The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Race Relations with Glenn Loury

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

Glenn Loury, Coleman Huges and Josh Johnson

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table, on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Comedy Cellar Show here on Sirius XM Channel 99, the Comedy Cellar Show. My name is Noam Dwarman. I'm the owner of the Comedy Cellar. I'm here at the back table, as always, with my co-host, Mr. Dan Natterman. Hello, Dan. How do you do, Noam?

How are you feeling? I'm feeling very well today. Before I introduce the... We have some big guests today, huh? The guests of honor. We have a semi... He's been on a few times, right? This one, I've only been on once.

Only just once? I've been upstairs twice. But he's fresh off his performance here at the Olive Tree, playing trombone with John Mayer, author for Quillette magazine and student at Columbia University, Coleman Hughes, and friend of mine, Coleman Hughes. He's part of the new intellectual group that Noam is surrounding himself with here at the Cellar. That's my biggest credential.

That's your biggest credential. And our guest of honor is Mr. Glenn Lowry. Glenn Lowry is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Social Sciences and Economics at Brown University. I didn't get in there. As an economic theorist, he has published widely and lectured throughout the world on his research. He is among America's leading critics writing on racial inequality. And it's here, it's all right. He holds a B.A. in mathematics, Ph.D. in economics. He's been

elected Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association, American Philosophical Society, and U.S. Council of Foreign Relations. And it goes on and on. This is quite an amazing resume. Welcome, Mr. Lowry. I don't know. Coleman, where do you want to start with Mr. Lowry? You know, there's a very

can we start with something quite controversial story that's in the news this week? Or is that something we should just leave alone? I don't know what the story is. The Martin Luther King story. Oh, we could start there. Dan wondered if we should even talk about it. I don't know.

Do you have it? I don't have all the facts on that. I gather that there's new information about his Me Too issues. Yeah. But I don't know the details about it. I simply haven't had the time in the last couple of days to do it. They're pretty sketchy, but it's so upsetting. But maybe we can use it to discuss...

Well, there's a larger issue about having heroes. People have done great things that might also have done things that are not so great. That if it's true, and I think we all hope it's not true or that it's the least bad version it could be, that is this going to force people once and for all to separate a man's accomplishments from maybe his faults as a human being?

I hope so. It's time for that, right? hope so. It's time for that. I think it's past time for that. I, as I say, don't know the details, so I'm not endorsing anything that he may have done or excusing anything of that sort. He is on the Mount Rushmore, metaphorically speaking, in the 20th century.

He's Martin Luther King Jr. He has a holiday. He has a monument on the mall in Washington, D.C. He's an iconic figure. He represents the aspirations of African Americans to equal citizenship. He has a Nobel Peace Prize, et cetera, et cetera. So now, say, we find out that he was a sleazeball, that he treated women in ways that they ought not to have been treated,

that he did some awful stuff. That's not good. Nobody's saying that's good. You're going to take him off Rushmore? I wouldn't. Well, one thing I said to Noam a few days ago is that from my perspective, many progressives would be happy to have a reason

to disavow what Martin Luther King said about race because these days, if you quote Martinuther king or if you paraphrase his message with regard to if you end sentences with without regard to race color or creed you're actually seen as naive like bernie sanders a few months ago said something like we should be we should be electing politicians based on their abilities and policies, not their skin color. And he was mocked the next night on Colbert's very popular late night show, where 40, 50 years ago, that would have been seen as a very progressive sentiment. So what I predicted is that if this stuff comes out about Martin Luther King, about him laughing

as his colleague raped a woman. I think many progressives are actually going to say, this is our chance to actually disavow what he said, because we've wanted a reason to disavow what he said for quite a long time. I don't think that's right, Colman. What they have been saying, and didn't start this year, is that you have to distinguish the king of the Washington March, 1963, from the king of the Poor People's Campaign, 1968, from the king of the Riverside Church denunciation of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War, 1967. What they've been saying is early King should not be the stopping point for King. King was a social democrat. King was leading the movement for genuine equality, empowering poor people, and so forth. So I doubt very seriously

that people who object to colorblindness, you're certainly right about that, they do object to King's colorblindness, would want to trash King in virtue of his Me Too issues, since King for them is iconic not merely because of the March on Washington and colorblindness, but more fundamentally because of his

challenge to structures of American militarism and colonial, neocolonial... Just to clarify, I only meant the colorblindness part, not the democratic socialism. But King is a whole thing. I mean, if you're going to get rid of King, you're going to get rid of the whole thing. I think what I'm saying is, I think they're going to use it

to ignore what King said about race specifically. Okay, we'll see. I think that could happen. It could totally happen. By the way, I have to say, and this is not just me pulling for something I wish to be true, I find it very hard to believe that he was laughing while somebody was being brutalized.

I just find that very, very difficult to believe. I can imagine some sort of extremely, I learned a new word, called sybaritic environment, a sexually charged environment where there's drinking and smoking pot, whatever it is, and something was going on sexually

that somebody describes, something that by today's standards we would not approve of, but more in the Roman Polanski type of disapproval of kind of the 60s kind of vibe. I just can't process it. I just can't believe it's true. Are there truths better left unknown? Because, you know, people need their heroes. The Founding Fathers are in that category.

We, in a sense, they're part of the secular religion, but they were deeply flawed men, especially the southern slave-owning Founding Fathers. Are some truths better... Is it better sometimes just not to know because we need our heroes and we need our icons? No, no, I would say it's better to grow up.

It's better to understand people in the full context of their humanity. I do want to know all the facts about Thomas Jefferson and about Martin Luther King Jr., but I don't want to be, you know, an adolescent about them and run screaming from the room when I find out that they did this or that. I want to view it in the whole context. So Jefferson's not canceled out because he was a slaveholder. The Declaration of Independence speaks beyond his particular social morality. Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr. ought not to be canceled out. And again, I don't know all the facts. In virtue of the fact that he may have found it humorous that somebody was doing something in the room next door,

which, as you say, Noam, might in 1966 or whatever not have been such as a big a deal as we would make it out to be in 2019. Right. Well, that seems to be your style as I've seen it, which is to look the truth cold in the eyes. And I've seen you discuss things like even, you know, other third rails like race and IQ. And I've seen and Coleman has also this kind of serene, I don't know, it's courageousness or something about him. Like he'll just talk about anything, other subjects that other people really feel are better left not even discussed, no matter which way it comes out. And I guess that's just a personality trait of yours. Would you say that's accurate? I'd like to think of it also as an

intellectual trait of mine. Yeah. And I would note that I have the benefit, being an African-American, of natural cover, so that certain things that I might take up won't automatically lead to me being suspected of being a racist because I've taken them up. Uncle Tom is not so great, but it's better than being called a racist. Yeah, I've heard, I had an argument with somebody about something much less serious than that. I don't even remember what it was, and somebody kind of was attacking Coleman for being not properly loyal to his people. Remember that? And I was furious.

