TRIGGERnometry - Glenn Loury: "We're Playing With Fire" - BLM, Race & Policing

Episode Date: February 14, 2021

This episode is sponsored by Retalk. Join a community for the centre & centre right, discuss anything including this video at: https://retalk.com/l/trigger Join our exclusive community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a professor at Brown University who became the first black tenured professor at Harvard at the age of 33. Glenn Lowry, welcome to Trigonometry. Oh, thank you, Concenton. It's great to have you on the show. Listen, our American fans will be very well aware of who you are. but for anyone elsewhere in the world who watches our show, who is not familiar with your career and your story,

tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are? What has been the journey that leads you to here, sitting with us, chatting about some of the things we'll be talking about? I could go on about that for a long time, and I know that's not what you have in mind. Well, first of all, let me correct you. I was the first black tenured professor of economics at Harvard University. Yes.

I was born in Chicago in 1948, grew up in a working class family, went to public schools, became a father very young at the age of 18, dropped out of college and went to work, eventually found my way back to the university, part time at first, and then full time with a full-time job, long story. but graduated Northwestern University in 1972 with a degree in mathematics and studied economics at MIT in the early 1970s, where I took my Ph.D. in 1976. I started my career as a technical economist writing math papers, but evolved into a politically oriented and social critic type economists writing about race and inequality. I was naturally drawn to those questions. I became a Reagan conservative in the 1980s, became a born-again Christian in the late 1980s, dealt with a sex scandal and a serious drug problem, got those things behind me, regrounded my career, left Harvard, went to Boston University in the 90s, and I've been here at Brown since 2005. I have of late become notorious as a center-right critic of the Black Lives Matter movement about which I assume we'll talk more in due course. But think of myself as a centrist, not as a particularly partisan political actor. So that's me.

Yeah, and it's great to have you on the show because that's basically where Francis and I both are as well. We're just trying to make our way in the world understand what different people say on different sides without taking any particular party line at all. But let me ask you a question. We don't pretend to be experts on the show, which is why we invite people like you on. But a question that a lot of ordinary people around the world might be asking about America now, I think, is just over 12 years ago, America elected and inaugurated its first black president with overwhelming support. to huge enthusiasm. Of course, there were people who were against it, but the overwhelming support was definitely there. It was something that reverberated around the world. I remember where I was when Barack Obama was elected, where he was when he was inaugurated, even though I didn't particularly

have much of an interest in politics at the time. What has happened since that America now finds itself in the place that it finds itself now? Well, that's a very good question. One way of responding is that we've been seized by a mass hysteria completely disconnected from reality that has a life of its own, driven by the interest of particular political actors, maybe the Democratic Party and seeking votes from black people, maybe various kinds of activists who are able to pursue their own political interests on the back of this narrative about systemic racism and white supremacy. That would be one way of responding. I think there's some truth to it. These incidents, the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in 2012, if I'm not mistaken,

the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2013 or 14, again, I may get the date not quite right. These incidents, Eric Garner, selling cigarettes out in front of a cafe, a convenience store in Staten Island, New York City, choked to death by a police officer. and I could go on with these incidents, have catalyzed a movement, Black Lives Matter, for short, which has seized the imagination of many and has foreminute this change in the conversation about race here in the United States. Then most recently, of course, George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, choked to death, a famously, inflammatory and infuriating incident has galvanized people in this movement, this movement which spilled over into street protest and demonstration,

demonstrations which on occasion spilled over into rioting and arson and violence. A lot of angry rhetoric coming out of it. I'm not going to pretend to have the answer to your question, what's going to on. But the race conversation, in my opinion, has definitely become less productive, more volatile, angrier, less capable of being resolved from the parties on various sides. And in my opinion, I think, to some degree, disconnected from the reality which the election and successful eight-year term of Barack Hussein Obama reflects. this is not the same country that we were in 1920 or 1950 or even 1980.

The very fact that the anti-racist advocacy attracts as much support as it does from mainstream political interests, from corporate America, from the common opinion of the editorial pages of major organs and so on, that books like Ta-Ahasi Coates is between the world and me or Hebrew Mexicindies, how to be an anti-racist, have as much cachet as they have, that the cultural awards coming from places like the Pulitzer Prize Award Foundation or the MacArthur Genius Awards Foundation or whatever it might be, have celebrated African American assertion of African American interests have gotten behind the woke narrative about race. Those facts, it seems to me, give the lie to the claim that the society is intrinsically racist or that people who advocate on behalf

of the interests of African Americans are powerless. Quite the opposite, it seems to me, is the case. So I don't know. I could ramble on, but you've asked me how in the face of Barack Obama's ascendancy could the tenor of the complaint about race in America be such as it is, intrinsically white supremacist, anti-black, and so on. My answer is mass hysteria has seized us here, and common sense, recitation of actual facts on the ground has been displaced by the emotional fervor into which people can be whipped by self-interested advocates who have their own agendas. And you say that they have their own agendas, Glenn. If I could push just a little bit. Surely, though, these arguments must have a kernel of truth to them,

otherwise they'd be easy to dismiss and they wouldn't rear their head again. Well, yeah, they have a colonel. I mean, George Floyd is dead. I mean, everybody saw the video. The guy sat Derek Chauvin, the police officer with his knee on the man's neck for as long as he sat with his knee on his neck. That happened. There's not any doubt about that. Moreover, the relationships between police and members of the community in many cities across this country, members of the African American community and many cities across this country are fraught. They're fraught because there are bad acting police. There's not any doubt about that. There are incidents that happen.

