TRIGGERnometry - Is "Anti-Racism" Helping Black People? - John McWhorter

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

John McWhorter is associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University and the author of several books including his latest title Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] 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

Here we are in a situation where, again, intelligent people are frankly pretending that we still live in an America that's defined by the stain of racism in a way that if our grandparents could hear us talking, they would be appalled that we would compare ourselves to them. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is making a lot of waves at the moment. He is an associate professor at Columbia University and author of woke racism. John McWhorter, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure to have you, John.

You've written a book that, as I said, is making a lot of waves in the moment at the moment. A lot of our audience are big fans of yours and know who you are, but there will be also a lot of people, particularly here in the UK, who are less familiar with your work. Tell everybody a little bit about your story. Who are you? How are you where you are? what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

Well, actually, what I am is I study academic linguistics. I'm a linguist at Columbia University. And the linguistics work that I do is not usually about race issues. I'm not somebody who only studies black English or the like. I'm just a linguistics nerd, really. But I have developed an alternate commitment to making certain arguments about race because I think that the race debate in our country, and I think often in yours as well, is based less on actually helping people than on a certain kind of performance.

And I'm worried that things have gone so far in that direction that I feel like I need to speak up because I feel that my views on these things are shared by an awful lot of other black people. So the idea is not for me to tilt at windmills and being eccentric, but I feel like a certain on-the-ground view about what will help Black America doesn't get represented because of a certain orthodoxy that is typical of two places, which are only a subset of society, academia and the media. So really, what I am is a language geek, and I get detoured by also wearing another hat as a race commentator, which I just sense as a duty because I feel that a lot of people who feel the way I do

refrain from saying these things in public because they're afraid of getting their feelings hurt. I'm not. And so here we are. That's my story. It's interesting. Let me ask you this because as a fellow linguistic nerd, I ran my own translation business for about 10 years, then became a stand-up comedian, another thing where words are very important and how you phrase things is very important. And one of the reasons I've been concerned about, you know, we can talk about,

wokeness, which we're moving away from talking about quite so much. But this overall trend, there has been something quite pernicious happening in terms of the language that is used around all of this stuff. Have you note, is that one of the ways you kind of got into? You started, or no, it was purely the race thing. I don't make that much sense. No. There are linguistic aspects to this, but the link between linguist me and race me is very thin. So yeah, obviously, language issues and people say, well, you know, John, as a linguist, what do you think of the evolution of the term woke, et cetera? And what I'm quietly thinking is it has nothing to do with my linguistics training. I would think the same thing if I were an architect. And so, no, it's not

that I was dismayed by the language people use talking about race. I was dismayed by what people say about race and what it means for society. And that was quite distinct from me thinking about adverbs and suffixes and things like that. Really, very little relationship between the two things. And John, what was a moment for you where you felt compelled to write this book and before that compelled to make your voice heard? Well, it was a gradual story. And, you know, it's at the point. I'm 56. And so the story is too long to be told because, you know, nobody cares but me.

But in the early 90s, when I was in my 20s, my general feeling was that Black America had come a very, very long way since the mid-60s, the large civil rights victory. that happened then. I thought there's still things that need to be done, but miracles have happened over the past 25 years, and you should be thankful for it. Gradually, I realized that that was not what the educated black person was supposed to think, and I noticed that many people were nauseated by my sense that there was any cause for celebration, that I didn't think of myself as living in the same America as 1960, except that maybe manners had changed. I didn't like that. I didn't understand why I was having so many unpleasant conversations. And if anything, differentiated me from some others in that situation, and I was hardly alone, it's that I thought, what really gets me is that

the people who refuse to admit that there's been real progress and to feel it and to live it and to stop talking as if it's 1960, the people like this are intelligent and they're sane and they're nice. I wasn't inclined to think these people are crazy. I wasn't inclined to think these people are trying to line their pockets or manipulate white people. I thought, no, they're normal. And I thought, and so am I. What is creating the difference in view here? And so I just started analyzing it analytically, maybe in the same way as I was trained as a linguist to analyze language analytically. But it wasn't the way people were talking about race. It was what they were saying about it and how they felt. And so one thing led to another, and a lot of it was serendipity, but I wound up writing a book called Losing the Race in 2000. that started with a piece that I wrote for a kind of proto blog site, which I only wrote because I happened to be working in linguistics on my first language books for the public with a publisher that happened to have that blog site. All of it just, you know, one thing leads to another and you just have to basically show up. But that book, Losing the Race, was a minor

bestseller. And it put me on the map as the contrarian, one of the contrarians to go to about race. And much to my surprise, over the past 21 years, people are still asking me my views about those things. And so I end up having two jobs. And I've kept up with the linguistics. But, you know, Constantine, as you'll understand, that is not something the general public is usually as interested in as hot button issues like race. And so I do the linguistics sort of in private. And then the race stuff gets out there more. So it was a random story based on my just not liking disorder.