And it was over nothing. It wasn't anything as... Oh, yeah. But that reminds me. There's a video a few years ago of you talking with some other people on a panel at the Manhattan Institute. And someone from the crowd asked a question about race and IQ. I don't know if you remember this. I remember it very well.

The person who asked that question was named Jared Taylor. Jared Taylor. He's a notorious race and IQ monger. He's a white nationalist. Okay, then let's call him what he is. He is like, I'm not interpreting. He wants white people to live just among white people and black people to live. And he is, by the way, he's the most articulate defender of this view.

Obviously, I disagree with him. But if you want to know what white nationalists think at their smartest, that's him. Okay, what about him? Well, I just think it was interesting to me that that moment hasn't gotten picked up on at all. A white nationalist asking Glenn Lowry about race and IQ. It seems, I've showed my friends this and they're astonished that this happened at a public event and didn't get any more play. Well, let me tell people what happened. So Jared Taylor, the notorious white nationalist, stands up in a discussion about race and inequality and says, isn't there an elephant in the room here, Professor Lowry, about genetic differences between the races and their intelligence?

And is that something you're willing to talk about? And I said, yes, I'm perfectly willing to talk about it. Let me tell you what I think. I think IQ is a real thing. I think there's some evidence that it's heritable and passed on to some degree across generations within families. I do not think, however, that the evidence for racial differences in IQ, substantial enough to have any explanatory role in racial differences in social status in America, is valid. And we can go chapter and verse on that if you want. But I'm not running away from this conversation. You know where I live.

You know what I'm saying. And, you know, let's have it out. That sort of thing like that. And the Manhattan Institute organizers apologized to me afterwards for somehow not preventing Jared Taylor from asking a question in that forum. But they didn't need to apologize. I'm not afraid of Jared Taylor. Let's get into a few topics on race here. Can we start with, do we have a working definition of racism? Because so many things are going to be, this is racist, this is not racist. What is racism? What's your

rule of thumb definition? You know, Samir Harris led off my interview with him a couple of years ago with exactly the same question. It's the key question, you know. Sorry. Okay, well, Coleman will have his thoughts. I would say having a hatred or contempt for another person because of the fact of their racial identity, treating people in a derogatory or negative way, an exclusionary way, because of their racial identity.

I would say ascribing to crude stereotypes about the characteristics of people, they're lazy, they're stupid, they're dirty, because of their racial identity. That's at least a gesture in the direction of what I would think of as racism. What did I leave out, Coleman? I think that's right. Going back and reading what Bayard Rustin wrote about the topic, when they were, you know, when he was... Tell the people who Bayard Rustin is.

Bayard Rustin was Martin Luther King's strategist. He was a socialist who organized the 1963 March on Washington, was a prolific civil rights leader, great speaker, great writer. When he talked about what racism was and defined it in his essays, he would always gesture to the kind of interpersonal, I don't recognize you as a full person style of racism.

There was really no mention of unconscious bias, which is a separate phenomenon, whether we want to include it in racism, I guess it's a separate conversation. There was no, to the extent that systems were racist, they were identifiably and concretely racist. There was this racist policy that we can point to. Here's how it's racist.

Racism was not abstract. It was primarily a lack of recognition from person to person. And that today is seen as not nearly a capacious enough definition. You're seen as naive to mark out such a small space for racism in society now. But that's a definition that's most intuitive to me, at least. It's the definition that I give in my mind to anti-Semitism. I mean, people can say anything they want, have any thoughts about Jews or whatever it is.

It's when I detect that there's an animus, a hatred or whatever you want to call it, that's when I say that there's an animus, a hatred or whatever you want to call it, that's when I say, no, that's anti-Semitic. You can have a very difficult opinion, and if it's in good faith, then how can I call it? What about Jared Taylor? He often says that he has not, and he may be lying, I suspect he is, but he often says, I have nothing, I wish black people well, but I prefer the company of my own people, and I prefer to be with white people.

Is that racist? Well, you've got a lot of black people who feel exactly like that. I don't think the idea that I prefer the company of being with, I'm Jewish, other Jews, I think my daughter ought to marry a Jew. I don't think the idea that I've got some time on my hands. I prefer to hang out with black people because I grew up on the south side of Chicago, and that's where I feel most comfortable. You know, so maybe saying that about white people is different. And maybe the reason it's different is because of the political implications given our history of saying that.

What do you mean? You want to undo the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which has a public accommodations title that says you can't refuse service to people because they're black. What do you want to do? You want to undo Loving versus Virginia, which is a Supreme Court decision that says that you can't have a law preventing white people from marrying black people. If you make the Jared Taylor type statement, I prefer to company my own kind. I don't know that you're not trying to undo those things. And those things were hard fought.

Second Reconstruction, 20th century move needed to give African Americans full citizenship. Given a history of a country with slavery, given a history of a country that goes for a century after emancipation where people can't vote in some states, saying I prefer to accompany my own white people kind is not simply a preference for social affiliation. It also has resonant political implications that you might want to single out for sanction. I would think that Jared Taylor is putting it

that way and he's really kind of hiding what's really behind. He's kind of cleaning up and putting it in a way that he can kind of sneak it through. But I think what's smoldering underneath is real hate. Let me ask a question here. I know I'm not sure I'm moderated, but so what about indifference?

Okay, what about the idea that I don't give a damn what the Negroes are doing over there on the south side of Chicago? They're shooting each other up. Let them shoot each other up. It's okay with me. I don't have any invidious intent. I don't have any derogatory idea, but I don't care. Is that racism? Well, I think, I mean, if the indifference is motivated by race, but of course

people are an indifferent species to that which we don't see, that doesn't directly concern us. We're indifferent to a lot of things. If you're indifferent to the south side of Chicago, but you're also indifferent to the suffering of white people, you're just an indifferent jerk, but not a racist. But if you're indifferent to the south side of Chicago, but you're also indifferent to the suffering of white people, you're just an indifferent jerk, but not a racist. But if you're indifferent to only the suffering of black people, then yeah, I would qualify that as racist.

There's also, I sense, a certain indifference that comes from modern politics, where people are so, that they feel that they can only weigh in on the issue if they have the correct uh opinion about it and when they don't feel that they can pretend in that way they're like you know like fuck it you know let let let them handle it themselves i'm gonna move on with my life because i'm just gonna step in in in something here that i that i'm not gonna be able to wash off and because i feel that way sometimes even though i don't shut up but you feel like you know you just you it you there's no point having a conversation because you're supposed to come to the conversation already with the right opinion. And that can lead to a kind of indifference, no?