More than incidents happening, there are institutionalized forces that impinge upon the quality of life for African Americans in ways that are objectionable. That's certainly a part of the story. But the idea that there's a kind of systemic, violent terrorizing of African Americans by police officers is simply false. Simply false because there are 40 million African Americans here in a country of 330 million people. There are about 1,200 police killings of Americans in a year, of which may be about 300 are African Americans, of which maybe about 50 or 60. I make the number up, we could check it, are unarmed African Americans killed by police officers. A country of 330 million people. There are tens of thousands of encounters between police officers and citizens on a daily basis here.

There are hundreds of thousands of arrests. of people for suspicion of criminal offense per year in this country. So these incidents, which are real, are not emblematic of the experience of people in the country. They are not representative of what's happening on a daily basis. They're only a part of the narrative. I mean, I feel obliged to observe that some 8,000 black people were murdered. in the year 2020. That's 8,000 compared to maybe 300 who were killed by police officers and maybe 50 or 60 of those 300 who were killed under circumstances where you would not immediately say the police officer was justified in using force. So it's a question of what's the

actual experience of people and then what's the narrative that gets affixed to that experience? The actual experience is much more benign. I will use that word much more benign than the narrative of police hunting down black people at every turn. And that narrative leaves out the fact that the police are out there encountering people who are committing crimes, mostly against other black people. This is not an easy job. This is a difficult job. Now, I'm making no brief for racist police officers who exist. I'm just saying if we put the circumstances into some kind of realistic proportionality,

the narrative, I think, would be much more different. The narrative about threats to the integrity of the black body about black lives mattering would be very much different because the actual threat to the integrity of the black body, the actual extirpation of black life is being carried out not by police officers under cover of law, but rather by common criminals who behave viciously and who have to be dealt with. I say that with trepidation. I don't take any pleasure saying it, but if you go and ask people who live in these neighborhoods, they're going to tell you that they're worried about having a carjack or put a pistol in their faces at 1 o'clock in the morning when they're trying to fill their tank,

that they're worried about sitting your child out for a carton of milk at the store on the corner because sometimes the child doesn't come back, that they hear gunfire at night before they put their children to bed and they cower in fear of what that might entail. So the painting of the circumstances of African Americans as susceptible to rogue, vicious, violent intervention in their lives by agents of the state is false. It's not true. And Glenn, where would you stand on the fact that the argument that American police disproportionately target black people, in particular, young black men, and that's the reason why they're overrepresented when it comes to the prison system in America? I wouldn't say with the same degree of finality that that is false, because there is some evidence,

especially with the use of force, short of lethal force, that race plays a role in that the police officers are more aggressive, more likely to put on hands, more likely to use handcuffs, It's more likely to use a baton, more likely to rough up a suspect if the suspect is black. And there are police departments in which the culture of cowboy vigilante kind of violence, you know, we're the good guys, they're the black guys. We've got to go out and get our quota today is operative. So there is an issue in policing. Of course, there's another side to that story.

there are many police departments in which innovative community relations, initiatives have been undertaken, people working cooperating with police and so on to try to solve the problem of securing public safety for people. I wouldn't poo-poo the issue of policing. I would say reform is an appropriate item on the agenda. It's just the relative weighting of the various different threats. Now, the other thing that I would say here is there's an unavoidable problem here, which is that if you have high rates of offending in a racially identifiable community, it's going to be very hard for law enforcement to ignore that fact. So even if the proportion of offenders is a small proportion of the total population, which is certainly true,

the fraction of young black men in any city who have a gun, tucked in their belt, we're prepared to pull it out and use it on a police officer. It's got to be a low number. I mean, I don't know the number, but it's got to be a small percentage. Still, if it's a large percentage who are black of those who are prepared to behave in this way, a police officer at 2 o'clock in the morning pulling someone over because they're driving erratically, noticing that it's a young black man in the front seat of the vehicle, it's hard to ask that person not to be mindful of the fact that there's a risk involved in that situation,

not to have his sense of that risk heightened by observing that the person is black. Now, this is an officer of the state. This is someone who is a servant of the people. This is someone who has been through many, many, many hours of training. They should be so instructed that their responsibilities require them to suppress whatever their visceral reactions might be, and to conduct their encounter with a citizen, regardless of race, courteously, respectfully, et cetera, et cetera. But they're also human beings. If as private citizens, we're coming home from a party after a few drinks at one o'clock in the morning on a dark street,

when we observe two or three people walking toward us on the other side of the street, you can't tell me that our reaction in that situation is not going to be conditioned by whether or not those are old ladies or young men, whether or not they are black or they are white, whether or not they are dressed with business suits on carrying an attach case, or they have a hoodie on and they have their hands in their pocket. We are, as social animals, conditioned to take that kind of information on board. So are police officers going to be socially conditioned? Their training should work to counteract that, but to expect that they would be completely oblivious to that I think is a request that's going to be very difficult to enforce.

Well, we're having the conversation that we've had with Coleman Hughes and with others very much going through similar themes. What I wonder, though, if maybe we can take it in a new direction would be, what does a healthy conversation about this issue look like? Because, you know, at the moment it's all very much one side says everything is white supremacy, everything is systemic, everything needs to be defunded over. and the other side is saying, well, actually this is because this group of people commits more crime and actually police officers are just doing a good job. And yet people are, a small number of

people are being killed. As you said yourself, there is some evidence that black suspects are treated differently to white suspect, etc. So how do we talk about this issue in a healthy way as opposed to having this tension and culture war over it? Well, you're going to say I'm a Leanna for saying this. I think we need to de-racialize the conversation. That we need to talk about policing, about citizens, about the rights of people,

about the responsibilities of public agents as they interact with their charges. Not about blacks and whites and Asians and so on. That's what I think we need. I think all lives matter. I think that should be the mantra. All lives matter.

