Making Sense with Sam Harris - #336 — The Roots of Identity Politics

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Yascha Mounk about identity politics. They discuss Yascha’s concept of the “identity synthesis,” skepticism about “cancel culture,” racial segregation in schools, the ideological change on college campuses, Michel Foucault and postmodernism, the rejection of universalism, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, the “permanence of racism,” the indoctrination of children, intersectionality, white privilege, institutional racism, equity vs equality, racial preferences during the Covid pandemic, the asymmetric advantage of authoritarianism, class and elitism, affirmative action, media coverage of crime and violence, social media and the business model of mainstream journalism, 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.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.  

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Today I'm speaking with Jascha Mauck. Jascha is a writer and academic, known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. He was born in Germany and holds a degree in history from Cambridge and a PhD in government from Harvard. He is currently a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins and the founder of the digital magazine Persuasion. He's also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and host of the Good Fight podcast. His most recent book is The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time. And that is what we discuss. We talk about the origins of identity politics, his concept of the identity synthesis, skepticism as to whether or

not any of these ideas are a problem, racial segregation in schools, the ideological changes that have occurred on college campuses, the contributions of Michel Foucault and postmodernism, the rejection of universalism and objectivity, Derrick Bell, Kimberly Crenshaw, the imagined permanence of racism, the indoctrination of children, intersectionality, white privilege, institutional racism, equity versus equality, racial preferences during the COVID pandemic, the asymmetric advantages of authoritarianism, class and elitism, affirmative action, media coverage of crime and violence, social media and the business model of mainstream journalism, and other topics.

Anyway, I hope you find this conversation as useful and as clarifying as I did. And now I bring you Yasha Mauck. I am here with Yasha Mauck. Yasha, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast, Sam. So you are a repeat guest on the podcast, but perhaps remind people what you're doing. How do you summarize your place on the intellectual landscape these days? to you, which is to say that I am, you know, a critic of some of the assumptions that have come to dominate our mainstream institutions. But I also keep a very clear distance from some of the

more knee-jerk and reactionary elements on the right, so it can be a slightly lonely life. But I like to say that I'm a democracy crisis hipster. I'm somebody who started to worry about the crisis of democracy before it was cool. I wrote a number of books and countless articles about the threat of right-wing populism and some other forms of populism. But the latest book is really my most ambitious attempt to make sense of the ideas about race and gender and sexual orientation that have come to be so influential in universities and nonprofits and politics and increasingly the corporate world over the last 10 years. And that's called The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time,

and it's just out now. Yeah, well, I want to focus on the book. I'm very grateful that you have written it. You have finally produced the book that tells the story of how things have gotten so crazy, especially on the left side of our politics. But summarize your current work in a little bit more detail. So where are you in academia now? And also remind people about Persuasion and your own very fine podcast. remind people about Persuasion and your own very fine podcast. Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I'm a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. I'm a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. I write for The Atlantic. I've actually become a publisher of a German magazine called Die Zeit recently.

And in the summer of 2020, I founded a magazine in a community called Persuasion, which really is trying to stand up for philosophically liberal ideals like free speech against the threats from the right, but also some of the ways in which we're being undermined in a lot of more progressive and left-leaning spaces. So, you know, if you're interested in that,

please come and join our list at persuasion.community or subscribe to my podcast called The Good Fight, which has only the best guests such as Sam about half a year ago. Yeah, and it is a great podcast. I regularly catch it. Okay, so let's talk about the book. Again, the book is The Identity Trap, talk about the book. Again, the book is The Identity Trap, just out now, I believe, at the point we will be releasing this. And we will track through it, but by no means exhaust the points of interest in it. You describe the core phenomenon that we're going to talk about as the identity synthesis. What is the identity synthesis? Yeah. So first of all, you know, we just need a damn name to refer to this ideology with. You know, Freddie de Boer has this point, just tell me what you call the ideology and I'll happily call it that.

And that's different from other ideologies, right? Some people love socialism, some people hate socialism, but both of those sets of people can agree to call it socialism, even though they might have disagreements about, you know, whether socialism is to blame for how horribly wrong Venezuela has gone recently, right? With this ideology, we're in this really strange moment where a set of new ideas about the role that identity should play in our lives, in our society, in our politics, have come to exert tremendous influence. And we don't have a name for this ideology that is generally accepted. So I call it the identity synthesis, because as I try to show in the first part of the book, they really are an amalgam of different ideas that originate in the intellectual life of the second half of the 20th century. My story starts with Michel Foucault and the postmodernist and later more broadly poststructuralist

tradition in post-war France. It then goes to the post-colonialists who are trying to think about the kinds of ideas that can help to liberate people in what they call the third world in the 70s and 80s. And then it really takes shape in American law schools under the banner of critical race theory. So this is not a form of cultural Marxism, as some people want to say. You don't understand it by simply starting with Marxism, taking class out and putting culture in. It's its own, it has its own intellectual history that we really need to understand to chronicle where these ideas are coming from and how they operate today.

