The Arc of Racial Progress with Neil deGrasse Tyson (Ep.10)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Arc of Racial Progress with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Podcast: Conversations With Coleman
Episode: 10
Date: July 2, 2020
Host: Coleman Hughes
Guest: Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Overview

In this wide-ranging and deeply candid conversation, astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson joins Coleman Hughes to reflect on personal and societal changes in race relations and policing in America. Using the George Floyd killing and his own recent essay "Reflections on the Color of My Skin" as a launching point, Tyson shares stories of discrimination, observations of progress, and thoughts on contemporary protest movements. The episode also grapples with how society parses data on police violence, the slow arc of racial progress, and the challenge of sustaining hope in turbulent times.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal and Generational Experiences of Racial Profiling

[05:06–14:39] Neil deGrasse Tyson recounts...

• A 1990s story from a National Society of Black Physicists conference: after hours of scientific discussion, every Black physicist present shared a story about being stopped or questioned by police—something Tyson notes he never experienced in all-white spaces.
• Tyson describes frequent stops by police, often without clear reason. One memorable encounter involved a cop questioning him at night and only relenting after learning he was an astrophysicist at Princeton.
• The pattern, Tyson argues, reflects a persistent reality for Black Americans: “Individually, you can listen to each story and say, 'Okay, I can see... I can explain that, all right.' But collectively, something else was clearly going on.” [09:48]
• Tyson feels responsibility to share these stories during moments of national reckoning, even if he'd been historically reluctant to be defined solely by his race or comment publicly on these issues.

2. Charting Tangible Progress in Everyday Life

[15:26–21:31]

• Tyson notes significant improvement in day-to-day racial bias, especially from the 1980s to the 2000s. The fraction of cabs refusing to pick him up in Manhattan dropped from about 1 in 3 cabs (1980s) to 1 in 30 (2000s).
• Notable quote: “The more occasions people have to see black people doing ordinary things, being, quote, ordinary citizens, then the more evidence you have against what might otherwise be a bias that you want to invoke.” — Tyson [21:32]
• This progress, he theorizes, is due in large part to increasing representation of Black people in diverse roles on TV, in media, and in professional life—not just as entertainers or athletes but as experts and ordinary citizens.

3. Shifts in Media Representation and Societal Norms

[21:32–27:11]

• Recounts the evolution from all-Black musicals (necessitated by exclusion from mainstream productions) to “mainstreaming” of Black talent as society recognized untapped excellence.
• Early TV representation required actors to “play Black,” reinforcing stereotypes. Modern shows (e.g., The Good Place) now cast Black characters in roles that play against stereotype, sometimes without the audience even noticing—an indicator of true progress.

4. Parsing Police Violence and Data-Driven Complexity

[27:11–36:36]

• Coleman describes his journey from Black Lives Matter activist to a more nuanced, data-driven view—recognizing police violence is not solely a racial issue, as numerous unarmed whites are also killed by police each year.
• Tyson acknowledges statistical data (risk per police encounter is similar across races), but adds the caveat that Black people have historically had (and may still have) more police encounters due to bias, which multiplies total risk.
  • Quote: “The crux of my piece ... [is] to keep the total number of encounters a black person would have with the police down to as low as possible, so that when the requisite number of people die ... the total number becomes low, even if the percents are the same.” [34:00]

5. The Limits of Statistical Reasoning on Police Violence

[37:03–44:44]

• Coleman worries about the future: “The more progress you make, the harder it gets to make progress on an issue like this … with millions of cop-civilian interactions per year, if .001% go bad and someone films it, the conditions for a riot are there.”
• Tyson resists statistical complacency: “Certain things should simply never happen ... If there was a crazy heart surgeon, how long would that person stay on the job?” [41:42]
• Tyson draws the analogy to past lynch mob justice, stressing that society’s reaction to the killing of George Floyd matters even if it's statistically rare—the legitimacy of law enforcement depends on rooting out such abuses entirely.

6. On Reform, Accountability, and Institutional Change

[46:28–51:43]

• Tyson strongly argues against militarization of police: “Military grade weaponry has no place with one American wielding it against another.” [46:40]
• He believes psychological screening and selection are as (or more) important than accountability boards: “I’m less interested in having accountability boards and prosecuting bad cops ... than I am preventing bad cops ... from ever having become cops in the first place.” [50:05]
• Tyson points to NYPD’s relatively low rate of police killings (despite its population) as a model, suggesting more focus on what works rather than just what has failed.

7. The Challenge of Eliminating All “Bad Apples” and Societal Psychology

[52:47–55:54]

• Coleman expresses skepticism that all bad actors can be filtered out: “No matter how hard we try, there’s going to be a small number of quote unquote bad apples that get through.”
• Tyson rebuts, noting that peer culture and silence also enable misconduct: “If you hear [racist or homophobic remarks] and they’re one of your fellow officers and you do nothing about it, then you’re culpable.” [53:15]

8. How Rarity Amplifies Outrage, and the Value of Transparency

[55:54–58:28]

• Tyson and Coleman discuss how reducing police killings will make each remaining case stand out, much as plane crashes do now; confidence depends on convincing the public every incident is analyzed and leads to concrete improvements.
• Tyson: “If I knew that when disaster happened, there are responsible people making sure it will never happen again...” [58:03]

