Making Sense with Sam Harris - #207 — Can We Pull Back From The Brink?

Episode Date: June 13, 2020

Sam discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America. 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. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I've been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week, and I've actually been unsure about whether to record it at all, frankly. I mean, conversation is the only tool we have for making progress. I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about seem impossible to talk about. And I think social media is a huge part of the problem.

I've been saying for years now that with social media, part of the problem. I've been saying for years now that with social media, we've all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it's not clear how it will turn out. And it's still not clear how it will turn out, but it's not looking good. It is fairly disorienting out there. All information has been weaponized. All communication has become performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time.

We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality. Unable to distinguish fact from fiction. And then, becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one another on that basis. So I'd like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest

and its possible political implications and other cultural developments, and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. And I'm going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism, because that really is at the center of this, And there's so much to talk about here. And it's so difficult to talk about. And there's so much we don't know, right? And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago. I've been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now, and perhaps lay

the ground for something worse to come. And I've been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance. Not because I haven't had anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if I feel that way, given the pains I've taken to insulate myself against those kinds of concerns, I know that almost anyone with a public platform must be terrified. Journalists and editors and executives, celebrities,

everyone has to be terrified that they might take a wrong step here and never recover. And this is really unhealthy, not just for individuals, but for society. Because again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. And if we can't reason with one another,

there is no path forward other than violence. Conversation or violence. So I'd like to talk about some of the things that concern me about our current state of communication. And unfortunately many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic, which is still very much with us, and it remains to be seen how much our half-hearted lockdown and our ineptitude in testing and our

uncoordinated reopening, and now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the COVID-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see. As many have pointed out, the virus doesn't care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other's necks. And we've certainly been doing enough of that. Of course, almost no one can think about COVID-19 now. But I'd just like to point out that

many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock-on effects in the economy, and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the U.S., the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost, and the ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible effects, of course, but it is also an opportunity cost. And the ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible effects, of course, but it is also an opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest and other recent events is compounding these problems. Whatever the merits of the protest may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what's happening,

the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burned buildings, the neighborhoods that won't recover for years in many cities, the educations put on hold, and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution. Just think about all the good and important things

we cannot do, cannot even think of doing now, and perhaps won't contemplate doing for many years to come, because we'll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called normal life. Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. And the disparities in wealth and health and opportunity we've gotten used to in this country, and as so much of our politics and ways of doing business

seem to take for granted, are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. And what we're seeing now is clearly a response to that. But it's a confused and confusing response. but it's a confused and confusing response. And worse, it's a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation.

And this makes it dangerous. This isn't just politics and human suffering on display. It's philosophy. It's ideas about truth and about what it means to say that something is true. What we're witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we're attempting to have with one another in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what's going on in the world? What is real? If we can't agree about what is real,

or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we're stuck with one another. So, what's happening here? Well, again, it's hard to say. What is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him as a cog in the machinery of systemic racism. Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics?

Or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It's not entirely clear. In the most concrete terms, what we're experiencing is widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed to the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter-response from law enforcement, much of which ironically is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence, both real and perceived. And many of the videos we've seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous.

Some of this footage has been unbelievable. are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable. And this is one of the many vicious circles we have to find a way to interrupt. Again, there's so much to be confused about here. We've seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters.

And yet we've also seen video of police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them and simultaneously trying to teach a lesson to the rest of society by letting crime and mayhem just spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what is actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than is being advertised to us?

Again, it's very hard to know. What's easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. And it seems to me we've long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous and now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air, the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non-sequiturs, is just astonishing. And it's important to keep in mind that with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy.

And I believe the last two weeks have been very good for him politically, even when everything else has seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don't say this. A large majority of people seem to disapprove of his handling of the crisis so far. But I think we all know now to take polls with a grain of salt. There's a very real problem of preference falsification, especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is politically acceptable,

and then think or say or do something very different in private, like when they're alone in a voting booth. Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy, right? According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn't make a lot of sense. And a lot can happen in the next few months, right? The last few weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law and order president, that may be his path to re-election, if such a path exists.

Now, of course, this crisis has revealed, yet again, just how unfit he is to be president. I mean, the man could not strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it. And the fate of the country has depended on it. depended on it. And the fate of the country has depended on it. And I also think it's possible that these protests wouldn't even be happening, but for the fact that Trump is president. Whether or not the problem of racism has actually gotten worse in our society, having Trump as president surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that for many people it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So, all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November. But before this social unrest,

But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. And now he's been given a very different battle to fight. It's a battle against left-wing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. And if our social order frays sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically now. Things can change very, very quickly. And to call a basic concern about law and order racist isn't going to wash.

