Bringing An End To Race Politics - Coleman Hughes

What do you think about the state of race in America now? What's your meteorological weather report? Yeah, so you know, the reason I wrote this book is that this idea of colorblindness, which means you try to treat people without regard to race. I see obviously that you're a quote-unquote white guy, you see that I'm a quote-unquote black guy, but I'm going to treat you like Chris Williamson knowing everything I know about you as an individual, and I ask you to treat me like Coleman Hughes knowing everything you know about me. And we don't regard we don't give weight to each other's races when we treat each other. And my book is is advocating not just for that, but also advocating for getting race out of public policy. In America, we have all kinds of policies that use racial discrimination explicitly. And people have various reasons for this to fight racism, to combat the legacy of slavery, and so forth. And in my book, I want to argue instead for a colorblind philosophy. Let's get race out of public policy. If we want to correct for disadvantages, let's do that on the basis of basis of socioeconomics and class. And in my view, this is a much healthier path towards the ideal of a colorblind society. It used to be you know, common sense on the left and in liberal circles that that's what you wanted to do. In in the mid-60s, you had Martin Luther King writing to and speaking to to this effect. But in the past 50 years, and particularly in the past 10 with the explosion of Black Lives Matter, social justice, wokeness, DEI, critical race theory, whatever you want to call it, this idea of colorblindness has come under attack as naive at best or as white supremacist at at worst. So so in the book here, I really try to rescue this idea of colorblindness because I think it's the the wisest way to actually navigate a multiracial multiethnic society in the long run. Explain to me the difference between being colorblind and not seeing race cuz that kind of became a meme. I don't see race became a meme. What is there a difference? Right. I think there's a huge difference because the truth is we all see race, right? When someone says I don't see race, I understand what they're getting at, but it's actually a lie. It's not true. I could you know, everyone watching this can see that you're white and that that I'm not, right? So when people say I don't see race, they're putting up a very convenient target for the critics of colorblindness to say, "Look, they're just being naive. They're pretending not to see race." And it allows people to dismiss the deeper philosophy of colorblindness without giving it a fair consideration. So in my book, I I advocate that people just stop saying that. It gives enemies of colorblindness far too easy a target. What you should say instead is "I try to treat people without regard to race." Now, that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as quickly, but it's it's it's much closer to the truth. It's more accurate. And so you know, I think we should all admit that we see race, all admit that we are theoretically capable of being racist racist. All of us are. So this is not a book that's telling you to be naive or to pretend that racism doesn't exist. It's a book that says we should treat people without regard to race both in our personal lives and in our public policy. You mentioned before about this abandonment of the conversation around class and this focus on the conversation around race. This is something that I've noticed especially coming from the UK, which is still a super classist society. I have a party trick that I've done a couple of times over the last year since moving to America. If there's me and another British dude or girl in the room, I'll say "Don't tell me anything about you. Just let's have a conversation for 60 seconds about something that isn't you and your origins." And I'll try and work out where you're from, what sort of school you went to, what level of education you've got, what your parents did, what what class you would be considered from. And the ability to do that I don't know if that's a skill set that the Americans have to be able to just x-ray in on someone's class background, but just accent and presentation of British people denotes so much about their background. Right. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you can sort of do that in America, but not probably not quite to the same extent. Mhm. So talk to me about this abandonment the conversation around class and this prioritization of race instead because you know classic left-leaning policies were about class. They weren't about race. Mhm. Yeah, so during the Civil Rights Movement the the policy of the Civil Rights Movement, and you can anyone can read this in Martin Luther King's book Why We Can't Wait from the mid-60s, he says "Here's the plan. We are going to have a anti-poverty program." He called it the Bill of Rights for the disadvantaged. It's going to benefit the black poor. It's going to benefit the white poor alike on the basis on the basis of class, though it will benefit black people disproportionately because black people are disproportionately poor to begin with. But it won't be a race-based policy. It'll be a class-based policy, and we're going to get rid of Jim Crow, get rid of all race-based policies, and proceed with a kind of war on poverty and disadvantage that is colorblind in nature. Everyone agreed uh I mean, for for for a brief moment, the elites at least, the people in power agreed, passed the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s, which made it the case that for instance, my grandfather and grandmother could vote, and so on and so forth. Uh sit at wherever they wanted on a bus, go to whatever restaurant they wanted, go to whatever school they wanted. And then in the late 60s, there was a series of destructive riots, over 150 riots in in American cities around this issue of race and policing. Um and what happened is everyone who had just agreed to this colorblind principle lost faith in it because they said, "If we just agreed on colorblindness, passed all this legislation, how come there's all this riding? Clearly, we must need to do more. We must need to do something else." And the only thing that I can compare this to in your and I the lifetime of most of your listeners, if not all of your listeners, is the summer of 2020 when George Floyd died in Minneapolis, and you had riots all over the country in most American cities. And and you had politicians and everyday people feeling enormous pressure to put racial identity on the front burner. To do and and to do all kinds of things. Every elite institution was in some way trying to promote black people to high levels of authority, to show how much they cared about black people, to require black people to be on the boards of publicly traded companies, to you know, change the categories that the Grammy Awards operate under. Just everything, right? Everyone felt this enormous pressure to quote-unquote center race. Something very similar happened in the late 60s, and that's where the impetus for race-based affirmative affirmative action came from and the whole suite of race-based policies that have become normal in American society. So that's really what happened with the pivot away from colorblindness. It's looking back on 2020. It was almost like a collective apology from people that didn't really know what was going on. We feel like maybe someone's been racist somewhere. Maybe this George Floyd thing is indicative of some huge big underlying problem. Oh my god, I don't know. That makes me such a piece of [ __ ] I I I'm not I don't have my finger on the pulse empathetically, sympathetically. I I'm not a good person. What can we do to not only signal that I'm not one of them, whoever them are, but also to make reparations, to fix this problem. I need to I need to make sure that these poor minorities are okay, and let's bring a bunch of impetuses