9. Final Thoughts—The Necessity (and Tragedy) of Protest

[59:53–62:30]

• Reflecting on history, Tyson laments that, “To do the right thing requires bloodshed,” but also points out that public outrage and protest are often what drives leaders to enact change.
• “Maybe people ... will wake up. They woke up in 1968 ... They woke up when they saw Emmett Till ... And it’s unfortunate that this doesn’t happen peacefully ... It happens when those in charge realize how seriously people care about outcomes.” [59:53]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On cumulative microaggressions:
  “Collectively, these stories ... the only common denominator among us was this color of our skin.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson [09:10]

• On progress in everyday racism:
  “By the late 90s, it was 1 in 10 [taxis that wouldn't pick me up]. By the 2000s, it was 1 in 30.” — Tyson [17:42]

• On effect of media representation:
  “The more occasions people have, the more to see Black people doing ordinary things ... the more evidence you have against what might otherwise be a bias.” — Tyson [21:32]

• On police violence statistics:
  “If you have a police department that stops and frisks black drivers, then the numbers of encounters with police are higher, informed by ... suspicions and biases.” — Tyson [32:47]

• On why rare events matter:
  “Certain things should simply never happen. … There should not be any crazy police officers.” — Tyson [42:05]

• On flawed police selection:
  “I’m less interested in prosecuting bad cops than I am preventing bad cops from ever having become cops in the first place.” — Tyson [50:05]

• On protest and change:
  “To do the right thing requires bloodshed. ... It’s unfortunate that this doesn’t happen peacefully around a circular table.” — Tyson [59:53]

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Important Timestamps

• [05:06] — Tyson’s physics society story & cumulative police stops
• [15:26] — Tyson details improvement in daily-aggression metrics
• [21:32] — Tyson’s theory on representation changing perceptions
• [27:11] — Coleman shares evolution on police-killing activism, BLM
• [34:00] — Discussion: why risk is compounded for Black Americans
• [41:42] — Tyson on zero-tolerance for brutality, "crazy" professionals
• [46:40] — Tyson’s stance on militarized policing
• [50:05] — Emphasis on preventing bad hires in policing
• [53:15] — Peer culture and integrity among police
• [55:54] — Rarity and reporting: pitfalls of “success”
• [59:53] — The tragic necessity of protest in pursuing justice

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Tone & Style

The conversation is analytical, reflective, and earnest—with Tyson often combining the rational detachment of a scientist and the lived experience of a Black American. Coleman approaches as a data-driven, introspective host wrestling with competing truths. Humor occasionally breaks up the heaviness (as in Tyson’s cab anecdote), but both men speak plainly and often poignantly about frustration, hope, and the slow progress of justice.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a thoughtful blend of autobiographical reflection, hard truths about systemic bias, data-driven discourse on policing, and philosophical musing on what real progress requires. Both Tyson and Coleman underline: Yes, things are better than they were—and yes, outrage at injustice remains necessary so long as even isolated incidents can shake public trust. The arc of racial progress is long, complicated, and unfinished.

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Transcript

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

SA.

[Coleman Hughes]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Before I introduce my guest today, I want to welcome the many new people that have subscribed through my website or through Patreon in the past three weeks. It seems like there's a hunger for content that is not simply going along with the tide of identity politics that's currently sweeping the nation like a tsunami. If you haven't subscribed yet but want to, I ask that you do it through my website rather than through Patreon, as Patreon has been known to occasionally cancel people who are deemed problematic, and I want to insulate myself against that possibility as much as I can. To give you a sense of how important contributing is, the podcast is now making enough money per episode to justify hiring an audio engineer to handle the many hours of technical work that go into making a single episode sound good. Of course, if you don't support the podcast financially, that's fine too. You can also support me by subscribing to my YouTube channel. Okay, today's guest is Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who probably needs no introduction, but I'll give him one anyway. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Since 1991, he's been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003. In the first half of this conversation, we talk about the progress that has been made in reducing racism since Neil was a kid, especially with regard to the prevalence of racial profiling and stereotyping in the mainstream media. In the second half, we talk about police brutality, different ways of parsing the data on police killings of unarmed civilians, and whether an attitude of optimism or pessimism is warranted at this moment. So without Further ado, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Neil, thank you so much for coming on my podcast.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sure. Happy to be there.

[Coleman Hughes]