Now, as I said, trust in institutions has totally broken down. We've been under a very precarious lockdown for more than three months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They've been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public health officials and news anchors, by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it's fine to stand

shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so given that the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It's a totally rational question to ask. But the question itself is taboo now. So it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment.

And before I get into the details of police violence, I just want to attempt to close the door to a few misunderstandings. Let's start with the proximate cause of all this, the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. Now, I have a lot more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation. That video was absolutely sickening, and it revealed a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by.

In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes. His actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there's no question he should be prosecuted, right? And he is being prosecuted. He's been indicted for second-degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he'll spend many, many years in prison. And this is not to say that the system is working, right? I mean, it certainly seems possible that without that cell phone video and the resulting public outrage, Chauvin might have gotten away with it, right? To say nothing of the other cops who were with him

and who are now being prosecuted. And if this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police. So as I said, I'm going to return to this topic because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video and from videos like it. But let me just echo everyone's outrage over what happened, right? This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent. Now, on the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear and preemptive statements. Racism is still a problem in American society. No question. And slavery, which was racism's most evil expression,

was this country's founding sin. And we should also add the near-total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race. And the legacy of these crimes, crimes that were perpetrated for centuries, remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this, and nothing I'm about to say should suggest otherwise. And I don't think it's an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, African Americans and Native Americans,

suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be because we managed to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all of its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this, economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted is a betrayal of our values,

whether we realize it or not. If it's not a betrayal of your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don't manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kids' values when they're old enough to understand the world they're living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society and very unlucky should not be as enormous as it is.

unlucky, should not be as enormous as it is. However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and what is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society? What should we do next? Tomorrow? Next week? Obviously, I don't have the answers. But I'm very worried that many of the things we're doing now and seem poised to do will only make our problems worse. And I'm especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this, right? I'm just trying to have conversations. I'm just trying to

figure these things out in real time with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous. And think about the politics of this. Endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive during this pandemic, and seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs, cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses and assaulting their owners isn't social justice. It isn't even social protest. It's crime.

And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump. And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It's always seemed somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we're living in Weimar, Germany.

I've had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, and he's been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the U.S. for several years now. And I've known in the abstract that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It really doesn't anymore. Of course, what we've been seeing in the streets isn't just one thing. And some people are protesting for reasons I fully defend.

They're outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd. And they're worried about creeping authoritarianism, which we really should be worried about now. And they're convinced that our politics is broken, because it is broken. And they're deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and to the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society. And they recognize that we have a president who is an incompetent, divisive conman and a crackpot

at a time when we actually need wise leadership. Now, all of that is hard to put on a sign, but it's all worth protesting. However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment almost exclusively through the lens of identity politics, and racial identity politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order,

or at least remaining non-judgmental about it. And you could see in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line. On CNN, for instance. Talking about the history of social protests, sometimes it has to be violent, right? What, do you think all these protests need to be non-violent? I mean, those words came out of Chris Cuomo's mouth

and Don Lemon's mouth. Many people have been circulating a half-quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about riots being the language of the unheard. They're leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed that riots harmed the language of the unheard. They're leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed that riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists. And there are now calls to defund

and even to abolish the police. Now, this may be psychologically understandable when you've spent half the day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I'll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind.

Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime and solve crimes when they occur and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system is the necessary precondition for almost anything else we value in society. Now, we need police reform, of course. There are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing, and its hiring practices, and training, and the militarization of so many police forces and outside oversight and how police departments deal with corruption,

the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job, and yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks that we can do without the police, or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones? This just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. Sure, we should have psychologists and social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill.

Perhaps we're giving cops jobs they shouldn't be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we're witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over-resourced, that we've given them too much training, that we've made the job too attractive so that the people we're recruiting are of too high a quality, right?

That doesn't make any sense. And what's been alarming here is that we're seeing prominent people in government, in the media, in Hollywood, in sports, speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society and of society itself is a form of progress. And any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point, the woman who's running the city council in Minneapolis that just decided

to abolish the police force was asked by a journalist, I believe on CNN, well, what do I do if someone's breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call? Right. And her first response to that question was, you need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is. Now, she's had to walk that back because it's one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said, but this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone's breaking into your house

and you're terrified and you want a police force that can respond, that that fear is a symptom of white privilege. That's where democratic politics goes to die. And again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response and the acceptance of that response on the part of many millions of Americans. I mean, if you step back from this, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air, right? And it's destroying institutions. It's destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information. Universities, the press. I mean, the New York Times in recent days

seems to be preparing for a full self-immolation. What's happening is that no one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable. Certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It's just become too dangerous. points than they do. It's just become too dangerous. I mean, there are people being fired for tweeting, all lives matter. Hashtag all lives matter in the current environment is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. Right? That's how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the L.A. Galaxy

was fired for something his wife tweeted. Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world, or young people who fear they never will, people who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops, people by the millions are now surrendering themselves

to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality. And on top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin, people who are living wonderful lives in gated communities or Fifth Avenue apartments, people who are living wonderful lives in gated communities or Fifth Avenue apartments, and who feel damn guilty about it, these people are also supporting this movement uncritically for many reasons. Of course, they care about other people.