Linguistics is about problem solving. For me, race is about problem solving. And for me, the idea that I was supposed to think that I'm living in 1960 when it was 1991 was a problem to be solved. And John, you say it was a problem to be solved, dare I say it, that the problem has got significantly worse since 1991. Yeah, it has. And I really regret that.

When Barack Obama was elected, I thought. that it was an indication that, yes, racism exists, but something is really significant when a black man can be elected president and twice. It didn't have the effect that it should have, because around the same time, social media became default. And social media whips people up into extremist and tribalist views, and that's both on the right and on the left. And part of that was calling attention to the relationship between black people and the cops, which is important, but it was brought to attention in a rather distorted way with this new social media. And as a result, here we are in a situation where, again, intelligent people are frankly pretending

that we still live in an America that's defined by the stain of racism in a way that if our grandparents could hear us talking, they would be appalled that we would compare ourselves to them. And social media does not help the pandemic has certainly brought people inside of themselves and whipped groups up together because everybody was lonely. So yeah, it hasn't changed that much. I'm sad to think that I know. I don't even have to wonder. There are 22, 23 year old, middle class, educated black people now who are in college wondering why they're having unpleasant conversations with people who refuse to admit anything has changed. My, my friend and colleague Coleman Hughes, who is not yet 30 and has the same feelings I do, had that experience. He

basically have the same experience that I had where he understands that things are so different now that we need to ask a whole different set of questions and was told by a great many people that he was a moral pervert for thinking so he's having the same experience I had when I was his age so no it hasn't changed the way I wish it had yeah and John we've had the Coleman Hughes your friend Glenn Lowry Larry Elder we've had all all the people here in the UK we've spoken to former England footballer John Barnes. We've talked about this issue a lot because we're genuinely curious and we're trying to understand.

But I suppose that comes a point and I feel that certainly Francis and I have reached that where we kind of know where we stand and the information is out there if you want to. You can go and watch our interviews. You can go and watch a bunch of other stuff. But what do we do about this? What do we actually do to improve? Because I think you're right. Social media is the thing that has made it so much worse and probably the change the

direction of travel. I think we were doing better and better and then social media came in. Would you agree with that? Definitely. Yeah. Right. So what the hell do we, other than smashing Twitter to pieces, which I think we'd all happily do at this point, what else do we do? Well, it's at the point where if you sense that somebody is exaggerating, you have to stop, I don't mean you two personally, but one has to stop thinking that there must be something wrong with you. If somebody is exaggerating about race, chances are that that is true.

And socially, maybe you have to pretend to agree. Socially, maybe you can step around that person. But that person who's talking about white privilege and white supremacy as if it was 100 years ago and refuses to budge, that kind of person, we have to step around them. And that's a lot of what woke racism is about. You can't engage somebody on that because they've built their whole identity around it, the white ones and the black ones. step around them. You can't let them run the show. You have to get used to telling them no when they want to turn an institution upside down. And I think we need to focus on the things that black people actually need, which I'm afraid are less charismatic to talk about than talking about something as abstract as eliminating white supremacy. But that's why in the book I write about ending the war on drugs, on promoting vocational education in a new way, on making sure that poor black kids are actually taught to read properly, which is more important

than it sounds. Those are the things that will turn things around down on the ground in the real world, which is really different from this prayer circle pseudo-Marxist routine that we're being taught has to happen before anything real goes on. Many people insist, and this is people, you know, from, you know, ordinary people who just, you know, watch a lot of TV to people who read too many books and everything in between. People think we must have this conversation where white people acknowledge before anything can happen.

No, that's not true. That's something that we're told, but that's hardly a settled question. How much do people need to realize? That's not how civil rights activism has ever worked in the past. Basically, what white people need to know, they know. It's at the point where now it's time to go out

in the world and do the hard stuff that isn't as much fun as wagging fingers in people's faces. And that's what I'm trying to get at in woke races. But this is a problem, isn't it, John? This idea that you can, these people, what they do is they go on social media and they preach and they say about how we need to reach this new utopia. But nobody wants to do the hard work.

