Tangle - PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Kmele Foster joins Isaac and Ari to race, Pope Francis, and judicial independence

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

On today's Sunday podcast, Kmele Foster joins Isaac and Ari to discuss race, identity, and racial categories. They explore personal anecdotes, societal perceptions, and the implications of race in science and genetics. They also get into the complexities of genetic diversity, the absurdities of race science, and the implications of racial disparities in society, as well as cultural stereotypes, the dangers of racial pride, and the need for a more nuanced understanding of race in policy discussions. They talk about the passing of Pope Francis and the complex relationship between faith and politics, particularly focusing on the legacy of the Pope and the reactions to his political involvement. And, as always, the Airing of Grievances. By the way: If you are not yet a podcast member, and you want to upgrade your newsletter subscription plan to include a podcast membership (which gets you ad-free podcasts, Friday editions, The Sunday podcast, bonus content), you can do that here. That page is a good resource for managing your Tangle subscription (just make sure you are logged in on the website!)Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up! You can also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by Ari Weitzman and Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Coming up, we are here with Camille Foster talking race and some insane stuff he's been doing with on Twitter. We get into the Pope, some of the blowback of our take from this week, and then apparently the Trump administration has arrested a county judge in Wisconsin, so we talk about that too.

It's a good episode. We're flexing today. From executive producer, Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. And welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place to get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. I'm here in Philadelphia in person with our dear friend, Camille Foster, who's been going to war with the race IQ people on Twitter, which I cannot wait to talk to him about, and our managing editor, Ari Weitzman.

Fellas, how are we doing? Doing very good. Thank you. Doing pretty well. To clarify, you two are together. I'm by myself out here. Yeah, that's tough, sorry, man. Sorry, sorry, Ari. Looks like you're having fun though.

Well, it sounds like Camille had an eventful experience getting here to Philadelphia, so maybe we should start there. I've heard through the, you know, I wasn't in the office when Camille arrived here I was I was actually talking to the Neiman Foundation journalists Which was really interesting and fun and then by the time I got out here I was hearing office rumors that you had an altercation at the train station on your way in here

I just would be I would be very clear because it's been an eventful week for our podcast There was an altercation on there as well. I won't go into detail about it now except to say it wasn't my fault. Similarly, this was not a physical altercation. It's just one of those things. You jump on the train and you are getting ready to ride on the Amtrak and you ask someone, is the seat taken?

Because they've got a backpack sitting in it and it's clear that they just don't want someone to sit there. Then the guy says to me, I'm holding the seat for my wife. I said, okay. And I just turned the other direction and I said right across from him, aisle between us and an empty seat,

which remains empty all the way to Philadelphia. So I say to the guy after this hour long ride, because I knew it was gonna bother the hell out of me, sir, that's a kind of a weird, embarrassing thing to lie about. And all I hear as I turn around to walk off the train like a normal human is I didn't lie. And I just I didn't pay any attention to it, didn't acknowledge it.

I'm leaving. And it's outside while I'm waiting for my Uber to come over to the office that the guy like suddenly is behind me again, and is telling me that I personally, Camille, like, you shouldn't judge people. You shouldn't be so quick to judge people. I said, one, we're not having a conversation. Two, I don't need a lecture from you, sir. And he escalated from there. And later on, like moments later, middle finger wagging at my finger, X-Flips are flying from him, not me. And I just, I assured him that it was a bad idea to do this,

that he didn't really know who he was getting involved with and that this would probably end in embarrassment for him. Walked away. And he walked away continuing to be upset. And it's entirely possible I was wrong and he made an honest mistake and his wife just couldn't make the train. But the fact that you behaved like a vulgar, He walked away continuing to be upset. And it's entirely possible I was wrong and he made an honest mistake and his wife just couldn't make the train.

But the fact that you behaved like a vulgar lunatic when I politely informed you that I didn't really like our interaction and you never in the hour plus long ride from New York to L.A. Hey, that was weird. I'm sorry. My wife just missed the train.