Now, in saying that, and I laugh because we have gotten to the point where if I say all lives matter, it's almost as if I'm saying blue lives matter, if you get what I mean. If I say all lives matter, it's almost as if I've taken a side against black interest by saying that all lives matter. I have not done so, I think. I was at a conference once, and I tried to make this move that I'm making with you right now, and I got my head handed to me by the audience who called me Uncle Tom and said that I had my head in the stand,

and I was ignoring reality. But here's my argument. My argument is, yeah, there is a disproportion in the way in which police use force against citizens based upon race, and that needs to be dealt with. Yes, there is. And yes, there are these incidents like George Floyd and so on that happen, which cannot be ignored. And the people responsible for them should be held accountable. I grant that. I grant all of that.

But if we racialize a discussion of crime, punishment, and policing in America, we are. playing with fire. On the one hand, there is the claim that advocates of black interests will make. Police are racist, Black Lives Matter, we must focus on their excesses. On the other hand, there is the unspoken conversation that goes on sub-rosa, that goes on beneath the access to the TV camera and the microphone, which is that there's a tremendous amount of black crime in this country and I'm sick of it. That's another kind of conversation. Ferguson, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis, has a horrific, not just Ferguson, but the entire St. Louis metropolitan area, has a horrific profile in terms of criminal victimization, in terms of homicide, in terms of assault,

in terms of robbery and burglary and car theft and so on. Those people living in that community, I'm talking about the white people, are aware that most of these. offenders are black. That's the last thing that we want to reiterate in their consciousness. The offenders are Americans who are breaking the law and who have to be dealt with. That they are disproportionately black is something that should not be brought to the forefront of the consciousness of people. It's something that we should attempt to tamp down. We shouldn't feed the reflex to see it in that way. The progressive advocates of black interests make an error when they think that they can play only one side of this card and get away with it. They can play it on

MSNBC or CNN or the CBS News of the New York Times on one side because those organs will never give voice to a commonly held sentiment, which is that in many, many cities in America, it's way too dangerous to step outside of your home. And the unspoken subtext there is, The reason it's way too dangerous is because there are too many black criminals roaming the streets of these cities. That's what people may be inclined more frequently to think if we frame the police violent problem in racial terms. Way more white people than black people are killed by police in America every year. For every incidence of a Tamir Rice, that's the young boy 12 years old, shot when he had a toy gun in a park in Cleveland. who has become a cost of left rightly because he should not have lost his life under those circumstances.

That was terrible policing. He happened to have been a black kid. They're white kids who had been killed that way. I can't remember the name of the gentleman, an African American in a Walmart who had a gun that he was trying to buy and got killed by store security officers because they thought that he was a threat. But there have been white people killed under those circumstances. There have been white people choked to death by police officers kneeling on their necks after they've had difficulty arresting the suspect. These problems need not be primarily seen through a racial lens. In my view, progress would consist in moving the conversation from one about generic claims of racial domination to one about the responsibilities of public officers in their

interactions with citizens of all races. And one of the reasons that I think that is because there's a lot of black crime, a lot of it. If you're inclined to think of the crime, in racial terms. If you want to racialize the conversation about law enforcement, policing, punishment, and prisons in this country, there is a dark subtext there that we would do well to be mindful of and not to encourage that it come into light. You're going to be racist. Excuse me, Constitin. They think they're winning the argument because they can call the people who are afraid of black crime and are prepared to say so racist. They're not winning that argument. those people don't care that you're calling them racist. They know that it's not racist to be afraid of carjackers.

And if most of them are black, it's not racist to be afraid of the black guy who pulls up next to you at 1 o'clock in the morning at the gas station when you're trying to fill your car. If you smell marijuana coming out of the front window, you've got to be, and you see that's a black 19-year-old, you're not crazy to think that that person might harm you. And that's not the kind of thing that we want to feed into. This is what I'm saying. Forgive me for interrupting you, Constitu. I mean, these conversations are very, very difficult to have on both sides. And I take your point about we need to stop racializing this conversation. But isn't that impossible, Glenn, in a world where we racialize literally everything now.

Everything now has become racialized to a degree. where I grew up in a multicultural part of South London amongst black people, white people, Asian people, Latino people, whatever and I went to school and it wasn't as much as an issue it feels like as it is now. It feels we've gone backwards. Yeah, I agree with that. And I don't know quite what to say about it. Your point is well taken. I could be just spitting in the wind. I could be just tilting at a windmill here,

arguing for a move away from the racialization of a discourse which has become progressively more focused on race. You know, I don't know how to turn the clock back. I only know to say what it is that I think is right and hope that people will listen. But that's not a strategy. And I frankly do not have a strategy that I think could actually work here in terms of, I mean, there's some people who are talking about we have to change the language and whatnot. There are, you know, there are rumblings of a kind of counter movement in the fringes. But I don't see it. I mean, the center of the discourse has definitely shifted in a direction that I don't think is entirely healthy.