So we're speaking on June 4th, which is a week and three days after George Floyd was killed at the hands of Derek Chauvin and two other Minneapolis police officers who restrained him on the ground, including on his neck, and ended up killing him on camera in a way that was truly brutal and horrific to watch. And that event has sparked protests, for now over a week, peaceful protests in virtually every city in America, as well as many nations around the world. It has also sparked riots in most American cities. And, you know, this is a historic moment, I think, for the nation, coming over two months into the coronavirus lockdown, which is also, you know, one of the huge historic moments of the past few decades. And you have written an essay called Reflections on the Color of My Skin, which I hope we could use as a jumping off point. You've been reluctant to weigh in on the issue of race for most of your career. And I'm sure you get asked, because you happen to be a black physicist, to comment on these issues quite frequently. But you've chosen your spots really sparingly, and I really understand the basis of that. But you've chosen to weigh in at a deep moment right now, and I'm hoping we can use that piece as a launching off point. So in this essay, you start with a story about physics conference. Would you mind telling that story?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sure. Back in the 1990s, I was an active member of a physics society, physics organization. We had annual meetings, like any society would, where you have collections of experts in whatever is there, the interest base of that community. And we can have conferences of refrigerator salesmen. And so you gather and there's a certain comradery because everyone at a conference has strongly overlapping professional interests, and you learn from each other about how to do your job better. So that resonance, I think, creates a level of friendship and camaraderie among people who you might not necessarily even know very well simply because you have common interests. That would be true for any conference. Art, technology, surfing, it wouldn't matter. So in this particular case, it's a community of physicists. And as is true for most conferences, there's a last dinner banquet where everyone eats together, and usually the night before the last day, and there was wine being served. And at the end of the banquet, there was a group of us. I don't remember the exact number, somewhere between 8 and 12, just enough to say, let's find some common room, maybe a top floor suite or something where we can all gather and just continue. So we grab the bottles, the not quite empty bottles of wine from the table and we went and found a common room somewhere in the hotel. Just to talk, just to chew the fat. We're all physicists, so we get to talking about some geeky things, which is entirely unavoidable when you have a level of math and physics background that we do collectively. And so we start arguing about things like does Superman really need a cape in order to fly? If you stole his cape, would he not be able to fly? And what role would his cape play in it? And if it's just he comes from Krypton and it's a different star and it's only the star and others on Krypton don't have capes, do they? So the whole argument about it and as only sort of a community of geeks could engage and the topic went on to other. The topic would shift. Exhausting one topic going to another. I remembered we were curious that diet a can of Diet Pepsi floats water, whereas a can of regular Pepsi sinks. That's just peculiar because regular Pepsi has sugar. That makes it slightly more dense. Diet Pepsi is still wrapped in a metal, metal canister. So whether something floats or sinks is a matter of the average density of the object. So if you take the liquid that's in a can of Diet Pepsi, add to it the metal that's surrounding it, it's still kind of a mystery that it floats. Anyway, we discussed that and we discussed other things and we just went on and on into the night. And then at one point we started talking about momentum transfer in car collision. So it turns out, if you never thought about it, that two cars going, let's say 60 miles an hour, having a head on collision is the same energy involved doing damage to you as if you went 60 miles an hour into a brick wall. It's not double okay, but you have to think that through and understand why. So we were doing that and figuring that out. That got us talking about cars. And one of us started saying. I started recounting an occasion when he was stopped by the police driving his car. And we all listened attentively and turned. Turns out he was speeding. But the cop sort of searched him and searched the car and searched the trunk. Then he got a speeding ticket. He was driving a sports car, by the way. We didn't have much sympathy for him in that just because he was speeding and he was driving a sports car. But that got everyone else thinking and we just started sharing stories about our encounters with the police and that would occupy us for the rest of the evening. There must have been about 30 stories communicated over the several hours that followed, each one of us in turn. I had stories of being stopped by the police. And one time I was stopped in New Jersey and it was late at night, hardly any cars on the road, and officers stopped me under an overpass, asked me to get out. This was at night, asked me to stand behind my car in front of his bright squad car lights. And so I remember squinting at the light and he started asking me questions. Where are you coming from? I said, I'm coming from my parents house. Where are you going? I'm going home. Who's the woman next to you in the car? Who's the woman sitting in the passenger seat? I said, that's my wife. What's in the trunk? I said, just a greasy tire and some other stuff. And this line of questioning just. And I didn't know why this was happening, so I stopped you because you change lanes without signaling. Okay, this sounded kind of incredulous. Maybe I did. I don't remember in the preceding minutes before I was stopped, but he would later say after he said, well, what do you do for a living? I said, I'm an astrophysicist with Princeton University. Only at this point did he then start saying, well, the real reason why I stopped you was that your license plates were very shiny and new. I just recently moved to New Jersey and I needed Jersey plates that were shiny and new and it didn't match your car. So we wanted to make sure that either the car nor the license plates were stolen. Okay. Then I moved on. Okay, I put this into the circle and okay, I wasn't roughed up, I wasn't. There was no violence committed. There was no. But it was just a little odd, I felt. But by the way, I have a dozen other such stories. Being stopped, being questioned, and not getting a ticket. Not getting a ticket. Collectively, these stories, excuse me, individually, you can listen to each story and say, okay, I can see all right, you know, I can explain that, all right. But collectively, something else was clearly going on. And then we just wondered, is it because we're physicists? They know we're physicists and they got something against educated people. What's the common denominator? The common denominator is I was attending the National Society of Black Physicists. That's the society of physicists that I had joined for that week. And the only Common denominator among us was this color of our skin. Some of our cars were old, others were new, some were sports cars, some were kind of old beat up cars. Like my car was 17 year old Ford. Okay, who would ever steal a 17 year old Ford? I don't know. Okay. He's worried about stolen cars. I mean, what's. So I open my commentary with a recounting of this evening, of that evening, just to bring people in to the world of a black person. That was just an opening sort of salvo. This is what goes on all the time. If not that incident, another kind of incident. And am I being petty? Am I being oversensitive? Does this happen to everyone? I suppose it could and they just don't tell me. I don't know that I've ever been in a circle of white people unless they themselves were truants in some way. I don't know if I've ever been in a circle of law abiding white people where they all took turns telling police stories. I've never. So maybe they do have the stories and they just don't speak of them. That's possible. But this was a way for me to bring the reader into my reflections. The title of the piece is Reflections on the Color of My Skin. Reflections on what Happened in My Life. Simply growing up in America and in this time of unrest triggered by the police brutality leading to the death of George Floyd, I felt, you know, I can't any longer just keep all these stories to myself. Somebody has to know this. I'd be irresponsible if I didn't put this out there in some way or another. Now, that story with the physics conference actually does appear in my memoir as one part of one chapter of a much larger discussion of my lifetime growing up. That, by the way, that chapter is called Dark Matters.