You know, that's a good point. I see it in my classroom with students sometimes who sit quietly through a whole semester of talking about mass incarceration and race, talking about affirmative action, talking about police brutality and whatnot, and don't raise their hand a single time. And you can't tell me these kids are not smart enough to have some views, but they're probably just keeping their heads down because they don't want to get them chopped off. And, you know, it could be somebody like me who truly in his heart,

I mean, would want nothing better than to see every human being doing well. I mean, this sounds so corny, but like very,, but very earnestly, that's the way I feel. So then if you want to say, well, what about these black kids who are not getting into Stuyvesant? And I might think that, well, you know, and I do think this, that it's good that these tests don't budge

because if they change the test, they're just going to obscure the problem. The only reason we know about this problem and the only reason we might be moved to do something about it is because we see the harshness of these test results. But then I might get attacked for that. And I'm like, you know what, I'm not even getting into this anymore because I want to help, but the only way I can help is by saying the wrong thing. So I become indifferent. But I guess I'm not really indifferent. It's more just frustrated. And maybe

we can use that to get into it. What do you think about these tests and Stuyvesant? Just a brief background for the listeners. Mr. Lowry can give it. Alright, so the exam schools... Is it Dr. Lowry? It is indeed. Professor Lowry, Dr. Lowry, or Mr. Lowry, they all work. Forgive me.

No, no, you don't need to be forgiven. Oh, the Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech and Bronx High School of Science is all this. So these are special schools that you get into a New York City public school system through excelling on an exam. The exam is an instrument that measures what the kids know. Black kids are not scoring as high on the exam as other kids, and so very few of them are getting admitted. I think Stuyvesant had a class of almost 900 kids, and there were like seven blacks in the class coming in in the recent year.

So this is obviously a problem. It's a public school system. These are gateway institutions. These schools into higher education at the IVs and so forth. And you've got an underrepresentation of African Americans, what I think. And there's a controversy. And it's been suggested that we do away with the test here in New York City in order to ensure and use other instruments for selecting kids in order to ensure you get more black

kids in there. I agree with you, Noam, that the test is a messenger. The issue here is what do people know? The test is telling us what they know, and it's telling us what they don't know. That's a problem. There's no doubt about it. You could call it a civil rights problem if you want to. I wouldn't object to that. The problem needs to be addressed frontally.

The kids are not, on the average, for reasons that we could go into, and I don't think it has to do with their genes, acquiring mastery over material that is necessary in order to succeed in this society in the 21st century. I mean, if your math and your science are not strong in this society in the 21st century, you're not going to be able to participate in the cutting edge of what's going on. If the test is telling us that black kids in New York City don't have those skills, something needs to be done about that pronto. But getting rid of the test is not a solution to that problem. What can we do about it?

Well, we can enhance the opportunities at an earlier stage in education. And I think we need to be clear about who are we. So there's the public we. What can the public sphere do about it? What can government and policy do about it? They can invest in resources. There can be summer enrichment programs. There can be tutoring. There can be, etc. And then there's another we, which is the communal we. What can African American families, community organizations, and so forth do about it in terms of devoting themselves in a different

and more intensive way to investing in their children's acquisition of these skills. I'm talking about after-school programs. I'm talking about church basements on a Saturday morning. I'm talking about billboards and posters that say, you know, this is what excellence is. I mean, if we are prepared to extol the athletic achievement of somebody on the basketball court or the football field, we can extol the intellectual achievement of somebody who belongs to our group with whom our kids can identify in the classroom, at the blackboard, and on the computer screen. So, you know, I mean, I'm giving a short answer to what's a deep question, and I don't have all the answers to the question, but developing the human capital of these kids, starting early. I mean, obviously, it has to start early,

which can be abetted by public resources, but which also, I think, puts some onus on families and communities to nurture their children in a different way than what we're doing. I just want to point out very briefly at the point of irony here, you're talking about the necessity of math and science skills to succeed in society. We're here at a comedy club where we see a lot of successful people with few, if any, math or science skills and some perhaps literary skills. Well, we can't all be comedians. That's true. If we could, then maybe we wouldn't have to focus so much on math.

Coleman, do you have anything to add? Let me add to the question. It is one of the problems. The reason I'm going to ask this is because I went to New York City public schools and I've also at certain times had young black women who were mothers, single mothers, working for me,

struggling with their children. It is one of the problems that um that there there's too many black kids who are good black kids smart black kids kids who would do their homework who are properly motivated to do well in school who are trapped in schools where they are odd people out or maybe even if they're just like half the class is really good. And the other half of the class is difficult and doesn't behave and doesn't do the homework. And brings the pace that the teacher is even able to teach down to a crawl. And I've seen this happen where they don't want to leave anybody behind.

So the most difficult case is set the pace. But then the smart kids and the gifted kids suffer from that. And I feel like there should be a way, maybe charter schools are what this is. Maybe the success of charter schools is really just the self-selection of these families to get their kids out of these crappy schools into a school where they know the atmosphere is different. But every young kid should be able to go to a school which has a proper academic atmosphere where they're not hostage to bad behavior and disrespected teachers and all that stuff. Is that part of it? I think that's certainly part of it.

The question is how much. I think one of the things that makes me pessimistic about this conversation is the importance of peer effects. I think, obviously parents matter in many ways, but I think Judith Rich Hill's whole life was kind of devoted to this point. And it also gels with personal experience. The effect of peers shaping what you become and determining the social status games that you're inclined to play like the ladder that you're climbing and and like the rubric for what it means to be a high status such and such like peers have such a big effect on that and it's so i feel like there's such a deep there's such a deep desire to have a policy solution from the top down for for problems that are are deeply located at the peer-to-peer level and norms that spread in a way that is kind of mysterious and

bottom up and we don't really understand totally how culture reproduces itself. It's a very, very messy question. And yet we can observe the differences. So when the New York Times editorial page talks about poor Asian immigrant families in New York who scrimp on food to pay for test prep to get into Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

Clearly, that's a phenomenon that's happening to a greater degree in the Asian American community, black community. Couldn't a black family have a right to say, listen, it's not fair that the only way we can get our kids into this school is if we scrimp on food.

Like, if they're going to take it to that level, it's not really fair that we have to, you know, we have to follow, raise the bar that high. It's not just unfair for blacks. It's unfair for the Asian kids that he's talking about. Unfair for the Asian kids themselves. But be that as it may, the Asians are doing it. Yes. And the black man is doing it less. What is also unfair is if we at least on its

face, it seems unfair to penalize those kids by reducing their numbers. It almost seems like every option is unfair to somebody. So the question is what trade-off can we form? You wrote a book, a collection of essays called One by One from the Inside Out

many, many years ago. And at least the implication of that title, it hints at or suggests a bottom-up cultural process that has to happen one by one. Not to say that there are no policy solutions, obviously, but how do you see the status of that project really panning out? Because this is something I struggle with. Hey, well, that's a big question. Let me make an observation first. The observation is that in the context of the exam schools here in New York City, the numbers of blacks getting in are actually down substantially from what they had been 20 or 25 years ago. More Asians now.