along, a bunch of procedures, a bunch of a bunch of initiatives that people can do. Yes. So the the one of the reasons people had that sense is because because the media the national media in America does not report when there are police incidents with white Americans. It just doesn't become news, and it's partly because of the media, it's partly because there's less of an audience for it. So for example, there was a guy named Tony Timpa who died in a way extremely similar to George Floyd with an officer's knee on the top of his back for about 13 minutes. And they're cracking jokes as he's losing consciousness saying, "Wake up for school, Tony." Just really uh terrible behavior for a group of police officers, and he died. Whole thing was caught on video. You can look it up on on YouTube. Almost nobody to this day knows or or or cares about it because it didn't catch fire because he happened to be white. This was just a two or a three or four years before before George Floyd. So when you have a media ecosystem where those stories are unseen, now when you see it happening to a black person, everyone assumes that this kind of thing only happens to black people because they are black, and then it becomes an example of racism that ties into the whole legacy of slavery, legacy of racial inequality, and really infuriates people. And so people in 2020, they lost all reason. They didn't ask whether all the policies they were implementing had anything to do with helping black people. Uh the kinds of black people that are poor and from poor uh backgrounds like George Floyd. Instead, they promoted black people to the heads of uh board uh boards of publicly traded companies as if those are the same kinds of black people that need help like George Floyd. Uh in essentially, they made the black elite even better off than it was before. While at the same time uh defunding the police for neighborhoods where black people need them the most. Okay. At the time of the summer of 2020, Gallup polled black Americans with three simple questions. Do you want more police in your neighborhood, the same police presence in your neighborhood, or less? 80% answered the same or more. Only 20% wanted less police. And that was the position, a very minority position within the black community, of the Black Lives Matter movement, the defund the police movement, and so forth. Police were defunded in many cities in America, and then later refunded um in many cases by popular demand within the black community in certain places. And the end result was that 2020 represented the single greatest increase in homicide from year to year in America in the past 100 years. Okay. That is a a shocking fact that most people don't know, and it was a direct result of the reaction to George Floyd's death, the depolicing, the the uh mass retirement of the police, the general sentiment of anti-police. And it hurt nobody more than the black community because those homicides were not equally distributed in nice neighborhoods, unless they were highly concentrated precisely in communities that are disproportionately black and disproportionately poor. I told Joe Rogan yesterday on his podcast about luxury beliefs from that's been recently repopularized by Rob Henderson, and defund the police is patient zero for this. I mentioned that I was walking through Austin and saw a house that has a defund the police uh placard in the garden, and a private security sticker next to the front door in the window. Yeah. It it the fact that people like that don't see the irony is really depressing to me. I mean, there are literally people that have their own private security detail okay, who supported defund the police. They're people in gated neighborhoods who pay a premium just so that strangers can't come near their house, not even in their house, but near their house, who want to want to gut police forces in that are, you know, for for poor neighborhoods. This is amazing. And that's what that's what happened in 2020, and more importantly, that's what can happen uh in particular in America on the left when people when people only obey their empathy towards a video and suspend the rational thought that should come with that. Okay, this video is horrible. Let's all agree that. What is actually the best way to move forward? Let's not just rage. Let's actually think, uh look at evidence, and not be so hasty with supporting policies that might backfire for the very people you're trying to help. I think it would have been very difficult during the summer of 2020 to have put out uh realistic crime impact statistics. Um what the actual polls are saying from mostly black neighborhoods, I think anyone that posted that, it would have been very quickly lambasted as some white supremacist race denial, you don't care, you don't understand, you don't know. I that would have been the smart thing to do, but the incentives all aligned to not have I mean, who who was going to be the person that does that? If it was a black person, they'd be accused of being an Uncle Tom. If it was a white person, they'd be accused of being a racist. There there was no vector in which that narrative could have inserted itself, I don't think. Yeah. I mean, Sam Harris tried to. I think he released like a 90-minute 90-minute audio essay. Yeah, pull back from the brink, which was very good. One of the best for the people that haven't listened to it even now, it is it is one of the best like monologues I think that I've ever heard. That thing is phenomenal. It was spot-on in my view. Uh and I'm sure he took a lot of flak for it. Uh as as my friend Camille Foster likes to say, people like me and Camille have the melanin force field, which is, you know, no one is going to call me a racist. They make as you say, they may call me an Uncle Tom or a traitor to my community, and so forth. To which I would respond, what what could be more of a betrayal to your community than not speaking out when you know that policies are being adopted that are going to lead to potentially hundreds or thousands of excess deaths for black people. Cuz that's what happened. The internet is obsessed with the prioritization of looking good over doing good. Mhm. Completely obsessed with it because the distance between our opinions and our deeds have never been greater. So it's very easy to hide behind words that sound caring and and and just and forthright and charitable and understanding. And the implications of it, what actually happens, kind of no one really ever fact-checks that. It's like, oh, well, he was the guy and I'm sure he had good intentions. Who could have foreseen that defunding the police would have negatively impacted black people? Well, I don't know. If if you'd used a little bit of a little bit of second-order thinking. Mhm. A lot of people foresaw it. A lot of people talked about it at the time, me included. Uh but mostly we were ignored because of the the frenzy around uh around the moment. I mean, it's very interesting to live through a moment that I think will be written about uh by historians. Yeah. Um uh we're we're fairly close to the same age. We haven't gotten too many of those, I think. But it will, you know, the summer of 2020 we we have to acknowledge what happened. Uh a man died in police custody in a city, uh Minneapolis, not one of the cities, frankly, that is known by non-Americans. And there were protests not just in America, all around the world. London? Newcastle? Where I'm from, northeast of the UK. In and even more surprisingly in non-English speaking locations. I think as far as Japan, if I'm not mistaken. Um so this is this is obviously had something to do with the pandemic and the fact that you know, everyone was stuck at home. Uh you know, I I don't know if you you recall this, but I I do remember just the palpable sense of I don't get to move my body every day. I don't get to go out. And when there when you finally have an outlet for that, uh I think the floodgates kind of opened. Do you think that the same outcome would have occurred had it not been for COVID? No. No, I think I think it would have struck a chord, no doubt, but I think it would have been like 1/10 as as crazy. Um but, you know, the other thing that many people have pointed out is just how quickly the principles of the medical establishment disappeared and buckled. So what I mean by that is in early COVID, there were all of these protests by right-wing uh kind of uh activists and and citizens around lockdowns, right? There were protests uh outside where people didn't want to be locked down, and and they went outside, and I I can't remember whether they were wearing masks or not. But those were roundly denounced by every important medical institution in the country because they were jeopardizing uh herd immunity, they were killing grandma. events. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, mass mass mass mass spreading events or or whatever they Yeah. Yes. Uh and and then literally weeks weeks later when you had uh thousands or tens of thousands of people marching in the streets shoulder to shoulder all over the country, the whole medical establishment just turned around and said, "Nah, it's okay because it's for racism, right?" And even some of them said, "When you when you think about it, isn't racism a kind of pandemic, also?" And people watch this uh on understanding that elite institutions are capable of such hypocrisy, of such you know, a such a loose relationship with their own principles and lose faith. Talk to me about the relationship between racism, anti-racism, and neo-racism. So, over the past 10 years, there's been a a real upswing in what many have called anti-racism. I'm talking in particular, if your listeners may have heard of people like Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, um Robin DiAngelo. Uh these are people that got a big in the case of Kendi and DiAngelo got a a big boost by the atmosphere of 2020, but they've been around and writing for longer than that. And they have a kind of philosophy around anti-racism that comes out of critical race theory. And their philosophy is that, you know, a a white guy like you should be more or less constantly thinking about how your whiteness has uh given you privilege, how your how how your whiteness blinds you to the realities that a black person like me can see. And on DiAngelo's account, you are supposed to be constantly deferent to to black people in conversation. So, she literally says in in her book, if you and I are talking about race, you as a white guy, me as a black guy, you are not supposed to disagree with what I have to say about race. You're not supposed to argue back. You're not supposed to remain silent. You're not supposed to get defensive. So, if you cross everything on the list off the list by process of elimination, what's left is to vocally agree with whatever I'm saying. Now, I don't think you and I can have a a meaningful conversation meaningful conversation as adults if the rules are you have to agree with everything I say and simply defer to my superior epistemic authority. That can't be that can't be what that can't paint the path towards a healthy multiracial society where we try our best to get along despite our differences. It has to be a two-way street. It has to be that you can learn things from me and I can learn things from you based on our individual experiences. You may know stuff I don't know. I may I may know stuff you don't know. And ultimately, there is an objective reality out there independent of our perspectives. Like, I there are facts in the world that don't depend on your skin color or my skin color. And so, uh that's been the style of anti-racism that's been promoted. Now, I I view that as in fact racist. It's it's in fact racist to suggest that different races of people should live by different sets of books. Uh and and so, I I call it instead of anti-racism, I call it I call it neo-racism. And I substitute my own form of anti-racism, which is your race does not matter. Your race says nothing about who you are. It doesn't say whether you're smart or dumb. It doesn't say whether you're kind or or mean. Uh it it doesn't speak to any of your deeper values. And we have to be uh enshrining that and teaching people to think that way if we are if we're going to, you know, have success in the long run. Why did that particular narrative spread so effectively? Mhm. What what made it so memetically contagious? Yeah, that's a great question. So, I have a whole chapter about this in my book. The interesting part is, if you go back only to 2012 or 2013, just uh uh 11 years ago, the majority of Americans, black, white, and Hispanic, all believed that race relations were good. Right? That that that may shock people, but very recently, uh the majority of of Americans of all colors thought that we were in a good or somewhat good place. Then in 2013, if you look at the polls, suddenly, it just takes a nosedive. And it had been steady or or getting better for for many decades. So, something happened in 2013 that has yet to reverse and that has literally cut in half the number of Americans that think we're in a good place with respect to race. Hypothesis one, racism suddenly increased and everyone noticed it. Well, we have ways of measuring that and and it's just not the case. There's no evidence that racism suddenly increased in 2013, however way you look at it. My hypothesis, and the only one that actually makes sense, is that 2013 is around the year that a critical mass of people had two pieces of technology, camera-enabled smartphones and social media. If you go back to the pre-2013 world, if something happened between uh a cop uh say a white cop was trying to arrest a black suspect and it went sideways, the only way you'd know about that is if your local newspaper covered it. It might make your local uh paper the next day. Perhaps it would make the 6:00 news if you were watching it. There is unlikely to be a video of it. And when you saw it, it would be surrounded with journalistic context. The journalist would have asked the police for for their point of view, would have asked the family for their point of view, and would be packaging it to you in with some kind of journalistic uh ethos. In the post-2013 world, what happens is in that same situation, police trying to arrest a suspect, someone has probably pulled out their smartphone within 2 minutes, begun filming and a video which is now out of context of how the interaction started. And they've uploaded it to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. And it gets millions of views as raw footage before anyone puts any journalistic or fact-checking context around what it is and what it means and why it happened. That's a fundamental change in the way that information spreads. And so, I make an analogy in the book. Imagine if the uh if if if the speed limit on the highway in America were sudden suddenly went from, you know, 80 miles an hour to 200 miles an hour. Not all cars would be able to take advantage of that change. So, like a Chevy Spark has a top speed of what? Maybe 90 miles per hour. But uh a McLaren that can go up to 250 is is it's going to be suddenly a lot different to be a McLaren driver. This is an al- analogous to what happened when we got smartphones and social media. The speed limit on the information highway doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or more. And certain kinds of information on that new highway were able to take advantage of that speed limit change, and others were not. The kinds of things that spread insanely in the age of social media algorithms, it turns out in America and the West at large, are videos that tap directly into uh the the us versus them, historical guilt, white guilt, uh black outrage. This is uh somehow at the core of the American and Western European psyche in a way that leads videos that that evoke that, that push that button to just spread like wildfire. And they spread much faster than the fact-checking