Making Sense with Sam Harris - #42 — Racism and Violence in America

Episode Date: August 9, 2016

Sam Harris talks to economist Glenn C. Loury about racism, police violence, the Black Lives Matter movement, and related 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. 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. Today I'll be speaking with Glenn Lowry. Glenn is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. He's taught previously at Boston and Harvard and Northwestern and the University of Michigan. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Northwest mathematics from Northwestern and a PhD in economics from MIT. He's a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former Guggenheim

Fellowship recipient. He has published widely and has written several books that I will link to on my blog. I discovered Glenn through his Blogging Heads TV podcast, where he's been having some extraordinarily candid and clarifying conversations about race and racism with the linguist John McWhorter from Columbia. And I highly recommend you check out Glenn's podcast on Blogging Heads TV. And again, I'll provide a link to that on my website and the purpose of my conversation with him today was to dive headlong into these controversial waters of race and racism and violence in America as though my work weren't controversial enough already but I've been wanting to do this for a while because these issues are just so consequential and politically divisive.

But I've been worried about doing this for obvious reasons. I raised the topic in my podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson, if you recall, but he didn't want to touch it, which I understand. He didn't feel the time was right to weigh in on these issues personally. But for some reason, I've been feeling like the time is right for me. It's just really been bothering me that so much of what I hear about race and violence in America doesn't make any sense. And the fact that I've been worried about speaking about these issues in public was also bothering me. In fact, the implications of speaking about race in particular caused me to cancel a book contract I had last year. It just seemed like too much of a liability. But I have since

stiffened my spine, and I was left wondering who I could talk to about these things. My goal has been to find an African-American intellectual who could really get into the details with me, but who I could also trust to have a truly rational conversation that wouldn't be contaminated by identity politics. As you probably intuit, I think identity politics are just poison, unless your identity at this point is Homo sapiens. But I certainly found what I was looking for in Glenn. He is just so good on these topics. And as you'll hear, he spends a fair amount of time giving the counterpoint to his positions on each topic, steelmanning rather than strawmanning the views of his opponents. Anyway, I found this conversation extremely helpful. I felt like Glenn and I could have

gone on for much longer. And many thanks to Glenn for being so generous with his time. If you find this conversation as useful as I did, I encourage you to spread it around and follow Glenn on Twitter at Glenn Lowry, G-L-E-N-N-L-O-U-R-Y. And please tell him that you appreciate what he's doing. And again, check out his podcast on bloggingheads.tv. And now I give you Glenn Lowry. Well, I'm here with Glenn Lowry. Glenn, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Sam, my pleasure. Well, listen, I've really been excited about having this conversation. I think probably irrationally so, because the topics we're going to cover, race and racism and police violence, really can't help but bring us some measure of grief. So thank you for doing this. And I think most of the grief will come my way, probably. But first, I want to say that your podcast that you do on Blogging Heads TV, especially the ones I've seen that you've done with John McWhorter, whom I also greatly admire. I've got to say that those have just been fantastic.

And you guys are just, I mean, it's so rare to hear two people talk about these topics, honestly. So I just want to point people in the direction of those podcasts. So I just want to point people in the direction of those podcasts. Great. Sam, can I tell your audience that that's The Glenn Show at bloggingheads.tv that you're referring to. And all viewers or listeners are welcome. Yeah, yeah. And I'll put a link to your page where I embed this on my blog so people can find that link.

Just to kind of start us off, what I'm noticing now, and it's really as though for the first time, it's really been in the last year or so, is that there's a culture of censorship and identity politics and a kind of addiction to being outraged and a resort to outrage in the place of reasoned argument, especially among young people, that is just making it impossible to have productive conversations on important topics. And this is happening on topics other than race, of course. It happens on religion and terrorism and gender. But race is obviously one of those hotspots. And from what I've seen, you've been illuminating this topic on your show in a way that's really unusual and just cutting through confusion like a laser. So it really is great to be talking to you. That's good to hear. I appreciate it. but I think this would apply to him too, is that in the face of this situation that you just got through describing of addiction to outrage, that's an artful way of putting it, of a kind of,