I totally would have let you sit here because I'm not a jerk. But no sir, you were a jerk. And hopefully not a total subscriber. They wouldn't have done something like that. I love, first of all, I think you have to have like a high tolerance for an awkward social interaction to go up to somebody to beat to do what you did and say like that was a weird thing for you to do. I would never I would be thinking that in my head and it would bother me the rest of the day but I don't think I would have had like the chutzpah. That's why I did it. That's why I did it because it is expensive to have these things running in your head over and over again what you wish you had said in the moment, there are two things that I have committed to. One is I tell the truth,

which is not to say that I've been lying before that, but if you ask me a direct question, I'll do my best to give you a direct answer and I'll be polite if it's criticism, but I'm going to be honest. And the other is I do my best to not leave myself with regrets and if there are social norms or even the risk of embarrassment or fear that are preventing me from saying something that I think is important, I've forced myself to do the thing.

And I just, again, I was respectful enough, as respectful as one can be when they're saying, you lied. But hey, that's a kind of an embarrassing thing to lie about, I think is the best possible formulation of something like that. And because I'm a stranger, you don't have to care when I think about you if you were in the right. You can just move on with your life.

You'll never see me again unless you, again, a fungal subscriber or you're watching television. What up? You know, he'll be fine. I didn't watch your interview and I feel good about that. So verbal mental artication that did not escalate despite maybe attempts of this other person otherwise. In this particular conversation to be clear, you know, like linguists and jiu-jitsu. But let me ask this though, because you said you didn't want to have it linger because

that's expensive. Do you think it's less expensive now in that, in using that formulation? No, it's a great story. We are still talking about it. Yeah, no, but it's a great story. I mean, I think totally... It's not eating. ...about everything that happened here.

It is entirely possible that I misjudged him. That's fine. But... So maybe saying you lied about it might have been wrong. Might have been the imperfect formulation. If it's possible. Yeah, I could have said if you lied about it. But all I said is that's an embarrassing thing to lie about, isn't it? And then left it at that. There's the presumption that you lied. It certainly is true that it would be an embarrassing to lie. But you know, we could just leave it at that. Again, I don't know who he is.

I hope he's okay. I hope he thrives. And I hope he does better next time. The following out of the train station is bizarre behavior. It's strange. Especially because you had to follow me over here to the east when in fact you're heading north. Just go north. You don't have to follow me. We don't have to talk anymore.

There's, I can't imagine. I wonder the moment that you sat down in the seat right next to him, if his blood pressure just spiked like 15 points, where he's just like, fuck dude, this guy's gonna see that their wife isn't coming. All right, well, that is a fantastic story. I'm sorry that happened to you or congratulations. I don't really know what the appropriate sounds like.

Yeah, great. Now you have that a good Philly interaction. Welcome to the city of brotherly love. It happened in New York. So at least you got on in New York. Yeah, that's true. Maybe it's from here. I didn't bring you on for Amtrak stories today,

as entertaining as they are. We've roped you back in here just weeks after having you on the podcast for a few reasons. One, lassoing you into the Tangle family, as it were. That's always the objective. Isaac buys a house in Texas and now he's lassoing people. Yeah, I'm not lassoing people. That's my idea, right? But two is because, as I understand it,

you were quite sick last week, which somehow induced a fever dream of incredible content on the platform on Twitter. Thank you. Yeah. I asked you to come back because I, A, I want to chop it up a bit about some of the news this week, but B, I want to talk about some of these race-related tweets, I suppose, that you've been engaging in.

We'll get to some of the current event stuff after we kick off here, but you've been going to battle, I suppose one could say with some folks on line, on Twitter, on X, who seem very focused, maybe obsessed one would say with race as a particular paradigm or lens to look at things through. I think maybe one bit of important context here, people who can't see or are listening, Camille is what some people might describe as a black man in America. I really would prefer, Isaac, if you just try to describe the actual color of my skin. Deeply uncomfortable. Camille's got beautiful mocha brown. Lighter than her mocha. Yeah, a chocolate color. I'm blushing. Isaac's skin color right now is like a sunburn.

Which is, yeah, sort of like almost two on the nose, but you don't describe yourself that way. You don't believe in what you might call the myth of this conception of race. And the long story or the short story is that some of this stuff is so interesting. I couldn't help myself, but want to dig in on it. And when I talked to Ari about it,

I think he agreed that there was a lot of really interesting meat on the bone here. So maybe my opening salvo before you get into some of these tweets and some of the characters you've been responding to is just, if you could give us a little bit of the context on how you think about and view race and maybe your own race as it were. about and view race and maybe your own race as it were? Well, how I think about my own race is fairly straightforward. I'm a human, human race. We're all members of that race.

