Making Sense with Sam Harris - #353 — Race & Reason

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Coleman Hughes about race, racism, and social justice. They discuss the ideal of "color blindness," race and crime, Coleman's experience at TED, LatinX, the confusion of the elites, Ibram X. Kendi, affirmative action, class differences, poverty, single-parent families, the death of George Floyd and the trial of Derek Chauvin, mob rule, Candace Owens, Christopher Rufo, guilt by association, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow, immigrant communities, evidence of discrimination, Martin Luther King Jr., 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, a little housekeeping here. How shall I put this? Well, for those of you who heard my previous episode with Rory Stewart, this might come as a bit of a surprise. I thought that was a great conversation, as did many of you. As did really everyone, as far as I can tell.

I'll remind you, Rory is a fascinating person who spent something like 20 months walking across the Middle East and wrote a book about his travels in Afghanistan in particular. He has wide experience in the Muslim world, served in Iraq for the British civil service. And we talked about many things in this podcast and touched on my concerns about jihadism fairly briefly. We spoke for about an hour and 20 minutes, and maybe it was 20 minutes of that conversation that we focused on jihadism. The general focus was on just the failures of nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq and the unraveling of the rules-based international order. We spoke about Brexit and how odious partisan politics have become. There were many other topics. And what was notable is that we basically agreed about everything except we had a clear difference of emphasis.

I tend to emphasize the ideological origins of certain types of violence. I'm very concerned about extreme religious beliefs and how they're motivating. And yet, of course, I acknowledge that there are other sources of human conflict, tribalism, nationalism, sociopathy, etc. And in the context of our conversation, Rory was emphasizing the importance of nationalism, which he thinks is a bigger variable, even in the history of our conflicts in the Muslim world. Now Now that is certainly debatable, but in our conversation, he wasn't denying the importance of religious ideology, and I wasn't denying the importance of nationalism. If we were disagreeing at all, it was simply a matter of how much we weighted each of those variables. So anyway, I thought it was a great conversation, but someone surfaced

some remarks that Rory made on his own podcast later that week. Rory is speaking here with Humza Yousaf, who is a Muslim Scottish politician who served as First Minister of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish National Party. And I'm otherwise unfamiliar with Humza, but you'll hear some of his remarks for context. One of the things that I've noticed recently, particularly since October the 7th, is an increase in people making stereotypical comments about Muslims. I mean, I just did an interview with an American podcast guy called Sam Harris, who was hammering me for nearly an hour saying, yes, but surely Rory, you have to admit there's a connection between Muslims and suicide bombers and Muslims and terrorists. He just wouldn't let it go.

And I wondered, is that something that you've experienced? And is it something that's getting better, getting worse? How does our society deal with it? I think it's getting worse. Maybe it comes in and and it maybe comes in in cycles but i look i remember for me 9-11 was such a seminal moment for me and that makes it a bit kind of selfish given you know thousands of miles away and affected and killed so many thousands of americans but for me it was a day i'll always remember when 9-11

took place on a tuesday i think and coming back from school and school bus home you know radio was on you can kind of hear what was going on the driver was telling us to shut up because he was trying to listen to to what was going on went home and saw the scenes as you guys would have seen a terrible tragic and terror attack that took place and then the next day i remember going to school and sitting in form class and you know the same two guys i used to sit beside every single morning and we'd talk about the things that teenage boys talk about mainly in my case Celtic you know football club I loved and they were bombarding me not with any maliciousness just bombarding me with questions I had no idea the answer to you know why do Muslims hate America do you know who was behind it what was it all about I have a clue right and so uh

for me and then and then of course all the Islamophobia that followed post 9-11. But I have to say my position as First Minister, and even perhaps before then, there is definitely still a deep-rooted systemic and endemic Islamophobia in this country. And Scotland is absolutely not immune to that. in this country. And Scotland is absolutely not immune to that. What is really disappointing about this is that there's really no way around the fact that Rory is painting me as a bigot here, or at least somebody whose politics and ethics are compromised by a lack of understanding about what's really going on in the Muslim world. I don't think I'm being especially thin-skinned to perceive this as defamatory in some sense.