[Coleman Hughes]

That's good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But my point is, there came a time, and it was this week, where I said, people need to know what I have experienced in my life. And so in that sense, I sort of broke the fourth wall and said, this is what has shaped who and what I am today.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So I think growing up later than you did, I have fewer of those stories, but I do have them.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Where did you grow up?

[Coleman Hughes]

Also growing up where I did. I grew up in a very nice, diverse, progressive town, suburban town in New Jersey.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What town was that?

[Coleman Hughes]

Montclair and West Orange.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah, Montclair. You can't get more progressive than Montclair. I can also say that it was the 1990s. When I began to notice a significant drop in the daily sort of aggressions, some macro, some medium, some microaggressions. And one of my barometers for this is what fraction of taxis will drive by me and not pick me up if I want to go north in the direction of Harlem in Manhattan. So this is a fascinating measure. Of course, in any given incident you can say, oh, they probably just didn't see me or they just weren't looking. So you could say that, of course, any given incident. But I have statistics over all of these years. In the 1980s, that rate was about a third. About a third of all taxis would just drive by and pretend to not notice. Of course, human peripheral vision is huge. We don't think of it because you're always focusing on something in front of you, but peripheral vision. You can see more than 180 degrees left and right of you. Okay. And so. And a taxi driver whose livelihood depends on noticing people who need a cab to miss me. And I'm not small on the street. I mean, I'm a relatively large person, not crazy large, but big enough so that I'm not hidden behind a van or car. So in the 1980s it was about a third and occasionally a half. By the way, that number was a little lower. There are more of them would pick me up if I was headed south in Manhattan. Okay. So these trend lines are quite for.

[Coleman Hughes]

People who don't understand the context of New York City. If you're headed south, that's a signal to the cab driver that perhaps you're wealthier, more affluent versus if you're headed towards Harlem or the Bronx, where you grow up. Where you grew up, if I'm correct.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, correct. I grew up in the Bronx. Yeah. So come the 90s, those numbers dropped. Come the mid-90s it was 1 in 5. Taxis would not pick me up. By the late 90s, it was 1 in 10. By the 2000s it was 1 in 30. So in my commentary, I didn't give all the bits of evidence for why I think things are better today than they were yesterday. Speaking metaphoric time there. But for you to be born in 1996, that means you're really coming of age in the 2000s. And consider also after 2001, September, the nations tribalism was no longer black white, it was America, Islam. Right. So there were other redirections of people's anger and ire politically and culturally over that time. So I would not expect you to have the depth of stories that I'm drawing from that come from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s. But if there's any issue about whether you can believe what I tell you, whether it's I'm just all delusional or whether I am. It's just anecdotal, I can share with you the trend line of it improving over those years. And we got to a point in the 2010s where I'm noticed enough. I mean, I'm identifiable enough so that now there's a celebrity factor. So I'd have to wear glasses and a hat to reconstruct an authentic experiment. But yes, times are better. So when I say one to five, which are the numbers I gave in my commentary, one to five acts of offense per week, that number spans 40 years. I mean, no, 50 years more than 50. I'm 62 right now. This year I'll be 62. So I'm going back to when I had first an awareness of people's conduct, and that would have been when I was eight. Eight or nine. So let's go 55 years back. So I see trend lines and the trend lines are good. I'm happy to report, even though in the face of the police violence we see now, it doesn't feel that way. So. And let me say that differently. There's great progress in other metrics, but it's not clear whether we've made great progress in police stopping because what were those, what were those car stories drawn from? It was a kind of an automotive stop and frisk is really what that was. Oh, there's a black person. Let me stop him. Probably up to no good. And this is a room full of PhDs, so. So, yeah, I would not have expected that at all. Yeah.

[Coleman Hughes]

So what you're highlighting, and yeah, I totally agree with you about the progress that's been made. I actually, I had a really funny interaction with a cab driver a few months ago who was an immigrant from Hungary who has been driving a cab in New York since 1980. And he told me that and I said, I asked him what's the biggest thing that's changed? And without skipping a beat, he said, I picked you up. We both. I just, I couldn't help but laugh because it was, it was just the. He had this huge smile on his face and he seemed really warm hearted and like he meant it not in a offensive way. It was, it was a right. Just a matter of fact, just as a matter of fact way. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Even have to applaud the honesty.