Well, I want to talk about the history here. I think it's fascinating, and it's something that I actually have not talked about on the podcast, though I have wailed and gnashed my teeth a lot about what I generally refer to as wokeness or identitarian politics on the left. But before we dive in to start, what would you say to someone who denies that any of this is a problem, right? I mean, there are very smart people on the left, and they're not necessarily academics or activists, for whom the first response to the discussion we're about to have will be more or less to accuse us of having been taken in by right-wing propaganda. I mean, they'll insist that social injustice is still all too real,

and that's a point that you and I, I think, would be fairly quick to concede. Yes, absolutely. Right? I mean, we're not denying that social injustice is entirely behind us. We're not denying that inequality isn't a problem, etc. But this imagined critic of ours, who, again, is all too real, would say that beyond any shame-faced acknowledgement we might make that racism and inequality are problems, anything else we say is probably motivated by our own bigotry or, at a minimum, it's just an expression of clueless white privilege. So, I mean, all this talk about wokeness being a problem is essentially a Trumpist hallucination. And for instance, I just heard this morning the comedian

and podcaster Mark Maron say this. And I don't know Mark, but I like him. I like his podcast. He's certainly left of me politically, although I consider myself very much a creature of the left. But this is where he is. And he said explicitly this. This is more or less verbatim. He said that the only real issues of the day are fascism and climate change. And all this talk about wokeness and cancel culture and censorship is just a distraction. What would you say to that? forms in which that argument comes. The first is to say that there's really nothing new about these ideas, but all that wokeness is, is wanting to be honest and upfront about the injustice that persists today or something like that. You know, that often comes with a claim that it's impossible to define something like wokeness or something like critical race theory. And I think it's true that a lot of the people who rail against wokeness and critical race theory all day long on Twitter wouldn't be able to define it and call anything that might be reasonable or anything that's in any way progressive woke in an undiscriminating way.

And that then has tempted the defenders of this ideology, you know, on MSNBC and sometimes the big newspapers and so on to claim, well, you know, all that woke is is wanting kids in the South to learn about the history of slavery or something like that. You know, to that, I would say that when you actually go through the intellectual history, as I think we will in a moment, you just recognize that that is profoundly wrong. That the founders of critical race theory, for example, were explicit opponents of the civil rights movement. But somebody like Derrick Bell, you know, mocked We Shall Overcome, what you call the theme song of the civil rights movement, and said that we need to move beyond what he calls the defunct racial equality ideology of the civil rights

movement. For somebody like Kimberlé Crenshaw, you know, the fundamental tenets of CRT are, what she says, fundamentally at odds with the politics of somebody like Barack Obama. So there is just a new set of ideas here that, as people interested in intellectual and cultural life, we should take seriously. So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is that part of the complaint or part of this pushback is to say, well, look, when people complain about cancel culture, for example, they're just afraid of a healthy consequence culture. They, you know, either just want to go around, you know, using the N word or something like that, or they just, you know, are making a mountain out of molehills when people sort of get the deserved consequences for, you know,

People sort of get the deserved consequences for, you know, morally bad action. I try very hard in the book to respond to that by not telling many of those stories, which we all have heard about at this point, but by telling stories where these questions really matter in terms of what our society looks like. Stories, for example, about teachers at many of the most elite private schools throughout the country now coming to classrooms in the first or second grade and separating children out by their racial identity, saying if you're black, you go over there. If you're Latino, you go over there. If you're Asian, you go over there. And by the way, if you're white, you go over there. And that, I think,

and we can get into that in more detail later, it's just not a good way of building a cooperative community or a healthy country, in part because it encourages the zero-sum conflict, and in part because it's really naive about what that's going to do to the white kids, right? The idea here is that they're going to become, you know, I mean, they're supposed to embrace the race,

see themselves as racial beings, embrace the whiteness. And then the idea is that they're going to fight against the privileges of white people. Everything in social psychology and history suggests that the opposite is going to happen. That when you tell seven-year-olds the most important thing about who they are is that they're white, they're going to fight on behalf of the interests of whites. And that's the kind of politics that you and I both abhor. And so, you know, and then thirdly, the question is whether or not this has negative consequences, right? Whether this is just trying to build a better world. And here, I think there often is a temptation to say, hey, the problem

with these ideas is that it's really well-intentioned people who are fighting against things like racism and sexism and homophobia and injustice. And sometimes they just go a little bit too far. And then the response is, what do you mean going too far? How can you go too far in the fight against racism, right? And here, I think it's really important to really explain what those ideas are in order to make clear to people, this is not going too far. It may be motivated by genuine injustices. The people who believe in these ideas may genuinely be wanting to build injustices. The people who believe in these ideas may genuinely be wanting to build a better world, but they're in fact pulling us in the wrong

direction. They're in fact pulling us to a society in which everybody will profoundly and perennially be defined by the groups into which they are born in ways that will make it much harder to understand each other, to treat each other fairly, to build thriving communities and stable democracies. Yeah, I think you've just planted a flag at really the heart of the problem here, where even though we can agree that injustice and racism and various forms of inequality, wealth inequality, academic inequality, inequality with respect to crime and violence, etc.