We all have our origins in Africa. So I suppose you could call me an African-American if you like, but only insofar as you're willing to apply that label and that weird hyphenation scheme to everyone in exactly the same way. I find it interesting that most people haven't ever really bothered to scrutinize these categories that we're attaining traffic in. Even as you were describing me earlier, I'll encounter people and there is this, well,

Camille is a black man. Well, what does that mean? It's not the same as simply saying, well, he's kind of tall or short. Like there's a sense in which we all know that that's an abstraction. That could mean any number of things. It probably means if you say tall, like bigger than five, nine. And if you say short, shorter than five, nine. Okay. What on earth does it mean to insist that someone is black or white or Asian, which is my actual favorite racial designation, because it is the most absurd on its face. Like, does that mean Japan?

Does that mean the Middle East? Does that mean parts of Russia? Does that mean China or Japan or North Korea? India, Pakistan. I don't know what we're talking about. And in truth, blackness and whiteness are similarly ridiculous. And I think the word that I would use, generally speaking,

is incoherent word, an incoherent concept to use to try to describe people, given not only what we know about human history, but what we've come to know about biology and genetics. What we know is that the human family is this incredible diverse spectrum, and that in general, what we see when we look at the human genome is not these clear definitive breaks that separate black from white or anything else. It's just these interesting kind of climbs and hills. Are there distinct populations with respect to continents? Kind of, sorta.

But even the best commercially available genetic ancestry tests that people use, the results that it gives you, they're not telling you how much of your DNA came from Africa. Because there's no such thing as African DNA or European DNA or Asian DNA. It is the street map effect. There is a sense in which our beliefs about race, which predate our knowledge of biology and predate our knowledge of genetics, are in a way informing those consumer products and in a way kind of sort of informing the way that the science is done amongst people who are not rigorous.

And it certainly is informing the way our social science is done. And there's this concept in programming, garbage in, garbage out. If you have a concept that is vaguely defined, where the parameters are profoundly uncertain, where across time and space, this notion of blackness and lightness are changing. In South America, they had a caste system.

And the caste system, you would recall, you would look at someone and you say, are you an octo-rune or a quadrune or a black or white? In some cases, you're talking about 16, 20 different dimensions of human difference that are being described. And when I talk about that, people immediately kind of start to smile because they see the absurdity of it.

And what they don't appreciate is that going from a system of 20 different layers of apparent quote unquote human categories or kinds to one where there's like five or six isn't better. It's equally absurd. To the extent there is diversity that we can talk about in humanity, it is individual diversity. The dignity of individuals is the thing that I think our notions of human freedom are founded

on. The way that we actually do things in common parlance and oftentimes in science and politics, I think is just kind of absurd on its face. To have conversations about race and IQ is something that I found not to be offensive because it's impolite, not to be offensive because people's feelings or senses of themselves might be hurt or wounded, or not that it's embarrassing to be a black man who perhaps has a very high IQ but is part of a population that has a low IQ. It's absurd and it's wrong because you're doing a procedure

by which you take this incoherent concept and you put it into these contexts where you're supposed to be doing sophisticated analysis of the world and it is necessarily the case that the resolution is lost. Race is not a precise something. It is a proxy for many things. And as such, if you're doing these comparisons and contrasting of various things on the basis of race, like what you're actually doing is far removed in most instances from the actual substance of your concern. And I think it has a lot of other kind of philosophical and moral implications as well. But I've been lecturing for a little bit and can do that for quite some time on this topic. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. I think, I see Isaac's giving a little bit of a pause and I've got plenty to say, so I'm going to jump in on it.

I'm sure. I mean, it's such a small concept so we can. Well, most people know what it is. That's the thing. I think when the thing that comes out to me right away, because I've got like, personal relationship with race, as far as like being Jewish, and what that means, that I kind of want to talk about a little bit, but the concept of the individual being having a race and that

inform either identity, I think is something that I remember like when I was in college reading about that, we read France Fanon's book about the way that there's hierarchies in the Caribbean based off of the color of skin and the pigmentation of the hue and how that similar I think to what you're talking about about the caste system in South Africa. But the thing that is interesting to me

is we can see how this stuff fails at an individual level. But with a concept like you said with race, where it's multifaceted and isn't precise, when you broaden out and you look at things at a larger population scale, it does seem like that there's some larger trends that you can map onto. And to make it something that's not just about skin color, but is also about larger conceptions

of identity, like being Jewish, a thing that frustrates me that I have a hard time grappling with is a higher proportion of people who identify as Jewish or you can call Jewish end up in this field, like where I am with Isaac right now in journalism. The two of us are here and it always annoys us. We're Jews in journalism. Fuck, we did it. We're perpetually in the middle. Yeah, we are the media.