Very few people want to go into a classroom in the inner city where it's, and having done it myself, where it's really tough to teach. And you don't get a lot of money for it. Or, you know, you go and work on things like initiatives like knife crime. You go and become a youth worker. These are difficult things to do. It's far easier to go on social media and just say what a great person you are and how you want a rainbow in every classroom.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people's view on this is that it'll be easier to teach those kids in the classroom if you eliminate white supremacy by white people learning their complicity and the way things are now. And notice there's an ellipsis there. Most people would be hard-pressed to say, and what? After this realization comes, what are you saying they're going to do? And are you talking about something that would take 100 years?

Because that's remarkably unimaginative. And that's the problem. So, yes, people like to go on Twitter and strike poses, showing that they're good people. But that's different from actually facing and dealing with what conditions are actually like out there. And let's say that those conditions are there because of something you can call systemic racism. But often undoing what's going on is not going to be a matter of changing something called racism, which I think a lot of people would enjoy because it feels like you're slapping a bigot in

the face. Really, society is more complicated than that. And that's the problem. The Twitter version of all of this can't acknowledge those complexities. And speaking of complexities, you just mentioned the term systemic racism there. Does it exist? Do you think there are areas of society, particularly in the United States, where there are systemic structures that treat different races differently? Yeah, there are things that it's harder to do if you are black because of certain things that are baked into the system. A lot of it is based on racism in the past, as opposed to the present. And then there's some things that you might even trace to bias today. You might say that in health care, there does seem to be a sense that black people don't suffer as much pain.

And yet that's real. I accept those studies. All those things fall under the heading of systemic racism. But most of the things that are systemic racism, I don't like the term, but the phenomena definitely exists, racial inequities. A lot of those things can't be solved by doing something called eliminating. racism. So it's not that I don't think those things exist. It's interesting. Many people seem to think that I'm saying there's no problem. That's not it. The issue is what you do about the problem. So for example, I'm guessing, this is just my guess because I don't know Larry Elder that well

anymore. But my guess is that Larry Elder would say, let's just stop talking about systemic racism. These things aren't real. Just buck up and get out there and deal. That's not what I'm saying. That's expecting too much of people, if you ask me. That's not how human beings operate. If you don't know how to deal, if you've never been around anybody who dealt, you've got to be taught how to deal. The occasional person teaches themselves how to deal and they become Larry Elder. But most people can't do that. But the thing is, going out and undoing the racism is not going to solve, say, for example, the attitude that many black kids have towards school because of racism 50 and 60 years ago. You can't undo the racism.

You have to undo how the black kids feel. and it's not about changing white teachers' attitudes. For a lot of people, if it's not going to be about changing white teachers' attitudes by giving conference papers and doing Twitter posts about white teachers' subtle racism, well, that's no fun because that's not undoing the racism. What that means is that the kids stay exactly where they are. That won't do. That's the point of the book. Well, and particular, on the teaching point, I mean, it strikes me that the last thing you'd want to do

if you want to help kids of white teachers is make the white teachers super concerned about the way they use words and all of that instead of giving them the robust support they need to teach the kids what the kids need to learn, right? Yeah, they should teach the kids what the kids need to learn. And there's this fashionable idea that we're supposed to look away from that and think of new ways that are sensitized to the conditions that the kids come from. But isn't it interesting that Back in the day, no one thought of that. And in many circumstances, the education of even poor black kids was better. It's treated as a settled question that teaching must be infused with a very subtle and very thorough awareness that a poor black kid isn't the same as a middle class white kid. And it's always just verging on saying that poor black kids can't learn as well. But no, that hasn't been proven. It's just that it feels good to think that way if your central goal is showing that you know racism exists. which is different from actually making life better for somebody who was of a race. This to me, John, and I'm sure you might agree with this, is the bigotry of low expectations.

When I was a teacher, you know, consultants would come in and they would say to me, see, the thing is, Mr. Foster, with your boys, you can't expect them to do what girls do when it comes to reading, when it comes to sitting still, when it comes to concentration. And I just remember thinking to myself, well, once you have that, attitude to a certain section of society, they're doomed. They're absolutely doomed because then they will play up to that. And you're offering kids an easy way out. Because once a child has an easy way out, the vast majority of them are going to take it. So to me, they're crippling these children before they have a chance to even walk. And you know, the thing is, that's absolutely true.

And the person who tells you that cannot point to any studies or even any logic. that shows that things are better when you don't require people to sit still, when you don't require people to do their best. Where are the studies that show that people learn more and do better when less is expected of them because they come from less than perfect homes? Nowhere.