All of these are social ills that good people should want to correct. The proffered remedy here is exactly the wrong one. In fact, it perversely ramifies the very disorder it's pretending to target. And so we'll get into the logic of that in the moment, but I want to stick with the history. I think probably the best place to start are the universities, particularly elite universities in America. More or less all of my time at a university preceded the changes you talk about in the book. I mean, when I was a freshman at Stanford, the changes you talk about in the book. When I was a freshman at Stanford, everyone had to take a Western civilization track. And I was among, I think, the last classes that got a standard

great books seminar out of that year without being told that they were reading too many dead white men. And I do recall that I think it was two years later, Jesse Jackson led a march on the campus with hundreds of students chanting, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. And I remember that making national news, but I also remember not paying much attention to it. The curriculum was then changed at Stanford, I think, two years later in 1989. But then I have a weird backstory, and so I got to sample campus culture quite a bit later because I took a full decade off between what was my sophomore and what would have been my junior year. And so I went back to Stanford in 98, and the only thing I witnessed at that point that seems a bellwether of the kinds of changes we're going to talk about is that I attended a lecture by Jacques Derrida, along with thousands of other students, and I was, I just, I could not believe the mouth noises this

man was making. And it was a kind of a watershed moment for me intellectually, because I was a student of Richard Rorty at that point, and I was basically devouring every course he was teaching. And Rorty had clearly invited Derrida and introduced him on the stage with great fanfare. And then I was the first and perhaps only student to walk out of that lecture. And I mean, it was almost in the spirit of intellectual protest. I was quite happy to be visibly seen to have walked out of the lecture. And I literally had to crawl over the bodies of the credulous postmodernists in the making, because the aisles were filled with students just sitting on the floor in violation of every possible fire code. And that was honestly the

first and last thing I noticed happening on campus. I don't think I knew anything else was happening until I saw footage of Nicholas Christakis getting heckled by a mob in the quad at Yale, I think it was like 16 years later, around Halloween of 2015. So I went completely to sleep on this issue for more than a decade and really didn't understand what I was noticing, stirring when I was on a campus. But you've been on a campus for quite some time and continuously. When did you first notice the change and how did you first intersect with this as an issue? So first of all, let me just say that that fight over a cause like Western Sith is, I think, a great little microcosm of how part of a core of a critique has some amount of value, but the solution that the adherence of the identity trap then chooses done in human history, it would make a lot of sense to enrich that kind of canon with the writings of Confucius and the writings of Ibn al-Khatib and the writings of all kinds of really interesting thinkers from other parts of the world. And to

fight for that would have been a perfectly appropriate movement. But instead, the slogan was Western civ has got to go, right? It wasn't, let's also have a class on these other things, or let's enrich this class with a broader set of readings, let's reform it in ways that make it a better starting point for a truly global conversation. So say, let's get rid of these ideas because they're exclusionary in this kind of way. And that, I think, pre-shadows in interesting ways the debate today about what are the right solutions to all kinds of social ills. You know, I would say similarly to you, that I had two moments when I started to be aware of these ideas. One is in the classroom. So one is like you, you know, coming across many of those very postmodern ideas or later coming across sort of elements of critical race theory, seeing that people were insisting in certain academic contexts on seeing something exclusively through the lens of race or gender and sexual orientation, that they had come to have a kind of monomaniacal view in the same way in which marxists used to just think about social class and used to try as hard as they could to squeeze any historical event into the lens of social class even if it doesn't really make sense

i started to see in many academic disciplines an attempt to squeeze everything into race or sexual orientation or gender even when it didn't really seem to have anything to do with that. But like you, I sort of thought, well, you know, academia, I mean, 19 year olds always have terrible ideas. I had my share of terrible ideas when I was 19. And academics always like overly broad, complicated theories, most of which don't really seem to have a real impact on the world, this is not going to have any real life applications. And I started changing my mind about that in a sense when I stumbled across a website, I think perhaps late in 2014 or early in 2015, called everydayfeminism.com.

And that was the first time that I saw many of these ideas distilled in a sort of BuzzFeed viral form in a more popularized and a more vulgarized version for a mass audience. And I thought, wow, actually, in this sense, these ideas might be able to have a real influence. I have a couple of the headlines that I stumbled across here. One is, four thoughts for your yoga teacher who thinks cultural appropriation is fun. You call it professionalism, I call it oppression in a three-piece suit. Six ways to respond to sexist microaggressions in everyday conversations. And my favorite, so you're a breast man, here are three reasons that could be sexist.

Now, to be clear, I think this is the popularized version of ideas that are more subtle than that. But that's the first time when I was like, oh, this has sort of escaped the lab and is out in the wild. Okay, so how did we get here? I mean, you really trace the origins of this quite methodically in your book. quite methodically in your book, and you take us on a tour through Marxism and post-modernism and post-colonialism. I think we should probably talk, however, briefly about some of the key figures here, like Foucault and Edward Said, and then we'll get into critical race theory and intersectionality, Derek Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw, you've already mentioned. And then we'll just deal with some of the concepts that this style of thinking have rendered fairly indelible in our public conversation now, things like white privilege

and structural and systemic and institutional racism. Those are all synonyms, as far as I know. So we'll just get into the content. But let's start with the origin story. How did we get here? Yeah, so the common conservative story about this is that it's just a form of cultural Marxism. You take out class and put in these identity categories into Marxism. That's how you get there. I think that's a profound mistake.