But at an individual level, I see the path I took to get here. I know that I wasn't labeled at some international cabal of Jews and assigned this profession. I know what happened to get me here. Weren't you? Weren't you? Maybe, maybe I forget. Yeah, I was just programmed. But there's something broader there. I have a hard time putting my finger on it, but I don't think ideas have to be precise to have value in aggregate, I think is what I'm saying. I think I struggle with that.

Yeah, I think that's true. And look, I won't deny that when we zoom really far out, we start to see these patterns, but also importantly, we're pattern seeking animals. We see patterns everywhere. We see patterns in the clouds. We see patterns in photos that we get back from Mars of rock structures, and we imagine their faces. And in much the same way, we imagine we see similarities where profound differences exist. I can remember distinctly spending time in Asia. I've spent a decent amount of time there, actually,

when I think about it in Asia. I've spent a decent amount of time there actually when I think about it in aggregate. And it really only takes a few days, in my experience, wandering around the streets of Hong Kong talking to a lot of people to be able to look at them and see the differences in their appearances and be able to say, oh, okay, I think Thailand. Oh, Singapore. Oh, okay. Especially in an international city like Hong Kong where people are kind of coming together Because in mainland China might be a little difficult a little more difficult But it's actually just different like there are differences there as well And there's a sense in which If you were to take this and apply it to some other species of animal like let's say cats and you were to say

Well, what is common to all stripy cats? We again, like see the absurdity of it. Could there be commonalities in some sort of average similarity amongst stripy cats? There might. But does that mean that there's going to be really deep fundamental similarity amongst trippy cats to the extent that we should create a category of stripiness and we should talk about stripiness at all times and in all contexts. I mean, I don't there is a concept of breed though, especially with dogs. Dog breeds vary so much.

Yeah. And what's funny is the race science people who respond to me like when I'm most about this sort of stuff. Yeah, I know I kind of walked into a trap there. Are dog breeds and gender. And neither one of those fit because they're so fundamentally different from race. With gender, you've got chromosomes.

And while I know we've got very huge public debates, the conversations about this, I'm going to be controversial and say, look, X, Y, and Y, Y, or XX chromosomes. Like, that's most people. And we know that that generally corresponds to biological man and biological woman. Are there some things on the margins like intersex and other sort of chromosomal things? There sure are, but it is generally speaking much smaller. There

is no such corresponding reality to even our popular notions of race or antigenetics like these notions of population. It just isn't the case. The base pairs that they use in those commercial ancestry tests, it is a black box, it is very weird. There's all sorts of reasons why it doesn't make sense. The one that I like most highlighting for people is,

if you go back just a couple of generations, doesn't take long for there to be people who are your ancestors in the same way as anyone else who contributed nothing to your genome that is actually detectable. When we look back into our ancient past in genetics, we're looking through time with a straw. That is not who we are, and we've never been our genes. And we know that in a true profound way,

but we are still in many respects holding on to these notions of human difference being buried in quantums of blood. There's a profound absurdity to that. I think I spoke to both things. Actually, no, I didn't speak to dog breeds. The difference between dog breeds and human races, the dog breeds were deliberately created very recently,

selectively bred for specific traits. And the maintenance of those breeds even is something that takes a hell of a lot of effort. You're doing the same sort of cross-breeding. It is not remotely the same as human genetic biodiversity, which as we know, and I don't know that we all know, but I certainly know, is something that is far more recent and has always included people traveling between groups, intermarrying, interbreeding. We've always done this. And certainly the case that there's nothing like an African diaspora where people in Africa are kind of more like me than they are either of you two. Like there's a sense in which, like my son was born,

and while I do have brown skin, this rich, beautiful brown skin, my hair is what you would perceive as black. My son was born with red hair, and he has red hair because my mother had red hair, because my grandfather had red hair, because I'm Scots Jamaican. Like, to look at someone and imagine you can kind of put them into one group or another and

that there are all sorts of things that you can essentially derive about their character and their person and their personality and even their intellectual capacity is beyond absurd in a way that I think deserves to be ridiculed in the same way that we ridicule people who are promoting notions like flat earth or fake moon landings. We know enough about science at this point to not be intimidated by circus clowns who are promoting ridiculous notions like race science. Again, not because the data is wrong, but because their conceptual frameworks are absurd on their face. The end.