It would never occur to anybody that they would have to prove it. It's just a matter of what it feels good to say. That won't do. And John, one of the things that strikes me about this because I was born in the Soviet Union. I'm originally from Russia. I'm sort of white, but I'm also not exactly. And I was not born here.

My ancestors didn't own slaves. In fact, my ancestors were slaves in the Russian Empire and in Nazi Germany, et cetera, et cetera. So to me, I have this visceral instinct of reaction when people start telling me that I'm guilty of stuff, or I need to acknowledge stuff, or I need to apologize for stuff. It seems counterproductive to me. It doesn't strike me as the way to bring people along. And I worry about it for myself because I don't want that to radicalize me into opposing things that actually need to be done. And I feel that that maybe has happened over the last couple of years because this way of approaching it does push people into corners.

So how do we avoid that while still having the conversation that we need to have? Well, there needs to be, and I haven't thought deeply about this yet. I haven't thought deeply about a lot of things. but there needs to be a reassessment of this notion of complicitness. Because, yeah, the standard issue answered to you is that, yes, you arrived here from somewhere else, but you are now participating in and benefiting from a system, and therefore you are abstractly complicit in the oppression of people by systemic racism, even if you have a history somewhere else. And we all know that that argument is forced.

There are people who are going to enjoy and embrace that argument because they have other imperatives, but most people never will. That's never going to work. That is never going to compel a critical mass of society. And we need to just start facing it and realizing that if we're going to move ahead, we need to try something else. That complicitness argument really jumped the rails in the United States starting in the teens. And it's an interesting idea, but to push it too far, especially with as many immigrant people as we have in this country, including children of immigrants, not to mention immigrants themselves, it will never compel a critical mass of people, and it's not because the people are racist. It's because life is complex,

and we all have our individual identities and stories. A lot of the race debate that we have now is predicated as if it were in 1960 when it was highly oversimplified to say it even then, but there were white people and there were black people. In some places, there were some Latinos. There was a handful of Asians, except in a few places in the country. And God knows what else there was and there was the idea that immigrants from, say, the Czech Republic, et cetera, well, Czechoslovak at the time, they assimilated quickly. So nobody thought of them as a foreign element beyond their first generation. So you had white people and black people. That's not true now. There are Latinos getting to be more of them than black people. Since the Immigration Act of 1965,

so very many people in this country come from very different places. Black people are just a sliver at this point. And the conversation that we're having is basically becoming. what do we owe that sliver of the American population who were descendants of African slaves a very long time ago? That's going to have ever less purchase upon, say, the Korean grandmother. It isn't going to work. And that is so true. But the problem is with that conversation,

the more you talk about it, the more you realize there is no solution to it, and the more we just go around in circles, and the less it is able to be done, the less we're able to move forward. Yeah, it worries me because there needs to be a proactive agenda. And instead, for example, you think about the current administration in this country. And I have no damning complaints about the Biden administration so far. I think it's too early to prognosticate, especially given that we're still dealing with the pandemic. But I think that if Biden and Kamala Harris wanted to do something about race, I'm afraid that in terms of what's considered the proper optics, what they would do was in invite, you know, Ibram Kendi to the White House to say some things. And whatever he said would make sense to him, but wouldn't have much to do with what would actually change lives on the ground in terms of people who are informed about policy, people who are informed about politics and the like. So there'll be these pictures taken of writers who have a certain clout. Nicole Hannah-Jones

will be one of them. And the thing is, nothing would happen is the problem. And I haven't the slightest desire to be asked to the White House. It's not me. It's that it would be people who were more interested in doing real things on the ground, such as elected officials who actually are showing interesting results in their cities. Those are the people who should be asked about what Black America needs. But instead, it's going to be people who have a message that America must be made aware that it needs to, you know, stand up to its ideals. America needs to understand that all black problems are due to racism in some fashion, none of which changes anything. That's, yeah, that does worry me very much.

Because that's the problem, isn't it, that we platform people, or I hate that term, but we turn these people into celebrities without actually analyzing the quality of their ideas. Because once you listen to the quality of these ideas, as someone who comes from Venezuela and has seen what's happened when you abolished capitalism, I'm here to tell you, They're not very fucking good, excuse my language. Yeah. And of course, the idea is it wasn't tried properly. You know, that's always the idea.