There's very plausible argument that the reason for that is that the kind of tracking and gifted and talented programming within the schools that these kids are going to that would allow, I don't know, the top 15 or 20 percent of them to get specialized exposure to developmental instruction that would give them a real shot at being competitive has been pushed by the side, that that has found disfavor with a kind of egalitarian philosophy about education that says you can't have gifted and talented and you can't have tracking. So that point, I think, is worth noting.

I think another point is worth noting is that disruption in the classroom is a very real thing. When I talk to public school teachers who have to teach in low-income communities, not only in minority communities, but especially so, they complain about the fact that maintaining order in the classroom becomes a full-time job, and to the detriment of kids who have come in prepared to learn, ready to learn, interested and eager to learn, but not having as much of the teacher's attention as they could get. So I want to mention those things. Now, as for my 1995 book, One by One from the Inside Out. Available on Amazon.com.

Which won the American Book Award for that year, et cetera. Sure. I mean, we're going back 25 years. Sure. I was saying that at the end of the day, nobody is coming to save us. Okay? You can have public policy up the wazoo. We can argue about it. I'm for thinking about public policy, for good, open, inclusive, egalitarian public policy to that effect.

But there's no substitute for parenting. There simply isn't any substitute for that. So without trying to put the blame on hard-pressed single mothers who are working two jobs and have got three kids and are scrambling trying to keep everything together, who wants that job? That's hellish. That's really, really very tough. I'm not blaming her. find a way to provide those young people with a framework that's developmentally affirmative, and that gives them the attitudes, values, habits, practices, as well as the knowledge that they need in order to be competitive in society, we're never going to solve this problem. So yeah, when I wrote that book, I was gesturing in the direction of the idea that, you know, the civil rights movement is

over. The year was 1995. Civil rights movement is a matter of history. We still have a huge problem of racial inequality. Nobody is coming to save us. Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, left or right. Nobody can substitute for things that only we can do. And raising our children is one of those things. How does all the incarceration play into that equation? In, I think, extensive and complicated ways. So incarceration in the first instance is a removal of people from society.

You don't think that has an impact? You take people out of society. You have an available male-female ratio that is much lower than, much lower in terms of the available for maritable partners and so forth than it otherwise would be. Jails have a culture. People don't stay there forever. They go for two or three years and then they come out. When you've got a constant revolving door of mostly men going in and out of these institutions,

the patterns of behavior that are necessary for them to survive inside the institutions end up then getting reflected in the communities to which they return. In terms of the norms and, you know, guys come back, they're buffed up bodies, they got their tattoos, they're walking, you know, they're tough guys. You know, they become kind of heroic figures to these young people. And that's not a good thing. So, you know, I mean, mass incarceration or over-incarceration is a big problem. It's a problem not only for blacks, it's a problem for the country as a whole, but it surely factors into the situation. Where are we going wrong? Who are we incarcerating that we shouldn't be? I think we're incarcerating people much longer than we need to.

Our sentences are too long. The drug issue is always mentioned, and it's important, but it's not nearly as important, I think, as people sometimes make it. But the war on drugs, I think, is wrongheaded, has been wrongheaded, and ought to have never gotten off the ground in the first place. I think pretrial detention is a serious problem. Now, this is incarceration, although it's only for months or maybe a year or so while people are awaiting trial. But these are people who have not been convicted of anything, but who are nevertheless being held in institutions. I think that the idea that we put people in prison and we just lock them up and close

the gate and walk away, we don't worry about any kind of developmental, any kind of affirmative, any kind of rehabilitative programming in prisons is also a problem. It's a big subject. It's a tough one because if they're not incarcerated, they can do damage in the neighborhoods as well, right? So, I mean, I guess the people who really are antisocial. Yeah. I don't know.

Do you have any thoughts about that, Coleman, while I look at them? Well, okay. So then let's follow all the leads. And then what about the issue of the police now coleman i know is pretty um pretty skeptical of the idea that blacks innocent blacks are being shot in in numbers much higher than the white if at all than white people i don't know how you what what was it was that a fair characterization what was the man's name fryer was the heart roland fryer is his name so i don't know what you... Was that a fair characterization? What was the man's name? Friar was the harlot? Roland Friar is his name. So I don't know what you want

to say about it. Well, I want to say a couple of things. The police kill about 1,200 people a year in recent years in the United States of America. That's a lot more people that, even after you adjust for population, are killed by police than any other rich, democratic country in northern Europe

and so forth. So police in the United States are killing a lot of people. Secondly, they kill a lot of white people as well as black people. Blacks are 1,200, maybe 300 a year are black people who are being shot by police. I don't know the exact number off the top of my head. It varies from year to year, but that's roughly the case, about a quarter or so. And most of the people who were killed by police are white. What Fryer found in the study of a particular city, Houston, using methods that are not beyond dispute but that I think are professionally defensible,

is that when you take account of all the circumstances in which police and citizens encounter each other, what time of day, what part of town was a policeman called because there was a report of a person having a weapon? Did the person indeed have a weapon? Did they resist arrest and blah, blah, blah? That using statistical techniques, you can control for these other factors and the likelihood that the police would use deadly force against a citizen was no higher if the citizen was white than if the citizen was black, other things equal. He also found in the Houston data and in other data, including stop and frisk from the New York City, that the police use of less than deadly force, cuffing people, forcing them to the ground, using a taser, and so forth, was more likely to be used against an African American citizen than a white citizen, other things equal. So his study, I think, has to some degree been mischaracterized in saying that he, you know, basically found that the police were, you know, racially unbiased. He did not find that,

but he did find in Houston, in the years in which he was looking, that the likelihood of deadly force being used against the citizen was no higher once you took account of the circumstances if the citizen was black and if the citizen was white. I have a question. So this is one of, I think, my big disagreements with my father, we were talking about earlier uh about the source of bias the source of racial bias particularly unconscious bias of the sort that might lead a white police officer to be quicker to pull the trigger or forget deadly force for a moment what fryer found be quicker to rough up a black subject, perhaps be quicker to fear a black subject. The question is, where does that, let's posit that the bias does exist.

There's a racial bias that most whites, maybe even most black cops also have, to the detriment of black people. Where does that bias come from, and how does that bias get eradicated? As I see it, there are two substantially different answers to that question the first answer is that society through myriad ways is programming people to have anti-black biases it's the movies you're you're raised on it's the ideas that seep into you via american culture or yeah and i don't think that's completely wrong but there's a second story which i think accounts for far more of the bias which is that the human mind is a pattern-seeking machine and it's a pattern-seeking machine that is completely politically incorrect so that if

it detects a correlation between skin color and behavior it will seize on that correlation and form what we call a bias, somewhat helplessly, that then is kind of impossible to eradicate because it's impossible to eradicate until the underlying correlation is attenuated. So do you think... Can I add a third thing is what people accuse the cops of, which is simply hatred. Well, yeah.