I'm curious because one of the things that strikes me that's interesting is like, the- I'm seeing you interact with a lot of people on this issue right now, like sort of the race science people, you know, they're like- Anonymous spokespersons for the truth. Right, yeah. There's a conspiracy in academia. Yeah, who are like, they have a hobby of like measuring skull sizes or whatever, you know. Yeah, we love phrenology.

Yeah. But there is, I mean, to take the position that you're taking, there are some real world implications that I find interesting and compelling. Like, like I, I, so first of all, I'll just say, I find your position obvious and compelling when you articulate it. I mean, it makes total sense. And you just call me articulate. Yeah. Yeah, I did.

Blackland. That's dangerous. Yeah. Really has a verb. It's in your Twitter bio, I think. Uh, but the, there's a lot of implications there for not the kind of skull measuring, maybe low key neo-Nazi crowd, but like the progressive left too, which is like very interested in looking at things through this kind of racial lens and categorizing-

Disparities between groups, yeah. Yeah, so I guess that's sort of my next question is like, what does this mean to you about that whole area of inquiry? Is it worthwhile for us to be thinking about or talking about why categories of black Americans have certain outcomes, the patterns we notice there, or is that to you a useless endeavor because dividing people into those categories is a distraction from what the environment was like at home or what economic situation they were born into? How do you think about that? And then I guess, I mean, there are like, there seem to be things where the race question is sort of unavoidable, like racial disparities in policing, where like, what a cop sees or perceives maybe will actually impact how he'll act.

Although the data there is actually really complicated and doesn't justify a lot of the concern that's actually been addressed with respect to those issues, like police involved shootings in particular. I won't go into the details, but that only suggests that actually what's useful about that particular example is that it illustrates what is actually going on here. There's a sense in which America has something of a monomania when it comes to race. Part of my unique concern about the issue is the fact that we have attached a kind of primacy to race in our thinking about policy and in our thinking about science and even social science as a result in policy

social science related. And I think that what we don't appreciate is that when you're using this proxy to do all of this kind of, all of this different kind of research and to kind of inform your sense of the world, because you're necessarily rescaring detail, you're making it harder, not easier to have sophisticated conversations about say, the risk of sickle cell anemia or hypertension, people will start to say as shorthand, well, you know, black people have a much higher – that's not actually how that works. And if you care, then you do a little bit of digging and look into it and you'll learn

a little bit more. And in much the same way that you can create a sense of unique concern about sickle cell amongst black people, you could create a sense of unique invulnerability among white people about sickle cell despite the fact that there are parts of the world where there is a high instance of sickle cell anemia trade because of their particular region and the fact that there happen to be a lot of mosquitoes there which is what you'd expect and there are a bunch of other examples that are just like that. So the question becomes are we interested

in the finer details of particular issues where we can really zero in on the actual causes of things that are specific? Or are we more interested in kind of having this faux sophistication, this veneer of seriousness and position where we reference race and we talk about black people categorically, when in fact, even if you want to talk about race, regional differences matter a lot.

Neighborhoods, when you get to places like Philly and New York matter a lot. You talk about a black person from the Bronx and a black person from Bushwick, these are different. And you can even say Brooklyn and Manhattan are different, but again, neighborhoods are different. Blocks can be different. There are profound differences. And I think that part of my concern here is just getting us to really think in a more sophisticated way

about the problems of the world. I think it's the defect in thinking here, the category error when it comes to race, is something that is shared on the left and the right. And the worst manifestation of it, perhaps on the political right, but not uniquely, are I think related to this kind of race science stuff. And in certain respects, the renewed prominence of it is almost certainly a result of the prominence of this obsession with racial disparities that

emanated on the left for, I think, ostensibly good reasons. People were concerned about the well-being of kind of Black people and systems of oppression. But again, they lose a lot of sophistication as well. And I do think that when it comes to education, for example, it's probably better to worry not about the distance between the outcomes for blacks and outcomes for whites, and to worry more specifically about the fact that today some kid is going to wake up and have their first day of school at a new school, and that new school is chronically underperforming and underfunded, and it's dangerous, and most of the kids who graduate from there won't have any chance of going to university.