And I'm sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do. But they're also supporting this movement because it promises an expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars, and you shoot Botox into your face, and you vacation on St. Barts, and you're a liberal, the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC and just like everything she tweets. The truth is, the problem isn't just with the looting, and the arson, and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves. Of course, I'm not questioning anyone's right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right. What she did is the D.C. police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church,

awkwardly holding a Bible as though he had never held a book in his life. The problem with the protests is that they are animated to a remarkable degree by confusion and misinformation. And I'll explain why I think that's the case. And of course, this will be controversial. And needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. And I could have invited any number of great black intellectuals onto this podcast to make these points for me. But that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Lowry, John McWhorter,

Thomas Chatterton-Williams, Coleman Hughes, Camille Foster, these guys might not agree with everything I'm about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I'm now stepping out on far more credibly than I can. But you see, that's part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person's skin, or even his life experience, matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. Yet for the discussion we really need to have, the color of a person's skin, and even his life experience,

simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break the spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything. Okay. As I've already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we are still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there.

And there are ways in which racism became institutionalized a long time ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic, the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different. And this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don't know. But it was effectively racist. Nothing I'm about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential. And I'm not denying that many black people, perhaps most,

have had interactions with cops and other people in positions of power, or even random strangers, that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they're actually in the presence of racism, and perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I've had unpleasant encounters with cops, and customs officers, and TSA screeners, and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people in stores or restaurants. People aren't always nice or ethical. But being white and living in a majority white society, I've never had to worry about whether

any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I encountered another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that is one form of white privilege. So nothing I'm about to say denies that we should condemn racism, whether interpersonal or institutional, wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can't afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn't exist,

and we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find, and the more likely we'll be to find ourselves merely chasing after its ghost. And the truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn't 1920. And it isn't 1960. We had a two-term black president.

We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. They're major cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, going on their fifth or sixth consecutive black mayor. Having more black people in positions of real power, in what is still a majority white society, is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is, it might not even solve the problem we're talking about. I mean, when Freddie Gray was killed in Baltimore,

virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we're about to see. But obviously there's more work to do on the problem of racism. And more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race, and will still be correlated with race even after the last racist has been driven from our shores. The question of how much of today's inequality is due to existing racism, whether racist people or racist policies, is a genuinely difficult question to answer.

And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present. Take wealth inequality, for example. The median white family has a net worth of around $170,000. These data are a couple years old, but I think they're pretty close to what's true now. The median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. That's the median, not the mean. So half of white families are below $170,000 and half above. Half of black families are below $17,000 and half above. And we're talking about wealth here,

not income. And this disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10% of the income distribution. For whites in the top 10% for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million. For blacks, it's around $350,000. Now, there are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families who make it into the top 10% of the distribution fall out more easily than white families do. But it's also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance. Now, how much of this inequality is due to the legacy of slavery?

And how much of it is due to the ensuing century of racist policies? I'm prepared to think quite a lot. And it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans. And then one wonders where all this ends, right? And what

about blacks who aren't descended from slaves, but who still suffered some consequences of racism? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I'm inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is, I'm genuinely unsure about this. Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask, how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth? And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts. And the problem with the social activism we're now seeing,

what John McWhorter calls the new religion of anti-racism, is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It's almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university, or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic. And perversely, they may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group,

even a group that has a long history of real victimization. The imprecision here, the bad faith arguments, the double standards, the goalpost shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced. I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society, and to effective liberal politics,

and to the welfare of African Americans. So, with that as preamble, let's return to the tragic death of George Floyd. As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So, people of any race are right to be horrified

by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this, because there are very likely a few tripwires installed there, and I'm about to hit some of them. So just do your best to remain calm. Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States? Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States? In other words, do we have reason to believe that had Floyd been white, he wouldn't have died in a similar way? Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years of black men being killed by cops, do they prove or even suggest that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men, and that this violence is motivated by racism?

Now, most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that even to pose them, as I just did, is obscene. I mean, the answer is yes, and it's a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets. The problem, however, is that if you take even five minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence? The answer really appears to be no in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I'm not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990, but in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US, and so has the police use of deadly force. And as you're about to see, the police use more deadly force against white people, both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society.