I don't know, a moral certitude and intolerance of argument that doesn't check the right boxes and all of that. In the face of that, because I care so much about these questions of race and equality and justice, I've felt really compelled in the face of a lot of pushback and vitriol and contempt expressed toward me for doing so. I've just kind of felt compelled to keep, you know, keep challenging, keep raising questions, keep asking questions, you know. And so I don't know, I'm not, I don't think I'm doing any kind of heroic, you know, celebration for doing it. It just seems like the right thing to do. But that's a big part of my motivation. Yeah. So before we dive into this topic, perhaps you can just say a few words

about your background and just your areas of focus intellectually. How do you describe what you do in general? Okay. So I'm a professor of economics here at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I've been here for 10 years. I've taught economics at a number of other universities, Harvard in the 1980s, Boston University in the 1990s. I'm a quantitative social scientist. I was trained at MIT in the 70s, took a PhD in economics there and for much of my early career focused on mathematical modeling of various economic processes in the labor market and industrial organization, firms, competition, research and development, natural resource economics, economics of invention and exploration, things of this kind, game theory, information economics, this kind of thing. I became a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and got very much interested in public policy after taking up that post and began writing essays and reviews and commentaries on issues of race in the United States particularly, and was a Reagan conservative during the 1980s, quite rare for an African American,

moved away from that political identity toward the center of the spectrum a bit, and I think of myself now as a kind of centrist or maybe mildly right of center Democrat, though that's not an identity that I cling to with any particular intensity. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously your background, both in mathematics and statistics and social science, makes you really perfectly well-placed

to have the kind of conversation we're going to have. I've been wanting to talk about race and racism for a while because it's a topic of just such huge consequence. And it's a topic that, again, attracts a fair amount of logical and moral confusion, which renders people unable to reason with each other. And this is not a problem just across racial lines, and it's not just a problem in public. I mean, frankly, I have white friends who I find I can't have this conversation with because they've become so emotionally hijacked. And they don't realize, from my point of view, they don't realize that almost everything that is coming out of their mouths doesn't make moral or logical or historical or psychological sense. And this really worries me because I view the maintenance of civilization and our moral progress as a species really as a sequence of successful conversations.

I've said this many times before on my podcast and in writing. It seems to me that we live in perpetual choice between conversation and violence, just as a species. So when I see conversations reliably fail like this, I start to get worried. And so I've been wanting to talk about race, and this is just the context of how I set up this conversation. I noticed the conversations you have been having with John McWhorter, and I realized that I had met John at a TED conference. So I got in touch with him, and then he suggested I speak with you. And so you are my Virgil, who's going to guide me through this wilderness of error. And again, thank you for agreeing to do

this. I hope I'm up to the task here. It's a tall order, actually. And I guess a final preliminary point, I feel the need to offer a disclaimer up front, because I think you and I are going to agree about many things. And I'm a little worried about this, because my staking out some of these positions as a white guy is going to rub many of our listeners the wrong way. And I really don't want to be in a defensive crouch as we have this conversation. So I think I should just acknowledge up front a couple of things that should be obvious, and it should be obvious that I would acknowledge them. And the first is just that the history of racism in the US has obviously been horrific, right? It seems to me no sane person could doubt that. And there's no doubt that racism remains a problem in our society. And just how big a problem is something that I want us to discuss.

But I can check my privilege at the outset here. I have no doubt that I have reaped many advantages from being white. And I have no idea what it's like to grow up as a black man in our society. So I get that I don't get it. And if there's any way in which my not getting it's like to grow up as a black man in our society. So I get that I don't get it. And if there's any way in which my not getting it seems relevant to the issues we're about to touch, I certainly hope you'll point that out to me. But as we drive toward points that many of our listeners will find fairly incendiary, especially coming from a white guy, I just have to make it clear that it is obvious how horrible white racism and its consequences have been in the past. And I am fully prepared to believe an accurate picture of race and racism and

police violence as it occurs now so that we can think about how to move forward. So I just wanted to erect that bulwark, however ineffectual it will prove to be, because I just have no doubt that we're about to say some things that will lend itself to selective quotation. And I've now learned through rather you know, rather cruel experience that some people listen to this podcast just for the pleasure of quoting me out of context in misleading ways. So, you know, but that's with this caveat, which may do me no good whatsoever. I just want to, I want to throw that up before we dive into, into the details.