One of the reasons why I bring this up is that I looked on Reddit where this got surfaced, and many people are now speculating that our conversation must have gone on for much longer than is indicated by the audio that I aired. I must have been badgering him for quite some time and then presented an abbreviated version of our conversation. That's not what happened at all. So you listen to our conversation, you are hearing every word we spoke to one another, with the exception of possibly some sidebar conversation about setting up our microphones or something that would cut from every interview. Anyway, I've since reached out to Rory, and he was quite gracious and, I think, embarrassed. He's agreed to come back on the podcast and do a post-mortem on this. I'm pretty sure I know what happened here, and I'm reasonably confident we can have a conversation that will be useful and, who knows, maybe even fun. So you can look for that in the coming weeks. As for other misunderstandings and misrepresentations

that seem very unlikely to be rectified through conversation, someone pointed out another one of those to me this week. Apparently, my former friend Elon Musk is bashing me again on the social media platform that he owns, X, on the basis of yet another clip of a podcast appearance of mine that has been produced by yet another right-wing troll. This is what seems to happen every time now. I go on someone else's podcast. People look for clips that can be exported from that appearance that are misleading as to what I believe and what I was saying in context. Sometimes, as in this case, it's pretty clear the clip isn't even saying what they claim it is,

but they have titled their post something profoundly misleading. In any case, there was a clip from my appearance on the David Pakman show where I seemed to be talking about the crisis at the southern border of the U.S. and worrying that someone like Tucker Carlson could exaggerate the gravity of the problem and thereby undermine Biden's chances of being re-elected. And the whole thing got framed as me being skeptical that there was even a problem at the southern border. Of course, the chaos there is now a major concern of everyone right of center and many of us left of center. So Elon's response to this clip in front of millions of people was that Sam Harris's mind has turned to goo. Sam Harris's mind has turned to goo. Now, the irony here is that I think Elon and I have exactly the same view of the southern border. I view it as a political and social emergency and a scandal,

and I have long been concerned that this is the issue that will deliver us a second Trump presidency. So I am not at all inclined to minimize the significance of the problem there. However, in this case, I'm actually grateful for this instance of misrepresentation because it has finally convinced me that I can no longer care about this sort of thing. It's now so clear that social media has become a hallucination machine. There's no way to prevent this. No one is taking the time to find out what was really said in context. There's just nothing to respond to here. context there's just nothing to respond to here so um i suppose this is an epiphany i could have had and perhaps should have had many years ago because i've been complaining for 20 years about people misrepresenting my views even before the advent of social media it's the thing that has driven me most crazy, really. But in this case, the misrepresentation is so ridiculous, because again, Elon and I actually agree about what's happening at the

southern border, that something has snapped for me, and I just simply can't care about this anymore. And I just simply can't care about this anymore. It's quite a relief. So my pledge to you and to myself is that I'm not going to complain about this anymore. I'm not going to notice this sort of thing anymore. And the truth is, I think this epiphany should extend to what just happened with Rory as well. which has happened with Rory as well. The reason for me to do a podcast with Rory about this is I think his confusion here is so well subscribed, and he is or should be so knowledgeable about the terrain here.

This is somebody who knows much more about the Muslim world in many respects than I do. There's no question about that. So I just didn't want to leave it untouched because if there's any possibility of someone revealing my ignorance about anything relevant here, surely it's somebody like Rory who could do that. And given how much I have focused on Islam in the past, and given how culpable I feel it is for so many of the world's problems, it would seem irresponsible for me not to revisit this topic with Rory. But in general, I think even there, I should forget about misrepresentations and misunderstandings. We are now just careening into a world of

deep fakes and the most malignant distortions of everyone's public persona. So now I think I should just reconcile myself to the idea that anyone who cares about what I think will listen to what I say in one of my own channels at some appropriate length. And beyond that, there's nothing I can do. In fact, another example just crossed my desk, and this proves that there's basically nothing I can do to successfully take other people's feet out of my mouth. I saw a clip of Konstantin Kissin and Tom Bilyeu in conversation on Tom's podcast about me. And they were talking about my cancellation, effectively, on the right, and my views about Trump and COVID. And the amazing thing is, I've been on both of their podcasts largely for the purpose of clarifying my views about Trump and COVID.

And both of them are totally confused about what I think on both of those topics. I mean, these are both very smart guys who are clearly well disposed toward me. I like them and they like me. And they're still completely confused about what I think on these two topics. And I have spent hours on each of their podcasts clarifying what I think. It is fucking hopeless. I'm embarrassed that it has taken me this long to realize it, but I mean, this is now my new religion. I simply cannot care what other people

think I think. I just have to put my stuff out there and move on. And that's what I will be doing on this podcast. Okay, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Coleman Hughes. Coleman is a writer and podcast host and musician. He's written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The Spectator, City Journal, and elsewhere. He's currently a contributing writer at the Free Press and an analyst for CNN. He also has a Substack newsletter titled Coleman's Corner and a podcast, Conversations with Coleman, and most relevantly, a new book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America.