But the public perception is of, completely different. I mean, in a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings. Think about that. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles, peacefully and violently? And do the people who are ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds, in many cases businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods, do the people who cause so much damage to the city that certain neighborhoods will take years and probably decades to recover? Do the celebrities who supported them and even bailed them out of jail, do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30-year low for police shootings in Los Angeles?

Now, before I step further out over the abyss here, let me reiterate. Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I'm about to say. You're not going to like the way it sounds. You're especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking. This feeling of outrage. This feeling of disgust. This feeling of, Sam, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Why are you even touching this topic? This feeling isn't an argument. It isn't, or shouldn't be, the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world. Your capacity to be offended isn't something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn't something that you should respect. In fact, it's something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you. If you care about justice, and you absolutely should, you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn't the case, it cannot be the case, that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be most offended by conversation itself.

So I'm going to speak in the language of facts now, insofar as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people's assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong, and that should matter to you. So just take a moment to think this through with me. How many people are killed each year in America by cops? Now, if you don't know, guess. See if you have any intuition for these numbers. Because your intuitions determine how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis. The answer for many years running is about a thousand. Okay,

1,000 people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year, and about 10 million arrests. That's down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually through the 90s. So of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police and the police decide to make an arrest, about 1,000 of those people die as a result. I'm sure a few people get killed when there's no arrest attempted, but that has to be a truly tiny number.

So without knowing anything else about the situation, if the cops decide to arrest you, it is reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around 1 in 10,000. Now, of course, in the United States, it's higher than it is in other countries. So I'm not saying this number is acceptable. But it is what it is for a reason, as we're about to see. Now, there are a few generic points

I want to make before we get further into these data, and they should be uncontroversial. First, it's almost certainly the case that of these 1,000 officer-caused deaths each year, some are entirely justified. It may even be true that most are entirely justified, and some are entirely unjustified, and some are much harder to judge.

And that will be true next year and the year after that. Of the unjustified killings, Of the unjustified killings, there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily. It might have been a terrible misunderstanding, or incompetence, or just bad luck. In certain cases, it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he's become enraged, or he's just a psychopath, right? And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings. Another point that should be uncontroversial, but may sound a little tone-deaf in the current environment after we've been inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we're discussing

this topic. Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment, they have an almost impossible job. If you're making 10 million arrests every year, some number of people will decide not to cooperate. Now, there are many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill, or drunk, or on drugs. And, of course, rather often the person is an actual criminal who simply doesn't want to be arrested. And among innocent people, and perhaps this is getting more common these days, a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do, ethically or politically, or perhaps as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes. He did nothing wrong.

Why are the cops arresting him? I don't know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race, but I can well imagine that if it's common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police, that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance, which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. And this is certainly one reason why it's wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it's policing. Now, unfortunately, there's no evidence that

this reduces lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is the likely explanation for police behavior, which itself might reduce conflict. Now, when a cop goes hands-on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest,

that person's resistance poses a problem that most people don't seem to understand. If you haven't studied this topic, if you don't know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person, who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven't thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt when attempting to do that, a gun that can be grabbed and used against you, or against a member of the public, then your intuitions about what makes sense here,

tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad. If you haven't trained with firearms under stress, if you don't know how suddenly situations can change, if you haven't experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you, and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don't know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest, you very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can

expect from cops in situations like these. And there's another fact that looms over all this like the angel of death, literally. Most cops do not get the training they need. They don't get the hand-to-hand training they need. They don't have good skills with which to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects. And cops don't get the firearms training they need. Of course, many police departments have elite units, but most cops don't have the training they need to do the job they're being asked to do. It's also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies.

And there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it's born of racism or not. But the truth is that even if we got rid of all the bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people the best possible training, and we gave them the best culture in which to think about their role in society, and we gave them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations, which we absolutely must do, And we scrubbed all the

dumb laws from our books so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem just and necessary. So the war on drugs is obviously over. Even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified, and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son,

or daughter, or father, or mother, or brother, or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface, and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen. So, while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand there are very likely always going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable or inexplicably stupid

that results in an innocent person's death or a not-so-innocent person's death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year, and we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped. Now I'm about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now. If we're going to let the health of race relations in this country, or the relationship between the community and the police, depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again,

the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed. About a week into these protests, I heard Van Jones on CNN say, if we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge. Now, he said this not as an indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police. With 10 million arrests each year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is. We have to put these videos into context, and we

have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret, but some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people, especially by activists. And there are a range of cases, some have video associated with them and some don't, that are now part of a litany of anti-racist outrage. And the names of the dead are intoned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice. And yet they are not. Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight,

and he got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer's taser. That part of the video isn't clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the cop to feel that his life was under threat at that moment. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

I'm not sure that was long enough, actually. That seemed like straight-up murder to me. The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don't know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It's quite possible he's a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him, though as far as I know the details of those complaints haven't been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop,

or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck. I don't know. I'm sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. Think about it. He was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It's possible, of course, but it doesn't seem like the likeliest explanation for his behavior. What I believe we saw in that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training

on the part of those cops. Or terrible recruitment, right? It's possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all the things you don't know when you're a new cop. And it could also have been a function of bad luck in terms of Floyd's underlying health. It was reported that he was complaining about being unable to breathe even before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. And the truth is, the knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death.