and the journalistic context can spread because those things appeal more to reason than emotion. So, there are so many of these incidents that uh people just experience the initial outrage of seeing and learning about what happened, and they don't experience uh the fact-checking. And that that's in a nutshell what happened. It created a false perception that racism was on the rise, when in fact, racism was in decline. This is reflected in a ton of surveys and polling data as well. Yes. Do you think that what is the number of black people per year that are killed by police? What is the number of black people that are shot by other black people, are shot by white people, or how many people would have a problem with their son or daughter marrying a person of the opposite race? Yeah, absolutely. So, you point out a really important one because there are a lot of people that would like to say, "Okay, Coleman, I understand what you're saying, but isn't it just that social media and smartphones exposed us to all the racism that was out there?" Finally, a window into what was going on all along. Yes. Finally, we just see it, and that's what people are reacting to. Well, if that were true, then you would expect people who are online to have an accurate perception of how much racism and how much police violence is out there. That's an easily testable proposition, and it has been tested. And I cite one study in my book, which in 2019 asked v- Americans of different political pursuit persuasions but in particular very liberal Americans who are the most on social media and therefore on this theory should be the most educated. How many unarmed black Americans are killed by the cops every year? And the answer on average was about a thousand. The true number that year was 12. So that should put to rest the notion that social media is making us all smarter and more informed on the on these kinds of issues. It's not, it's doing the opposite. Is social media and videos of black people being mistreated enough to galvanize and sustain the change in perception of race relations? Like that I can totally see why that would be the inflection point 2012-2013, but there's been an awful long time of this compounding. You would have expected that someone would have been able to come in with counter examples that everyone sites on the scope would have sort of been adjusted by "Ah well, here's some actual data about what's going on." Is that it? Is that in a nutshell that's all what what else has caused this to perpetuate? Yeah, well it's a good question because I do think that that is the main cause and and the trigger. Um but there are some background facts that I think are also important that allow American society to be more vulnerable to division today than it would have been in the past. One is the Cold War ended. We no longer have had a really scary external enemy that unites the country. Maybe I mean Putin was close, but it's not we're kind of divided on Putin now. I mean Tucker Carlson clearly likes him. Um we're not really united against China because China is not as obviously our main geopolitical rival as the Soviet Union was. Um and so you know I forget who who who it was it might have been actually Kissinger that said this someone else or someone else that war unites countries and peace divides them. So the United States is as a side effect of being a country that's perpetually at peace even when we're at war in far away places our homeland is never threatened almost ever. That allows us to focus more on divisions. And then secondly I think the the the war on terror losing its psychological hold on people also once again allows us to turn inward more and focus on our own divisions. This is a pretty big effect cuz you know look at a society like Israel. Israel was in one of its deepest divisions that it's ever been in in its country's history prior to October 7th over judicial reform. It was completely split. It was a it was it was a society almost traumatized by its splitness. You had people predicting civil war even over this stuff. The second it gets attacked it's like all of that doesn't matter. No one even talks about it, right? The whole country unites around the war that they have to fight. So America as a side effect of being so generally at peace is quite inward looking and inward obsessed. How has this changed or impacted the way that people behave interpersonally? I think before 2013 and certainly in my childhood I grew up in a multi-racial multi-ethnic town. I had friends of every race and I did not think of them as belonging to a race. I thought of them as their individual names and their individual characters. Um I made uh innocent racial jokes with all of my friends and it was something held very loosely not very deeply as it should be. In the in the new age of race obsession I think there's there are many situations that have introduced paranoia and tension into relationship of people with different races. I mean just the fact that say I'm meeting a white person for the first time. They don't know anything about me. They just see that I'm black. Because of everything they see on social media and the the cancellations of people for saying the wrong thing and the ubiquity of concern about racism they may think to themselves, you know what? I'm not even going to risk saying what I saying what I think about you know this this new policy we have like around this black guy. Why would I why would I even risk it? He's probably little do they know that I might agree with them and that might be the opening to a really interesting conversation, but with them, but be very interested in having a conversation and not offended. That's right. That's right. And so I think the self-censorship and and and you know all of it is I mean I I can't tell you how many employers I've talked to or have reached out to me that said yeah I mean I I don't even know if I want to hire a black employee because if something if something happens in this day and age or if if I fire them for a genuine cause which has to happen all the time the possibility that they claim I'm a racist and spread it all over social media could be ruinous for me. Right? This is this these are the things no one talks about that actually do change uh change the on on the ground reality for race relations in in ways that are really really negative I think. There was a study that I looked at about how Me Too hurt women's careers. Women's productivity fell post Me Too largely due to fewer collaborations with men. A study of research collaborations involving junior female academic economists showed that they started fewer new research projects after Me Too. The decline is driven largely by fewer collaborations with new male co-authors at the same institution. The drop the drop in collaborations is concentrated in universities where they the perceived risk of sexual harassment accusations for men is high. That is when both sexual harassment policies are more ambiguous exposing men to a larger variety of claims and the number of public sexual harassment incidents is also high. The results suggest that Me Too is associated with increased cost of collaboration that disadvantaged the career opportunities of women. Me Too was important to raise awareness, but the intent was not to impose costs on women's careers. Yeah. It's very interesting. Yeah I remember that result. It just shows you how you know in every cultural phenomenon changes incentives in a way that has downstream consequences. Now that doesn't mean it's bad. You know perhaps that was a necessary cost. I don't know. You know I'm also I'm curious if if the Me Too movement had a similar effect on on like dating and approaches by men in general. It has. Men men report approach anxiety increasing because of fear of being Me Too'd. Right. And I'm and I wonder if women I wonder I'm curious if women report wanting more approaches than they're they're getting than they were getting in the past. that's that's also true, but