All of these people are interested in flavors. They're interested in postures. They're interested in a kind of performance because they think it's a necessary prelude to change. That is not a settled question. Change happens without those things. And yeah, we need a whole different set of people who are embraced as celebrities in that way.

And I say, again, No one will believe me, but I have to say my truth. My real self is somebody who reads books like this. This is a book about Russian profanity, and I have been thoroughly enjoying it. You don't need a book, John. I can help you out with that, no problem. It's gorgeous how much of it there is. But that's what I want to do.

I want to sit at home and do that. I'm not interested in being, quote, unquote, a celebrity. But there need to be celebrities in that sense. who are about, here's what I did right. And you don't see enough of that because that's not considered sexy enough. That bothers me. And that, you know, the language point I tried to make to earlier, we didn't quite get to the position. But when Francis said, we platform this people and then corrected himself, that's the sort of thing that I was referring to, where language has been used for political purposes.

And we saw this in the Soviet Union. It's actually a very powerful thing, I would argue, John, where words no longer have the meaning that they actually have in the dictionary. So, for example, when you talk about an inclusive space, which these people often do, what they actually mean is the space where people like the three of us would be excluded from, right? But it's called an inclusive space. When you talk about diversity, it's not about actual diversity. It's about skin color variety or sexuality variety. It's not the same thing as genuine diversity. So my question to you would be, given how institutionalized all of these ideas have now become,

you talk about someone going to the White House. Well, I would put it to you that it wouldn't really make any difference who went to the White House because at the end of the day, the Democratic Party, the institutions of the media and other organizations that deal with all of this, they are so now, all of this stuff is so embedded. I don't even know that anyone's speaking sense as you do, for example, if you were in a nightmare of yours to be invited to the White House and have to answer some of these questions, you would make any difference because it's so institutionalized. Is that a concern? Yeah, it is a concern. And I think what we're really talking about is changing the national

conversation slowly. And it's easier to believe that change doesn't happen than to acknowledge that it happens slowly. And I think that can happen. I think that's one of the advantages of social media. And so, for example, I don't feel muzzled. I don't feel like I'm not heard. If I want to say something, I can say it, and it's out there. I feel that people are listening. And so there's contention,

but I don't feel like the other view of black issues is not, is somehow suppressed. You know, Coleman Hughes made, you know, Forbes magazine's category of, you know, people to watch under 30. That wouldn't have happened 10 years ago.

And so things are, things are, not what they could be, but it's going to be a slow business of changing what people think of as the norm. It's changing the Overton window, so to speak. Well, let me just push back a little bit, because I would say to your argument, at least for devil's advocate purposes, that Coleman Hughes is the Larry Elder example that you gave me before. He's an outstandingly intelligent, charismatic, good-looking young man who has a very soft way with these words. But we get the same in comedy, which is our world, right? Famous comedians, the Ricky Jervaises, the Bill Burr's, others might say, there is no problem with free speech and comedy. I can say what I want to

my theatre or to my stadium full of people. And that is true. If you're Ricky Javis and if you're Bill Burr, you can. But if you're a newer comic coming up the ranks, the entire thing looks different because you have a lot less power. And I would argue, yes, a tenured professor or a standout young man like Coleman Hughes, sure, they're not muzzled. There are a awful lot of people, I would put it to you, John, that A, are muzzled and B are self-musling. Well, oh, there's no doubt about that. And so, for example, in academia, which of course I know best, I know that muzzling is the default. Most people don't think the way you'd think academics think in terms of the typical op-ed in terms of what you see

on social media, but nobody wants to be called a white supremacist on Twitter. That's the students, that's the professors, that is many journalists. I would say that daily, often several times daily, but at least once daily, I hear from somebody who is within some body of people who says that they agree with the sorts of things I say, and they're usually not conservatives, they're not right-wingers. Say, I get it. Thank you for speaking for me, but I could not dare to say these things to the people that I work with. That is normal, without a doubt. But on the other hand, I think that people like Coleman, people like me, had less purchase upon the media, say, 10 years ago.