So I'm sorry, I can't give you an affirmative response that says, oh, no, no, no, don't worry. Things are going to get better. I'm rather pessimistic. But I think I know how we should be reacting here, and that's what I'm trying to give voice to. Well, yeah, and I hear you. I think, you know, you talk about the impact of racializing everything. And it's becoming quite obvious, I think, now to anyone who's an independent observer, that if you racialize these different conversations, you inevitably end up creating racism against groups,

which for one reason or another do better in certain circumstances. suddenly people are, again, you know, as a Jew, for example, people are going, oh, why are the Jews so successful? Why are the Asian Americans so successful? Why do Chinese kids do better at school? In our country, in the UK here, why is it the white working class boys don't do so well in education? And suddenly, everything is about race. And suddenly, you're going, why is that group doing better than that group?

And inevitably, everybody finds themselves in a position where they are either the oppressor or they're oppressed one way or another, and we're just stuck in this crazy way. And I think maybe that awareness that suddenly every group is being looked at as a potential victim or a potential victimizer might make some people wake up to this. Do you think that's a possibility?

Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a stairs. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing, and most people have no idea what's actually in it. Avocado green mattress is different. Their mattresses are certified organic, built from natural materials, designed to actually support your body properly rather than just hold you in one position until morning. The craftsmanship is real. These are mass-produced objects. Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he's. sleeps. My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it fine. But the older I get, the more I notice that fine isn't actually

fine. Your body tells you, if you're going to invest in anything for your home, your bed is the one that pays you back every single night. Avicado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocado green mattress.com to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. I don't know. Here's what I think.

I think there's a contradiction at the heart of the identitarian argument for group equality. The identitarian argument for group equality is we have these different groups. We have Jews, we have South Asians, we have East Asians, we have blacks, we have Latinos, whatever. And they have identities. And the identities deserve to be respected. Someone tells me I identify as an African American and that's a part of their personhood. And it wants to be respected, taken on board, given credence.

So groups matter in the identitarian view of the world. It's not a matter of indifference. It's not like we're all a part of the world. the human family. We are in these various little boxes. Groups matter. Groupness matters. My black culture and heritage matters to me. The music that I listen to, the food that I eat, the literature that I read, the stories I tell my children. That's important. Groups matter. There's groupness. On the other hand, we think there's supposed to be equality of groups across every human enterprise. But how can that be? Because if groups matter, some people are going to

bounce a basketball a hundred thousand times a month and other people are going to bounce it 10,000 times a month. Some people are going to be drawn to the book as a way of experiencing human culture and other people are going to be more verbal or more spontaneous or whatever. It might be their differences between groups. Groups matters after all. They're not all the same. They don't read the same things. They don't believe the same things. They don't do the same things with their time. So now I've got population groups that matter. Groups are different. Groups have their own integrity, they express it in the way in which they live their lives, that's going to result in a different representation of group members across various human activities. They're not

all going to be in the academy to the same extent. They're not all going to be in sports to the same extent. They're not all going to do the same occupations. They're not all going to have the same professional profile. Now, I look out at society and I see a difference between groups and the proportion who are, I don't know, members of the National Academy of Sciences, tenured faculty members at Harvard University, tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, hedge fund managers, traders on the floor of the stock exchange, etc. I see differences in the proportion who are getting PhDs in American or British English literature, etc.

Groups mattered after all. The groupness, the Jewishness, the blackness, reflected itself, to some degree in how people spent their time and therefore in what it is that they're doing. And yet I insist that the society is unfair unless I get an equal proportionate representation of these groups in every human enterprise. That's a contradiction. And it's a contradiction that's only going to lead to tyranny and racism. You would make a progressive person or progressive-minded person so incredibly uncomfortable by what you're saying right now because what I think at the heart of what you're saying is equality between groups is never going to be possible.

That is what I'm saying if we think groups matter and we respect the differences between them. Now, we can blend it all together. We can say you can't teach your kid like that. You can't send them to the private school over here. You can't spend more time on this. Everybody has to be the same. We can flatten all of the cultural and behavioral distinctions that are the actual substance of groupness and put everybody into one social milieu

and then imagine that we're going to have equality. But that would be tyrannical. That would be overriding people's autonomy as individual human beings to associate with each other and to believe what they please. We're going to end up with the question, how come there are so many Jews who are getting PhDs in electrical engineering?

How come there's so many Asians who are doing this or doing that? That's ultimately where the question leads. the presumption of group equality in the face of group distinctions of social organization and culture leads either to the tyrannical imposition of standards which attempt to tamp down the authentic expression of groupness or to a finger-pointing suspicion every time we see somebody pop their head up above the level zone. It's wondering if the blacks are underrepresented and the Jews are overrepresented, well, why is that? There must be some intrinsic unfairness that's built into the system.

And that is a problem. And isn't it also part of the problem here that, so I'm going to talk about it from a British perspective. So I'm a former teacher. Everybody who watches a show will have a drink now. But, you know, people would say, oh, you know, the black kids aren't doing well. And I'm like, well, that's actually not true. West African girls in the UK education system are one of the highest achieving subgroups.

and the whole of education. You know, and then when I teach, I used to teach in London, people go, oh, this is a black school. Well, there's a fundamental difference between Caribbean kids or British Caribbean, British African, first generation African, different attitudes, different cultures.

So just to refer to one group of people as black or another group as Latino, when someone can be Venezuelan and Honduran, it's completely reductive, different cultures. Agree. Hey, KKK. Do you like feeling silky and smooth like a sexual dolphin? Never talk to me again.

What if I told you that Manscape had brought out a new and improved lawnmower 3.0 that allows you to be fresh and trimmed for the ladies down below? I've been married 20 years. The last time I was fresh and trimmed down below, Jimmy Saville was a respected children's entertainer. I'm going to ignore that. The lawn mower has a cutting-edge ceramic blade which reduces a risk of having an accident where you least want an accident.