here's the other thing it almost like a kind of bizarre psychological Stockholm syndrome that women are also more afraid of being approached. They want to be approached, but their sensitivity that trepidation about being approached has also increased because what are you seeing? You're seeing we're memetic creatures. We look to others in the behavior and the patterns that they show as an indication of how we should behave. Mhm. And if what you're seeing is that this guy isn't to be trusted and there's a tweet that went viral a couple of weeks ago about how um a guy paying you a compliment is a red flag because he's love bombing. So you know there's there's basically this um repurposing of any kind of male behavior or any kind of white behavior Mhm. any male behavior toward a woman or any white behavior toward a black person Mhm. can be interpreted in a a way that fits a narrative of perpetrator and victim. Mhm. Right. It's kind of similar in a way to you know I remember in early 2020 I think this is after Ahmaud Arbery was killed in an attempted citizen's arrest gone wrong while he was out on a jog. And this was a this was a tragic incident and it was a example of just why you should never try to do a citizen's arrest unless for some reason you absolutely have to. Um but you know you saw articles saying you know the dangers of of of of jogging while black, right? You had you had you literally had a New York Times op-ed which was you know a guy saying that he fears for his life every time he leaves his house to take a jog. Right? Probably a guy that's, you know, like from the suburbs and no one's died, no one's been killed taking a jog in that town probably for a hundred years, right? Like um and and the odds of getting killed by a cop on a jog are probably lower than the odds uh of getting struck by lightning. Okay? Let's be perfectly clear about that. So, but what happens when you have New York Times articles saying that, when you have uh you know, just a whole narrative that plays up the risks of as a black person getting shot by the police, even though they're infinitesimal? What happens is you get everyday normal black people, if they get pulled over for speeding or whatever, actually now fearing for their lives. Right? And bringing all of that fear with them to their interaction with the cops. You have just uh and I'm sure cops have seen this. You just have people freaking out when there's almost no chance that something's going to go left in this interaction, because you've done nothing wrong, they've got both hands on the steering wheel, but they're freaking out because they've seen this narrative. Yeah. Did you see the Dartmouth scar experiment? Mhm. So, they brought people into a lab and said that they were going to put scars on their face and then get them to go and take a job interview. And as they're about to leave from the makeup room to go into the job interview, they say, "Sorry, we just need to touch it back up to make it a little bit more obvious." And as they did the touch up, the participant wasn't aware of what they were doing. They actually covered them over. So, sitting down opposite the interviewer, the interviewer didn't see anything. There were no scars on their face. And then afterward, they asked the study participants, "So, what did you notice? Were there any telltale signs? Do you think that you were being discriminated against?" "Yeah, I could tell that they they just couldn't stop looking at it." So, you are able to create a narrative in someone's mind where their reticular activating system is so obsessed looking for a thing that adamant that this is what they should be looking for. It was the same It was the reason why I think there's this dude called Joey Swoll, who is a uh fitness influencer, I guess, on TikTok. And he was kind of like the vanguard pushing back against these videos of girls um videoing themselves and then voice overing about a dude glances over and saying, "I feel unsafe in this gym." There were a bunch of videos that went viral maybe a year ago or something like that. And uh he was basically saying, "This is out of order. Like that that guy didn't do anything wrong. He came over, he tried to help you unload your 25 kilo dog [ __ ] form glute bridge exercise that you were doing or something whatever. Um but that was really important, because I think people, especially on the internet, they look to other people's behavior as a proxy or an example of how they should behave. Mhm. And if that hadn't been pushed back against, a whole swath of girls that saw those videos online would have said, "Oh, yeah. If a guy glances over three times in the space of 90 seconds while I'm doing glute bridge, that is something that I should be scared about." But the internet sort of came together and the collective judgment was, "Actually, that's kind of a bit ridiculous." And that then becomes the new matter. Right? That is now the new trend. Oh, okay. So, I've four times in 90 seconds or five times in I don't need to worry about it as much. So, this sort of safetyism culture doesn't make people safer, it just makes them more fragile and more vigilant. Oh, yeah. And I I I think the whole you know, generation of people roughly my age and younger and and a little older than me, too, is is just measurably more anxious about everything. Uh and I actually just had Abigail Shrier on my podcast, who has a new book. Yeah. And she talks about this, you know, just this notion of exposure therapy, which is one of the few kinds of therapy on her account that actually works. If you have some kind of uh um uh phobia, really what you have to do is just do the thing you don't want to do over and over again until it sucks a bit less, right? You're you're what you're afraid of dogs, well, you're petting a dog today, sorry. And you're going to keep doing it until you're no longer afraid of it. And it turns out that that works really well. Um it's very simple and very unpleasant, but it works. And I asked her and I I think it she agreed with this point. Exposure therapy, the lesson of exposure therapy is generalizable to anxieties most anxieties in general. The more at bats you get in uncomfortable situations, on a first date, asking a girl out, um meeting someone for the first time, public speaking, whatever it is. Uh even for some people, making a phone call is anxiety inducing. Um going to the post office, whatever it is that people are makes people uncomfortable, you precisely have to do that thing just over and over and over again. And what's happened, I think, on mass with the younger generation and this can be seen in, for instance, Jean Jean Twenge's research on generational differences, is that Gen Z has just gotten less experiences around the board on every conceivable kind of thing. Less sex, less hanging out with people, less all of it. And so, it's not exactly surprising that Gen Z has more anxiety about all of those things. Talk to me about affirmative action. You mentioned this earlier on. Is that useful? What about all of the corporate diversity and inclusion efforts beyond the ones that try to get more black people on boards? Were there not, you know, drives to get people into high-paying jobs or or or to fast-track them into higher education institutions? What's your postmortem on that? Yeah. So, there's kind of an older, healthier version of DEI that I would support, which is let's say you're a boss and you've got 10 people reporting to you. Uh let's say you're a white man. And uh you might like fall into the habit of golfing with the other white men every other weekend. And never really think to invite, you know, the the Hispanic guy or the black woman or or or whatever, not out of conscious prejudice, but just because what if they don't golf? Um and and you don't So, you don't think to ask them. And so, you can fall into a pattern of like golfing with non-golfers. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Of just yeah, you can have some kind of magnetism with the people that are more similar to you without actually trying to exclude anybody. So, a kind of innocent and useful version of DEI is just to have like corporate best practices with respect to including people. Like make sure you go to lunch with everyone one-on-one once a month, right? Have that be a policy. Golf-neutral best practices. Exactly, yeah. So, okay. So, if that's what you mean by DEI, then I think I'm all for it. Unfortunately, what most organizations mean by DEI is we have to have a certain number or a certain percentage or at a certain vague range of percentages of non-white people and women, or else we're a racist and sexist institution. Now, that makes me completely uncomfortable, because I know that it it is a sacred value to people. I know there's I mean, there's people that would would listen to this and just turn it off halfway through the sentence to even challenge that that is uh an important value. But I don't know about you, Chris. When I want to hire someone to work on my podcast, I don't give two flying [ __ ] what they look like. I want to hire the most competent person that is in my price range. Same thing goes for when you produce your music, which everyone should go and check out, by the way, Coldxman on YouTube. Uh phenomenal, dude. I I sent you videos of me listening to it in the car. But if it's the the guy that's mastering your tracks or making your beats or helping you mix everything down or helping you film the music video. What was it? Ukraine? Did you go to Ukraine? Yeah, I did go to Ukraine, yeah. Before This was prior, I think. I I have a habit of visiting countries right before they break out into war. I think Maybe considered that you might be associated somehow, that you could be the genesis. Did you film a music video in Israel on October 6th? I I I went there um uh like 10 months before the war. Blame it on you. Yeah. So, um uh we Yeah, so so DEI, right. So, I think if I reserve that right for myself, how can I deny it to to a corporation? I I I I don't understand. I think that people uh pay lots of lip service to the idea of diversity, because uh for like a a cosmopolitan globalized person, which I would consider myself too. Uh we we a lot of us are xenophiles and we like diversity. Like you know, it's nice to have people of many different cultures inhabiting the same room. It's it's it's enriching. Uh but I think diversity is kind of like love. If you force it, you've kind of missed the point, but if it arises naturally, it's awesome. I mean, you know, look at there are uh sub subfields in the arts and music that are highly diverse with no quota or bending of of the merit principle necessary. Look at the comedy world. Look at the music world. These are highly diverse places and no one has to manufacture the diversity. That's great. But in a place where you don't have it, I'm not sure that you ought to manufacture it. Should we be reducing the number of black people in the NBA because it's it's so undiverse? Um I'm not sure. I I mean, I it may sound glib, but I give an examples in the book. Did anyone think that the Beatles like needed a person of color? Does anyone think that Earth, Wind, and Fire needed a white person? I don't think so. I mean, the if things can be groups of people can be excellent and also homogeneous and who are who are we from the outside to say that that's a racist circumstance. Now, I will give one exception, which is that if being racially homogeneous prevents some institution from doing its job well, then by all means. So, for instance, if the NYPD were 100% white guys, I can imagine how that might make it more difficult for the police to protect the community because the community inevitably might perceive that as just a colonial relationship as white people policing people of color. So, so that's a situation where they actually can't do their job as effectively unless they are racially diverse. So, if you're in a situation like that, by all means, uh pursue diversity. But uh most of us are not at firms and companies that are in that situation. Most of us are in situations more like you know, at least my my cartoon image of what firefighting is. It's like the fire doesn't care what color you are, right? So, get the best people. Have any of the race-based policies actually worked? Have any of them actually helped in your opinion? Uh it's very difficult for me to think of any that have have helped more than they hurt. Let's put it that way. I'm not saying none have helped, but it is difficult to think of any that have helped on balance or net. Yeah. Uh whereas it's pretty easy to think of ones that have hurt more than they helped. Dude, I'm fascinated by what the what it's like to be you talking about this stuff. Uh you know, you had this this sort of incident with Ted a little while ago. Uh I always think I have this um do you know what the peak end rule is in psychology? Mhm. Oh, yeah. Yes. Yes, people tend to remember the most um emotionally salient salient and the final experience of of of of one particular event. Um I kind of have a the peak hate rule, um which describes uh content creators and and and individuals in the world uh that almost all individuals are known by their most egregious blowup and their most recent blowup. And I guess it's unfortunate that you're both for both of yours overlap over the top. Uh Jordan Peterson, for instance, might be um he didn't want to call trans people by their name, 2016, and he lost his license because he's a bigot on the internet, or he has things to say about Sports Illustrated models. You know, like there's the the the peak one and then there's the the most recent one. Um I always wonder uh hahaha you know, like how many people like this is the last time that I'll ever step onto the field of play, whether it's this is the thing. This is my crowning cancellation or my crowning sort of moment of of of furore or whatever. Um but yeah, you had the thing and it happens with Ted and I I'm I'm pretty fascinated by what the response has been to you talking about this. You've just been on Bill Maher, tons and tons of exposure on Sam Harris's show. You've been on Rogan's show. Like it's as as big as it can get with this. Yeah. What what do people say? What what's the response like to you on the negative side of the fence? Uh the response to me is still mostly positive and then there's a sort of concentrated stream of extreme negativity. Uh so and then a lot of people that ignore me that that might uh uh that that might not ignore me if I were saying something different. But uh you know, look, over overwhelmingly, I I get a lot of support and I'm enormously grateful for it. And more and more as I've I think gotten better at writing and speaking and as in particular as as we've gotten further and further away from the height of 2020 craziness, more and more people have seen in their own lives the cost of obsessing over race, uh the cost of suspending reason because of a desire to acknowledge racism. More and more people have lived those costs over the past few years, and so more and more people I think have become sympathetic to my concerns and to to my message. Uh on the other hand, there's as there always has been, there's an an extreme concentrated ray of hatred towards me gamma burst of vitriol. Yeah, and it doesn't give me superpowers, unfortunately, or maybe it does in some way. I well, you're able you're able to make wars happen uh a couple of right-wingers after you with 10 different countries. Yeah, it's a weird superpower. I'm not sure I'd be a member of the Justice League with that, but I have war man. It's war man. Yeah, war plus 10-month delay. Yeah, god damn it. It's really fascinating, man, to observe that that thing unfold. I I I spoke to this dude a while ago on the show um who had researched the history of existential risk, of human understanding of our own capacity to destroy ourselves and of the environment's capacity to destroy us, too. And he taught me this idea called conceptual