It really can't explain the actual intellectual history of this, and it can't explain the themes that are so prominent today. So where the story starts in my mind is with Michel Foucault. And Foucault is a critic of what he calls grand narratives, these kind of attempts to structure our understanding of the world through a particular set of conceptual prisms. One of the grand narratives that he was opposing was precisely Marxism. He thought this idea to try and understand all of world history through class struggle and then to predict the kind of revolution that that'll lead to and to imagine what the society that comes after the revolution might lead to, that is all naive and it's going to lead to disaster. But he also rejected the grand narratives of liberalism.

He said, you know, that structural account of what human nature is and how we seek freedom and the kind of institutions that can preserve inside it, that is just as fraudulent. And so that pushed him towards a really deep skepticism towards any forms or any claims to universal truth, and even to basic identity categories, interestingly. So even though Foucault was, in our terminology, gay or homosexual, he refused those labels. He thought that they were overly constraining of the variety of sexual experiences that people have in the world. The second important contribution he makes is that he really changes how we think about political power. So, you know, you ask a smart high schooler, how does political power work? And they'll tell

you something about, you know, the president having a lot of power and being the commander-in-chief or there being laws that are promulgated by Congress or something like that, right? It's some top-down model. What Foucault is saying is, no, power actually inheres in the kind of discourses that really dominate our culture. You know, this podcast to Foucault

is an exercise of power that imposes categories on people and constrains them in the kind of moves that they can make that helps to render them unfree. And Foucault, as a result, becomes a little bit apolitical. And Noam Chomsky has said that he's the most immoral, not immoral, but amoral person he's ever met. Because to Foucault, you know, you destroy or you challenge one kind of discourse that might give you a moment of freedom, but the new discourse is going to end up being justice constraining. So the funny story that I tell is that I will lay out in the conversation, I lay out in much more detail in the book, how sort of step by step, this is the impetus that leads to the creation of the identity trap. But I think Foucault himself

would be quite disturbed by what became of his ideas, by the naive way we think about identity today, and by the way, frankly, in which things like social media exert that kind of discursive control over people. I think he would actually be quite perturbed by how his ideas have ended up playing out in the world. Yeah, well, so the core contribution, I think, the postmodernists made here, and this is something you spell out in the book, and it really is the seed of the corruption of the intellectual and ethical and political norms here that follows is this rejection in principle of universalism, universalist values, universalist epistemology. I mean, any truth claim we make about anything, scientific or otherwise,

is at bottom an expression of power. It's just the ruination of epistemology, as far as I can tell. And it's, you know, all we have are texts and interpretations thereof, and there's no grounding of human knowledge in anything but the assertion of power over others. And that's, you know, while there are a fair number of turnings of the wheel since Foucault, as you point out, and Foucault wouldn't necessarily recognize what has become of his thinking in modern hands, there's this basic skepticism aboutattering of society into this perpetual identitarian contest where you have, you know, and we'll talk about some of the concepts here that enshrine this thinking, something like, you know, standpoint, epistemology, and we'll get there in a minute. But is that how you see Foucault's contribution or the contribution of the postmodernists in general? Yes, I think there's sort of one and a half contributions that they make to the core themes of the identity synthesis today. So the first exactly, as you're pointing out, is this profound skepticism of objectivity, of a deep embrace of a subjective reading of the world,

the idea of my truth that stands equivalent to your truth and there's no neutral way of being an arbiter between those two things. And the political implications of that, that phrases like all men are equal are just ideological claptrap because they can have no objective foundation or applicability. They're just the grand narrative we use to flatter ourselves into

thinking that we have a more humane society or that we have something to live up to, right? So that's the direct contribution. And then there's the indirect contribution, which starts to take us to the postcolonial project. Now, this is a set of thinkers at a time in the 50s and 60s where, you know, decades or centuries of colonial exploitation are finally coming to an end. And many countries around the world have to think, all right, on what kind of set of ideas and principles are we going to found our nations? And they're quite skeptical, deeply skeptical of a kind of Western set of ideas that they see as tainted with colonialism. So that's a basic

background. And somebody like Edward Said, Palestinian American who has roots in Palestine, grows up in Egypt and then in New England, becomes a professor at Columbia University, uses the tools of discourse critique that Foucault has inspired in him. In fact, Foucault is the first thinker he mentions positively in his most famous book, Orientalism, and just about the only thinker he mentions positively in that book. So he says, look, he mentions positively in that book. So he says, look, perhaps these tools can help us to understand how the Orientalist discourse in the West, the way that the West has thought about the East,

has helped to inspire, to defend, to create a fig leaf for its domination of those countries. But then he says we need to go a step further, whereas Foucault is sort of quietist, ultimately says one discourse is as bad as another. He says, no, one discourse is not as bad as another. The whole point here is to change the discourse in such a way that countries in the East and people in the East have more agency, and perhaps to invert the kind of discourse that we had earlier. So it becomes a politicized form of discourse analysis

or politicized form of discourse critique. And that, I think, is a second theme, one that has its roots in Foucault, but really comes to fruition with Said, that helps to explain a core theme of these ideas today. That what it is to do politics today in many contexts is not to, you know, campaign for a political candidate

or to argue for a particular kind of law. It is to deconstruct a public discourse. It is to critique or problematize, my least favorite word, to find problematic some way that we talk about the world. It is to engage in a kind of cultural criticism, right? Like today we interpret as naturally political or as a natural form of activist politics,