And by that description, you don't know the whether I'm talking about a school in Appalachia or in Baltimore City. And I think that's what matters. And when you focus on it that way, you'll know that the remedy for the problems I just described has nothing to do with race whatsoever. And a lot of the crazy abstractions that we traffic

and that we make real, that we compromise, like Black culture. And this is a nonsense concept. I don't even know. I can't begin. I was going to bring this up because I'm like, sort of the gotcha version of this would be like, you're a stereotypical Black dude. You love rap music.

Last time we were here, we're debating Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Like- Yeah, and you have opinions. Yeah. And Drake is Jewish. Yeah. But like, how do you, yeah, what do you,

what's like your reflection, I guess, on that element of it where it's like, the question I was gonna ask was like, what do you think about or what comes to mind for you when you think about the ways in which you're like fulfilling the stereotype? I don't think about it at all. I don't think about it at all.

Like there's, I mean, there would just be things that are true. I like watermelon, it's kind of delicious. I like watermelon too. I think most people do. Do I like fried chicken? Actually, I kind of delicious. I like watermelon too, yeah. I think most people do. Do I like fried chicken? Actually, I kind of don't because I just find it cumbersome. I don't really like eating with my hands.

I don't know if that's weird or not. I'm generally speaking, chicken skin, again, weirds me out. Find it strange that people want to eat that. So I don't eat fried chicken, but I do like watermelon and I don't have a problem eating it in front of people. I wouldn't be offended if I went someplace and someone asked me if I wanted watermelon, although these are the kinds of things today that certain people worry about. Yeah. I think that there is an abundance of concern, most of it misguided, plenty of it informed by

good intentions, but because it's misguided and because it's ill-informed, it's misspent and in some instances even harmful. I think it becomes especially pernicious when it involves young people and when it involves notions of pride and whether or not a young person should be reared to have pride in their inherited characteristics, like, I'm proud to be black, black girl magic, or they should be reared with an expectation that pride is something you earn and it has something to do with the things that you achieve. And it doesn't even have to be a big achievement for you to be proud of it. It just needs to be important to you.

And again, being born looking a particular way isn't an achievement. It isn't something worth being proud of. Even if other people want to shame you for it, the correct response to that is to understand that it is a ridiculous thing for them to try to shame you for it. They are wrong and the overcorrection is actually a hindrance. So again, I can talk about this a lot and I think there are a lot of dimensions to it and a lot of good reasons to ask questions about it.

And it's certainly appropriate to say, well, you know, what about actual racism that's out there in the world and bigotry? I think we can address those things and have concern for it without indulging in the fantasy that this is real. And we can do that without reifying the concept. It's like, I care about the Salem witch trials. I will talk about this, the number of people who were harmed as a result, but I will never say,

oh, well, you know, it doesn't witches were executed, because then you're indulging the fiction. Then you're doing something actually harmful to reality, and you're participating in it in a way that is not helpful, it's harmful. So I just think we need to be a little bit more thoughtful. We need to scrutinize these things a little more. And in 2020, I think, particularly around then, a lot of people got a lot crazy about these matters.

And in certain respects, I think the fact that there are a lot of growing communities where people are like, we got to push back, we have to tell the truth. The reason for all the racial disparities is actually genetics. And other people say, well, no, it's white supremacy. And my perspective is, no, you're both absurd. This isn't the way to do things. It's not binary in that way.