It could have been the weight of the other officer pinning him down. This is almost certainly what happened in the case of Eric Garner. It seems that half the people on Earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying, I can't breathe, he's not being choked. He's being held down on the pavement by several officers. Now, being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him

was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again. And if you're recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the video that shows the killing of Tony Timpa. It's also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race, and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops, about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos. Now, Tony Temple was a white man in Dallas who was suffering some mental health emergency, and I think cocaine intoxication, And he actually called 911 himself.

And what we see is the body cam footage from the police, which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived. A security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over, and they restrain Tempa on the ground by rolling him onto his stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner. And they keep their weight on him. One cop has a knee on his upper back,

which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck. But they crush the life out of him all the same over the course of 13 minutes. He's not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There's no animus between them and Timpa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe they're responding to a mental health emergency.

But they keep him down on his belly, under their weight. And they're cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he's going to be dead by the end of this video makes their jokes seem pretty callous, but the truth is, this was about as benign an imposition of force by the cops as you're going to see. And the crucial insight you'll have watching this video is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Tempa, they don't take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they're doing is perfectly safe, perfectly within protocol. They've probably done this a hundred times before.

Now, if you watch that video, and again, fair warning, it's disturbing, but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Tempa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Tempa's skin, that video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crush the life out of a black Tony Timpa. Given the nature of our conversation about violence,

given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching. And it would not have been a lynching. Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of the cops in Minneapolis and perhaps we'll learn more at trial. And perhaps there'll be a tape of Chauvin using the N-word in another context

and that'll bring a credible allegation of racism into the case. And it seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his behavior. But it seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his behavior. But most people who saw that video believe they have witnessed, with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt,

a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That's not what that video necessarily shows. As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether they have associated video or not, are very different. The Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there's no video of that encounter. and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there's no video of that encounter.

But if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you're attacking a cop, trying to get his gun, that is a life-and-death struggle, almost by definition, for the cop. And in most cases, it will justify a lethal use of force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is simply not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct. I've seen many videos of people getting arrested, and I've seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be the inappropriate use of force by the cops.

One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don't understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos and from the public reaction to them,

this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don't get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody, for whatever reason, it's not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match,

you're very likely to get injured or killed. This is a point that I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Lowry, and essentially it became a public service announcement. And I've gone back and listened to those comments, and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand, and it's something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly. If you put your hands on a cop, if you start wrestling with a cop, or grabbing him because

he's arresting your friend, or pushing him, or striking him, or using your hands in a way that can possibly be interpreted as you're reaching for a gun, you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin. As I said, when you're with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open. And any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn't know what you're going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. And most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person, for good reason, because they're not very well trained to do that.

And they're continually confronting people who are bigger or younger or more athletic or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They're ordinary people with insufficient training. And once things turn physical, they can't afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt. And this is something that people seem totally confused about.

If they see a video of someone fighting with a cop and punching him or her in the face, right, and the person's unarmed, right, and the person's unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back and that any use of deadly force at that point would be totally disproportionate. But that's not how violence works, right? It's not the cop's job to be the best bare-knuckled boxer on earth so that he doesn't have to use his gun. A cop can't risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out because there's always a gun in play, right? So this is the cop's perception of the world, and it's a justifiable one given the dynamics of human violence. Now, you might think that cops shouldn't carry guns, right? Why can't we just be like England? And that's a point that can be debated, but it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns

in circulation. The United States is not England. Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It's not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know that you didn't do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I'm going to ask that again. How could the fact that you're innocent, that you're not a threat to the cop, that you're not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he's attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest. And unless you called the cops yourself,

you never really know what situation you're in. I mean, if I'm walking down the street, I don't know if a cop who's approaching me didn't just get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I mean, I know I didn't do anything. I know that I'm mystified as to why the cop is paying attention to me at that moment. But I don't know what's in

the cop's head. The time to find out what's going on, the time to complain about racist cops, the time to scream at them and tell them they're all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct, is after cooperating, at the police station, in the presence of a lawyer, preferably. But to not comply in the heat of the moment, when a guy with a gun is issuing commands, this raises your risk astronomically. And it's something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they're not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested. Okay, end of public service announcement.