Well, I was just going to comment that I think your caveat is well taken as far as it goes, and that speaks well of you, I would say. But it's such a pity that it's necessary for you closed and tortured is the environment in which we're having the conversation. I mean, I'm Black, all right? I am, if anybody is, I mean, grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s from a working class background, have had many a run in with American racism, you know, all across the board and descend from people who had been slaves in the year 2016. 1863 is a century and a half in the past. Jim Crow segregation is a distant memory. Barack Hussein Obama is about to step down, having served two terms, winning comfortable national elections to the highest office in the land. The commissioners of the police in many of the cities in which police-Black community relations are most troubled are themselves African-American, as often are the administrative officers running the governments of those cities. We are 50 years past the advent of the onset of affirmative action.

the onset of affirmative action. This is not 1910, 1950, or 1985. This is the year 2016. And the idea that white privilege is such a stain on the country that an otherwise rational and intelligent person who happens to be white needs to give an elaborate preamble before they get a conversation about race relations in this country that the benefit of the doubt or the the willingness to hear something that one doesn't agree with without imputing invidious motives to the person who's expressed that view is so rampant that um a person like yourself needs to in effect apologize in advance for having an opinion, that's awful. That's poisonous. That's not good. So that's just Glenn Lowry spotting off, and I don't know how that'll leave me in the minds of some of your viewers who might want to take what I've said out of context as well, but that's where I'm coming from here.

Needless to say, I agree with you, but unfortunately, I think it still is necessary because, again, even my conversations in private suggest to me that this topic is so radioactive that it's just very difficult for people to even hear what is being said, much less trace the implications. So I want to start with just a very simple question, a deceptively simple question, and just ask you, what is racism? All right. This is not necessarily a scientifically precise response. This is just a more off-the-cuff response. I would say it is a contempt for or devaluation of the humanity of another in virtue of their presumed racial identity. Racism is the suspension of rational faculty.

faculty, it's a disregard for a derogation of a perception of the unfitness for intimate relations, a presumption about the intelligence, an imputation of bad character, this kind of thing vis-a-vis another person or group of people in virtue of what one understands to be their racial identity. Okay, so given that definition, which I agree with, who is the evil genius who first convinced the world that being able to honestly say that, quote, some of my best friends are black is not an adequate defense against the charge of racism toward black people. If the path forward toward some colorblind utopia doesn't entail having best friends or even a spouse who is from a different race, if that doesn't represent an adequate surmounting

of the problem of racism, and now I'm speaking personally. We can leave aside institutional or structural racism for the moment. But if having one's closest, most intimate friends be of another race isn't an adequate defense of what you just described as racism, or a defense against what you just described as racism, explain that to me. Well, it's funny that you use this phrase, some of my best friends are, because I once wrote an article that's been over 20 years now about self-censorship in public discourse, a theory of political correctness. It was published in the journal Rationality and Society in 1994. And in it,

I develop an account of political correctness, which I could go into in greater detail should you be interested, but I can say this much about political correctness. And on my account, a regime of political correctness is a moral signaling equilibrium in which people who don't want to be thought of as being on the wrong side of history will suppress an honest expression of what they believe about some controversial issue. Because people who are known to be on the wrong side of history are prominently saying the same things. Okay, so for example, if back during the day when the fight for independence of blacks in South Africa was going on. A person thought that

boycotting South African businesses was not a good policy, but that constructive engagement with those businesses was a better policy for trying to help the blacks in South Africa. If a person thought that, they might not be willing to say so in public because there were other people who were criticizing sanctions who were basically supporting the apartheid government. The apartheid government itself is putting out the line that sanctions were not as helpful as constructive engagement with the South African society. So a person might not want to say that because they don't want to be thought to be on the wrong side of history. to be thought to be on the wrong side of history. So with that understanding of what political correctness might be thought to be, I was making the observation that once a regime of that kind comes into existence, it's very robust and difficult to dispel. And in particular,

declarations of, you know, I'm not really racist. Some of my best friends are black. The sincerity of such declarations are called into question because who's going to say such a thing except for somebody who has the closeted view that is being sanctioned by common opinion, which they want to avoid being sanctioned for by making a declaration. Talk is cheap. Anybody can say it. So there was a time in American history, I think, American cultural and social history, maybe the 1940s, 50s, maybe even into the 60s, where a person could say sincerely and be taken at face value, some of my best friends are gay, but I'm against gay marriage. Some of my best friends are black, but I think that affirmative action is really a very poor policy, and that would have some kind of weight. But once the convention of value signaling in which correct positions on the sensitive issue, in the case at hand, affirmative action or a homosexual marriage, correct positions is a way of signaling moral