I mean, yeah. That's also kind of implausible. I'm not saying there are no cops that just straight up hate black people. You can always find crazy white supremacists in an organization that big, but my question is, we all want to get rid of bias. How do we do it? Do we tell people to be less biased? Do we do anti-implicit bias training? Or do we forget all that or expect less of that and go for the

underlying correlation? I don't think it's as black and white as you might be making it out, pardon the pun, Coleman. But I think there's something to what underlying correlation. I don't think it's as black and white as you might be making it out. Pardon the pun, Coleman. But I think there's something to what you say. I understand you to be saying that if indeed blacks are overrepresented amongst people committing violent crimes in a city, who can blame a police officer for being more cautious when he pulls a car over and a young African-American is driving a car? Because after all, the chances in the policeman's mind that there's a gun underneath the seat

or in the glove compartment of this kid's car is higher than if the kid had been white in the policeman's mind because the background information is that in this particular city, disproportionately, the people who are shooting each other and who are carrying guns in their cars are black. And that's certainly a rational response on the policeman's part. I would not call that implicit bias. I'm not sure I would even want to call it bias.

Rational stereotyping might be a more accurate way of framing it. But I don't think there's nothing that can be done about that. I think, rather, there is something that can be done about that if we decide that we want to do something about it. And let me give an example. So in my classroom, I've got kids who come from all different races and ethnic groups. I'm an economics professor. I got a lot of Asian kids in my classroom.

I got a lot of smart Asian kids in my classroom. So a kid walks in the door, he raises his hand, he's an Asian kid. Am I going to react to that kid based on the fact that I think he's probably statistically smarter than the typical student? I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt if he gets a bad answer on an exam because he's an Asian kid after all, and so on and so on. No, I'm going to train myself to treat every student in that classroom more or less in the same way, with the same benefit of the doubt, and the same expectation of excellent performance, overcoming my instinctual reliance upon a rational stereotype, because the service that I'm providing as a professor would be significantly diminished if I allowed those feelings and thoughts to creep into my practice. You're telling me I can't train a police officer

to say, yes sir, no sir, yes ma'am,, ma'am, regardless of the race of the person who's in the car. Sure, the cop is going to be more afraid. He can't control his glands and whatnot, but he can control the tone of his voice. He can control the facial expression that he brings to the window, and he can control the words that he uses when he interacts with the citizen, and that's his job. Yeah, and by the way, I've seen cops treat, well, not just African-Americans, just people terribly. But having said that,

when cops are tracking down suspects who fit a description of a violent crime that was committed, then what you're describing is much more difficult because then the white guy they pull over, they're not actually worried about, and the black guy they pull over, they might not actually worried about. And the black guy they pull over, they might actually be worried already. This might be the guy.

If the cop has got prior information that the assailant looks a certain way, he's going to treat people who look that way differently. Of course. I just wish they would pull people over less. You know, I was very against this years ago. I was against the seatbelt law. Is that my phone? I'm sorry. I was against the seatbelt law.

I said it's just another excuse for the cops to pull people over. And because, you know, that's human nature. Like they said, now I got another reason I can, because they enjoy it. I mean, that's the natural sadism. I also suspect that, like I always suspect that whatever the number of pedophiles are in the population, it's higher among daycare workers. And whatever the population of sadists are in America, it's higher among police. Because those are the professions you'd be attracted to if you have those personality flaws, you know?

So we know that you're not ever going to get the police to be nice all the time. And this kind of goes with your war on drugs and all that. You know, they should be pulling people over more as a last resort than it seems that they do. I don't tell that with your own workers not to engage people physically if at all possible. I don't know if there's any analogy to be made there. Let me just say this, Norm. They're pulling people over in part as a pretext for being able to look in the backseat or look in the trunk or smell the breath of the person or see how they react.

Because they're really trying to find, not traffic violators, they're trying to find robbers and whatnot. I think we should stop doing that so much. I'm not defending it. I'm just saying. And I felt for a long time, I mean, years ago, before Black Lives Matter, when the shootings, when Amadou, not a... Yeah, Diablo. Was it when he was on the show? Yeah, the guy reaching for his phone in the vestibule of a building, 44 bullets or something like that.

But no, let me just get my point. That I said, you know, when a cop shoots somebody, he has to go, he has to give up his weapon. He's going to go through a procedure. He may lose his badge. You have to be a real kind of murderer to shoot somebody in front of everybody. So my gut was always, he probably panicked. He probably was scared. He probably didn't just decide to murder somebody.

On the other hand, every black guy I know has a story of when they were alone in the police car, alone with the cop, and when the cop knew that no one could ever know what happened. And that if he came out bloodied up, he resisted arrest. That's when the real ugly sadism comes out and the way the cops speak to black guys. And I've seen it. I think this is where the real resentment of the police comes from. speak to black guys and I've seen it. I think this is where the real resentment of the police comes from. I think if the police would treat black guys decently in general, then people would be ready to give them the benefit of the doubt when they shot somebody.

But the everyday humiliations and people are only human. Even if you can rationalize it, you know the reason. You understand the crime rate is high in my community. You can even understand, you know what, if I was a cop, I probably couldn't even act any differently. Still, as a human being, it wears you down and you lash out. They need to learn to be more polite to the police.

Good luck with that. You know, your adrenaline kicks in. People are only human. Cops are only human. I'm not defending bad cops. I'm just observing. It's not an easy job. So you're going in day in and day out,

and you're dealing with the dregs of society, and you're going to crime scenes, and you're seeing people at their worst. And there's a racial coloration to what you're seeing in many parts of American society just because of the demographics of poverty and urban poverty and so forth and so on. So it's only natural that a cop might develop a certain kind of contempt, a certain kind of, you know, disgust, a certain kind of dislike. But here's my point. That's natural for an individual cop. Cops are an institution. There's training. There's discipline. There's compensation.

There's an institutional structure. And that's what needs to be mobilized in order to counter the natural human tendency of somebody who has to sweep up the debris, the detritus of social failure on a daily basis. I'm talking about cops. So that they don't become monsters and end up doing the very thing that you're saying people who have to deal with them object to. We've been joined by Josh Johnson,

a new up-and-coming comic here. Periel, our producer, wrote up a little. Josh Johnson is a comic and writer for The Daily Show. His first album, I Like You, is out now. He may be seen regularly at the Comedy Cellar. So this is Dr. Lowry and my friend Coleman Hughes that I've told you about in the past.

Talk on your mic for a second, Josh. Yeah, yeah. Josh, did you ever get... Talking to mic? Yeah, yeah. Did you ever get the talk? This is something I just heard about the past few years about black children being told by their parents how to act in front of police officers so that they don't get shot.