[Coleman Hughes]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That is, I Can tell you that. So he picks you up. So he would have been. In the statistics of everything I was describing, he would have maybe picked up only half the black people hailing a cab, and then maybe 2/3 and then 3/4, and then maybe now 100%. I have a hypothesis of what has contributed to that change. It's not a researched answer, but it's just sort of my sense of the world. And that is, the more occasions people have, the more to see black people doing ordinary things, being, quote, ordinary citizens, then the more evidence you have against what might otherwise be a bias that you want to invoke. So when I was in my teens, early teens, there were no black people on television except as athletes or as entertainers. And there just were not. No one was interviewed for their expertise unless they had expertise about being black in some way. They were a preacher in an inner city in the ghetto of the time. And we need to know what your people think. No one was talking to black people who had any kind of expertise at all. So if you were a casual observer of culture through media, you would think black people had no participation in anything at all. Not only that, I grew up at a time where this is an obscure example, but it's an often forgotten example. In the 1960s, there were no black performers in mainstream Broadway plays. You can say, well, they're scripted for white people. Well, you can say that in the day. But really, they're just scripted for good actors and singers and dancers and performers. So what happened? Famous musicals were created with, quote, all black casts. So you tapped the deep repository of talented black people, singers, dancers, actors, and you created familiar plays, musicals, with all black people. One of them was hello, Dolly. That had Pearl Bailey as Dolly. Everybody was black. And they throw in sort of ethnic, cultural references and jokes to pepper the otherwise sort of mainstream dialogues. So as a family, we went to all of the all black musicals that had come along. And you say, well, and I remember people coming up to me and saying, why do you have all black? What's the point of that? And these are people who didn't understand why these things. Why is there a missed black America? Why was there a black anything at the time? Why was there a black baseball league going back now, two decades before this? Because we weren't admitted into the rest of it, even when you had talent. So that's why it happened. And then what happens is the rest of the world sees this talent. They value the talent. They start incorporating them into the mainstream cultural product. Then it obviates the need to do things that are all black. So, no, there are no all black musicals anymore. So this is an arc of progress, an odd sort of arc, but nonetheless an arc. Not only that, I remember the 70s when you started seeing black people. Not the 60s, but the 1970s, where black people in larger numbers were showing up as characters on sitcoms and in movies and shows. However, when that first happens, you're on there because you have to be black in some way. You gotta talk black. You gotta act black. You are the black person in the script. You're not just another actor in the script. You have to be the black person. You gotta give some saucy comment. There's gotta be something that everyone can laugh at because you have a black attitude as opposed to mainstream attitude. I try to track this because I'm fascinated by how society arcs in its fits and starts through progressive thinking and conduct.

[Coleman Hughes]