virtue. The cover that one might have otherwise gotten from making this declaration, let's say it's a verifiable declaration, some of my best friends are no longer covers enough. What does Shakespeare say somewhere? He thinks he does protest too much. You know, the guy who's saying some of my best friends are protested too much. That guy is seeking an exemption from the moral judgment of others for having what he knows the others know to be unacceptable positions. And he's declaring some kind of fig leaf here. But we see it for what it is, a fig leaf, and we don't take it seriously, something like that. And in your definition of racism, I think we have to distinguish between the mere harboring of certain biases and a commitment to enshrining those biases or a

sense that those biases are good or something that shouldn't be corrected for. And so, I mean, so racism can't merely be a matter of harboring certain biases because it can't be that you fail to be perfectly neutral on an implicit association test. Because if that's the standard, almost no one will escape hanging. Even many black people will be convicted of racism against blacks. And I think that Mazarin Banaji, the psychologist at Harvard, who was one of the founders of the implicit bias literature, would agree with that. literature would agree with that. I don't think she would claim an equivalency between implicit bias, as measured by one of her tests, and racism, or in the case of gender differences, implicit bias about women's roles in society, which can be detected in almost every population

of people who take these tests, and misogyny. I think she would want to draw a distinction between those two. And I think your observation that in the case of race, many African Americans will also score, you know, positive in terms of the detection of implicit bias about race and American society on these tests. That doesn't make them racist. It just means that their cognitive processes implicitly incorporate certain presumptions or stereotypes about racial roles or racial behaviors that are a part of our culture

and that are shared across the racial lines. So I agree with what you just said. I should briefly describe this test just so that people know what we're talking about. So Mazarin is one of the founders of this test and she's used it probably for 20 years. And what it is, it's the purpose of the test is to expose beliefs and biases that people hold

that they're either unaware of so that they can't report or that they know to be socially undesirable and so that they won't report. It they know to be socially undesirable and so that they won't report. It's just been shown that, for instance, many white people will be faster at associating negative concepts with black faces than positive ones and will show the opposite bias for white faces. And this is interpreted as meaning that they harbor a preference for white people over black people. And it's easy to see why people would think this and view this as either a source or a consequence of racism. And as you

pointed out, you can do this kind of test with other things. You can do it with cats and dogs or flowers and insects. You can do it with anything, really. But let's just stipulate that most people will show an in-group bias on the IAT. And we can even go further and accept that this underlying psychology has something to do with racism. Let's say it's either the cause or the consequence or both. But racism as a social problem to be condemned and eradicated has to be something else. It's showing white bias on the IAT doesn't make you a racist. Racism is the endorsement of norms that support that bias. So it's a person's

understanding that he's biased and his further claim that he's happy to be that way because he believes that society shouldn't correct for such biases because they're good, because white people really are better than black people. He's someone who wants society to be unfair based on the color of a person's skin because he thinks skin color is a good way to determine the moral worth of human beings. That is something quite distinct from just merely harboring these biases, however they got there. And there's no question that such people exist, but they have to be a tiny minority in our society at this point. And the rest of us, people of goodwill and moral enlightenment who may or may not be biased to one or another degree, clearly now support laws and policies that seek to cancel that kind of racism.

And as you say, I mean, we've elected our first black president who's finishing his second term. This isn't mere tokenism. The people who voted for Obama with enthusiasm, whatever an IAT would have shown about them, these are people who have canceled their personal racism in the form in which any real racist worthy of the name would practice it. Yeah, I think that's true. Although I know that many people, if they were to hear this conversation, would be objecting that, you know, you've just, you know, more or less cleverly defined racism out of the picture because there won't be very many at all racists left if we were to um if we were to have such a strict definition um so i'm challenging myself right

now to try to think where i think might be the problem and i while i don't have a an entirely coherent development uh here let me just make an observation. Suppose someone observes that, you know, the homicide rate is very high in certain quarters of our society that can be distinguished by race. You know, so many people in Chicago have been killed in the last years, a disproportionate number of both victims and apparent perpetrators are black. The homicide rate in terms of whites perpetrating the crime is much lower. And therefore, there seems to be something going on in terms of black proclivity to resort to violence and settling disputes or something like that.