Yeah. Did you ever get that talk? Yeah. At what age? I think I was eight. And what did it consist of, if I may ask? Oh, it was just like pretty much like do what they say, but slowly. It was kind of like it was legit like look they

you we know you like my parents would be like we know you so we know that you're not going to give anyone a reason to approach you or to or whatever so even if a cop thinks you did something or whatever just be calm and be you know like oh i don, I don't know. Answer honestly. Don't, like, get indignant. Or, you know, like, even if they ask you for something, like, let's say I was driving and they asked you my driver's license, it's like almost repeat back to them, like, okay, I'm getting my driver's license. And this is all, like, a lot of it was too early because I was, like, eight.

So I was like, I shouldn't be driving. Oh, my God. If a cop pulls me over, it's like he's going to see that I'm eight. Like, no black man ages that well. You know what I mean? And so, you know, it was just this, like, calm, like, just always, you know, act like you are innocent. And you'll be easier to be perceived as innocent because they might stop you because they think that you're not you know there was one time i was uh driving well my dad was driving i was

maybe 13 14 and cops caught him in a speed trap pulled him over uh license registration i was i was holding um my phone in my lap and there was some pieces of paper above my hands and the cop asked me to remove the piece of paper and show me what I was what I was holding my hand it was my phone um and you know it was a low-stakes situation but there was obviously you know it was probably 2014 or something 2012 I was thinking is this because I'm black? On the other hand, it just seemed like that would be a rational thing for a cop to do is to see everyone's hands. If I were a cop, I would probably do the exact same thing. But, you know, I get the record show that I met Coleman's dad.

He is he is like the most unthreatening human being you could imagine. But here's the upshot of the story is the cop so clearly because it was right around Trayvon Martin, perhaps before Michael Brown. But you could see on the cop's face that he was mortified as a white cop to think at the idea that I thought that what he did was because we were black. So he didn't give us a ticket at all. He was so mortified. You could just see it. He was apologizing based on perhaps my facial expression, what I think was interesting. So I want to have a few. Listen, this is this kind of a frank conversation about race that people are interested in.

But I just want to ask some questions about economics in a second. But I want to ask you something that I've thought for a while, and I don't think this is disrespectful, but I've thought for a while that growing up black in America, for the most part, is by definition a psychologically damaging experience,

no matter how you do it, no matter how well you try to do it um is is is that you know they say how men think about sex every 15 seconds or whatever it is like how many seconds go between the time that a black man has to think about the fact that he's black uh i mean sometimes i forget i'm black until white people remind me. Sometimes I'm just going through my day and then something happens and I'm like, oh yeah, I might be seeing different, you know what I mean?

I don't know if I filter everything through my blackness. I'm just like Josh most of the day. And then something will either happen or someone will say something or someone will ask my opinion. I'll be like, oh yeah, I've been black all day. Because it seems from a white guy's point of view, it seems like always on the tip of the brain.

Maybe it's just an interaction with me because I'm white. How often are you thinking of yourself as a Jewish person? Let me answer that question for Noam. All the time. No, no, no. But not in a negative way, necessarily. He loves it. No, I don't think it's comparable.

It's not something I think about all the time. Well, I don't think it's comparable. It's not something I think about all the time. You think about a fair amount. There may be some comparable experiences between being Jewish and being black. We've all got our identities. There's nothing wrong with thinking of yourself as a black person or a Jewish

person per se. It doesn't have to be burdensome. It can also be a source of pride and all of that. But there is this thing. You walk into the restaurant person per se. It doesn't have to be burdensome. It can also be a source of pride and, you know, all of that. But there is this thing. I mean, you know, you walk into the restaurant, the maitre d' seats you at a table by the kitchen. You look over across the room and you see

an open table by the window. Now, if you're not black, probably the thought doesn't occur to you that the maitre d' discriminated against you. You probably think somebody's got the table by the window reserved or whatever. Or the maitre d' discriminated against you. You probably think somebody's got the table by the window reserved or whatever. Or they're just an asshole. Or the maitre d' just having a bad day or whatever.

But if you're black, it may be, for many of us, that you can't let go of the idea that this maitre d'. You're seething at the idea that the maitre d' put me at this table by the kitchen. You feel like you've been victimized somehow, and now you're carrying this burden, and that's got to have,, you know, over the years, it's got to take its toll on a person's psyche. Even the time, like, I have young kids, and they're actually mixed. Their mom is Indian, but they have barely any concept of what their race is or color or that it matters or any of that. But I would imagine if I was raising black children by this age, like seven years old,

it would be very deep within their psyche, racism, that we could be victims, everything on television, all the, you know, and... Well, was that your experience? I don't think it was. Isn't that damaging? It wasn't there when I was seven. It wasn't?

I don't think it was there when I was seven. No, like, here's the thing. I would get talks. Like, I would get, like, hey, you're going to be seen as there. And I also went to, like, a school where I was, like, I would get like hey you're gonna be seen as different and I also went to like a school where I was like there were some years where I was the only black kid in the class you know what I mean so like things like that

would remind me that I was like different in some sort of way but I think I think damaging might be too too strong of a way to put it because none of it like hurt me. And even the spots of racism I experienced when I was little, because I grew up in Louisiana,

little spots of racism that I catch throughout living in Louisiana, I still chalked up to being in Louisiana and not reflective of my blackness, if that makes sense. In my head, I was just like, oh, if I were in a different place right now, this thing might not happen. There wasn't this inevitable gravity towards my blackness that I was going to have a hard time here and a hard time here. And I was a pretty affable kid, too.

So I was also like... You're affable enough as an adult, I dare say. You're pretty affable. I have a question. On the one hand, I very much identify with people who have a problem with authority like i can totally imagine myself if i felt i was being unjustly treated just completely losing control just like i think i told you a couple weeks ago i was i was

uh you know in in the um duane reed with my girlfriend who's pakistani and a pakistani dude came up gorgeous by the way thank you um dude came up to her. Gorgeous, by the way. Thank you. Came up to her, started speaking in Urdu or whatever. I don't speak Urdu. She speaks and he's just talking or whatever. And I said, what did he say? He said he wanted to know who you were and why I was with you.