inertia, which is beautiful cuz it's explained within the the concept as well, that ideas take time to move. And I kind of I think about cultural changes uh and and the uh acceptance uh and understanding and then propagation of ideas, new ideas, kind of like a huge tanker that's moving across the sea, that it takes a [ __ ] eternity to get it to go left or right or even begin to nudge it a tiny little bit. There's that a quote about whatever it is, like uh um science science makes progress one dead generation of scientists at a time. Mhm. And this conceptual inertia thing as a perfect example, even after it was pretty uh widely accepted that the Earth was no longer the center of the solar system or the center of the universe, it took like two generations for that to be common parlance amongst people that were talking about it. That even after it was accepted, there was still kind of this reticence or just this delay. There was this inertia that was carried over from previously. And the problem is, you think, well, ideas are they literally travel at the speed of light. They travel at the speed of understanding. But it turns out the speed of understanding is really slow. Mhm. And it's not just the speed of understanding. It's like, I get this. I reject it. But I I there's a critical mass of of um information or justification that I need to be able to believe that this thing is the case. But then I've got it's not just me believing, it's everybody else because I don't just act in a vacuum and there's uh a tendency for people to skew what they think or believe based on what other people think or believe or what they think other people will think or believe about them thinking or believing that thing. Mhm. And then it's still you know, it's just this so many it's it's a lumbering behemoth. Mhm. This leviathan that takes forever to to move around. And it's such a shame because people who are able to see, you know, I remember in 2020 hearing about the defund the police things and I could I was listening to people like yourself, like Sam, that were highlighting the potential negative downstream externalities of these kinds of policies being implemented. And yet, there's still people now, nearly four years hence, that would say that would that would deny that that is something that's had a negative impact. And you know, you're right, living through history is a very bizarre scenario, but it's even it must be even more bizarre if you're Cassandra. And you're able to you're black Cassandra, and you're able to say, "Look, I this was something that we we we didn't need to wait a decade to be able to work out that this was going to happen. We could have seen it kind of at the time." Mhm. there's this, like I say, this sort of critical mass. It's very It's very interesting time. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with respect to change, you know, changing people's or opinions. In some sense, we're both in the business of this, you know, just in that we have podcasts and and so on. But, uh you're right about your point about inertia. At the same time, there are situations where I I think they could I think they're called like an availability cascade or something like this. I've heard this guy Cass Sunstein talk about these situations. book with the dude that did Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. Yeah. I'm sure others have talked about this, but there can be situations where everyone is pretending to believe something. But, no one really knows Most people don't know that everyone else is pretending, right? Everyone thinks that they're the only one. the the Abilene paradox is another name for this. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it's great. And then, if you get an emperor's emperor has no clothes moment where where a few people come out and talk about it, there can be a sort of cascade where everyone realizes relatively quickly that they're not on board. And The sort of veils fall from their eyes type thing. Absolutely, yeah. And with with certain with certain beliefs in in the belief cluster of woke social justice, it at least seems theoretically possible that that that can happen. You know, uh I I would at least I would I would hope. At the same time, I haven't really seen it happen, so uh who knows? It certainly seems to be upstream and downstream in quite predictable directions. Right? You you you if it allows performative empathy or toxic compassion or if it's memetically hijacking because there is a minority group which is being pedestalized and there is a previously privileged group which is being demonized, you can pretty reliably say that the stickiness of that idea and the rapidity of its uptake is going to be pretty quick. Right. Yeah, it's a strange a very strange blend. What about this trend of revising American history? How has that played into everything? Yeah, so in my book, I talk about this. There There is a trend uh not just in writing about history, but also in Hollywood movies about history of playing up the sins of white supremacy and the sins of white people and downplaying uh any responsibility that that black people have. So, for example, there was a movie called The Woman King which came out last year. I don't know if you saw this. It was Viola Davis, uh Viola Davis was uh one of the kind of chief military officers in an African tribe called the Dahomey, which famously had an all-female warrior unit. And that's actually true. They had a a warrior unit of females. And uh in reality, the Dahomey tribe in West Africa, you know, slave trading was essentially their uh their whole MO. I mean, it was a huge part of their MO was raiding other African tribes, capturing them as slaves, using those slaves themselves, and also selling those slaves to the highest bidder, which in that case was Europeans who would bring them to the to what was then called the New World. So, the Dahomey tribe, you know, no bueno, as you would say, historically from a historical perspective. Just a lot of slave capturing, a lot of slave trading, okay? So, in the movie about the Dahomey, they portray it as if uh the Dahomey generals had this great guilt about slave trading and and they get rid of the slaves, I I think by if I if memory serves, by the end of the movie. Or or at the very least, the main character is like so conflicted by the fact that they're doing slave trading uh and and I think they actually do end it by the end of the movie. Does it Does a redemption arc somehow? Yeah, there's a redemption arc that ends with the slavery being them washing No more of this. Absolutely didn't happen. They were They were They were actually one of the most persistent in slave trading, unanimously. It was just accepted, right? So, I I I give that one example because the idea is like for for Hollywood, for the culture of Hollywood, it doesn't compute that a group of black Africans would just be fully committed to slave trading as as an activity, even though that's what the historical record shows. It doesn't compute because slavery is something only white people do, right? I give another example, the movie Hidden Figures, which was about astronauts at NASA, probably 7 years ago or so. Astronauts at NASA, there were a few black women in the 1950s that were that worked at NASA and helped them get to the moon. Uh but they at the same time, this is during segregation. So, they're living during segregation, but also working at NASA helping America get to the moon, and it's this kind of hero arc of these these black women. And one of the black women in who it's actually about, in an interview, said, "I didn't feel any segregation at NASA." She said that in real life. But in the movie, she is portrayed as feeling an enormous amount of racial segregation at NASA, right? This is It's another example. Whenever Hollywood gets a chance, it's going to tilt history in in a direction that uh plays up the the evil white person archetype and plays up the suffering uh but morally superior black person