you know, celebrating or critiquing or debating about the Barbie movie. And that, I think, comes in many important ways from Said's response to Foucault. I just had a memory when you were talking about the transition from Foucault to Said around this issue of there being no such thing as objective knowledge without politics. It's all just politics at bottom. There was one other landmark in my pilgrim's progress into this issue that I should have recalled, which was I was in a journal club when I was getting my PhD in neuroscience at UCLA and was quite blindsided by a criticism of some paper we were reading, some neuroscience paper, that I think it was actually a guest professor brought in, and she launched into a feminist slash post-colonialist critique of

really science in principle. And I remember it being just a truly lacerating hour of really kind of failures of, ultimately of failures of politeness on the part of many people there to try to embrace these views. I mean, it was just so crazy making. That was later. That was more like 2007 or 2006 or so. So the post-colonialism, obviously, there are many critical things to be said't quite claim it was universally bad in every case. Watching the British try to get the Indians to stop practicing sati, the burning of a widow on the pyre of her husband. I mean, that's not all bad. But no one wants to defend that history without caveat. How do we get to critical race theory and intersectionality from here? Yeah, so there's one more key step that I think we have to chronicle. And that is the thought of Gayatri Spivak, who's also a post-colonial scholar, grown up in Kolkata, in Bengal, in West India,

also comes to teach at Columbia University as a literary critic. She also is deeply steeped in postmodern thought. She makes her name as a translator and editor of some of the key post-structuralist texts. And so she agrees with one position that people like Foucault held, which really seems to be fundamentally at odds with where we arrived at, where we got to at the end. And that is the idea that we should be skeptical about these essentialist claims about identity, skeptical about the idea that somehow if you're a these essentialist claims about identity, skeptical about the idea that somehow if you're a member of some group, like a racial group, or a different kind of group, perhaps, that just gives you some essential knowledge about who you are,

that some essential characteristics of yours are going to turn on your membership in that kind of group. So she buys, as a good post-modernist, post-structuralist, the critique of essentialist accounts of identity. But she is also perturbed by a conversation that Michel Foucault has with Deleuze, I believe, in which they say, you know, it's really time to stop. And you can see how that's a critique of Marxism. It's time for the intellectuals to stop being the avant-garde that speaks on behalf of these identity groups. We shouldn't be speaking on behalf of proletarians and powers. They can speak for themselves. And Spivak reads this and she says, well, hang on a second, you know, what she calls the subaltern, the most oppressed people, the least, you know, resourceful people,

the people who have the least access to education and other things people, the least resourceful people, the people who have the least access to education and other things in the streets of Calcutta, they can't speak for themselves. They simply don't have the standing and the tools that perhaps a white worker in Paris might have. Somebody has to speak for them. And so she comes to say, well, perhaps in order to be able to speak for them and use the identicators we need to do that, we should, for strategic purposes, adopt an essentialist account of identity. So she coins this term in an interview of strategic essentialism.

Yes, philosophically, we should reject essentialism, but in practice, for strategic purposes, we should reject essentialism. But in practice, for strategic purposes, we should act as though those objections didn't exist. And that means encouraging people to define themselves by these groups into which we're born in order to be able to fight against various forms of injustice. In a line that today might get her in trouble in progressive circles, she says, look, perhaps there's no essential nature to what a woman is. But for strategic purposes, let's just define a woman as having a clitoris and move on and be able to do feminist politics. So Spivak really inspires another...

Although I would point out, I can't remember if you make this point in the book anywhere, but there is a tension, maybe even incoherence around some of these ideas on the left currently, where you'll have it said that race, for instance, is nothing but a social construct. And yet, there's still an assertion of essentialism with respect to identity around race, right? This is exactly what I was about to say, Sam, and this is exactly where it comes from. That is an applied form of strategic essentialism, and we've all heard it.

Race is a social construct, right? Forget about race, it's complete, terrible fiction, but we're going to go on to talk about the world as though race was the only salient category, and in fact, we're going to encourage children to define themselves by their race. One of the most influential consultancy companies that consults elite private schools in their curricula is called Embrace Race. And one of the things they say is race is a social construct. And then they say,

the goal of a good education is to get students to see themselves as racial beings. That internal contradiction, and Spivak admits that it's a contradiction, comes straight from this post-colonial idea of strategic essentialism. Okay. Well, now the knot gets tighter. What about critical race theory? So that's the next step. Now we go firmly to the world of the United States. I mean, Said and Spivak have teaching in the United States, but the concern in many ways is with the Middle East or with South Asia, respectively. Now we arrive at American law schools, at a set of thinkers who at first start out in critical legal studies, which is basically postmodernism meets the American

law school. And you think that that tradition doesn't talk enough about race. So they want to use those postmodernist tools and legal analysis to understand the role of race in the United States better. And the really founding figure in this is an African-American lawyer and civil rights activist initially and and then scholar, called Derek Bell. Bell, in the 1960s, does heroic work, working for the NAACP, helping to desegregate schools and businesses and other institutions through the American South and beyond. But he starts to think in this work that this might be a mistake. He starts to say, perhaps the segregationist senators who kept complaining