The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America. And that is the topic of today's conversation. We talk about race and racism. We discuss the ideal of colorblindness and what that means. Race and crime, Coleman's experience at TED, which you heard me discuss previously with Chris Anderson. The concept of Latinx, the concept of Latinx, the confusion of the elites,

Ibram X. Kendi, affirmative action, class differences, poverty, single-parent families, the death of George Floyd and the trial of Derek Chauvin, Candace Owens, Christopher Ruffo,

guilt by association, John McWhorter, Glenn Lowry, reparationsations for Slavery and Jim Crow, The Difference Between Various Immigrant Communities, Evidence of Discrimination, The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., and other topics. As always, it was great to speak with Coleman, and now I bring you Coleman Hughes. Coleman, and now I bring you Coleman Hughes. I am here with Coleman Hughes. Coleman, thanks for joining me again. Great to be on again.

So you have a new book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America. And I must sheepishly confess that I have not read your book, though I appear to have blurbed it. Just for the record here, I had to declare blurb bankruptcy some years ago. And so I don't blurb books anymore, but occasionally I can blurb the writer of that book, which is what I did in your case. But normally I would have read the book before we do a podcast, but I didn't get a physical copy. I blame no one for this but the universe. And I know you sent me a PDF, but I spend so much time in front of screens, I just cannot read a book as a PDF. So the advantage to this is that there is a silver lining.

We can really take it from the top, and you can roll out your argument for a naive listener, which I'll pretend to be, because you and I have talked about these issues before and obviously we've thought a lot about them. But every listener to this podcast knows that I am a huge Coleman Hughes fan. I've made no secret of that. And I think in my blurb for the book, I say something about, it's like you're a person from the future. You're the person who's come back from the future and borne witness to what a sane future with respect to the variable of race actually looks like. And that's always how you've seemed to me. So let's just jump in. What is your basic argument in the book? Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for breaking your rule on blurbs for me. I'm honored. And, you know, in any event, a book is really just an occasion to talk about the topic in many ways.

which I define as treating people without regard to race, really making your best effort to treat the individuals in your lives without regard to their race when it matters, and to get race as a category out of public policy, to get rid of public policies that use race as a factor in determining how to distribute goods, services, aid, and so forth. And the second half of that is more controversial for people than the first half. And the reason this idea needs rescuing at all, because it was once the consensus view of American liberals, There was once the consensus view of American liberals, at least there was a brief moment in the 60s on the ringing rhetoric of Martin Luther King and the spirit of the civil rights movement, where enough people that mattered came together and agreed that colorblindness was the goal. And so many people agreed on it at that point that you even had a book like Black

Power, which was the manifesto of the movement by the same name in the late 60s, even acknowledged as a caveat that colorblindness was the ultimate goal worth pursuing and just disagreed on how we get there. In the intervening years, you've seen more and more people actually just abandon colorblindness even as an ultimate goal to the point where when I set out to do research for this book just as a test, I googled colorblindness race so as to distinguish it from the visual condition. And nine out of 10 articles I got were articles telling me why colorblindness is wrong. It's, in the worst case, a Trojan horse for white supremacy, or in the best case, naive.

And the 10th article was a Wikipedia page. So something has happened in 50 years where the view that colorblindness is wrong and evil, which used to be confined to critical race theory, has become sort of the norm on the left. And to be fair, I think proponents of the idea of colorblindness have made themselves an easy target with the phrase, quote, I don't see color, which is really a common refrain and a common point of mockery among the critics of color blindness, because it's obviously not true. We do see color, we all see color. And at a deeper level, we, at least adults, we all see color. I think, you know, there are actually kids or people from

other cultures can be something close to colorblind in the ways that matter, but most American adults are not colorblind. When I walk into a room, you notice that I'm not white. When you, Sam, walk into a room, people notice that you are. What's more, we are all probably capable of racial bias. Clever psychologists can put us in experiments and show us, in some cases, to be racially biased. And in situations where race strongly correlates with something that matters, I think almost all of us are capable of racial bias. So that's not what I mean when I say colorblindness, and I don't think it's what people should