It's not simple. And if we care about people, then let's care about people on a meaningful basis, on an individual basis, with an individual basis with a particular concern for their particular injuries and hurts and challenges. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. With the FIZ loyalty program, you get rewarded We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. You said something about the kind of the difference between, you know, like a black person in the Bronx versus Bushwick or whatever that reminded me of this excerpt that we pulled actually in a piece entangled because we made the decision in our editorial standards not to capitalize

the B in black. We broke from the AAP. Yeah, and we published a piece explaining why we did this. And part of it candidly was informed by some of the stuff that I had heard you talk about and being like a fan of the fifth column and hearing you touch on this issue. But it was also like, as a team, we went,

we just like stress tested, like why we did, the AP says to do this, but like, why are we doing this? And then we went out looking for these arguments and the one the arguments to not capitalize that being black were like so obviously more compelling to us. Or it's like, we like, we are playing the same game that like the white supremacists are playing by like, categorizing this group. But I came across this quote from Glenn Lowry, who I know is a friend of yours. Yeah, and he said, "'If all the disparate groups that constitute whites "'don't comprise a single people,

"'why should all the disparate groups "'that constitute blacks do so? "'To be honest, I don't think they do. "'I would probably have a hard time "'seeing the sociological similarities "'between, say, a wealthy member of Lagos's business class "'and a man on Chicago's south side working three part-time jobs just to pay his rent. Learning that both are black would tell me precisely nothing,

which I found like a very compelling and straightforward way to put it. Although interestingly, I will say importantly, Glenn and I actually disagree pretty profoundly on the right way to think about race. From his standpoint, it's like, you know, am I right about this? Sure. But ain't nothing wrong with a little bit of race pride is kind of Glenn's perspective. You know, this is still our people. And I, I appreciate, I love Glenn. I respect him and I admire him, but I do think that the lies we tell

ourselves have consequences. And I think that that is true universally. And we talked about this at length in different contexts that folks can actually find. And I always find him richly, our conversation is richly rewarding and compelling. But he does still just say explicitly learning that they're both black. Again, I don't know what it means. And it matters if it's not completely contentless. It may be incoherent, but we attribute some sort of validity

to it through our continued use of it, through our continued participation in a taxonomy of racial difference. And the fact that we are omitting all of the stuff from the caste system that was popular in South America and the Caribbean That no longer seems same to us like mulatto. You don't really say that He's a lot of oh, no, he's great. You know, this is great. Octoroo kid down the street. No, we Turn some heads

But the other thing is similarly weird It's weird if I have to wonder when I send my seven-year-old daughter to school and it's February, if there's going to be a strange interaction in class in Marin, where she is the only brown girl in the class with hair kind of like hers, is she going to be feeling singled out for an entire month while everyone is obsessing over this one thing? And there's never a month where any of the rest of her classmates are single bound on the basis of race and history is talked about as though they all

are either the oppressors or the oppressed. It's strange. And I think we can have an interest in history that's robust and an interest in who we are and who one another are and our unique, distinct pasts that's robust without indulging in this mythology that becomes a kind of prison for us. So I just think that that is a healthier way to move forward.

I think conservatives who are trying to push back against excesses on the left by indulging in this stuff or making a profound error, they're only making things worse. And I think that it's always possible to imagine a moral horizon beyond the one that we have been past. What I'm advocating here for is not color blindness. What I'm advocating here for here is fidelity to reality. Like I'm not blind.

I don't have any problems with my vision whatsoever. I'm very fortunate in that regard. I don't need to pretend that race doesn't exist. I think it's important we acknowledge that it doesn't exist in a meaningful way. It does create a little bit of a dilemma when I think about saying I can acknowledge some things that I can observe in the world, but also race is a construct that's been superimposed upon it. When you get into the realm of policy, there's something,

one of my superpowers is that I've dropped out of so many graduate programs. And it's given me a great ability to quit things, but also like a sampling ladder and a lot of different subject matters. And one of the things where I've like learned a bit, but it still remain like sort of a fresh mind that isn't super informed but still learning is about the way that the logic behind affirmative action was developed, which I got from my time before I dropped out of a PhD in statistics and education. The way that I was taught this was there are disparities that have grown over time that are unjust that are arbitrary based off of a concept that you can fuzzily describe

as race, but it's based off of skin color disparities. That's unjust that's happened. As a government, we want to take actions to correct injustices when we see them. So if I'm somebody who's interested in making fair policy and I see there is a statistical significant effect on this one attribute, if we call it race, and we should try to correct it in some way, it affects outcomes and learning

and it affects outcomes and socioeconomic status. If I then zero in on it, then my goal as a policymaker is to make that effect no longer exist. And one of the things that I remember my professor at the time telling us was, it's easy to say we should therefore make steps that are going to counteract this principle. And this is the takeaway that I had. If we instead focus on the outcome and say, if we attack the socioeconomic outcomes and say we want to do more to help people in all this entire bucket of poor learning outcomes and the entire bucket of poor economic outcomes and try to make that bucket addressed, then