that civil rights lawyers are just imposing their ideology of desegregation and aren't really speaking for the views and the interests of their clients, perhaps there's something to that. Now, there's a little bit of a basis for that, which is reasonable. You know, Bell has some clients who are fighting to desegregate schools, but by the time that they win in that case, those kids have graduated. So they never got the benefit of a desegregated schools. Some of the new schools really don't have many resources and the schools deteriorate. And so people don't have great educational opportunities. So there's a rational basis for what he says, but the conclusion to which he jumps is really very radical and really very extreme. He starts to say that, first of all, Brown v. Board of Education was not a way of living up to the ideals of the Constitution. It was not a way of walking through the contradictions

of American life to live up to a grander ideal. It was only pursued because it was in the interest of whites. Some constellation of things had changed. They wanted to, you know, compete with the Soviet Union ideologically, and they wanted to develop the Sun Belt and whatever else. And so really, it was just in the interest of whites to do this. And secondly, perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps, you know, the NAACP should afford for better segregated schools rather than try to integrate those schools. And so here you see really the, you know, along with some of the things that Foucault had said, the key rejection of integration, the key rejection of the idea that what we need to do is to live up to our

universal principles, to be aware of a way that they we need to do is to live up to our universal principles, to be aware of the way that they might exclude people and improve the country, form an ever more perfect union by fighting against those injustices. No, no, no, no. The point of all of these ideals is to pull the wool over people's eyes, to perpetuate discrimination, to make any progress we have to get rid of it, and really make how we treat people explicitly depend on the kind of group to which they belong. The second strain in Bell's thought is the thesis

of what he calls the permanence of racism. According to him, when he passed away in the 2000s, America was still as racist as it had been in 1950 or 1850. So really, there's no progress to be had unless we have a radical revolution that just gets rid of our entire legal and political structure. Let me just jump in here because I think it's worth lingering on this point of segregation. Because I think it would be shocking to most people who are not paying attention to this issue closely or people like someone like Marc Maron, who I mentioned at the beginning here, who imagine that these are all just right-wing talking points. focused on a couple of weird stories out of Florida or some other spot that don't represent any trend that we need to take seriously. And I don't know if you have a sense of how widespread this practice is, but the idea that anywhere in America, a teacher is sitting down second graders and insisting that they become excruciatingly

conscious of racial difference. I mean, that is just, at this point in history, that is just, it's not only child abuse, it's an abuse of society. I mean, it's a deliberate rending of the social fabric. It is so wrongheaded that I think most people hearing it, most people on the left, just will doubt that these stories are true, that anyone is actually doing this. Yeah, so there's two points here, right? The first is that, and we touched on that a little bit earlier, you know, this idea that all that wokeness, all that critical race theory is, you know, critical race theory, well, it's just wanting to think critically about the role that race plays in American society. And

surely race plays a big role in American society. And we should be aware of that. No, no, no, no, no. If you define critical race theory that way, you would offend the people who initiated it, right? Derrick Bell couldn't have been more explicit that he wanted to reject the defunct racial equality ideology of the civil rights movement, right? Kimberly Crenshaw couldn't have been more explicit about the fact that you thought that Barack Obama was fundamentally at odds with the basic tenets of critical race theory. So we're talking here about an ideology, which by the way, I think is smart and thoughtful. I think these are serious writers and theorists. I enjoyed reading them in many ways.

They are just fundamentally at odds with my vision of what would make for a better society and how we can create thriving, diverse democracies. And then the other question is, you know, how much, how far has that gone in actually being applied across the United States? And again, I do think that these, you know, when people claim, well, you know, I mean, CRT is a graduate level theory. It's not being read in elementary school classrooms. Well, of course, first graders aren't sitting down to read Derrick Bell or to read Gayatri Spivak or to read Kimberly Crenshaw, and they wouldn't understand them if they did as first graders. But this idea that to raise the right racial consciousness and prepare people for the right kind of political activism, you should get them to embrace race, even for white students to embrace the whiteness. And that that is the preamble to having the right racial consciousness that will allow you to make political progress

with a few other steps and so on, but does very much root in these ideas that I describe in the book. And yes, you see that very strongly in private schools, which have fewer legal constraints. You see it increasingly even in public schools. So there's a public school in Evanston that offers separate math classes for students who identify as black. There was recently an elementary school in Oakland that organized a play date exclusively for non-white students. And these ideas are fashionable. You know, one of the stories I tell in the book is of Kyla Posey, an African-American educator who lives in the suburbs of Atlanta, who has two little girls,

and she asked whether she could request a classroom teacher for her kids. The school had allowed her to do that in the past and said, sure. She put in her request, and the principal of the school kept stalling, kept sort of trying to put it off. And eventually, Kyla Posey said, look, what's going on here? Why won't you let me have my choice? And the principal said, well, I'm sorry, but the school you, you know, the class you requested,

that's not the black class. Now, you might think this is a story about straight-up racial segregation in the South of a straight-up right-wing racist, but the principal of the school is herself black. And she's a progressive

who says that she suffered because in the private school she went to as a child, there weren't enough black kids. And so she wants all of the black kids to be in a strongly black environment. And so she thinks that all of the black kids in this elementary school have to go to the black class, even if her parents don't want to do that. You know, this is rooted in a really influential book by an educator called Beverly Tatum, you know, who was the president of Spelman College, which educates a lot of teachers, right? I mean, these are not fringe ideas at this point. They are the fashionable, in some ways, the dominant theories in schools of education in a lot of the progressive educational world. Yeah. I mean, one problem we have rhetorically here is that many of these stories are catnip for people on the right. I mean, it's the single issue. I mean, this and the trans stories just get fused into the single issue of the problem of wokeness on the right. And the mainstream media, for the most part, ignores them.