mean when they say colorblindness, and I don't think it's what people should mean when they say colorblindness. So I think we should abandon this misleading phrase that's too easy of a target, we don't see color, and instead say what we mean, which is I try my best to treat people without regard to race in my personal life, and I think race should be left out of public policy. That's the basic thesis of the book. Yeah, well, maybe we can cycle on that last point again, because I think it's interesting psychologically and ethically, because I'm definitely guilty of saying something close to I don't see color or that I aspire to not see color or something like that, or I think

we shouldn't see color. But it's not a matter of seeing so much as it is caring about, right? It's like the analogy I keep using to the consternation of many of my progressive critics is to hair color or to eye color. Now, of course, I see hair color and I see eye color, but they're not politically or ethically salient, really, ever, right? So I just simply don't care how many blondes did or didn't get into Harvard this year. And I don't think we as a society should care.

And the only reason why we would care is if we had a history of discrimination against blonde people, and we were tracking that because there was some historical injustice that we felt we need to rectify. And of course, that is the case with skin color. But when I imagine a truly sane future, which, again, you appear to inhabit for me, I imagine a future where skin color has become like hair color or eye color, which is to say that it's an obvious surface feature around which people differ, but those differences simply don't matter.

Even if we celebrate them, they don't matter. I mean, there are people who have especially beautiful hair or eyes, and the color is part of that. And we might even talk about how amazing their hair and eyes look. And you can say the same thing for a person's skin, right? I mean, there are people who have just astonishing skin, you know, black or white or, you know, other. And it could be the actual topic of conversation, but it has no political or ethical weight. And it would be insane to think that it should. weight, and it would be insane to think that it should. And so that's the colorblindness I would advocate is something around that by analogy to hair color and eye color. Is there anything about that that strikes you as wrong? So you gave a caveat that, you know, unless we had a history of discrimination against a particular group of people. I think that I have the same

caveat in my book, and we can talk about sort of what my vision for addressing that looks like. So I would echo that caveat, and I would add one more. Unlike the case in eye color or hair color, there are cultural differences that track racial groups. We live in a multicultural society, multicultural country, which if anything means that there are multiple cultures. So I would consider Black Americans, for example, to be a subculture of Americans, which are a broader culture. And in my effort and desire to be colorblind, right, to support colorblindness both at the level of public policy and in my personal life, I don't think that that requires me to be cultureblind in the sense that, say, you are a Black person that's grown up your

whole life very attached to Black culture. You love the food that Black people cook. You love the movies that Black people make. You love the music that comes culturally from Black Americans. And you have a special attachment to it that you don't quite have to every other culture, that you don't have to, say, Serbian culture. Am I telling you that you can't feel that attachment or that you can't even preferentially consume and be among the culture that is familiar to you? Absolutely not. And that's not what I mean by colorblindness. What I picture is kind of a firewall between that kind of cultural affinity and our conversations about public policy and ethics and right and wrong. When we're talking about right and wrong, improving human flourishing, crafting

public policy, one leaves those things to the extent you can at the door. And I say that because it's a common objection to the colorblindness argument. Yeah, I would echo that. I mean, I have a special attachment to Indian culture, for instance. I'm a huge fan of it, notwithstanding all the insanity that one can find in India. But it's my favorite food. It's among my favorite music. I've spent a fair amount of time there. my favorite music. It's just, I've spent a fair amount of time there. I love so much about it. And I would never assume anyone, much less Indians, should give that up, right? So it's that part of the diversity assertion that diversity makes everything better is I fully agree with. I want great Indian restaurants in every city in America, and I rely on Indian immigrants to provide those

restaurants for the most part. And so it is with so much else we all love to one or another degree about cultural difference. So yeah, so colorblindness of the sort that we're indicating by shorthand with that phrase can fully embrace a kind of xenophile relationship to cultural diversity. I mean, but it's a little bit like where this tips over into identity politics, I think can be understood by analogy to what it is to be a sports fan. There are a lot of people who really love sports. They become huge fans of one team or one athlete or another. And all of that is incredibly fun and amusing and improves life until it tips over

into a kind of fanaticism that is really toxic. So toxic that you have, you know, soccer players who, in the worst case, commit an own goal in a big match and they wind up getting murdered by their fans, you know, back in, you know, Latin America or somewhere that really cares too much about that particular sport. It's hard to specify with a bright line, but there is clearly a line between the fun of diversity and the still caring about difference that adds spice to life, and tipping over into political factionalism that is obviously distorting our politics and making it morally unworkable. So I don't know if you like that analogy or not, but that's another shortcut I have in thinking about this issue. No, actually, in my book, I talk a little bit about sports too. There is a difference between