Have you seen the show the Good Place?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, I have. Yes.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I love this show. And I got to the end of it, and when I got to the end, I realized that the smart character in the show was a black guy. The dumb character in the show was an Asian guy. And, you know, more interesting than both of those was the fact that I didn't notice that they were going counter stereotype.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's yet another measure of progress. Correct.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And I look for key moments, turning points for how and when that happens. I have a comic from. From the New Yorker that shows a boardroom, okay? And there's a black person in the boardroom. And the caption has nothing to do with that person being black. The idea that you can now have a comic with a black person in a boardroom, corporate boardroom. And that's not the punchline. It's like, whoa, I wonder if that was the very first time that was done. So I watch for that, and I'm intrigued. My father was active in the civil rights movement. So in spite of me being an astrophysicist, I nonetheless have what I think are deep sensitivities to the capacity of society to exploit people.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I want to pivot a little bit and talk about what's happening right now in a bit more detail. But before I do that, I want to give you a little bit of backstory on who I am and how my views have evolved on this issue issue over time. So I grew up, you know, in a very diverse town, as I said, and I grew up being the type of kid that just wanted to be a person, full stop. I had a lot of interests And I didn't think about race too much. I remember one time when I was 11 or 12, some kids had the idea to play a black versus white soccer game. Me and one other black girl were like, why are we doing this? This is really stupid. We don't want to do this. And I remember that being my kind of base instinct on race, that it goes no deeper than the color of the skin, and the first person to make it important is the one making the moral and logical error. And then around 2012 is when Trayvon Martin was killed. And I was one year younger than Trayvon when he was killed. And like many people, I instinctively felt solidarity with him. I felt that I could. He could have been me. And, you know, it was around the same time that I began encountering a lot of ideas like white privilege and systemic racism and whole litany of ideas that I had never encountered before. And in 2014, when Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed, again, I felt that, you know, this was obviously. These were obviously not just tragedies, but were racist tragedies. And in 2015, when that list grew to include Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray and Tamir Rice and others, I began wearing a shirt with all of their names on it and sharing the Black Lives Matter hashtag. And slowly but surely, I've come to think differently about these issues than I did then. And broadly, the reason for that is because I have seen video after video, even just from a single year, of white people getting killed in the same way. And I wasn't aware when I was wearing these T shirts, that the problem with the police ran so deep that there are, you know, dozens of white people a year that get killed unarmed, you know, reaching for the alleged gun that they end up not having. And that, you know, seeing that evidence, you know, has slowly shaken me towards the position that, you know, a position of kind of a mixed opinion on Black Lives Matter, where I agree the police are much quicker to rough up a suspect if he's black. I agree that racism is completely real. I agree that, you know, short of shooting someone in the back, there's almost nothing a cop can do that reliably gets him or her punished. I agree that many people don't realize how frustrating it is to be falsely stereotyped. It is a. It's a really crazy making experience. But the more I've looked, the harder it is for me to believe that the killings, the phenomenon of unarmed Americans being shot dead, should be framed in racial terms. And so that leaves me with a very mixed feeling on what's happening at the moment. So I wonder what your. What is your reaction to that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, what you're referencing is the statistic, which I don't have good reason to doubt, that the likelihood of being killed in police custody, or rather killed by likelihood of being an unarmed person, killed by the police, or dying in police custody is about the same regardless of your ethnic group. Okay, so that's an interesting piece of data. What it says is that encounters with the police are dangerous, rather carry a death risk. Okay. And so you want to minimize your encounters with the police so that the total number of people who die drops. Okay, so now if you have a police department that stops and frisks black drivers, then the numbers of encounters with police are higher, informed by whatever was the suspicions and attitudes biases of the police officers. So I just want to keep the number of encounters with police to a minimum. I spent a couple of paragraphs, maybe one big paragraph in my commentary, retelling the lessons I was getting from my parents in the 1960s. We grew up in New York City. That was a turbulent time. Crime rates were high. And they wanted to make sure that their three black children wouldn't end up dead in the street, shot by police. So they went through basically police training, Right? Police avoidance training or police conduct training. Police officer stops you, you stop, you say polite things, you say, good afternoon, officer. How can I help? Make sure they always see your hands. No sudden movements. Don't put your hands in your pockets. Don't reach for anything. And if you're going to move, tell them what you're about to do. None of us drove a car, but there'd be car instructions later when I would learn how to drive. Make sure the officer can always see your hands. Keep them up on the steering wheel. If you're about to reach for your license, tell them you're about to reach for your license and tell them where your license is so when you reach there, they're not spooked. Okay, so that's an attempt to keep the numbers down. That's really what that is. And so to keep the total number of encounters a black person would have with the police down to as low as possible, so that when the requisite number of people die in the statistically repeated number of people die in their custody, that the total number becomes low, even if the percents are the same. That was the crux of my piece on reflections on the color of my skin. It was, yeah, I'm a scientist. I know. I see data and I know Data, and I understand it. And it's hard to stay dispassionate in the discussion of statistics when you have such graphic video running around the countryside. Okay. Or rather the capacity to obtain graphic video violent actions is. Knows no limits. Right. So my response to you would be that, yeah, if you're admitting there is racism and there's bias, if you're admitting all of that, and we recognize that you're not more likely to. To die because of your skin color once the police have you in their custody, you're not more likely to die after you're in their custody. If you want to say they're not stopping black people more often than white people. I haven't seen the data on that. Yeah. So we're just trying to keep the numbers down. And by the way, this is a subtle mathematical point. Well, it's not subtle if you're a mathematician, but if you're, if you don't think mathematically the difference between the same fraction of people dying, no matter the demographic, and whether or not the cops are racist for their policing practices, you would think that one negates the other. But the two different mathematical data points, and when we see Floyd, George Floyd getting killed, you're seeing police brutality against a black person. You're not seeing, here's yet another black person in the custody of police. That's real number that should be seen here.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Even if you're correct for crime rates and all of this, you know, if black people commit more crimes or if of what of certain varieties, depending on income and neighborhood and city and all the rest of this. So that's my reaction to your latter day revelations about the data.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I want to talk about where this is all headed for us as a nation, because I have to say I am very pessimistic about the possibility of recurring riots in American cities. And I think really nobody likes to see riots except the rioters themselves and a fringe on the Internet that will sort of fully make excuses for them. But the vast majority of people, those who support Black Lives Matter, those who are against it, really don't want to see riots. And I've been to a few of the BLM protests in New York, and they stress nonviolence very, very clearly. And I'm worried, though, that I'm worried about a few things. One is that it's hard for me to see realistically how we get from the number of unarmed Americans of all races getting killed. Say in 2019, according to the Washington Post database, last year there were 41 unarmed Americans killed by the police in total.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I've seen other data that puts that over 100 for just one.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I looked at. I looked at. So I was. I saw. I read the number.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's. Yeah. Relative to other ways people die, it's a relatively small number.

[Coleman Hughes]