Suppose someone says that. Suppose someone says, no wonder the police are so afraid when they encounter African Americans on the street. Have you taken a look at the crime statistics? Somebody says something like that. Somebody says, yes, it may be that Blacks are more likely to be shot by the police in terms of the rate of police killings per number in the population than are whites. But after all, Blacks are also overrepresented amongst violent criminals. And so who can be surprised that they are also overrepresented amongst the people who are shot by police officers? Someone says something like that. So now in all of these cases, these are statements that are in some way or another could be consistent with a person who might have certain kinds of implicit biases or whatever, but who wouldn't endorse the norm that those biases are justifiable in some sense or are not a problem or are in no way indicative of any kind of malady that needs to be addressed,

they would still nevertheless be thought to be racist. Someone who says the Asians are all over the sciences and the engineering departments and our best universities and the blacks are as scarce as in-teeth beer. Simply makes an observation about the facts. That would be thought by many people to be an act of racism, and yet it couldn't be so classified given the definition that you've just been developing. my definition, because I would argue, while it's possible for racists, real racists, to make precisely those observations, those observations themselves being, to my ear, quite factual. I'm going to make observations of the sort you made with respect to crime in a minute. If that is the signature of racism, well, merely reporting statistics, then we can't even talk about

the problem. Well, yeah. Again, I can imagine what a pushback might be. A pushback might be something like, look, you're talking and my talking about this problem is not something that's going on in the abstract, on the moon, unconnected to anything else. It's embedded within a structure, the legitimacy of which is up for debate. A casual conversation of that sort, merely a recitation of facts, you call it, merely a recitation of facts, without laboring to place those facts within a context and discipline our enunciation of those facts with a sort of deeper understanding of what history and contemporary social structure have wrought in terms of racial hierarchy, in terms of white supremacy, in terms of the comfort

that we have in enunciating those facts, in terms of the political consequences of so many people enunciating those facts, not taking that on board abets, reproduces, reifies, legitimates, etches in more firmly hierarchical structures of racial domination. And so the word racist is or racism is entirely appropriate. No, maybe it doesn't in these cases that I'm describing identify a, you know, the disparities and inequalities by race of wealth, power, privilege and comfort in the society, opportunity are very, very great. So it's laissez-faire racism is what Larry Bobo, the sociologist at Harvard, calls it. He says, you know, you do opinion surveys of populations. If you ask people

things like, would you be willing to see your daughter or son married to someone of the opposite race of a black person if the subject asked is white? And they say yes to that at high rates. If you ask them, do they think blacks are inferior? And they say no to that at high rates. That would be the old classical racism where they have answered differently. Still, but still, if you say, are white people disadvantaged by affirmative action? And they say, oh yeah, because my kid didn't get into Harvard and some black kid with a lower score got in. Well, some white kid with a lower score also got in, but you focused on the black kid getting in. You see, you think you're not a racist because you're willing to see your son or daughter married to someone who's black. You're willing to stay in

the same neighborhood if a black neighbor moves next door. But as a matter of fact, you interpret your son's rejection at Harvard as a consequence of racial affirmative action, where Harvard only accepts one in 15 applicants. And a lot of people got in ahead of your son who were not black and who had lower scores. So maybe I'm trying to make more elastic than makes sense, this definition of racism. But I think some of the proponents of a more capacious definition of racism would say, in the 1950s, we need to have a more subtle and expansive understanding of how this American disease is currently functioning. So let's make it as capacious as possible. I want you to now define what is often called structural or institutional racism. racism. And it seems to me that people talk about this in a way that you were just doing, even in such ways that people can participate in a structure that is de facto racist and perpetuating unfair treatment of people based on race. And yet the people operating in the structure

may not in fact be at all racist. Let's's, let's say everyone passes Mazarin's test. Nobody's harboring any bias and yet structures and institutions could still be deeply unfair. And, and if you could just talk about that. I want to say at the outset, I am not personally, Glenn Lowry,

a big fan of the current fad to invoke, quote, structural racism, close quote, as a meaningful category of social analysis. I often don't know quite what people are talking about beyond observing that Blacks come out on the short end of the stick by many measures of social achievement or status, and therefore structural racism. I mean, let me give incarceration as a case in point. So Blacks are 12% or so of the American population and 40% or so of the people who are held behind bars. Now, that's a complicated, big social phenomenon, and you could do a very elaborate kind of social scientific investigation of what all the sources of that disparity are.