two close friends even making racial jokes about one another that both find funny but neither take seriously. And on the other hand, two people coming to blows in a conversation because people of your race could never understand me. Those are both instances of quote-unquote caring about race in the abstract, but we know the difference between them when we see them. One is actually a healthy expression, a kind of release valve for the racial differences we all notice. And one, as your analogy says, it carries what can be benign to an unhealthy extreme. Now, my book, I talk about a similar racial analogy when I bring up this video that Morgan

Freeman famously participated in with Mike Wallace, I'm sure that you've seen it. I'm sure many people have seen it. Yeah. Where Morgan Freeman essentially says, look, this is how we're going to get past race. I'm going to stop calling you a white man, and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I'm going to call you Mike, and you're going to call me Morgan.

And it's a very powerful interview if you haven't seen it. But what it puts forth is kind of a testable hypothesis in a way. If we want fewer and fewer racist thoughts and feelings and toxic race-based thoughts and feelings to abound in our society. Should we talk about race more and more, or should we talk about race less and less? And by analogy, I imagine that, say for whatever reason, we have a goal of reducing the amount of animosity between New York Yankee fans and Boston Red Sox fans, which is a very tall task. Let's say for whatever reason we want to accomplish this. Would the thing to do be to raise people from age zero to care about baseball as much as possible, right? Let's say we educate

every child about the rules of baseball in kindergarten. We substitute every exercise in gym that used to be, say, dodgeball or kickball, and we make it baseball every time. And we just crank up to 12 the amount that people know about and care about baseball. about and care about baseball. Would this have the effect of amplifying the amount of animosity between New York fans and Boston fans? Or would it tamp down on it because everyone is so educated about baseball? It's at least not obvious to me, is what I'm saying. It's not obvious to me that the way towards better race relations between races of people is to raise the salience of racial identity from as young an age as possible. And this has been the implicit and at times explicit belief of progressive race ideas.

I'm thinking of Robin DiAngelo, her book White Fragility. I'm thinking of just this past week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a school in San Francisco has been paying an organization called Woke Kindergarten to come into a school of mostly Spanish-speaking kids and teach them about white supremacy as their math and reading scores have declined. supremacy as their math and reading scores have declined. So it's not obvious to me that Morgan Freeman is wrong in that we should dial down our somewhat obsessive talk about racial identity and sort of confine it to the real racism. I have no problem and am strongly in favor of talking about real racism that exists. And I give examples in my book. But I think a lot of what we end up talking about when we talk about race are either fake examples of racism or just kind of toxic race-based discussion that sort of stereotypes

whole groups of people and does not deal with actual examples of racism. Yeah, well, I want to get into some of those issues and the difference between race and class and how we should think about dealing with inequality in our society, even inequality that is highly correlated with race still. But what about those cases, just to close the loop on colorblindness as a goal, what about the inconvenient cases where one's awareness of racial difference is made all too rational because of different base rate effects with respect to crime and other variables, right? So there are definitely situations where a person's race is a relevant piece of information in judging whether or not something anomalous and potentially dangerous is likely to happen, right? I mean, this is a, it lands one way when you have a white guy like me saying that it landed differently when Jesse Jackson, I don't know when this was, this might've been in the 90s, somewhere around the peak of crime in America.

He said, you know what, I forget what context he was in, but he said to some audience, I'll tell you what I'm sick of. I'm sick of walking down the street at night, hearing footsteps behind me, turning and seeing that it's a white guy and feeling relief. And that was an all too honest confession of a fairly horrific disparity in the rate of crime in the black versus white community. And in case people are not in touch with these statistics, this is still true, although in the 90s, this was worse. And most of this crime is, you know, most crime is intra-racial. I mean, most black people are victimized by other black people. Most white people are victimized by other white people. There's some differences there that are worth talking about, but still, it's mostly a matter of, I mean, crime in the black community is mostly black-on-black