And for some reason, this pissed me off so much. It is like this Pakistani pakistani dude doesn't think that doesn't want a pakistani woman with a black guy maybe it was just with any guy that's not pakistani maybe it's one of those things but it was also like south asians and arabs can also be very specifically racist against black people sometimes and without the white guilt so it can even be less masked and something about this just incensed me. And I didn't want to like blow up in the middle of Duane Reade. So I have fairly good emotional self-control, so it's fine. On the one hand, I could totally see there's just an inherent thing about human nature in that

respect. On the other hand, I think of the fact that how much data there is testifying to the fact that it's harder to get into college if you're Asian. And I'm thinking to myself, why aren't Asians raising hell? I mean, yes, there's a lawsuit right now, but imagine how much hell black people would raise if black people were treated formally like Asians are in the college admission system, for example. So there's the human nature on the one hand, but then there's also the degree to which the specific subculture you're from programs you to get mad or not based on mistreatment. And I wonder how much of my own psychology or the psychology of blacks or Asians or whatever group is actually not just the natural human urge to be treated with respect,

but is also itself cultural programming. I do think also that Asians might be less comfortable in America. They might have the attitude, well, we're guests here. We've only been here one generation. We shouldn't be making any noise. Black people have been here since longer than anybody, except, I guess, the English, you know, and they feel very much at home and very willing to express their grievances.

Sometimes, you know, I think Jews were like that early on. We didn't want to, you know, hey, it's not our country. Don't make waves. Remember the thought experiment that we started, you and I started to get into, and I never followed up. But I was wondering, as a thought experiment one time, what if everybody woke up with a kind of amnesia where they had no knowledge of the past history of racism? And all they could learn about was how they experienced life prospectively. How racist would the average black guy think the world was if he never knew that there had been slavery,

never knew about Jim Crow, just had to base his opinions on the world today? Why is that interesting? Because Coleman reacts to this guy, and part of that is because he's quite aware of the racism with a capital R as a historical chapter. And it can build up in people's psyche and create a very sensitive outlook. I mean, I didn't mean to be disrespectful, but the reason I ask is because, of course, you'd not see the world as being as racist

if you had no knowledge of slavery and Jim Crow and all of that, and you looked around at the relatively open, relatively non-discriminatory society that we live in. There might be a little bit here, a little bit there, but it wouldn't be any big deal if that's all you knew. But the thought experiment that you suggest somehow overlooks the fact that the history lives in our present time in many different ways. I mean, there are institutions that are to some degree shaped by that history. And so forgetting about it while we can imagine.

Which institutions are you referring to? Well, I'm talking about the structure of the African-American family. I'm talking about the gender dynamics within the black community. I mean, I just give one example of that, okay? So seven in ten kids born to a woman who's not married. You think that doesn't have any... No, I don't mean to put this personally. That certainly has something to do with a long history of the dispossession and enslavement of African Americans.

This is not saying that it's somehow white people's fault that black people don't marry as much as they might and raise their kids in a certain way. It's simply saying that the disadvantages that African Americans experience are linked to a history which is easy to bracket if you're just doing a thought experiment, but is socially and politically significant. I think the thought experiment is useful insofar as, at least for me,

it gets me thinking about the way... So there's history, there's all the facts that have happened, all the innumerable grievances that have been inherited, all the innumerable harms that have been perpetrated. And then there's the way we conceive and talk about those facts. And it seems to me that there is something unique, not just, there's a, there's something unique about what happened to black people in America, but there's also something unique about our approach to it. The fact that nobody... Everyone I come to and talk about how Japanese Americans weren't allowed to own land until 1952, they don't even know about this fact.

We don't memorialize it. We don't- We don't dwell on it. We don't memorialize it. We don't dwell on it. We don't dwell on it. Obviously, another example would be the way in which Jews have memorialized the Holocaust. It's never forget. Obviously, there is something unique about the Holocaust, but there are also many, many genocides that people just don't even know about.

So there is a way of talking about, and arguably, you could argue that one negative consequence of the way the Holocaust or slavery has taken outside importance is that it fuels a kind of identity politics where every criticism of the Israeli government is seen as anti-Semitic because don't you know about the Holocaust, or every criticism of black culture is seen as racist because don't you know about the Holocaust or every criticism of black culture or of what is seen as racist because don't you know about slavery Jim Crow the point is that we're doing something to the history it's not just that we're looking at the history objectively there and reacting to it appropriately we're adding something to it we're putting some

top spin on it with black history in a way that we don't with others to the to our detriment yeah i feel like if everyone fell asleep i mean i wasn't part of the initial thought experiment but i do feel like if everyone fell asleep ever got the history involved with racism we'd wake up and just have to figure out how to be racist again like we just wake up and there'd just be like new very fresh slurs you know i mean like it wouldn't be because because it's a thing about the individual and it's a thing about like how you are raised to a certain degree. So if you woke up and forgot all that, maybe, you know, a person wouldn't have a problem with Jews or black people, Asians, whatever. But, you know, within sort of like an inferiority dynamic of an individual, that's why you have people saying like this is an affirmative action hire because in their mind they believe that if this person

just didn't even exist or never applied they'd obviously get the job which is a bit hubris to begin with you know so it's like I don't think it would take long for all those things to creep back up again we just wouldn't have we wouldn't be able to learn the thing if we would be recreating it ourselves. It just occurred to me where we started that. It was during the blackface thing, where there was this big separation between some white guys, and I just want to dress like Michael Jackson, you know?

And black people were bringing in this whole history that these white people were barely aware of, or if they were aware of, they couldn't really identify with it and create this tremendous difference in reaction, which was a distortion of reality from the historical memory. It's just interesting to me. I think Josh brought up an interesting point. If all the history were forgotten, would we recreate it?

Have we evolved at all? And to what extent is the history keeping us on the straight and narrow, knowing... That's interesting. People say, well, if you forget the past, you're doomed to repeat it. Is the past instructing us to not repeat that? You know how Jews always say the Holocaust

can happen again? We never say slavery can happen again. Isn't that interesting? Why is that? I don't know. I think we've got... They're both pretty bad. We've got too big and strong. Maybe economically we don't need slavery. I don't think the Holocaust can happen again. I always thought that was a stretch.

I want to ask you about protectionism. And forgive me for this whole thing. I'm an economist, everybody, in case you didn't know. So I asked Tyler Cowen. So he said protection is always bad. And I asked him, I, and he said, so he said, protection is always bad. And my, and I asked him, I said, even if the Chinese were using slave labor

to build cars, and consequently our auto industry went out of business, would we still be better off? And to my surprise, he said, yes, we would still be better off. Do you agree with that? Well, we'd be better off. We wouldn't be better. I'm better off because cars would be cheaper

and because if you're just counting money, the cheaper the car, the more money you have to spend on other things. But all those people would be out of work. Well, they'd be out of work doing car making, but they'd be in work doing something else, something else that we want to do, like giving me a massage.

So this is the economist's faith that there will always be something else. People will always devise something else to do. Well, you know, slavery is bad on a moral level, okay? So, you know, human trafficking that brings women who are willing to sell their bodies for money, you know, quote, are we better off, close quote. People who want those services are better off, but we're not better for having done it. But on the protectionism front, I don't agree with Tyler.