My bank account? No, you idiot. You know Los Weevos. Oh, right. Plus, it's waterproof, which means you can groom in the shower and it has an LED light so you can get a really accurate and precise trim. Excellent. To take advantage of this incredible offer, go to manscaped.com and you'll get 20% off with free shipping. Just use our code, which is, of course, trigger.

20% off with free shipping at manscapes.com and use our code trigger your whereos. Oh, thank you. Excellent. No, it's a good point that Francis makes. I want to talk about economics a little bit because that, you know, that's your forte. And I think that's a big part of this conversation. Do you think that a lot of these problems in talking about these issues honestly come from the fact we've essentially abandoned what used to be called the class analysis, the idea that people really struggle in life, first and foremost, because they grow up in poverty in areas where there's substandard housing, there's a lot of crime, there's not, the education is not good,

they're not surrounded by inspiring examples of attainment and success. And that is something that is much more universal across all these different racial groups who are struggling in certain areas than their skin color or whatever else it might be. The thing that really holds people down is being poor, growing up in poverty, etc. Do you think that's the abandonment of that viewpoint is why everything has now become so racialized? Yes, I agree with that. I am not a leftist, but I think I was trained in the conventional sort of neoliberal economic school at MIT back in the 1970s and have, as I have already confessed, flirted with the right wing of American politics in terms of economic policy and so on. I'm not a Marxist. I'm not a socialist.

On the other hand, I think there is a profound truth in the argument I associated with Adolf Reed, the political scientist at the university. Pennsylvania here in the United States, but there are many, many others who are very concerned about race and racial inequality. There's not any doubt that they're concerned about the interest of African Americans, but who understand the problem mainly through a class lens. It's the disproportionate representation of blacks at the bottom of the class hierarchy. That's the problem. Now, I'm not about to nationalize industries and declare $20 an hour minimum wages and all of that. That's not how I would approach it as a policy matter. But having as the goal, improving the quality of life for people at the bottom,

expanding their access to developmental resources, giving them greater opportunities for themselves and their children, ensuring that they have adequate health care, that they have access to good education, that their housing is decent and so on. If food security concerns are ameliorated, this kind of thing, that should be the goal. Now, I say that both for the reasons that I've already intimated, which is I think we overdue the racialization. But I also say it from a kind of pragmatic political perspective. You want to get something done in a democracy. You need 50% of the people to get behind it. If you're a racial minority group, by definition, you're not 50% of the people. If you frame your politics entirely in terms of your racial identity, you might be able to cobble together a co-aul of the LGBT and of the brown and of the black and so on.

But you'd be much more effective if you drew on some of that 60 or 70% of the population who were white, the working class of that segment of the population on behalf of a program of politics that tries to expand opportunity for people at the bottom of the society. If you did that, you have a greatest chance of being successful politically and you target your intervention in a way that it was most likely to help. those in the minority group who are the ones most in need. But those people, the poor people in the minority group, the poor black people in the urban ghettles of America, don't give news conferences. They don't write speeches for politicians. They don't write op-ed pieces. They are not

on the faculty of the universities. The people who speak for the minority group are largely themselves, not members of the class within the minority group who most desperately need attention. They're interested in whether or not they're going to get a job at the university, and whether or not the cabinet of Joseph Biden is ethnically or racially diverse, and whether or not the Fortune 500 company that they work for, hires a consultant to come in and do diversity training, and whether or not the university has affirmative action. They have a class interest. It's a middle and upper middle class professional interests. They racialize their offensive, ethically offensive class interests. They're already privileged people. They now just want

a better job and a higher income and more attention to their concerns. They racialize that under cover of acting on behalf of the poor when in fact, the most effective way of acting on behalf of the poor would be to de-emphasize race and emphasize their class. last differentiation. That would be my analysis. It's a very accurate analysis, I would say, because you do see, you know, people quote and always talk about AOC. You know, she's a Latino woman. You know, she's Puerto Rican. She's on the left. That's what Latinos are. And, you know, like my mom is Venezuela. Again, everybody drinks. She's pro-Trump. You know, she's on the right, as are a lot of Cubans, you know, because they've experienced, you know, socialism, et cetera,

etc, yet these are not deemed to be the correct views for a Latin American to hold. And I wonder why a Latin American person would be pro-Trump. And I'll bet you to some degree they thought, perhaps incorrectly, but nevertheless they thought Trump was giving voice to some of their class-based concerns. You know, there was something else you alluded to, which I'm not a conspiratorily, person at all, Glenn, a posture that has been rather challenged by the events of the last year, I must say. But I do wonder whether making everything about race is a really great way of avoiding actually having to do anything for ordinary people and their concerns. It seems like a great way

to get people to fight amongst themselves while elites continue to benefit and prosper. Do you think there's some truth to that as well? Yeah, if my wife, Leone, we're here, my lovely wife, and she and I argued this point all the time, she was a Bernie Sanders supporter in the last election cycle here in the United States. She'd be saying, right on, right on, yes, I do. When Joseph Biden basically secured the Democratic nomination in the South Carolina primary, with the help of James Clyburn, the member of Congress from South Carolina, the Democratic Party in South Carolina, South Carolina, a conservative state, but the Democratic Party of very black and relatively liberal congregation, saved Joseph Biden from an ignominious humiliation by coming out and

having him win that primary. And he then went on to the nomination. I mean, her concern was precisely this. It was, you know, they're just trying to avoid the issue here. They're just, it's a corporate Democrat who's going to come in and say that something that's not all that much different from what a corporate Republican was going to say. Meanwhile, the gut level issues about working people, about money in American politics, about how the fat cats always get protected about Wall Street end up getting ignored. You know, they're feeding them, you know, Pavlum. They're just playing with them. They're exploiting them by appealing to their racial sensibility rather than going for the jugular in American politics, which would be going after

the guys with the money. That's my wife. That's not me. But I do have. to listen to it every day. And some of it started to start to get your wife on the show. She sounds like a great lady, glad. So you don't agree, I take it. Then what is your refutation of that analysis now that you're safe from your wife's punishment for actually expression? Well, you know, I mean, I think markets and capitalism are actually the way to go.