crime, and it certainly was then. What do you do with the inconvenient fact that it is, in fact, true that in certain situations, just, you know, you see black people in a place where you know there are not that many black people living and you know that most crime in that, you know, now I'm not talking about violent crime so much as other crime, you know that most crime is in fact committed by black people in those, in that part of the city. It suddenly becomes relevant that you're seeing four black guys in a car driving on a street they almost certainly don't live on. And this is true in many major cities in America. And it's relevant for the police eye view of that situation, right? And this is profiling by another name. And conversely, it would be relevant to see, you know, four white guys with shaved heads in a parking lot outside a black church,

right? Like you would immediately wonder, what are those guys doing here? And you wouldn't be insane to wonder that given the pattern of criminality we know exists in certain contexts. So I just, I give you that none too softball to deal with. Take my feet out of my mouth. Okay. So look, I've lived in New York City for nine years now, and I've lived in many different neighborhoods, some less nice than others. I check the NYPD statistics as a matter of professional responsibility and someone who thinks and talks about these issues. And I also take, I ride the subway, I have eyes. Like I said, a commitment to colorblindness doesn't mean that I don't see race. It doesn't mean I don't notice patterns. And when there are patterns as strong as some of the racial crime patterns are in many American

cities, it is inevitable that your brain is going to recognize those patterns whether or not you want it to. Now, some people are more or less honest about this. I think you've chosen the path of being honest about this in line with your overall position on lying. Other people choose the path of denying the facts, which is understandable given how uncomfortable the facts are. And then a third group of people takes the route of focusing monomaniacally on those facts and posting nothing but videos of Black people committing crime on Twitter. That latter path, I think, is toxic and needlessly divisive. The path of simply not talking about it, while it might be right at Thanksgiving dinner, I don't think that it's

right as a general orientation for our public dinner, I don't think that it's right as a general orientation for our public conversation about race. I think that journalists have to be able to look at facts. So in New York City, basically the entire time that I've lived here, it has been the case that over 90% of shootings are committed by Blacks and Hispanics. 95% in some years. So what is it like to be a New York City cop that responds to these shootings? By the way, the majority of such cops are themselves of color. What that experience is like is, if it isn't clear from the first month of your being a New York City cop, it is clear by the first three or four months that almost every time you get a call about a shooting,

a 911 call, you'll make money all day betting that the person was not white or not Asian. That is an impossible fact not to notice, even for someone as committed to the end goal of colorblindness as one could possibly be. Now, I don't view that as refuting the goal of colorblindness in general. I view that as having two implications. One is it shows you how wrong things have to go for the general rule of thumb of colorblindness to be violated. You really have to be in situations where violence and life and death and catching felons, where the stakes are that high, as opposed to, say, meeting a friend of a friend for the first

time in a coffee shop, which is how most of us, I think, listening to this are lucky enough to live most of our lives in lower-stakes situations where there's no need to violate the principle of colorblindness. And then secondly, it impresses upon me the urgency of actually addressing crime and getting crime under control, of not letting crime spike. I can tell you every single Black person I know that lived in New York City in the 80s or 90s says that as a Black man in that time, you couldn't catch a cab. But nowadays, it's gotten better. time, you couldn't catch a cab. But nowadays, it's gotten better. The other thing everyone who's lived in New York City says is that crime was terrible in the 90s. Everyone got mugged and

carried muggers' money around. And then Giuliani came and it just all went away. My strong suspicion is that those two things are not correlated. In other words, if we care about reducing racism against Black people, there is almost no better way to do that than to actually address crime. Because when crime comes down, the proverbial cab driver and cop and so forth who are in those high-stakes situations where they can't help but discriminate, there will be less of an urge for them to do that. So you know, the hard example here just impresses upon me not the fact that colorblindness should

be jettisoned, but the fact that A, we should really pay attention to crime as a component of fighting racism, and impresses upon me how high the stakes have to be in order for us to jettison it in the first place. Well, finally, on the topic of colorblindness, I know you on your own podcast and elsewhere have done a fairly full postmortem on your experience at TED, where you gave a talk on the topic of colorblindness and received a fair amount of pushback. And I think you probably heard my conversation with Chris Anderson about that. So I don't know how much you want to be debriefed on your experience here.