But simply put, the weight of the state, the violence of the state, where the police come and they drag you away in handcuffs and they lock you up in a cage, where you're guarded, you're surveilled, you're pursued by agents of the state, you're stigmatized, you're civically excommunicated, you're held in contempt, you're treated badly. And such a large disparity in the incidence of that kind of treatment by race exists in the society. That is sort of ipso facto an indication of structural racism. The state stands up police forces, they build these cages, they corral people in them. And look at the impact that this is having on the black community. In some cities, the proportion of young men who are incarcerated or have a criminal record who are black is a third, 40 percent. It becomes a normal way of life. You know, young women go to the prison to try to find mates and pen pals and such like that.

Kids see the role models of ex-cons with their tattoos and their buffed up bodies coming in and out of the prison. It becomes normative in these communities. We have a school to prison pipeline because discipline of youngsters in schools seems to be somehow connected to their subsequent development into criminals. We have a prison industrial complex because indeed there is money to be made in the provision of the services that are associated with incarceration, and it's being made by private corporations and so on. So this is structural racism. This is what I think many people would say. This is a prime example of structural racism. The structures of law enforcement come down like a ton of bricks on people who are situated in the society at the margins because of our history of race. And by the way, if the same forces had been coming down with the same degree of severity on white people, the structure would be able to reform itself. Questions would arise. Three strikes and you're out would look very differently if most of the people suffering under that kind of punitive regime were white. But because they're black and brown, we can write them off.

We don't question ourselves. The, you know, business as usual seems acceptable when the people who are bearing the cost of it are black. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question. No, you are. But it was or not. But this is one of the reasons why I think the term structural racism is so compelling to many people. And I, a social scientist, find the evocation of that kind of one size fits all narrative, structural racism, inadequate to giving an account of what's actually going on. In other words, you know, it's not as if there are a bunch of, this is Glenn Lowry now speaking contra the reliance on structural racism as a category, I want to say. It's not as if there's a bunch of white people meeting somewhere deciding we're going to make the laws this or that in order

to repress blacks. And moreover, it's not as if the outcomes that people are concerned about in the example at hand, disparities in the incidents of incarceration, are independent of the free choices and decisions that are being taken and being made by people, in this case, black people who might end up finding themselves in prison. They made a decision to participate in criminal activities that were clearly known to be illicit and perhaps carry the consequences that they are now suffering, didn't they? Sometimes the decisions that they make have enormous negative consequences for other Black people, don't they? Do we want to inquire about what's going on in the home and community lives and backgrounds from which

people are coming who are the subjects of this racial inequality? Or are we to assume that any such deficits or disadvantages that are causally associated with their involvement in lawbreaking and that are related to their own community organization, structures of family, attentiveness of parenting, and so forth, are nevertheless themselves the consequence of white racism. Black people wouldn't be acting that way if it weren't for white racism. If there were greater opportunity, if the schools were better funded, if it hadn't been for the value of black life, the neglect of the development of black people, or because to the extent that it is a consequence of choices that black people are making themselves, they only are making such choices because of the despair,

the neglect, the lack of opportunity, et cetera, that they have experienced. Then it seems to me that that's a kind of tautology that says any disparity by race is, by definition, a reflection of structural racism. And it's a tautology that, as a social scientist, I don't want to embrace. And as an African American, I'm profoundly skeptical of because, at some level, it seems to me, and I'll conclude, I know I've been going on for a while, it kind of surrenders the possibility of African American agency saying that everything that is of a negative character, that is a reflection of inequality, of disparity, in which blacks are on the short end. Everything is a consequence of this history. How is it that blacks are unable to make our own lives, notwithstanding whatever the history may have been? Are there not variations and differentiations within the

black population that perhaps one could identify and extol the virtue of certain patterns of behavior and reactions to environmental conditions that seem to be, you know, more effective, more life-affirming, more successful than others. So I don't like structural racism because it's imprecise, because it's a kind of dead end in a way. It leaves us dependent upon, leaves us, I mean, African Americans dependent upon a kind of dispensation to be bestowed by powerful whites who actually are moral agents, who actually do have the ability to choose or not various ways of life, including responding affirmatively to our demands for redress of our subordination. Whites are powerful.