I think it's slowly getting better. Now, the question is, what would, you know, the iceberg breaks off, what would be the metric that shows that something had really happened? And, you know, it's not going to be somebody writing something in the sky. But I think that the conversation is such, let's try this. The conversation is such that I sense that the people. on the hard, hard left sometimes feel like they're on the ropes. They feel like the other people are irritants at this point, whereas 10 years ago they often pretended that people like me didn't

exist. I like to see signs of that. So you think the direction of travel is positive. Slowly. Slowly, my worry is, John, is I don't know how that is still a good thing. If you see what I mean, when I look around at everything, everything has been politicized, everything has been racialized. Do you not think that it's too little too late at this point? Well, to tell you the truth, it depends on what organs we're thinking about. I'm afraid that academia, at least in America, is lost because this kind of person is getting to the point where they're going to be making all of the hiring decisions. I'm watching my own field, for example, where people,

under 40 are being led by people who think this way. And I'm not sure that anything can be done about it. I have literally realized that I'm going to age out of a field that is nothing like the one that I joined in terms of its political commitments. And I'm sure people are feeling that way in sociology, in musicology, in history. And from what I hear, although I hope this is alarmist, in some STEM subjects, in terms of what you get in journalism, what kind of discussion, what kind of discussion that you get. It depends on what you call journalism, but for example, I hate to have it be about me, but notice that the New York Times is letting me publish things twice a week. Nobody would have thought that that would have happened, say, even a year ago. I never thought that I would write for the Times.

The Times never ignored me. I wrote for the Times in one way or another, probably once or twice a year, but a regular gig I would never have dreamed. And it's because of, I think, a general pushback against the excesses of what you might call wokeness these days. And I don't think that that is an isolated instance in terms of whose voices are out there and whether or not they're listened to. So for example,

another one, because I live in my own head and so I only know me. Masterclass. You know, you can learn how to cook. You can learn Hungarian, etc. There's a masterclass that is about race issues. Now, they've got Nicole Hannah-Jones, they've got Cornell West, they've got

the usual suspects doing their thing very well. Then they also invited me. Now, I'm kind of the odd one out, but they invited me. That masterclass two years ago would have been only Cornell West and Nicole Hannah Jones and the usual. There's a message getting out there that to not think like Nicole Hannah Jones, I hate bringing her up too much, does not make you a moral pervert. That's something. I feel that coming. And so I'm seeing a pushback against what happened in June 2020. And I hope that it can push things back at least to the way they were in 2019, but maybe it shows you what a desperate situation we're in,

that I'm now nostalgic for 2019. I think we're all nostalgic for 2019, John. I think that's surreal. Yeah, well, barely, barely. The world that has changed a lot since. It's been like 10 years. John, it's a refreshing conversation. Can I ask you something that is curious to me

because neither Francis or I are on the right or frankly on the left of this point, where somewhere sort of ambiguously in the middle trying to work what we think out issue by issue. Why is this race conversation such a right versus left thing? It isn't, if you ask me. The day of the black conservative for real passed about 15 years ago. The list of people that you used to see then, most of those people we don't hear from that much anymore.

And this is not a diss, but Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams, until recently, frankly, Larry Elder, I mean, now he's acquiring a new prominence and all power to him. But for a while, he was somebody you thought more about in 2004 than now. And I only mentioned that to say that the people who are actual card carrying black conservatives, the media definitely stopped paying attention to them in the mid-aughts. It's not that they're not there, but, you know, Jason Riley, these are great people, but they end up talking mostly to themselves often. Glenn Lowry is a very good friend of mine

and one of the smartest people I know, but also kind of an eccentric as a black conservative. Really, he's just Glenn, essentially. I think really what we're talking about is the center, such as me, and the hard left, and the fight is over whether the hard left is somehow the heart of black issues because of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining.

I think the real question, is why can't there be a centrist way of looking at black issues that isn't seen as some sort of right-wing adjacent fantasy? And I'm seeing that conversation as one that is progressing more constructively than I would have expected. But yeah, right-left doesn't quite make sense. We're not talking about Cornell West versus Shelby Steele. Frankly, Shelby Steele, who was my hero, but Shelby Steele lost that battle. The media just stopped paying attention. But Now it's about center and left, I think. Well, let me follow up on that because there's something you keep talking about, which is I find very interesting, which is black America.

And that used to be a phrase you used to hear a lot. Then you heard a bit less. And I think maybe now you're starting to hear it more. And I am someone who always thought from as an outsider perspective, and this is probably extremely idealistic and naive, which I am prone to sometimes. But the American dream, the American idea was that in the words of Barack Obama, there is no black. America. There is no white America. You are an American and that is the thing that defines you. And as long as you subscribe to the American values, you are that. But you are quite, I think, insistent on using that term and addressing that audience. So do you, are you someone who thinks

that a little bit of identity politics in that way is necessary? Is a good thing? Is a way to reach people? Is just matches your belief? Like, what is your take on all of that, John? Constantine, you're catching me in something that is a bit of a pose. You're right. What you suspect is correct. I'm saying Black America and I'm saying it because to reach most Black people who are interested in this sort of thing, one should say that. Especially because there is a sense, which I do not agree with, but that I figure. you can't cut through immediately and you have to choose your battles.