archetype. Why? Because that fits their concept of history. The the way that neo-racists think about history is whiteness is evil, blackness is good. White people are slave owners, black people were slaves. That's the whole story for them. So, they don't know that almost all the slaves that were brought to the New World were not captured by Europeans. They were captured by other Africans. They were slaves in Africa and sold voluntarily by African tribes to Europeans. They don't know that slavery or they're not taught that slavery has existed in almost every society down through history on every inhabited continent. And it would be easier to come up with a list of societies in the past 10,000 years that didn't use slavery than to come up with a list that did, because the list that did would be so long. Uh and you'd be on every continent. You'd be with the Aztecs, you'd be with the Chinese, you'd be with the Koreans, you'd be with the West Africans, you'd be God knows, you'd be with the Middle East. You'd be with the Slavs of Europe, where the word slave comes from, because they were slaves, and so on and so forth. You'd be with the Russian serfs, and so on and so forth. So, from my perspective, history is a story of every group and and everyone having some element of oppressor and oppressed. Not a story of the evil European white man versus the long-suffering noble people of color. I mean, this is there's no honest way to look at history and filter it all through that lens. How is this perspective, not only about history, but about what's going on now, how is this bifurcated between the elites and the non-elites? Like Is Is that the primary difference between who who views race in this way? Oh, yeah, that's it's a huge difference because it's mostly in elite circles that you will see people uh people that are really sympathetic to the white is evil, uh people of color good, kind of frame. Uh also in the elite is where you'll find people sympathetic to kind of every trendy new way of signaling that you care about racism. And often, the elites are clueless as to how much in an elite bubble we are. And I say we because I'm as much an elite as anyone. And the best example of this was with the word Latinx. And this is a as as a half Puerto Rican myself, I grew up speaking around a lot of speaking Spanish and around a lot of Spanish speakers. And so, when I got to college and people started saying Latinx, I was like, "No, that's what?" Because not only do like no Hispanic people actually use that word, but it doesn't even phonetically make sense with the Spanish language. Like it doesn't obey the typical rules of Spanish structure, which are fairly rigid. Um So, but people would, you know, people would use this word when I was at Columbia University and and and you have major politicians on in the Democratic Party, like Elizabeth Warren and and so forth, referring to the Latinx community. Finally, when Pew did a poll and actually asked American Hispanic people if they like the word Latinx, something like 60% hadn't even heard it. And then another something like another 36% had heard of it and did not like it. And then the the percentage of people leave? Four. Right. Four. Four percent roughly was the number of people who both knew it and liked it. Okay, so that is as good a measure of sort of what the elite is. The elite is is the people in that 4% that all of them know Latinx, so they assume everyone else knows it. And they all feel comfortable with it, so they assume everyone else feels comfortable with it. And they don't realize the extent to which that sort of 4% is living on almost on a different plane of reality than the other 96% of people in the country who either haven't heard of even their length the language they're speaking or don't like it. God, that's funny. Yeah. And tragic as well. What's your solution then? What what is a way you understand the incentive structure, you understand the media landscape, you understand how people are responding to wanting to appear compassionate and and and and tolerant and upstanding and all the rest of it, how do we move forward? Mhm. Well, I think everyone has a responsibility to check in with their own personal lives and see if they're living by the ethos of color blindness with their friends and their family. Step one. And and something everyone can do. Uh step two is is to um promote policies and and and politicians that uh that speak to your values. I think in America, we actually have a lot of executive orders and judicial decisions that require employers and and and and so forth to discriminate on the basis of race. And these are things that could be overturned, right? The the next president uh could on day one undo several executive orders that require affirmative action to be implemented in in in the federal government. And so, there should be a lot more discussion and pressure uh aimed at those kinds of changes. Obviously, the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action last summer, I think, is a step in the right direction. Um but there's there's more that can be done on that front, too. And As a culture, we just have to insist on the ideal of a color blind society as the only end goal. Uh and we have to I hope I can help people become less shy and less fearful in expressing their commitment to live in a world where I'm doing my best not to judge you by the color of your skin, you're doing your best not to judge me by the color of my skin, and we're both doing our best to demand that the state, which has the monopoly on violence and sets public policy, does not discriminate against any of its citizens based on the color of our skin, which is something we cannot control. So, to recom- recommit ourselves to that as a culture, to fearlessly stand for it, uh that's what has to be done if we're going to uh make steps towards a color blind society. Coleman, you're awesome, man. And this must be the second or third time you've been on the show. We did Didn't we do um We did the Super Bowl 2 years ago. Yeah, yeah, we did. We did. Yeah. Yes, we did. Me, you, Douglas Murray, and Jordan Peterson, which is like the oddest Yeah. squad to watch a Super Bowl with, but it's very fun. Bro, I I Your music's fantastic, your book is fantastic. I'm so happy that everyone should go and pick it up now, The End of Race. It's only I mean And the Politics. There it is. Uh how how long is the audio book? Oh, that's a good question. I should know off the top of my head. Uh I read it myself. It It might be 6 hours or so. Yeah, but it's a it's a pretty like Not too long. Easy read. Dude, I I I think it's great and I think that you're a fantastic voice for all of this stuff. Tell people where they can check out all of the other cool [ __ ] that you do. Yeah, so you can check out my writing at my Substack, Coleman's Corner. You can also check out my writing at The Free Press, which is a great new publication I would highly recommend, uh founded by Bari Weiss, um where I'm a contributor. You can occasionally check me out on CNN, where I do political analysis. And uh you can check my check out my podcast as well, Conversations with Coleman. And I want to just redirect the praise right back at you. Uh you have one of the best podcasts out there right now. I love I love what you're doing. It's It's It's It's It's just fantastic. So, um kudos to you as well. Thank you. And everyone can go and listen to your music, dude. Honestly, just go and watch the video. What was the video Man. Yeah, but what was the video of the first song that you released that blew everyone Blasphemy. Blasphemy. Yep. Everyone can before you go buy the book while you're going to buy the book, go and listen to Blasphemy by Coleman X Man. It's Yeah. You're awesome, dude. I'm looking forward to catching up with you again the next time you're through Austin. Absolutely. Hell yeah. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, there is something else you will absolutely love right here. Go on. Give it a tap.