I mean, we can touch it as fully or as superficially as you want. But, you know, I didn't go so deep with Chris apart from just exposing what seemed to me to be the core of the issue, which he more or less admitted, which he said was a fairly amazing disclosure. He didn't seem to treat it with the astonishment that I think it deserves, which is when he admitted that you could never have been invited to TED just a few short years ago, right? Which is tantamount to saying that, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. could not have given a TED Talk a few years ago, given the level of, you know, ideological capture of the organization along the lines of that we're talking about. Feel free to say anything you want about your experience or my conversation with Chris, but you were talking to a very high status audience about the virtues of maintaining colorblindness as the goal of our racial politics. And it provoked a

fairly hysterical response, which was really, in my view, pathological on its face. It doesn't testify to a mere difference of opinion on these issues. It testifies to a kind of brokenness of certain people and a certain cultural attitude, which is, as I think I told Chris, you gave one of the most anodyne talks imaginable. Not anodyne as in boring, but just anodyne as in non-threatening, given your thesis. And yet people perceived it to have really precipitated a kind of moral emergency in the room when you gave it. Yeah. So if people want the detailed version, they can read my account of it at the free press. I'll just make a few comments. One, yeah, I agree with you. It was anodyne and it was non-threatening and I was non-threatening and I was friendly had a conversation and hugged it out with one of the people that was upset with the TED Talk afterward because I just, for whatever reason, I have a lot of patience for people that are emotionally upset by what I say. And so I was willing to go every extra mile to get people to understand that I wasn't quote-unquote attacking their existence. But there were some people at TED, a very small minority,

it should be said, that have the philosophy of safetyism wherein what I was saying wasn't just something they strongly disagreed with, it made them feel quote-unquote unsafe. And once something makes you feel unsafe, then I have to be removed essentially, right? It's a very powerful bargaining tactic if you're an employee because then there's like implications for hostile workplace environment and things like that, when really all I did was, you know, gently give my perspective that, you know, 98% of the people in the room, you know, went down pretty smooth with them. People of all colors, by the way, people were coming up to me afterwards, not just white people as the stereotype might,

you might think, but black people, Hispanic people, and so forth. But just to give that, just to remind people the context here, it is pretty amazing for Chris to have told me that you could not have been invited a couple of years prior. You know, his perception of the organization and perhaps his misperception of his audience suggested to him that you were an edgy speaker and really all you were arguing for was, as you said at the top here, what was the moral consensus view during the civil rights movement. Yes, that's true. I mean, right down to Martin Luther King's recommendation in his book, Why We Can't Wait, for a broad class-based anti-poverty program that would benefit the black and white poor alike. So I was really just giving a pretty straightforward Martin Luther King updated for the 21st century. It was nothing new, nothing original, just something I feel passionate about, and I think people have forgotten. And when I agree with him, I actually take it for granted

as almost obvious that I couldn't have given that talk two years ago, for instance, because the so-called racial reckoning around the summer of 2020 and its aftermath was still reverberating too strongly through elite institutions, I would have been received as just even further outside the realm of acceptable opinion. But I think this underscores the huge difference between the elite and the non-elite in general. I think most non-elites that listen to that TED Talk, I appreciate you saying it's not boring, but I think many would have found it boring because it's common sense. That's right. And it's only not common sense to the kinds of people that think Latinx is what Hispanic people want to

be called. And I use that example, I should flesh it out a little bit more, because it encapsulates the divide between the elite and the non-elite better than any other single issue, I think. I'm half Puerto Rican and grew up spending a lot of time with the Puerto Rican half of my family, many of whom didn't speak English in the older generation. And so when around 2014 and 2015, I got to college and I started seeing this term Latinx, it was very bizarre because I'd never heard it before. And I figured having grown up constantly around my Puerto Rican family members, I'd have heard of it if it were in use. And then secondly, it just seemed like a bizarre anglicization because Spanish doesn't actually operate in a way that makes a word like Latinx even make sense, theoretically.

So when people started using it at Columbia, most of whom had no Hispanic family, this struck me as very odd, intuitively, because in that particular case, I was fairly in touch with how a working-class Hispanic person would speak. Now, when Pew finally did research on this and found that some 96%, 95% or 6%, if memory serves, of Hispanic people either had never heard of the word or didn't like it, that struck me as intuitively obvious. Now, Latinx is an issue because I happen to have that background. I happen to have intuitions that were more in line with reality. But in most other ways, I could be as clueless and elite as anyone. I grew up upper middle class. I went from a very nice public school to a very nice private school to Juilliard and then Columbia University. I'm as

elite virtually as anyone could be on most issues. And to sit back and reflect on how thick the bubble of eliteness can be, it's like you can pierce it 20 times and it can still have an effect in terms of just the difference between the norms and culture of elites and the norms and culture of everyone else. And the TED example is just another example of that. What I said is only controversial to a group of people who have really, I think, forgotten or don't work hard enough to understand how unique and elite their set of values are. I mean, I should just say, if it wasn't obvious, it was certainly obvious in my conversation with Chris,