The main problem with using individual cases where black men and women have been killed by cops to conclude that there's an epidemic of racist police violence in our society is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them. In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece for Time magazine about this, and here's a snippet of what he wrote. Quote, the heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters.

That has seemed plausible to me, and I've recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam DuBose, and others. End quote. So McWhorter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases. But there's no song about these people admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer. And I don't know any of them, right, other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names, in addition to the ones I just read from McWhorter's article.

I know the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. And now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. and now of course I know the name of George Floyd. And I'm aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Breonna Taylor. I can't name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these other than Timpa. And I just read McWhorter's article

where he lists many of them. So this is also a distortion in the media, right? The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops. Activists are not demanding that they do this, right? I'm sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot. Who knows? But in terms of the story we're telling ourselves in the mainstream, we're not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence. So back to the data. Again, cops kill around a thousand people every year in the United States. About 25% are black.

About 50% are white. Now, the data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they've been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, at least for the last five years or so. And this ratio between black and white appears stable over time. And again, many of these killings are justifiable, right? We're talking about career criminals who are usually armed, and in many cases trying to kill the cops. Those aren't the cases we're worried about.

We're worried about the unjustified homicides. Now, some people will think these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. After all, African Americans are only 13% of the population, so at most they should be 13% of the victims of police violence, not 25%. And any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism. Okay, well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts. Blacks are 13% of the population, but they commit at least 50% of the murders and other violent crimes. If you have 13% of the population responsible for 50% of the murders, and in some cities committing two-thirds of all violent crime, what percent of police attention should it attract?

I honestly don't know. But I'm pretty sure it's not just 13%. And given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I'm pretty sure that most black people wouldn't set the dial at 13% either. And here we arrive somewhere near the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. But for more than a generation, it really has not been much of a story of white-on-black crime. Now, the murder rate has come down steadily since the 1990s, with only minor upticks.

But nationwide, blacks are six times more likely to get murdered than whites. And in some cities, their risk is double that. And around 95% of these murders are committed by members of the African American community. The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide, when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community,

92 people were shot and 27 killed in Chicago alone. Right? One city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this type of violence is far more representative of the kind of violence the black community needs to worry about. And ironically, it's clear that one remedy for this violence would be effective policing. Now these are simply the facts of crime in our society, as best we understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to

these facts professionally and ethically. And the question is, are they doing that? And obviously there's considerable doubt that they're doing that professionally and ethically. But Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist whose work I once discussed with Glenn Lowry on the podcast, he studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force. involving black and white suspects and the use of force. His paper is titled, and this is from 2016, An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. And Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there's an epidemic of lethal police violence

directed against black men, especially. But he didn't find that. However, he did find support for the idea that black people suffer more non-lethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do. So let's look at this. The study examined data from 10 major police departments in Texas, Florida, and California. Generally, Fryer found that there's a 25% greater likelihood that the police would go hands-on black suspects than white ones,

cuffing them or forcing them to the ground or using other non-lethal force. Specifically in New York City, in encounters where black and white citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that cops were 17% more likely to go hands-on black suspects, 18% more likely to push them into a wall, 16% more likely to put them in handcuffs in a situation where they weren't being arrested, 18% more likely to push them to the ground. 25% more likely to use pepper spray

or a baton. 19% more likely to draw their guns. And 24% more likely to point a gun at them. So this is more or less the full continuum of violence, short of using lethal force. And it seems, based on the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. So what accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it's inconvenient to note from other data that suggests that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are.

I'm not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that. Are there other explanations? Well, again, it could be that blacks are less cooperative with the police. And if so, this would be worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force. Now, whatever is true here is something that we should want to understand, and it's all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods,

which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects, with or without an arrest, for whatever reason, it's easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism,

whether or not racism is the underlying motive. And it's totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And given the level of crime in the black community, it seems that a disproportionate number of innocent black men are guaranteed to have this experience, right? And it's totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle we have to find some way to interrupt. But Fryer also found that black suspects are around 25% less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations,

where an officer was not first attacked, but nevertheless fired his weapon at a suspect, the police seem more likely to do this when the suspect is white. Again, these data are incomplete. This doesn't cover every city in the country. And a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But as far as I know, the best data we have suggests that for whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted.

And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. Sciences by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And given the data we have, it seems undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, again, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society. Now, can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic, and our response to it has been totally inept. And on top of that, we're now being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression.

And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing several horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics. And these videos will keep coming. And the truth is they could probably be matched two for one with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way?