So, yes, that's what matters, I presume.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And where we're headed here.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, that's what matters, is that it's lower than you might think, depending on what your prior beliefs are. And we can talk about how many are black, how many are white. But to me, it feels when I read all of these news stories, and I've spent a lot of time reading the news stories, the ones that never go national about these altercations. And, you know, a lot of them involve people having a gun that looks like a real gun but is in fact a toy gun. A lot of them involve the cops thinking that you're reaching for a gun and there's actually nothing in your pocket. A lot of them involve mental illness. And, you know, the point I'm making here is that as we talked about in the beginning, I think there's been a lot of progress made on this issue. Not enough. But it seems like the more progress you make, the harder it gets to make progress on an issue like this. Because, you know, we have a crazy gun culture in America, which means that unlike in many countries, when the cops do pull over a suspect, they have a more rational fear than in other places that the suspect might be armed. And so it seems to me if there are something like, you know, tens of millions of civilian cop interactions every year, and 000, one of them, you know, go bad and someone is there to film it, which hasn't been the case throughout most of history, then the conditions for a riot are going to be there unless we somehow find a way to get a Z, get the number down to zero year after year. And the more I think about how we would do this, the more I despair for the possibility that can't be done.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So here's how I would respond to that. That's pretty pessimistic. The country ultimately got rid of slavery, all right? And talk about sort of violations of human dignity. That was a pretty big one. There was Johnny come lately in that one relative to Europe. But nonetheless, it did happen. The way I look at it is suppose there was a black police officer who had his knee on the neck of a white person. Suppose it wasn't even a police officer. Suppose it was a black person who killed a white person. And if this was the south, you know, at any time, at most of the decades of the 20th century, up through the 1960s, there would probably be mobs of white people trying to find the black person to lynch them. That. That would be the form of justice exacted on that incident. So you say, okay, that's messed up. That's not due process. That's whatever. And so you can analyze it in the moment for what should have happened. Okay, so now we look at this. It's a white cop knee on the neck of a black print, and the black person dies. How you feel about that matters in a free country. Okay? So you can, you can't. I'm speaking this as a scientist, but as a person who lives in the real world, okay, there's the philosophical world, not to put needless distance between us, but there's what is philosophically true, logically true, and then there is what's actually happening. Okay, so the fact that that happened at all is a problem that should happen zero times, right? No, it's not. Someone pulling out a toy gun on video. That's not what. He's handcuffed, okay? Rodney King was tased, and he's just trying to stand up and they keep hitting him. Okay, I left out a piece where I recounted that, where they're instructing each other to hit him at his joints, on his kneecap, at his ankle, on his elbow, on his head. He ended up with a fractured skull. That should never happen ever. So I don't care what the percent is, that should never happen. That is not a cop being scared. That is deep. I don't even know what that is. So you can say it's 0.0002% and we shouldn't worry about it. The fact that anyone behaves that way at all, and they're endowed with the power of. Of weapons given to them by the mayor of their town, who is generally the commander in chief of the police force. What is that that matters? Sometimes small things are big things, and they don't lend themselves to pure statistical analysis. There's certain things that should simply never happen. And you can't say, oh, it happened because there are a few crazy police officers. There should not be any crazy police officers. If there was a crazy heart surgeon, how long would that person stay on the job? If there was a crazy. I mean, just think about this. If there was a crazy pharmacist who would occasionally mix up medicines on purpose, how long were that person stay. How would that person even get to have that Job. So this is a. In this case, I can't look at how small the numbers are given how dangerous it is for the confidence we have in law enforcement, how dangerous the capacity for that to erode the confidence that we all need to have to have to maintain a law abiding society.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, to be clear, I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression. I think what happened to George Floyd and Tony Timpa was a very similar case three, four years ago. You know, like putting your knee on someone's back and listening as they slowly suffocate to death. I think that we can get rid of that probably entirely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I think it's possible. This is the optimism that I carry maybe a little more of than you have in this moment. That police, historically, I don't know that psychological dimensions of who and what a police officer is, was ever really a big, historically a big part of what the selection process of that job was. And can you shoot straight? You know, can you arrest the bad guy? You're good. You know, why else would you even have the tradition of we need to, we need some. What's it in the. You get the. You deputize people who have guns to then join you in your law enforcement. And that's just. Yeah, just somebody, some farmer who's got a gun. Hey, I need some, you know, you're marshal and you deputize some people. That's. Are they trained? Are they, do they know what they're doing? Do they understand the psychology of who it is they're tracking? So yeah, I think it's a watershed moment in the reform of who it is we entrust our safety in our society.

[Coleman Hughes]

Do you have an opinion on the reforms that are being advocated, like ending qualified immunity and you know, not giving police military grade weapons, independent review boards and such?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I regret that I don't have full awareness of everything in progress right now, but I can tell you that military grade weaponry has no place in with one American wielding it against another. This is the level of science and technology that has been invested in war machines designed to destroy, to kill en masse. This is not what should be happening on your own soil, bringing your own weapons to bear on your own citizens. You could argue those weapons shouldn't be brought to bear on any citizens, given how horrific they are. But if you look through the history of warfare, there are times where that has been fully justified by both parties and all levels of the political spectrum. The second World War among them. So that one, to me, the answer to that is pretty Clear. What does it mean to have tanks roll down your streets when protesters have rocks? Like, what does that mean? You know, you can't. Is that the best? Really? Really? What does it mean? And in New York City you don't even have rocks because there are no rocks in the city. There's nothing to pick up and throw. Right. What does it mean for you to have. By the way, the riots that you described were, from what I saw, maybe you saw other footage, it was looters, looting and setting fire. This I would count as mild compared with full scale riots that first happened in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict and riots in 1966 through 69 where it wasn't just protesters marching, where a fringe element turned violent. It was the entire, the entire expression of energy was one of hopeless anger. So, yeah, I don't have all the rest of the review board. Sure. But I think in the end it's really the psychology of the police officer that needs to be more closely assessed. And I also commented that, you know, the Minnesota Academy is a four month program. The police academy and the New York Police Department has a six month program program to become an officer, and there's a culinary academy where it takes eight months become pastry chef.