And you just have one story. I remember a story now, I forgot where it was reported, but I think this happened in Las Vegas, but it was basically an Onion article, of which there have been hundreds, where a girl in her public school is being brought into some quasi-Maoist struggle session around race and told that she benefits from white privilege and she has to be aware of this at all times. And her mother wound up complaining and it got some media attention because the family was literally homeless, right? This is a homeless girl who was being hectored about how much white

privilege she has. It's completely insane. It's not to say that white privilege isn't a thing. I mean, we can talk about the reality of it insofar as it still exists. But historically, there's no question it has been a real variable in society. But it's so psychologically obtuse to think that the way to ameliorate the problem of inequality, the problem of racism, the problem of tribalism, the problem of spurious notions of human difference on the basis of superficial characteristics like skin color, the way to deal with this is to take children who are not born racists or racially conscious and to problematize the variable of race for them at the soonest opportunity. The real issue is that, as I think you've spelled out clearly here, but we should

reiterate it, critical race theory and its attendant ideas explicitly repudiate the vision of racial harmony espoused by what most liberals would recognize as the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King's notion of judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that is not the goal of this way of thinking about race. Yeah, two thoughts. One is that by definition, anybody who is in a position to lecture others about privilege is probably going to be more privileged. Again, that doesn't mean that there isn't an underlying reality where white people have certain advantages in the United States, and certainly historically have had those advantages. But just by definition, who are you

going to hear about white privilege? It's going to be a well-paid educator dei consultant or some talking head on cnn and on average the person who's receiving that message is always going to be less privileged than that person so there's just a real situational problem where people are continually put in this position where they look at somebody who they know in all kinds of ways has has a better life in them probably has a higher salary than them, and so on, is telling them about how privileged they are. And so it's not always as extreme as this particular example you outlined, but that's just always going to be, you know, a basic problem of communication for this theory. You know, the deeper point here is that, you know, there's a really deep literature

in social psychology about how you can overcome prejudice, about how you can inspire trust among members of groups that have historically been in conflict with each other. And that's called intergroup contact theory. And there's been, I mean, thousands, literally thousands of studies demonstrating that these forms of intergroup contact can have a very positive effect. But we also know something about the conditions under which those effects are likely to accrue. And those are when people in that situation are equal. They don't have to be equal in society as a whole, but in that situation, in that context, they're equals.

It's when they have a common goal, when we're fighting for something together. And it's when the, you know, background background society the background institutions and authority figures encouraging them to get along what's the paradigmatic case of that being on a sports team together right you are equal members of a sports team you're trying to win over the other people and your coach tells you no beef right we got to hold together in order to win that's when often people come to trust each other. And then, you know, after the game, they can have a conversation and they can open up about forms of experience, you know, discrimination or injustice they may have experienced. That's

how you build trust. A lot of the pedagogical practices that we have today are directly designed to do the opposite. And we're giving up on many of the kinds of traditions that facilitated those exchanges in American society. You know, as a European, I'm always slightly shocked by this weird, cruel and unusual habit you have of making first years in college literally live in the same room with somebody they don't know. But that doesn't really happen in Europe very much. But it used to be that those were randomly allocated or perhaps people even tried to choose roommates that were very different from them. Some colleges did that.

Today, you either have students come in and they've found somebody they like on social media or some kind of local meetup, and that person is much more likely to be similar to them, or you even have lots and lots and lots of elite universities build racially separate dorms for African-Americans and sometimes for Hispanics, encouraging incoming students to take rooms in those spaces. are discouraging that and encouraging to see each other as potential enemies, to be hyper-attuned to any kind of bad formulations that might be a form of microaggression. In many universities, rather than saying you expect it to get along, you now have anonymous tip lines to report perceived microaggressions.

That is the opposite of what the literature tells us we need to do to facilitate those meaningful exchanges. Okay, well, I want to talk about the role that elites have played here, but I think there's a few terms we should define before we hit that part of the conversation. So I last left you with the contributions of mostly Derrick Bell insisting that racism is permanent. We've mentioned Kimberly Crenshaw. Let's talk about her concept of intersectionality, because many people will have heard it and perhaps have some false associations with the term. What is intersectionality? Well, it's hard to say what intersectionality is, because there's intersectionality as Crenshaw described it, and then there's what's become of that term in our discourse. So let me tell you both of those. You know, when she first writes about intersectionality, she's basically describing what in social science we would know as an interaction effect, right? So if I go out

without an umbrella, but it doesn't rain, I don't get wet. If I go out and I haven't, it is raining, but I have an umbrella, I don't get wet. If I go out and it's raining, and I don't have an umbrella, I might get drenched, right? So there's interactions of different factors that can have a very, very different kind of outcome. What Kimberly Crenshaw shows in quite a convincing way by using a lawsuit about workers at a factory in Michigan, I believe, in the General Motors factory, is that that factory had refused to hire black men for a while, and then it started hiring them, and it had refused to hire white women for a while, and then it started hiring them, but it didn't start to hire any black women until much later.