In light of the belief that the data run the other way, people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves, and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting this civil unrest from the sidelines

because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump, and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video. Now, as I hope I've made clear, we need police reform, right? There's no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking the peaceful protests is totally outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that I'm unaware of that. I mean, from what I've seen, and again, by the time I released this

podcast, the character of this might have changed somewhat, but from what I've seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. I mean, in many cities, they just stood by and watched society unravel. And then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protest. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. I mean, there is no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear on all sides. But racializing how we speak about the problem of police violence, where race isn't actually the relevant variable? Again, think Tony Timpa. This has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, you take the recent case of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a so-called no-knock raid of her

home. As occasionally happens in this carnival of moral error we call the war on drugs, the police had the wrong address, and they kicked in the wrong door, and they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But the truth is this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it's not safe to be sleeping while black. The problem is that these no-knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances, and very likely in greater numbers.

I don't have data specifically on no-knock raids, but we can assume the ratio is probably conserved here. I mean, just think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. I mean, if someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night, and you're a gun owner, of course you're going to reach for your gun, right? That's why you have a gun in the first place. And the fact that someone bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might

have yelled police, you know, or might have not yelled police. It's alleged in some of these cases that they don't yell anything. The fact that someone yells police isn't necessarily convincing, right? Anyone can yell police. And again, think of the psychology of this. If the police have the wrong house, and you know there's no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, right? Because you know you've done nothing wrong.

You're not the guy running a meth lab, right? And now you're reaching for your gun in the middle of the night, right? Because you know you've done nothing wrong. You're not the guy running a meth lab, right? And now you're reaching for your gun in the dark? Of course someone is likely to get killed. But this is not a racial issue. It's a terrible policy. Now, unfortunately, the process of police reform isn't straightforward. And it's made more complicated by the kinds of things that are happening now. I mean, yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way now, that seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of cops in a climate where

viral videos and racial politics are operating, have dramatic effects and dramatically negative effects. He studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and Laquan McDonald. And he found that, for reasons that are pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much as 100%, once these investigations get started.

This is now called the Ferguson effect. And the police still answer 911 calls, but they don't investigate suspicious activity in the same way. They don't want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. And Fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into a thousand extra homicides and almost 40,000 more felonies over the next 24 months in the U.S. And of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. Now, one shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we're about to see nationwide. I'm sure the morale among cops has never been lower.

I think it's almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force. And it's going to be much more difficult to recruit good people to the police force. I mean, who's going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealistic about occupying that role in society? could be idealistic about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I'm pretty sure there's a difference there. I think we're likely to see that difference expressed now in the future. It's a grim picture unless we do something very creative here. So there's a real question about how we can reform police departments and

get rid of bad cops without negatively impacting the performance of good cops. That's a riddle we have to solve, or at least we have to understand what the trade-offs are here. And why is all this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down. And they are very rare events. They are 1 in 10,000 level events, if measured by arrests, and 1 in 50,000 to 60,000 level events, if measured by police encounters. 50,000 to 60,000 level events, if measured by police encounters.

And the number of unarmed people who are killed by cops is much smaller than that, right? Of the 1,000 people killed by cops last year, around 50 were unarmed. And again, there were more white people killed than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent, right? Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops. Again, the data don't tell a clean story, or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that African Americans get more attention from the cops. Though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don't know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, it seems,

which is bad, right? But again, it's simply unclear that racism is the cause of that. And contrary to everyone's expectations, it seems that whites are more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are seven times more likely to commit what's called suicide by cop. And they're actually three times more likely to commit suicide generally. What's going on there?

Who knows? There's a lot we don't understand about these data. But ask yourself, would society seem less racist to you if the disparity ran the other way? Is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed, a form of white privilege? Is a higher level of suicide by cop and suicide generally, a form of white privilege? We have a problem here that, read either way, you could tell a starkly racist narrative. We need ethical, professional policing, of course, right? But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that? I mean, in a city like Milwaukee,

blacks are 12 times more likely to get murdered than whites. And again, they're being killed by other African Americans nearly 100% of the time. I think the lowest figure I've seen is 93% of the time. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now? Now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct. So we need to lower the temperature on this conversation and many other conversations and to understand what is actually happening in our society. But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos.

Everything I just said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands, but I think what we're witnessing in our streets and on social media and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won't be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video, right? There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video. The media have turned these videos into a form of political pornography, and this has deranged us. We're now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has truly been poisoned by bad incentives in this regard, and social media doubly so. Now, in the mainstream

of this protest movement, it's very common to hear that the only problem with what's happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins, a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence, has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. And most people in the media have taken exactly this position, right? People like Anderson Cooper on CNN, or the editorial page of the New York Times, or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. And the most prominent liberal voices in our society believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral sense and perfect political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed

to be on the right side of history. I mean, how could anyone who's concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? I mean, how could anyone who isn't himself racist not support Black Lives Matter? But of course, there is a difference between slogans and reality. There's a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. And that's why propaganda works, right? I mean, for instance, many people assume that there's nothing wrong with Antifa,

because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as anti-fascist. What could be wrong with being anti-fascist? Are you pro-fascism? There's a similar problem with Black Lives Matter. Though, happily, unlike Antifa, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I'm discussing is more ideological,

and it's much bigger than Black Lives Matter, but BLM is the most visible symbol of this movement. And the wider issue is that we are in the midst of a moral panic, and it's been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations, and have a legitimate fear of being hounded into oblivion online. So this is nearly everyone left of center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America. And we're making ourselves sick, right? We are damaging our society.