eventually we're going to make the causal effect disappear if there is one that's just correlative. So not causal but correlative effect about like some racial marker or some arbitrary marker that's making people end up in this bucket. But if I'm talking about it, if I'm in engineering policies in a way that's trying to address this concern, I'm sort of reifying it. Like it's really hard to address the concern but also not reify it. Like it's really hard to address the concern, but also not reify it. And I wonder when we get into the realm of policy, how people should act. Like what makes sense if there's a policymaker listening to this podcast? Like what's a good step for them? What's a good way to think about it?

Yeah. I would say that trying to remedy those disparities between groups is generally misguided, is my perspective. And that focusing on the actual deprivation is better than focusing on the general disparity. And I would also direct people to Musa Al-Gharbi's book, We Have Never Been Woke, which is not a book that is written against all people on the left who are woke and terrible. It's a book that I think does a better job than almost anything else I've been exposed to of demonstrating how a lot of these affirmative action programs tend to benefit people who are already in these kind of upper middle class, upper class brackets.

Like they're the ones who get the 8A set of sides. It's the kid who's actually Ghanaian, whose dad is an electrical engineer who starts the contracting company that is getting these really lucrative government contracts. And it's not helping the fifth generation American whose parents were enslaved in the South who is suffering today because that's generally not how things work. It's similarly the case even amongst native born quote unquote black people who are the ones who get these slots at prestigious universities who get the promotion from one side of the C-suite to the other better side of the C-suite because they needed a black person. And

I think the other problem with the disparities, the obsession with disparities, is the Harrison-Bergeron conundrum. Like it is entirely possible to eliminate the disparities by making everyone materially better off in a world where we... I think is what I was trying to articulate poorly. I'm not articulate. Is a worse world. It is just worse. And I think it's not a coincidence

that focus and obsession with disparities has that double edged problem associated with it. Either the wrong sort of people are gaining advantage or it's possible that we're making people worse. And by measuring disparities instead of actual progress and outcomes, we are not actually focused on whether or not humans are thriving collectively. So I think we just need to choose better policies and make better policy. And we don't do that by trying to embrace some new heterodox, which is a word I hate, but I just used appropriately, a new heterodox approach. Take notes, Isaac. We use that word all the time.

Well, I mean, I just hate the way that people are collectively lumped into it because I know a lot of people in the quote unquote heterodox community and they're genuinely diverse and I don't think it actually makes community. And they're genuinely diverse. And I don't think it actually makes sense. And we learn more and more that that's the case, I think as time goes on. So, yeah. The heterodox community is a challenging concept too.

Whatever that means. I think next week we should just start putting black in quotation marks throughout our Tangle Heart. Let's see if anybody notices or has any I didn't, I didn't advise that. All right. Well, we, we spent a good bit of time on this and there is a ton of other news and some, some naval gazey Tangle controversy that I want to get to before we get out of here. So we'll pivot from, you know, one controversial issue to a really non-controversial issue, the Catholic Church and the Pope, which has never been a point of any contention anywhere.

We covered this. So first of all, let me just say, one of the things we love doing on the podcast, we like using this as a space to respond to some of the reader and listener feedback we get throughout the week. It's one of the benefits of doing it at the end of the week is we get to see people's reactions to the stories we publish. And, you know, we get some challenges to our arguments, our writing, our coverage, and then we get to talk about them on the show. And it's one of my favorite things to do here. And we covered the Pope's death on Monday. Obviously, it was a huge global story. I sometimes know when we're going to cover something, you wait into the trans issue,

or you wait into abortion, wherever you're like, all right, there's landmines everywhere. And we're, we're going to start some shit. I did not feel that way about this story. I was, you know, like, the Pope died, sad, he's a controversial figure. Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription, or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled

subscription which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode, as well as ad-free daily podcasts more Friday Editions Sunday editions bonus content interviews and so much more most importantly We just want to say thank you so much for your support We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings. So stay tuned. I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday For the rest of the crew. this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'all. Take care.

Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will K. Back and associate editors Hunter Kaspersen, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Sall, Lindsay Knuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website

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