All of Black America is united in having an antagonistic relationship to the cops. The idea is that the cops kill black men. And so whatever conditions you're in, that is supposed to be something that you deal with whenever you leave your house. I honestly think that is vastly exaggerated. I think that the statistics do not support the idea that the cops disproportionately murder black men, for reasons I've written about often. the cops murder too many men in general. It's not just a black thing. Nevertheless, that position is so fiercely held what I found in the 90s when I thought, why are so many people exaggerating?

The main reason was the cops. I found, oh, this is what's on people's minds. You have to pick your battles carefully. You have to do things in sequence. So, yes, I say Black America. The truth, am I being a bit of a phony in that? Yes, I'm thinking about crafting a message. The truth? The truth, is, and I learned this from Glenn Lowry back in the 90s, and it's still true, about a third of the black community needs serious help. The other two thirds, life isn't perfect, but the battle is one. And I find myself thinking, you know, I, there's a seafood restaurant. Everybody's going to say, oh, this is anecdotal. But then again, if somebody on the hard left tells one story that's considered testimony to the history of the world. There's a seafood restaurant that I go to occasionally. And like

many restaurants like that. The food is overpriced. You know, you get this fried shit and you spend like $100. It sounds great. It's wonderful. It's that kind. It's too expensive. And I always notice when I'm there, because it's in the Bronx, on the beach, there are a lot of black people at it. And it's expensive. You know, you're drinking your, your bad wine. You can't get out of there without spending $120. And yet it is very popular with black people. And it's not only black people who are there because somebody graduated and they're only going to do it once. You can tell they hang out there. These are ordinary Bronx black people wearing velour tract suits, etc. They can afford to eat at this place. And they're not unique. It's a core black community who are doing just fine.

Now, the reason I'm a phony is because if you talk to two out of three of those people, they would still say the police are against us. And so, okay, we can eat this shrimp and spend $120 living middle class lives, but still we could get knocked over the head by the police just like the poor person. I think that that's exaggerated, but I can't convince them of that. It runs too deep. So yeah, you've caught me out there. What I'm really thinking about is what used to be called the ghetto, but I call this Black America as a rhetorical convenience. I feel like I have to, but you're right. That makes sense. The reason I bring it up, sorry, Francis, I just want to finish this. The reason I bring it up is I am skeptical that we can

ever come together as people of different ethnicities if we don't buy into the ideal that I naively perhaps believe in. And I wonder whether in the process of attempting to reach people and playing to those concerns, we maybe sometimes forget that we can't live together as one people if we're so focused on our ethnic identities. That's a concern for me. What do you think about that? You are correct,

but you have to slow walk that because there are people who simply can't hear it. Yes. And notice what happens to Thomas Chatterton Williams, who we haven't talked about. yet, but Thomas understands that we've got to get past this race idea, because, you know, the way we think about race is as if we were Strom Thurman. It really is absolutely ridiculous. A smart child can figure out how silly this is. We've got to get beyond this idea of race, vulcanizing in that way,

race as an identity. But wow. And yeah, I don't, now I'm going to sound like I'm essentializing. If you grow up black, you realize that for an awful lot of black people, to question that issue, of whether you're black or not, especially if you've grown up fortunate, as it used to be called, and you talk like this, it is very hard for people like that not to hear you as saying

that you think you're better than them. And once you get, you have to pick your battles. And so I want to talk first about what will help real people and maybe say, please stop exaggerating, stop disrespecting our ancestors.

Then we can get into must you think of your color as defining you when really most of us can afford to think, we're just Americans eating our fried shrimp and spending too much money. We're all doing the same thing. That's going to have to happen slowly. And you know what I mean by slowly?

Another generation, 30 years. It's not going to work now. It just makes people too upset, is my thought. You know something, John, in 2019, I wouldn't really describe myself as a conspiracy theorist. The more I've gone through this pandemic, the more I've seen things that haven't really, made sense and dictates that my government have given which are completely nonsensical. Is there a part of you that looks at all this stuff and go, this is just glorified divide and conquer? No. We're bees. Everybody is a bee. We're doing what we need to do. They're doing what they

need to do. There are aggregate effects that nobody intended. I don't know how you would identify a divide and conquer mentality as anything deliberate. Nobody says it, or at least they don't write it down. I'm not inclined to think that they're discussing it in private spaces. It's the way it ends up looking because there are such shallow but powerful emotional benefits to tribalism and shallow emotional benefits to being white and encouraging that tribalism out of a sense, not of divide and conquer, but of showing that you're not a bad person. It's a religion. So, yeah, that's the, I'm I'm not inclined to think of conspiracy theories. And we always say it's a religion.