And by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process, looting that doesn't even have a pretense of protest, the left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we're worried about Trump's authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don't know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democratic calls to abolish the police going to play in half the country that just watched so many cities getting looted. We have to vote Trump out of

office to restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality, a problem which affects the black community most of all. We need police reform. We need criminal justice reform. We need tax reform. We need health care reform. We need environmental reform. We need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce inequality in our society. And if we did this, African Americans would benefit, perhaps more than any other group. But it's not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society. And just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like?

Well, here's what I think it would look like. More and more people, and ultimately all people, would care less and less, and ultimately not at all, about race. As I've said in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance, which is to say it would have none. Now, maybe you don't agree with that aspiration. Maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can't be outgrown or shouldn't be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I'm afraid I don't know what to say to you. It's not that there's nothing to say. It's just that there's so much we disagree about,

morally and politically, that I don't know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time. For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say you share the hope that there will come a time when the color of a person's skin really doesn't matter.

What would that be like? Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know? What percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough redheads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there's a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care. Imagine a world in which people

cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care, or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing, and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe. Now, the analogy isn't perfect for a variety of reasons, but it's good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and anti-racism were truly broken.

The future we want is not one in which we've all become passionate anti-racists. It's not a future in which we're forever on our guard against the slightest insult, the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn't age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don't agree with that, what did you think Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about? And finally, if you're on the left and you don't agree with that,

if you don't agree with this vision of a post-racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race, and that racial identity is indissoluble, and that skin color really matters and will always matter, these people are white supremacists, and neo-Nazis, and other total assholes.

And these are also people I can't figure out how to talk to, much less persuade. So the question for the rest of us, those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings, merely, the question is, how do we get there? How does racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by having thousands of institutions whose funding, and therefore very survival, depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world? Can it become less significant by being granted more

and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object, ringed on all sides by taboos? ringed on all sides by taboos? Can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood at any moment by saying one wrong word about it? Now, I think these questions answer themselves. To outgrow our obsession with racial difference, we have to outgrow our obsession with racial difference, we have to outgrow our obsession with race.

And you don't do that by maintaining your obsession with it. Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post-racial society would seem. But you might disagree about the path to get there and the question of what to do next. And in fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post-racial future, he thinks it's just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. And he asked me to imagine just how absurd it would be to have told

Martin Luther King Jr., at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race. That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has actually drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I'm hoping to be here. And you can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment. But in any case, as I said, I think we're living in a very different time than Martin Luther King Jr. was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we're paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism and social justice generally, and the importance of identity generally. And this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for

historically disadvantaged groups isn't generally barred by white racists who won't vote for them, or hire them, or celebrate their achievements, or buy their products. And it isn't generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. Now, there is surely still some of that, but there must be less of it now than there ever was. The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality with respect to wealth and education and health and social order, levels of crime in particular,

and the resulting levels of incarceration and single-parent families. And it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on the problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn't exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point. And yet now we're inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. I mean, Black Lives Matter is everywhere. Of course Black Lives Matter,

but the messaging of this movement around the reality of police violence is wrong, and it's creating a public hysteria. I just got a message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science talking about fear of the other the other. And the quote from the email is, left unchecked, racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future. Okay, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now? Unchecked racism, sexism, and homophobia? Is that really what ails science in the year 2020?

I don't think so. I'll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted everywhere right now. It's the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It's the other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can't join a conversation that converges on the truth because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the other, who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren't something to be corrected for because they're the very foundations of his epistemology.

We should fear the other who can't distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science, or worse, can make these distinctions but refuses to. And we're all capable of becoming this person, if only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature. And we have to continually correct for it. One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the COVID-19 pandemic was first landing on our shores

and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. Now, I'm pretty confident that most of the kids we're talking about here aren't white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country, and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there's no question that some of us start out on third base or second base.

Everyone has a lot to deal with, of course. Life is hard. But not everyone is a single mom or a single grandparent struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable. And we need a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions. We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. I mean, the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments, a willingness to update one's view of the world when better reasons are given.

And that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive. Okay, well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say that. I hope it was useful, and the conversations will continue on this podcast. Stay safe, everyone.