They want energized senses of racial identity. They want people to be hyper-aware of their whiteness, and they want those white people to be segregated and kept away from mixing. There's a depressing element when you realize that you're fighting kind of on two sides. You're fighting on the left and the right to kind of carve out a space to just have an individual existence that's not defined by a racial essentialism. Yeah, well, you mentioned Kendi, but you also, you write about Ta-Nehisi Coates in the book. And I mean, this is something that I've struggled with, because on one level, it's very tempting to try to have a conversation with Coates. He's held up as a secular saint on the left, and his wisdom and prescriptiveness around race as an issue is just assumed to be more or less perfect from the crowd who reads the kinds of journalism

I read, you know, the Atlantic readers and the people who would go to the Aspen Ideas Festival or to Ted, the man can do no wrong. And yet, to my eye, he is a kind of pornographer of race, right? He's a good writer, but he's somebody who is trafficking in... If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast and to 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. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.