And I heard this interview. I think there's a strategic element. I think one of the things you're doing is it's not a perfect competitive market. You're dealing with a behemoth over there. I'm talking about China. They don't play by the same rules as a perfectly competitive market, so it's a bargaining situation. You know, you mess with me, I'll mess with you. You want something, I got it.

I want something that you got. Let's see how we're going to make a deal. So in that context, protectionism is the first step in an ongoing negotiation to try to resolve who's going to get the better of whom in a bilateral situation. Yeah, I asked him that. Does he think this is Trump's endgame or it's just a bargaining position looking for leverage? And I think he said he wasn't sure.

He suspected that Trump actually was protectionist in his heart. I don't know Trump and I don't know that. It might be right that he's protectionist in his heart. But it looks to me as I'm watching this that this is a bargaining game and that we're looking for and expecting to hear before November 2020 some kind of deal, some kind of resolution. I'm with you. Is Trump a racist, by the way? No. Okay.

You know, silly question. Silly question? I think it's, silly question. Silly question. I think it's a silly question. The personal proclivities of Trump, I mean, is Trump free from any critique that he might have handled racial etiquette more effectively? No, he's not free from that critique. Is Jesse Jackson a racist? No. Okay.

You can find incidents where Jesse Jackson has said things. Jesse Jackson friendly with Louis Farrakhan, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'd say Jackson has more racial resentment than Trump has anti-black resentment. What's sillier, Noam's question about is Trump racist or the thought experiment? Here's what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that what really matters are policies, not the personal proclivities of the president. And I see the racist charge as a political move on the part of his opponents to try to make him unacceptable to a critical component of the electorate. Yeah, I never ask my plumber, like, hey, do you mind me owning this house? It's like you kind of just hope they'll do their job, and that's, like, the main focus. We have to wrap it up, because Dr. Lowry's going to see a comedy show around the corner.

Good. What's on the top of your mind these days? You know, if you were going to do a podcast later of your own, what would you talk about first? I'm talking about affirmative action a lot these days. You're against it. I'm kind of against it becoming a permanent fixture. I'm not against it in the abstract. I'm not against it on constitutional principles. What I'm against is having African Americans to require dependency

on a special treatment in order to be included in the most selective and competitive intellectual venues. To me, it's just another version of the problem we were talking about with the exam schools in New York City, which is to say, if African Americans are not getting admission to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford at the numbers that we want them to gain, sure, you can cover that problem in the short run with affirmative action. But if you build that in as a permanent practice, you're basically putting African Americans in a horrible and undignified situation. Because everybody knows the real currency of the realm is intellectual performance. And everybody knows that AfricanAmerican presence is to a large degree dependent upon exempting them from the judgments that would be applied to others.

That's not equality, and I think equality ought to be the goal. Did you see, you reminded me of it, there's a thing where there are some schools that are going to start adding points to your SAT based on your level of... Adversity points. Adversity points. Yeah, I saw that. I feel like that's going to make the smartest kid in class rob a liquor store

just to whip his dad's gun to make sure his dad goes to jail, and now he's from a one-parent family. He's got the test grades. Apparently, Thomas Chatterton Williams, who lives in France, said that they instituted this in France and then found out that something like 40% of the kids with adversity scores were rich kids gaming the system. Yeah. That's always going to be the case. So, you know, when I went to Penn Law School and there

was a heavy affirmative action there. And I remember very clearly that there was a heavy affirmative action there. And I remember very clearly that there were a few black guys and one woman in the class who were really smart and kind of in the thick of things and basically indistinguishable. Talking about my dad? They're about the same, ain't they? Indistinguishable from any other student there. And then there were like six or seven kids who were there who, you know, couldn't answer the,

they were clearly in over their heads and they all dropped out by the end of the three years. And it seemed like all they succeeded in doing is making the accomplishments of the other black people in the class look less credible.

And you probably agree with that. But I really saw it firsthand. other black people in the class look less credible. And you probably agree with that. But I really saw it firsthand. We were going on interviews and I'm like, what can these law firms think when they interview this girl, I remember the girl who was sitting next to me, who couldn't answer the most simple questions in class. Why? This is not helping.

I do agree with that. Anecdotes should not be the basis for making broad social policy, but they can be the starting point for doing so. And like I say, the goal needs to be equality. The story in the New York Times not long ago about a law firm announcing a crew of partners that were being elevated to the position of partner and there were no blacks amongst them.

And the response was a firestorm of protest. Why are there no blacks? And some people say, you read down into the bowels of the story, well, because the associates that we're bringing in who were black were disproportionately not competitive. And we had to weed them out because when you make somebody partner and you give them a stake at the bottom line, you know, you got to know that you're bringing somebody in who can really pull their own weight. And unfortunately, the fact of low LSAT score and low GPA in college is predictive for everybody, not just blacks, of how well they're going to do in law school, which is predictive for everybody, not just blacks, of how effective they're going to be as associates in law firms. And, you know, and I'll say that I'm going to say this now, I guess we'll wrap up. I think there actually is a real racism

also at play there because partners are also dependent on to bring in business. True enough. And very high end, you know, the lot on the line. Yeah, it's clubby.

And they'll get skittish about, you know, is this black partner? And it's a, I mean, it's an ugly cycle because then you say, well, is he there because of affirmative action? I don't think I want to give my, I don't want to risk it.

You know, I have too much to lose. So, you know, these are tough problems, right? There's no easy answers. Even if you had a magic wand, you might not be able to make them. That's why it's at the top of my agenda, things to think about and write about these days. All right. Dr. Lowry, it's been a pleasure. Can we just plug very briefly

the new Live From The Table Instagram put together by our own Perry Alashian brand, our producer. It's at Live From The Table. Also, please email with your thoughts about the podcast at podcast... What is it again?

Podcast at ComedyCellar.com I always it again? Podcast at ComedyCellar.com. Podcast. I always forget that. Podcast at ComedyCellar.com. Any thoughts about Noam's thought experiment you can write in or just general questions and comments. Coleman, by the way, are you doing a podcast? I'm trying to.

I get a little tongue-tied sometimes, but I think the thought experiment is not as silly as you think it is. No, I didn't think it was said that silly, but I always like it when somebody puts you in your place, and it's fun to see. Do you tweet, Dr. Lowry? I hope not. Tweeting Twitter is horrible. I do tweet. I do Facebook, and

I have my own podcast. It's called The Glenn Show, and you can find me at YouTube. The Glenn Show, and Coleman is a regular on Quillette, and at ColdXMan. The Glenn Show. And Coleman is a regular on Quillette and at Cold X-Men. Cold X-Men. Yeah, and you can find me on Instagram at Josh Johnson Comedy, and then at The Cellar.

I have a spot right now. All right. Okay. Break a leg as actors say. We don't say it, but a lot of non-comics will say to me, break a leg, because they don't realize comics don't say that. Good night, everybody. Good night.