I mean, I think you don't want to shut stuff down. You want to open stuff up. You do want to have a robust safety net. So you want to take care of people who are displaced, let's say, by trade. or whatever. I don't like the minimum wage. I would subsidize people's wages. The reason I don't like the minimum wage as an economist is that I think it's a very inefficient way of helping people who are poor. I think it basically prices out of the labor market individuals who have a few skills. And I worry that it encourages employers toward automation tendencies that, you know, they try to

minimize their dependence on labor. That's becoming more expensive. That will have a long-term detrimental effect for the well-being of poor people. If you want them to have money, give them money, don't force the employer to pay them more than the employer thinks. That's the kind of thing that I would be inclined to say. So the differences are more about how to get something done than they are about what needs doing. Glenn, and what would you say to the idea that your position is great and it's very, very utopian, but the problem is not capitalism, it's crony capitalism. The system is rigged.

There's lots of evidence to say that. And really, these people at the bottom have little to no chance of making their way up. I'd say I understand why you're saying that. I think there's more than a little bit of truth to it. I think there's welfare, you know, money for poor people, money for people who can't pay their rent, who can't buy the food that their kids need and so forth. And then there's corporate welfare, which is an act of Congress that protects an industry from competitive pressures. and ends up putting billions of dollars, or there's hedge fund capitalism where the rules of the

financial marketplace are configured in such a way as to protect people. Or there's tax cuts for the rich, quote unquote, tax cuts for the rich. I don't think all of the tax cut initiatives undertaken under Trump were bad. I talk about it at my podcast with my economist friend, Larry Kotlakov, who's a tax expert. There were some things that needed doing in the tax. code that got done in that legislation, which promote efficient allocation of resources, et cetera, et cetera. But there was also a lot of, you know, fat cats getting paid, of rules getting configured so as to make it easier to make money and keep the money that you make if you're a well-law person. So chronic capitalism is a real thing. It is a threat to the

political integrity as well as the economic efficiency of the American political economy. every bit as much or more than the welfare state kind of handouts to poor people and so on. It deserves a much greater degree of attention, and both parties are guilty to it. I mean, I would just tell you, I didn't vote for Bernie Sanders. Well, he wasn't on the ballot. And I probably wouldn't have voted for him if he had been on the ballot. Like I could say, I'm not a socialist. I'm a little bit worried about that.

But of everybody who was speaking during the time, 2020 election cycle. He's the one who actually made me sit up on the edge of my chair and pay attention to what he was saying. He was actually talking about the things that need to be talked about. It's an interesting point. Brett, our friend Brett Weinstein, when we had him on the show, I mean, this is, I'm sure you'll be aware, something he talks about the fact that the two-party system is designed to reflect the interests of the people who are in those parties at the very top, not of people. And what you do about that is obviously a very difficult question. but you alluded to, or you referred rather to Joseph Biden a few times.

I wanted to get your take on the early days of the Biden administration, some of the executive orders we've seen. Certainly, you know, the conversation we were having a few minutes ago about race and not making everything about race, I'm not sure it's seen quite in the same way in the Biden White House. What do you make of him so far and of what his administration is likely to do, in your opinion? I'm concerned. I mean, it's early yet, and I want to give the benefit of the doubt, and things are going to shake out, and we'll see. I think there's a demonstration effect, you know, the first hundred days I want to do a certain set of things. I'm going to sign this executive order on day one. He did get elected with a constituency, and those who speak on behalf of that constituency, and I'm talking about racial minorities as an important part of that constituency, have at the top of their list certain things. So Trump has a, kind of anti-critical race theory initiative that he says the government employment services will not

rely on training public employees according to the doctrines of what he regards Trump as a more radical critical race theory. Biden comes in the first thing he does. One of the first things he does is to rescind that. He wants to make it clear that he's moving in a different direction on the race-related issues than was Donald Trump. After all, Joe of Robinette Biden has informed the American people that the reason that he ran for president, when he, that the thing that was the straw that broke the camel's back that decided it for him was the support that Trump purportedly gave to white supremacist at the Charlottesville after the Charlottesville incident. Of course, Trump didn't support white supremacist. His words were

quite explicit in not supporting, but never mind, never mind. Biden has to some degree, defined himself as Vice President Kamala Harris, an African American woman, et cetera. And so he has to come out of the box demonstrating his commitment and signaling that he's on a very different side of the question than was the previous administration. So therefore, some of these things, I'm not all that happy about his posturing on behalf of critical race theory. I would have, you know, and you can infer from what I've already said here, many doubts about that. I'm happy that an African-American has ascended to the position of Secretary of Defense, assuming he's confirmed by the United States Senate.

