Here's Why Racism is Complicated...

I was curious about you because you said at the beginning that even though your mother had taught you the in some sense these woke precepts, there was something in you that rebelled against it.

Yeah, it's what was that?

Yeah, it's not um, I don't rebel against the idea that, for example, there is institutional racism. I don't think it should be called that, but there are inequities in society between, say, black and white that are due to racist attitudes, usually in the past, and racist biases and racist. Looking past all of those things are definitely true. There are all sorts of things in black history that have helped to set us back that one should certainly know about. One should know about the redlining of neighborhoods, where in many cities, most black people lived in neighborhoods where banks would not give you a loan. All of these things are very real.

I never felt like I rebelled against that.

What I rebelled against was the idea you base your whole sense of identity upon those things, such that you live a life that's abbreviated because you're exaggerating how bad it still is, and you're distorting what's necessary to create dignified lives for black people. My feeling has always been you probably have about 80 years, you know, you're lucky if you've got 80 years.

And if you spend your whole life maintaining, in my time period, the same battle poses in the 80s and 90s that people needed in the 50s and 60s, after a while you've spent your life play acting and then you die, and the world goes on. What I rejected was the exaggeration.

And so, for example, I remember what really—there was one moment where I realized there was something wrong with me. It was in the wake of the Rodney King trial in 1991, and a lot of black people I liked very much were united in saying what happened to Rodney King shows that a black man can't get justice in this country.

And I remember thinking, "No, no." That statement would have made sense in about 1965 and in many American cities, 1975. And there were islands of it even in 1991. But the idea that as a 20-some black person you were living in a country where you just couldn't get justice struck me as beyond rhetoric, especially given the general attitude they had towards what being black meant then.

As we were standing around at Stanford University, a campus where all of us have been evaluated according to adjusted standards out of the idea that we were really wanted on that campus, etc., we were supposed to still be speaking that language that the Black Panthers had spoken. It struck me as a pose, and there was a part of me that was deeply disturbed by the artificiality of it and that you were actually expected to live it.

Why, why the AR?

Okay, so you again you use very specific words: oppose artificial as opposed to what? Like what on what B? Like you're comparing it to something and it sounds like you're comparing it, and you don't just Ed. As an exaggeration, your criticism has gone farther than that in the past. I mean, you've also directly stated that conceptualization of the problem in this form is actually interfering with the solutions that we still need to generate.

So it's not just an exaggeration; it's a problem in and of itself, and that's a deeper criticism. So, so, so what's the artificiality as far as you're concerned and compared to what?

Yeah, what, trying to live apparently. But what do you—what is that exactly? The question is how much of an obstacle is racism after formal segregation has been battled? After racial attitudes changed profoundly in the 1970s, and I'm just old enough to have watched that happen.

Just—it gets to the point where, okay, racism does exist, both social and institutional, but how much of an obstacle is it to doing pragmatic things that will make poor black people less poor and all black people happier?

So, quick example would be that these days, you can look at the fact that black kids tend not to do as well on standardized tests as other kids. It's there. Now, you can look at that and you can say, "Well, if black kids don't do as well on the test, that's because of racism, and so we need to eliminate the test because the test is racist."

Now, in what way is the test racist? Forty years ago, maybe those tests asked you what wine goes with chicken? That hasn't been true for generations now. So it's not about asking people things that they have no reason to know.

How is it—how is it racist? And there are people today who even will imply that black thought is somehow incompatible with tests like that, which is very close to saying that black people are incapable of disembodied abstract thought. And many whites will share in probably identical that claim.

Yeah, it's very unfortunate, especially given that the people who are saying it know very well the history of that being said about black people. And so you look at the test and you say that because black kids don't do well on them, they are examples of systemic racism.

Well, you have to get rid of racism, so you have to get rid of the tests, which means that you tell America that black kids can't have their abstract reasoning measured without it being racist. And then when you get somebody saying, "Well, then black kids just must not be as quick on the uptake," you call them a racist.

And in the meantime, it's ignored that you consider helping black kids get better at the test, helping black kids' parents realize what free test prep programs there are in those neighborhoods. The tests just take a little bit of practice, but you're not supposed to talk about it because the tests, quote unquote, are racist. That's a—it's an abuse of language, and it's abuse of the very conception of what racism is.

That's not what my mother raised me in. That's not your grandmother's racism. That's something that comes from a way of thinking that was marginal in 1955, became sexy in about 1966, and here in 2021 is being treated as impregnable wisdom. Someone black has to speak out against that.

So that's what I mean by the exaggeration and the artificiality and the outright harm that comes from these sorts of things.

Well, and with regard to it being a pose—so is it—is it a pose of—so I could say, well, is it a pose of unearned virtue? I mean, virtue is not easy to earn. True virtue you have to establish, let's say—well, see where we go with this—maybe have to establish a relationship with beauty, and beauty is real. You have to establish a relationship with truth, and truth is real.

And so to earn virtue is difficult because beauty and truth are imposing and formidable. If you have any sense at all, you see that. And so that's a daunting task to establish genuine virtue and a terrifying task.

And is theose—the willingness to adopt—see, because when I talk to the ideologue types, and maybe that happened most famously with an interview I had with—I think I was just thinking about it—you mean you mean Michael Eric Dyson, right?

Yeah, oh, I was—no, I wasn't thinking about Dyson. I was thinking about a GQ interviewer, and that interview has been watched like 40 million times now. It's this ideological pose.

Is it the aping of virtue, as far as I can tell? And I mean that in sort of a technical sense—is that you master this language, and it contains the expression of true virtue, but you know the kind of problems that you were talking about.

And I see this on the environmentalist side of things too. Uh, well, how do you get black kids to do better in elementary school, let's say? Well, that's a more manageable problem. It's a problem that would take a little bit more humility to conceptualize, and it's also a really, really hard problem.

And so to be virtuous in your attempts to solve that would require—it probably requires the dedication of your entire life really to take a good crack at that problem, right? 'Cause that's a tough problem, man.

And so maybe you don't want to do that 'cause it's—and then you're enticed, and you're enticed by your educators into this alternative possibility where all you really have to do is master a set of propositions, and you're on the winning side.

And that also gives you some convenient enemies and maybe it fulfills to some degree the religious instinct. And it appalls me to see the universities complicit in this and that they've come to see that.

I think part of the—that falseness and artificiality that you described, I think the fact that that exists is part of the like overbearing insistence that the veil not be lifted and that no one question this because what is underneath it is so damn ugly.

Yeah, yeah. Jordan, you actually—you are, um, you have nailed something. I would be loath to go so near that word virtue because the last thing I want to do is imply that somebody isn't virtuous.

Nevertheless, you're getting it in that it's an unearned virtue which people are settling for not because they're so callow as to wish to be virtuous without earning their stripes, but because religion is attractive.

And so if you are surrounded by people who are brandishing this message that everything that you don't like is racist and you can get beyond it that way, it's not that you're lazy; it's not that you're trying to get stripes that you didn't earn, but it's comfortable.

Because part of being in that religion is that there's an us versus them conception which is very comforting. You're part of a mission of uplift which is very comforting.

And in a university, that religion is there. It's as if there—are people from a church who were behind tables out in the plaza who are waiting to recruit people. That's there as soon as you hit campus.

And so that's why so many people—and now it's not just black kids; it's also white kids—fall for this way of looking at things.

Where it is, is you become virtuous without having done the sorts of things that ideally one might have. You can—you're virtue signaling, and it is unearned virtue, but it's because you wish to have a cloak. You're seeking a comfort zone.

I can't hate anybody for that, but it does mean an awful lot of mendacity—that's the problem.