Why do you think that particularly? Oh, because a religious framework is the only way that a lot of this stuff makes sense. You have a stray white cop who kills the occasional person, almost always in indefensible ways. The same person who got killed that way was often in much more danger of being killed by a black man in his own community in much, much, much more danger. And yet the national discourse is much more upset about the white cop than about what that black guy is in more danger of dying of. That makes no sense whatsoever unless you see a commitment to showing that you know racism exists that is so furious, so much a part of identity, that it resists facts and logic. That to me, that to me,

me is religious thought. It's part of many religions to let logic go. And then the chasing heretics, the white privilege as original sin, the fact that you're not supposed to ask too many questions, all of that falls out naturally from it. But I honestly believe. And I'm taking a certain amount of heat. The idea being that my religious analogy is simplistic or that I should just call it an ideology. But no, the religious analysis works. I fully think. that a naive anthropologist who didn't know of language in the labels that we use would see the way the wokesters have been behaving since two years ago as indistinguishable from Pentecostalism. I don't think they'd see any difference. They would apply the same words.

And it also helps understand why a person can be so confoundingly mean when you question their beliefs about these things. You're questioning them. You're questioning their basic ethical commitment. You're questioning their religion. That's when somebody gets that upset. It's like saying Jesus doesn't love you. That's going to make somebody angry. Same thing here. So yeah, it really does, it helps me make sense of what otherwise can make you mad and I don't want to be mad. And are they positive to this religion, John? No. Not the religious degree of it. No. I mean, when it gets to be a religion, it ends up hurting black people because you're more concerned with showing things than actually helping someone. It'd be nice if people were deeply committed to helping

black people in a religious sort of way. That would be an offshoot religion to this one. So yeah, the one that we have, no, I would like to see it gone. But it won't go away. So we just have to work around the people who think that way. John, that makes perfect sense. Listen, I know you've got to go in about five minutes. So we will ask you the last question of the main interview and then do a couple of questions for our supporters only. So the last question we always ask on the show, and you actually haven't been warned of this. So I'm curious to see what he says. And this doesn't have to be related to anything we've been talking about is what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

My answer to that is really mundane. Well, it's not that we're not talking about it. I don't think we talk about climate change enough. I feel like in 10 years, it's going to be at the point where we're wondering why we were talking about woke racism, et cetera, when the planet was about to burn up. I really worry about that. But you want something more underground than that. I mean, to be fair with you, John, in this country, we talk about climate change an awful lot. I promise you that.

Yeah, I mean, it's not that it's not talked about. I sometimes worry that we're all going to think we should have talked about it even more. But what do we not talk about? I wish that science were more interested in finding a cure for clinical obesity. Because I feel like it wouldn't be that hard given what can now happen. It's not considered as important as some other things. And I guess I understand why. but I watch people who have that condition, and often it's not because they eat too much,

or sometimes it is, but you can't stop eating too much. And I think to myself, wow, I would hate to be that person. I don't think that it's their fault. And I wish that there were a more concerted solution to that. I think about it all the time. I'm not sure why. Obesity has never been a personal problem of mine. but watching the way people eat and the way people in non-Western countries are beginning to eat the same way,

that that seems to be a way people start eating when prosperity comes in, watching what's happening in some parts of China or on some Polynesian islands. I know that seems like an eccentric thing that I'm just kind of bringing up to sound fresh, but it has always touched me deeply that people end up ruining their bodies through no fault of their own, because of the way food is in modern societies. I wish that could be solved. That is my honest answer to that. And a very good one of that.

John, we're going to do a couple of questions for locals after we wrap up here, but I thoroughly recommend everybody get the book, Work Racism. And if there's any way people can follow you online, John, and keep up with your work, where's the best place to do that? I'm kind of low-tech on that. I'm on Twitter, but I don't spend my life on it the way many people do. I write a piece for the times twice a week, which often reflects whatever's on my mind, and it's not always race.

I don't have a website. I'm not that type. Read my books. Well, we do recommend that you do. Thank you so much for your time. John, we'll do a couple of locals questions in a second. Thank you all of you for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Oraw.

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