That's a good thing, I suppose. I mean, I'm not against it. You know, it's a symbolically significant thing and so forth and so on. But, you know, it hardly scratches the surface of what actually needs to be done. It is symbolic, after all, not really substantive move in the direction of, justice and equality for African Americans. But I'm not going to be a curmudgeon, poo-pooing something that seems to be on the whole a reasonable thing to do. So I'm keeping my powder dry. I'm not going to jump around and start castigating Biden for doing things that out of political necessity probably have to be done. Let me see what the larger picture comes to look like after a few months and I'll have more to say about that.

And do you think from what you've seen that the Biden administration is actually going to target some of the issues that we've talked about, you know, the fact that the lower classes in America are struggling financially, there's going to be more support for them? Or do you think there's going to be more focus on the critical race theory and amping up the culture war? I don't know. I certainly hope the former and not the latter. I think some of this culture war stuff, as I say, is just built into the cake because you had, you know, the electoral outcome.

The left, quote unquote, have won. They've been in the wilderness. They've had to endure Donald Trump. They want to see some changes. How deeply that runs? I don't know. I want to know who's going to be in the Justice Department in charge of the civil rights division. I want to know who's going to be at the education department.

in terms of what they do about equity and inclusion stuff. I want to hear some of the speeches that are going to be given by the new president as he tries to point the nation forward and see what he places his emphasis on. If I feel that those speeches are being written by the usual suspects of racial chauvinism and race-based advocacy, I'll object. On the other hand, there's an opportunity here. for the president to not simply react, but to foster a coherent, positive vision for what it is that we should be doing. I would hope that that vision would take cognizance of the fact that Trump actually did get 70 plus million votes,

that there are a lot of working class people who were attracted to his anti-establishmentarianism that many, many Americans of all colors feel that the two parties have not fostered their interests and that that is not mainly a racial issue. There's reason to hope that that kind of wisdom would be reflected in the new administration and certainly I would advocate that. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think a lot of people are massively sleeping on is if it hadn't been for COVID-19, it's almost certain.

that Donald Trump would have been re-elected. And so the idea that Trumpism has been defeated, I think, is way of over-optimistic. What seems to me to have happened is COVID came along. It discredited him quite a bit. Obviously, he was an off-putting character to a lot of moderate people as well. Put those two things together. But it doesn't change the reality. I mean, every way you look now, whether it's this GameStop thing,

ordinary people are not happy with the elites. and they're trying to do something about it, and they're increasingly aware that they have people power through technology, and that is a battle I've been saying is going to play out over the next period of time. Hopefully your optimism about the Biden administration is right, but you mentioned critical race theory. Maybe that's something we can wrap up the interview with. Can you just explain to ordinary people who keep hearing these terms,

critical race theory? What are they talking about? What is it, simply put? I think what they're saying, this goes back a long way. This goes back to the 1980s, the literature in the legal academy about race and inequality. I think they are arguing that one view of racial discrimination is this kind of one-off, unfair treatment of individual persons based upon race. but there is a deeper structural foundation for racial inequality. And it has to do with things that are not so much the treatment of individuals,

but the way in which we organize economic activity, the way in which physical space in the cities is organized, the way in which the laws are promulgated. So I give an example to be concrete, mass incarceration. Mass incarceration on the critical race theoretic sensibility is not just that the police are put, catching people based upon their race and more likely to a cost or to detain an African-American because they're racially discriminatory. It's that the constituencies that enact the laws

which are being enforced by the police are indifferent to the consequences of those enactments for communities of color because there's a devaluation of the worth or the personhood of the people who are in the communities of color. The systemic reach of racial unfairness, it insinuates itself into every nook and cranny of the society's operation. So the commercial advertising program of a sneaker company would be fair game in terms of thinking about racial oppression. So the way in which educational services organized and delivered in the cities would be fair game. Now, I may not be doing justice to this because I am not a critical race theory, devilte. They would say things like intersection.

They would say, well, you've got a variety of different groups, and we have to think about how the hegemonic domination of the white male, cis-normative, hetero people who are running the system, oppresses the native population in this way, oppresses women in that way, oppresses gays in this way, expresses trans in that way, oppresses immigrants in this way, oppresses black people in that way. and therefore we have to see all of these various tentacles of oppression through a centralized lens in which we understand how they interact and support one another. Again, forgive me if I don't make a lot of sense here because this is not my story, but it's how I understand their story. moving from the rights of individual persons not to be infringed upon because of their race or their sexuality, to an understanding of structures within a system of economy and polity and administrative law and practice and commercial activity and all the rest that work together so as to affect a suppression of the interest and of the well-being of communities of color. something like that. I don't know. Did that make any sense?

Did that make any sense? It means complete sense, Glenn. But what's wrong with that? What's wrong with it? What's wrong about, you know, thinking that we need equal representation? What's the problem with this? Well, okay.

You catch me a little bit off guard here, but I'll try. Okay. It essentializes and reified. dimensions of our humanity to an excessive extent. And it doesn't, it's illiberal. It is not taking the individual person seriously at some level. And it's also not accurate as a social scientific. So there's a normative argument, which I just made.

It's the individual that should be the focus of any theory of justice that we elaborate, not groups. It's the individual. But there's also a question of if we see disparities or we see social problems, to what extent are they actually the result of the forces invoked by the critical race theory? To what extent does identity really determine destiny in the society and so on? And I think we talked about the police violence question specifically, and I've given my view. But I think if you talked about educational attainment, if you talked about the achievement of economic security, if you talked about wealth disparities and so on, if you talked about underrepresentation and certain lines of business enterprise and all of that, that the systemic racism, white hegemonic domination, critical race theoretic framework, doesn't actually give an account of the data. I mean, you gave reference just a moment ago to differences amongst various African-descended immigrant populations in the U.K. In terms of what's actually happening, their race is not what's distinguishing between Caribbean origin and West African origin, UK, second-generation immigrant populations.