And when there was a recession, they used a first-in-first-out system, and so they fired all of the black women that were there. And when they sued, saying, hey, because of this past discrimination, we now have these disadvantages that goes against civil rights legislation, the judge said, well, the only protected categories we have

is women or black people. Women aren't being discriminated against. Black people aren't being discriminated against. Black people aren't being discriminated against. So tough luck. And Crenshaw rightly says, well, that's an affront to our sense of justice. You know, the disadvantages that black women experience

aren't just a sum of what white women experience or what black women experience. In this particular case, they were differently situated and the kind of disadvantage they suffered because of that interaction effect or because of that intersectionality goes beyond that. That I think is a helpful concept that helped to redress some problem in America, a real problem in American law. Since then, people have sort of run with that concept in two ways that I think are much more troubling.

The first is that intersectionality has now come to merge with the theory of standpoint epistemology to say, look, if you stand at a different intersection of identities than I do, you know, if you're a Latina woman, I'm a Jewish guy, we really can't understand each other. And because we really can't understand each other, rather than trying to have conversation and building solidarity with each other on that basis, I just have to defer to your political claims, right? Don't even talk to me about those things. You're never going to understand me, just defer to my point of view. And that I think is a very damaging political idea. I mean, in some contexts, intersectionality has come to mean that because all these different forms of oppression are supposedly related, in order to be in good standing and fighting against one of those ideas,

you have to fight against all of those ideas at the same time. And so in order to be allowed to join a feminist group, you also have to take on a particular kind of view about racism and a particular kind of view about the Israel-Palestine conflict and a particular kind of view about racism and a particular kind of view about the Israel-Palestine conflict and a particular kind of view about trans issues. So the litmus test for joining these organizations becomes really high. And if you disagree with any one of those topics, you sort of get run out. Neither of those ideas are what Crenshaw's sort of seminal articles would have defined as intersectionality, but that is what has become

of that term in public discourse. And so just to go over very quickly, you know, you take the six or seven themes together, and that really gets you the identity synthesis, rejection of truth in Foucault, the politicized form of discourse analysis in Said, the embrace of strategic essentialism in Spivak, the rejection of universalism of the civil rights movement's ideology of integration, and the belief in the permanence of racism and other forms of bigotry in Bell. And then finally, these two interpretations of intersectionality as we won't really understand each other if we're in different intersections of identity, and therefore to fight against oppression, I can't just be fighting against the cause that I care about. I have to sign up to your views, your ideas about what it is to fight against

oppression as well. Yeah, it's been interesting to notice the places where the intersectional arithmetic doesn't quite work out, and this has been especially clear on trans issues, where the very concept of trans rights has been in tension with gay rights and the rights of women in some obvious ways and ways that are still taboo to talk about. Let's bring a couple of other terms here into the conversation and define them, or at least describe how you think about them. How do you think about white privilege and the related concept of structural or systemic or institutional racism? or institutional racism? Yeah, so I think that some of those concepts can be useful or helpful on specific contexts if they coexist with older concepts. And if you don't become sort of

monomaniacal in seeing everything in the world through the prism that you prefer, right? So let's take a concept like structural racism. There certainly are societies where some form of structural racism persists, though it's certainly true for much of American history, and in some sense it continues to be true today. The core of that idea is that one kind of form of racism, of racist discrimination, is a set of first personal beliefs about the evil or the inferiority of some other group. To say that there's something bad about homosexuals, for example.

We think they're immoral and they should be shunned in society, right? But then you might have forms of structural homophobia in our society, where perhaps most people no longer are homophobic in that way. But, you know, do you want to be seen with a friend who's gay, and perhaps people think that you're gay? You know, perhaps that takes a little bit of courage, and a lot of people don't have that courage. When I was in high school, I think that was still probably the case in the context of my high school, for example. Or perhaps there's, you know, to advance at work, you really have to be able to bring a partner, and you're not welcome to bring a same-sex partner. And so even for nobody in your particular workplace might hate gay people, that's going to make it harder for you to advance, right? So I think it's helpful to say, hey, not all forms of bigotry have to have this first personal, I hate these people element. It can adhere in those kind of structures.

The problem becomes when two things happen. The first is that you insist on seeing every social ill through the prism of identity, even when something else is going on. In France, I think often people only see social class, and they don't realize that some of the seeming inequalities of social class are actually driven by race. In America, many social scientists publish articles in which they only control for race and not for social class. And so then you're going to say that something is caused by structural racism, which might actually, in part, be caused by those kind of class boundaries. And then the other problem becomes when you don't want to enrich the older concept with a new

concept, but you want to supplant it. So you say, hey, the only kind of racism that exists is structural. We don't have to care at all about people's first personal views. And so a black person cannot be racist against a Jewish person. Because structurally Jewish people have supposedly more power in the United States than black people. And so if you have somebody who's black going on a killing spree of Orthodox Jews, it happened in Jersey City, that cannot be racist. You're making a misunderstanding if you think that's racist, because only structural racism is true racism. Much of the media class has embraced that definition of racism and then simply becomes incapable of explaining the motivations of somebody

like that murderer in Jersey City becomes incapable. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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