but I should make it obvious here. I really greatly admire Chris, but I've always viewed him as a kind of canary in the coal mine for these kinds of issues. I mean, I think I told him, I viewed him as someone who was a bit of a hostage of his organization and suffering from, you know, suffering from by turns, you know, Stockholm syndrome or, you know, some other condition where he can't quite

recognize how aberrant the elites have become on certain issues. And, you know, I say this as someone who considers himself embedded very much in that same bubble with you and Chris and the very people who were reacting badly to your talk. I've run into this issue with Chris around issues around radical Islam and the allegations of Islamophobia, etc. And so we've gone around that track a bunch. And I just think we have to be honest about what's really happening in the world and honest about how clear the ethical and political goals are or should be. And I think here's a landmark we really shouldn't lose sight of. And yet certain people are working to guide us in a very different direction. I mean, the landmark is, as MLK had it and as you have dusted it off, getting to a world

where superficial differences simply don't matter and we care about the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin, to use MLK's line. That just seems so obviously good. to use MLK's line. That just seems so obviously good. And yet many people are arguing, explicitly arguing that that's a false goal. It's not just that there's a different way to reach that goal. I do take it as pretty much actually absurd to think that we're going to care more and more about race as a way of caring less and less about it, as you pointed out. But, you know, we have a few characters who are quite celebrated in elitist circles at places like TED or at, you know, the Aspen Ideas Festival. And I think none has been as damaging to the conversation,

from my point of view, as Ibram X. Kendi. I know you have offered to debate him. Has he ever responded to those offers to debate? No, he hasn't. He said in a few of his lectures that I've misrepresented his views. And so a debate between us would be him constantly And so a debate between us would be him constantly sort of correcting my straw man. But to my knowledge, he's never given an example of me misrepresenting his views. And I would hope a debate would be a great forum for him to make clear what my misrepresentation alleged. But I think I just want to pick up a little bit on what you said about Chris too. And I want to make that clear too, because I like Chris. I continue to like Chris.

I think he is in a tough position, it seems, maybe straddling between values he seems to share with me and the reality of his employees' feelings. Not sure how I would navigate that, and I'm not in charge of a big organization like that. Frankly, I think that my TED debacle unleashed a wave of repressed anger at TED among people that used to love TED, but for one or another reason, that used to love Ted, but for one or another reason, because of some aspect of woke capture, either don't go to Ted anymore or just don't like it anymore. And I think my debacle became released pent-up anger of years. And I think that was quite unpleasant, but it can also be an opportunity for him to course correct. And I know he's invited Barry Weiss and Bill Ackman and other people that might upset the same kinds of people that were upset with me. I think a bunch of TED fellows have resigned

because of those invitations. Which might be a good thing. But again, it's worth reiterating, Which might be a good thing. But again, it's worth reiterating. Literally, high 90 percentile of the audience appeared to be totally fine. Whether or not they agreed with everything I said, they were not triggered. Ted's audience is actually way more open to, I think, all of these ideas than they might be stereotyped by people unfamiliar. It's really the heckler's veto. It's a very small percentage of people that punch above their weight and ought to be ignored. So where does DEI come into this? I'm not sure anyone listening to this podcast thinks the ideological capture of our institutions has been exaggerated anymore. advocating for genocide against the Jews, while having just merely weeks and months prior defenestrated people for not admiring DEI policies or admitting that there are only two biological

sexes, etc. So we know that there's a fair amount of moral confusion in our universities and that DEI has something to do with it. But it was up until that moment, it was still very common to hear that all this concern about wokeism or identitarian moral confusion or DEI overreach, all of this, it's just pure Republican hyperbole, right? It's just not a problem. It's just, it's exaggerated. And it's, I'm not detecting that anymore. So, I mean, perhaps you have a better sense of if there are any shades of skepticism on that point still remaining. What's your sense of what DEI has done? And do you think the pendulum is in the process of swinging back

across all of our institutions? And now I'm thinking of major corporations and universities and media properties. And where do you think it should swing back to? Yeah, so the original idea and the benign idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The idea that, say, someone like my dad, a black man in corporate America, would have meant by DEI in, say, the 90s is like, say you're a boss of a company who happens to be white. 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. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program.

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