It's not their race. That's the issue. It's their culture, I'm inclined to think. that's not within the orbit of the critical race theoretic reflections. And there's a lot of stuff that's like that. Glenn, we've got to wrap up in a moment, but there's one question that's just occurred to me that I want to ask you about. If we take the economic analysis that a lot of the problems in inner cities,

in black neighborhoods in America are the product of the economic circumstance in which those people find themselves, would it not be then? reasonable to argue that that is the product of the various discriminatory laws that were in place in the United States, the genuine widespread racism that existed in the United States in the previous century, particularly, and obviously the consequences of slavery. Now, if I posit to you that that is a reasonable argument to make, is it not then quite logical to suggest that some form of reparations be made to address that and to help those communities up so that they can operate on a level playing field with everybody else?

It's not illogical. It's just mistaken, in my view. Let me explain why I think it's mistaken. I think it's a political misstep. I think it's the wrong way to frame the problem. I'm responding to you now by acknowledging, by stipulating that history casts a long shadow and that the history of racial oppression and exclusion in America is partly implicated in the disparities that we see today. I don't dispute that. And therefore, it is natural and logical to think that the right way to respond to that history is to monetize it in some sense and to make transfers to people based upon how they might be imagined to have been affected by that history. Here's why I think that that's a mistake.

I don't think that there is a sum of money large enough to indemnify disadvantaged persons. and a person who didn't complete high school, who has very little skills, who has drug addiction problems, who has three or four kids and no husband, who is basically on the outs of society. I don't think there's a cash payment big enough to indemnify them from the consequences in their lives and their children's lives of what history has bequeathed to them. They've been dealt a very bad hand by history. I worry that reparations advocacy, should it succeed, should it succeed in bringing about $50,000 per head of cash transfers to African Americans? I know that there are many arguments about

how reparations might be implemented. I just say that for the sake of concreteness, that it would guarantee that five years, 10 years, 30 years, 50 years from now, they would not still be jails overflowing with young black men. There would not still be 70% of children born to a black woman in this country born to a woman without a husband, there might still be 16-year-olds reading at the blacks, reading on average at the same level of proficiency as 12-year-old whites. That's the case today. I don't know that reparations would cause that situation to be different in 10, 20 or 50 years from now. However, what it would do is commodify the claim that African Americans have on the general public

for attention to the problems that beset our communities. It would commodify it, and it would enact a transaction in which we will have been paid in compensation for what history has wrought. That is, I think, not a good situation to be in, to discharge the obligation. I would credit that there is a communal. obligation to be especially attentive to the disadvantaged suffered by African Americans. I would advocate for programs of intervention aimed at reducing the most deleterious effects

of that sort. But I would object to sitting across a bargaining table with the rest of America. We have our moral capital on one side. They have their money on the other side. We push our moral capital into the middle of the table. They push these chits over to us on the other side. And then we're done. The ability to command the society's attention to the ongoing, certain to be ongoing social maladies afflicting Black America will have been significantly diminished. Better, far better, in my opinion.

More moral and also more politically effective is to take our moral capital, combine it with the influence of others on behalf of the creation of a decent social contract for all America, and get that implemented. If that's implemented, bad schools and black neighborhoods will get attention. Jails overflowing with black people will come to be a big social issue. The needs of families, et cetera, employment issues, et cetera, will be attended to. They'll be attended to for all Americans, and therefore they will be attended to for black Americans. Don't try to cut a separate deal with America, is my message to black people. That is a mistake. Well said.

A very, very powerful note to end the conversation on. Glenn, thank you so much for coming on the show. The last question we always ask is always the same one, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be. Intermarriage. You want to talk about race? Know that race is not something that falls from the sky.

Race is the consequence of what we do. In other words, the reason that we have all these different groups is because we reproduce those differences through our social behavior over time. Breaking down the barriers between racial groups means breaking down the barriers between intimacy amongst individual persons. The real solution here is a solution

in which we don't allow our futures to be dictated by our past. We don't understand ourselves. I mean, after all, to call myself black, I have to willfully trim huge branches off of my family tree because I have got answers. ancestors who are European. You can tell that just by looking at me. I am black, but I have

many things besides that. Blackness today in America does not have to be what blackness is in 50 years or what blackness is in 100 years. It will sound like I'm advocating intermarriage, and maybe I am to some degree, but at least what I'm advocating is talking about it. It's a very good point. Glenn, thank you so much. I mentioned, of course, at the beginning that you're a professor, but you also put a lot of stuff on YouTube, you have a podcast, you write stuff. Tell everybody where they can connect more with the things that you're putting out there. Well, my newsletter is at glenlawry.substack.com.

And my podcast, the Glenshow, can be supported and can be seen at patreon.com forward slash glens show, two ins, one word. So that's my podcast and that's my substack newsletter. And I'm out there trying to, you know, hold up. the flag in the spirit that you've heard me exemplify here today. So thanks for having me on Constitin and Francis. Thank you very much. Thank you, Glenn. We really appreciate you taking time to speak to us. Our fans will as well. And we thank them for watching. And we'll see you very soon with another episode like this one or a live stream, all of them going out at 7 p.m.

Take care and see you soon, guys.