Whites are agents. Whites can do the right thing or the wrong thing. Blacks are merely historical chips. We're merely cogs, automata, being driven by the fact of slavery, by the fact of Jim Crow segregation, and so on, and ultimately not responsible for our own and our children's and so on, and ultimately not responsible for our own and our children's lives. Yeah, I mean, it's a very complex picture. And I think one thing I just got from what you said is that even if it's true, even if you could draw a straight line from slavery and Jim Crow to the state of inequality and social dysfunction in the Black community, as a matter of history and social dysfunction in the black community as a matter of history and a matter of just causality through time. That's not to say that in the year 2016, the ambient level of white racism is the ongoing cause of these problems. And that if you could just get white people to be less racist, if you

could wave a magic wand and literally dissect out all of the racism harbored by white people on any level, that would magically correct for all of the problems you just articulated. That doesn't follow. So what does it get you if you really can trace that line, that 200-year-old line to the present? Where does that leave you? I mean, it leaves you with something like Ta-Nehisi Coates' picture of reality, where what we should be talking about now is paying reparations for slavery. I don't know what I think about that. I, I, I know what I think about Coates' style of talking about this issue. And the fact that I'm talking to you and not to him suggests, you know, where I think the more profitable and civil and rational conversation is going to be had.

Frankly, I, at one point I thought I would, you know, someone recommended that I have him on the podcast. And I just, you know, honestly, I feel like the conversation would be a disaster. This style of talking just strikes me as, to put this in starkly invidious terms, from which he would want to defend himself, it just strikes me as not intellectually honest in its totality. It's very, there's a kind of pandering to white guilt and black rage that never stops. And we can't just talk about facts in a civil way. And so that worries me.

Let me say something here. We can talk more about cults if it suits you, and I'm happy to not do so. But there are a couple of things I want to say. you, and I'm happy to not do so, but there are a couple of things I want to say. One of them is, I want to mention the name Thomas Chatterton Williams. He's an African American. He's younger than Coates. He's maybe 10 years younger than Coates, which puts him in the early 30s. He lives in Paris. He's a trained philosopher, a graduate of Georgetown University, and I'm not sure where he did graduate study, but I think he did some graduate study in philosophy as well. And he has a essay. It's published in the London Review of Books. And it is a review essay of Ta-Nehisi Coates' book, Between the World and Me. And the burden of Thomas Chatterton Williams' argument in that essay is that Coates' open letter to his son, in which he advises his son that America is so thoroughly contemptuous of your value as a human being that you must not ever, ever relax. You must

not trust these people or turn your back on them. They will rip you to shreds. There's nothing more American than taking a guy like you, hanging you from a lamppost and tearing your limbs off one by don't believe in the American dream. We are up against an implacable force. That force erases your humanity. It's always been so, and it will always be so. This is a paraphrase of the posture that Coates takes in Between the Road and Me. I think it's an accurate paraphrase. And Williams, Thomas Chatterton Williams in the London Review of Books uses it as a point of departure to say, there's no place to go from here. You know, for black people, this is an absolutely bleak landscape and it is disempowering. It just surrendered agency. There's only one possible future here in this, and it's a very bleak one indeed.

And he thinks that's both untrue of the actual historical, socio-historical circumstances in the United States, rather more complicated than that. But he also thinks it's soul-killing that it's an existential surrender of one's humanity to take such a posture. etc. posture. So I just want to mention that so that your listeners who might not have come across Thomas Charterton William, who, by the way, submitted that essay to The New Yorker, I happen to know on Good Authority, and it sat on an editor's desk for many months and was eventually killed. It's an absolutely brilliant, if controversial, engagement with Ta-Nehisi Coates' book. And so Williams ends up taking it to the London Review of Books because it couldn't get published in the United States. Because the liberal, if you will, cognoscenti, the ruling

class of cultural mandarins, will not tolerate that kind of argument from an African-American contra the stance that Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken. So that's one thing I want to mention. The other, and I'll be very brief, is Mitch Landrieu, Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of the city of New Orleans. Out at Aspen, at the Ideas Festival at Aspen a couple of years ago, Landrieu and Coates were paired up in a panel in which they were discussing, well, race and inequality in America. And Coates was taking the posture that we know he would take. And Landrieu was armed with what he called the books of the dead were literally the case books from his police department in the city of New Orleans that recorded the details of as yet unresolved homicide cases in that city. There were hundreds of them and 90 percent or more of the victims in these cases were black people. in these cases were Black people. And Landrieu was trying to say to Coates, in response to Coates's arguments about the implacability of American racism and the erasure of Black humanity and

the devaluation of the Black body, that Black people are killing themselves in very large numbers in the industry. Now, he's not a Sean Hannity conservative with a wagging his finger about black on black crime. This is Mitch Landry, a centrist Democrat, mayor of a city, New Orleans, in this case, a scion of a political family of some prominence Democrats in Louisiana and served as mayor of New Orleans and confronting Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Aspen Ideas Festival in a debate about race and inequality in America, in which Coates had taken a position that we know that he takes. And Landrieu had tried to call to, gently, call to the attention of the audience the observation that much of the threat to the integrity of Black bodies and black life are coming from other black people. Offering as evidence of that is so-called Books of the Dead, which were the case books that were a compendium of the details about unresolved homicide cases in New Orleans. The vast, vast majority of which are 90 percent of whom were, the victims were African American.

Coates's response to Landrieu was to dismiss him with the back of his hand. This, by the way, is written up in New York Magazine. One searches New York Magazine, Coates and Landrieu, New York magazine, Coates and Landrieu, you'll find a very long essay that is about Ta-Nehisi Coates and that reports on this encounter. Coates' response was to give Landrieu the back of his hand. There ain't nothing wrong with Black people that ending white supremacy wouldn't fit. What do you expect people to do? They rats in a barrel you've got the lid on the barrel you you open the lid and peek down in there and you find that they're at each other's throats well what would you expect to happen it's the frigging barrel man you're going to blame the rats okay that's my metaphor not what kind ofisi Coates might have used, but it's capturing this idea that the mayhem, the despicable devaluation of life attendant to people riding up and down a street in an automobile with heavy weapons, firing them more or less aimlessly out the window at their gang rivals and killing innocent bystanders along the way, and this happening in the scores and hundreds within a year in a given city,

that that kind of mayhem, that that kind of despicable contempt for human life shown by black people toward other black people is not relevant to assessing what it is that actually imperils black life, because those behaviors understood themselves to be the consequence of a system and a history of oppression. Now, you can say this. You can say this with eloquence and style. You can say this with fury and anger. You can say this with economy of word and clever turn of phrase, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has been given to do. But it doesn't make it a valid moral argument. It seems to me, and I've said this, that Coates was holding a pair of queens and that he was looking at an ace

face up and that he was bluffing. In other words, he was daring Mitchell Andrew to come back at him and say, what an absurdity. You're telling me that people have to run up and down the street, firing guns out of windows and killing their brethren because we didn't get reparations for slavery handed over to you yet because somebody who was mayor of this city 10 years ago happened to be a racist because the police department has somebody who's affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan in it. And you're telling me that that explains or somehow excuses or cancels out the moral judgment that I would otherwise bring to bear against any other

community in which I saw this happening. You're telling me that the history of slavery in Jim Crow, now a century in the past, is pertinent to our reaction to this lived experience on a daily basis of African Americans in my American city? You're beneath contempt to talk in that way. You're the one who has no real respect for the value of Black life. You live in a bubble. Why don't you get out of it and walk the streets of some of these places where people have died? Now, Coates will flash out, oh, well, I was raised in Baltimore at a time when,

and I've seen enough gang activity, and I know what's going on inside and out, and I've been there, whatever. And Landrieu can say, the body count continues to mount while your blather titillates the cultural elites in Washington, D.C. and New York City and gives guilty white people an excuse not to feel so guilty. While you blather on, we're actually burying the dead. Landrieu might have responded to him like that. He might have told him to get the heck out of here with that nonsense that attempts to intellectualize what any person with common sense can see as an absolute disaster. You're blaming white people for black people living some like barbarians. You're blaming white people for that. He might have said to him,

that's what I said to him. Landrieu folded the hand with a pair of. Now you've convinced me that we need to stage a public debate between you and Coates and put it on primetime television. That'll be worth seeing. Let's talk about the mayhem. Let's get into the question of violence. So here's the basic picture as I understand it. America is distinguished as one of the most violent societies. 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, NAMAs, and the conversations

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