[Coleman Hughes]

So yeah, that was a good point.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Coleman Hughes]

I mean, what the other thing about the NYPD that I think might be really important is that so far as I know, they've kept the very best data of any police department in the country on shootings going back to 1971. And so they've been. It's been possible to hold them accountable in a way that hasn't been possible. We didn't even know who was getting killed by the cops in a nationwide way until 2015. And even still, we actually don't have a federal official database. So I think accountability is a huge issue. If you can, you know, point to this is how many people you're killing, it becomes much, much, much more pressing on police departments to make first.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I see it different. Yes, I agree with that, but I see it, I think even more deeply that I'm less interested in having accountability boards and prosecuting bad cops. I'm less interested in that than I am preventing bad cops from bad such people from ever having become cops in the first place. These review boards are band aids to a problem that would then never go away, possibly. Whereas if they never have access to that level of power over the citizenry because they have bias, because they're trigger happy, because they have tattoos that say kill them all, let God sort them out because they have swastik. Whatever is their issue. It's a free country. Fine. They have their free expression of opinion measured in whatever way they choose. But if you're now appointed to keep the peace in a diverse culture and we find out that you hate gays, we find out that you, you're a fan of the neo Nazis, you're not the person who should have that job. Think about it. If none of those people ever there, you wouldn't need the review boards. You wouldn't need any. It wouldn't even be necessary. That's what I'm after. And I don't think that's impossible to achieve because I keep looking up all the time. By the way, I did want to make it clear that you look at the lists of police killings city by city, and New York City is the lowest out of 60.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. Way lower than you would predict based on population.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Say it's low for a city with millions of people. And they say, how about cities that are just a million or half a million? It's lower than them. How about cities down to a quarter million? It's lower than them. So I wanted to make sure in my article that some credit went to my hometown for turning it into what I remembered it to be to what it currently is. And that's why there's one sentence in there. So maybe we should see what New York City would, in spite of ugly behavior that we see on the Internet between police and protesters in every city, including my own city. In spite of that, we need to look at what New York City was doing well and maybe do more of that rather than look to see what people are doing bad to try to do less of it. I mean, not rather than. But you do both. You're right. You see what works and do more of that. There's not enough of that kind of thinking going on out there.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. Okay. Before I let you go, I think I agree with most of what you said. I think I'm a little bit less optimistic about the prospect of making sure that no either incompetent or evil people become cops to begin with. I feel like there will always be some kind of. No matter how hard we try, there's going to be a small number of quote unquote bad apples that get through.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, but a lot of those bad apples are not called out by their fellow officers.

[Coleman Hughes]

That's true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If the officers are at a bar one night and they hear one of them say, look at these niggas, I can't stand them. Or they're with a. You know, or these fags or this. If you hear that and they're one of your fellow officers and you do nothing about it, then you're culpable. Was that the right word? Culpable? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So if someone is weird, you know it. If you spend time, if they're your person that you spend all this time in the squad car with, on stakeouts or whatever, you know who that person is, their behavior is not some kind of surprise to you. So, no, we need a cultural shift in attitudes towards how we think about who and what the police are to us and what we are to the police.

[Coleman Hughes]

Let me give you one example to show you where I'm coming from. There's a video from 2015 of a cop responding to a domestic abuse allegation. And it happens to be a black cop. It's not relevant to the story. Responding to a domestic abuse allegation. And he comes up and he gets startled by a dog and he shoots twice and one of the shots accidentally hits the woman that called in the abuse allegation. And then after the body cam, he says he's just like completely despairing, lamenting, and he says, I'm not gonna drop the F bomb. But he says, I'm effing going to prison. And my impression, as someone who, you know, I've never. I don't have police in my family, I don't have so much firsthand experience with the police, is that it's not, you know, it's not a matter if we weed out every bad apple, then the good apples will sometimes make massive screw ups. And what I'm worried about is, you know, if we institute all the reforms that I support and that many, many support, it will be hard to go five or 10 years without a riot because the screw ups will be magnified and will seem to represent the norm.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So that's an important psychological issue. What you're saying is the commonality of it dilutes the impact that any one incident would have on people's emotions. And the rarer they become, the more significant they will land on people's reaction functions. Is that a. Did I summarize what you just.

[Coleman Hughes]

That's exactly what I'm saying.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. That's an interesting. In fact, I don't know how that would play out. If at some point you do get to say, there was one mass shooting this year when in previous years there were 20. That's good. That's a good sentence to utter, not to diminish the tragedy of the one incident, the fact that we went 10 years, was it between 2002 and 2012 where no one died. I think that's the interval. And check me on that, no one died in a domestic airplane crash. Every year I grew up, there's at least one plane crash a year. Hundreds of people would die, a hundred people would die every year in a plane accident. And that we just live with that. And even at that rate, planes were hugely safe compared with many other forms of transportation. Now it's so rare that if a plane crashes, it is major headlines scattered everywhere. Then it gets investigated. But you know what happens? You find out the reason why this happened is because this thing happened where there was a lithium battery in the truck we didn't know about. Now we know now that's not going to happen again. So then the public is given confidence that we care about even that one case and are taking precautions so that that will never happen again. You know something? The faa, the Federal Aviation Administration, investigates every single plane crash and finds out exactly why the plane crashed because there's enough going on. You can see the wires, this, the communication, and that's why there's a black box. They know everything. And so over the years, things like wind shear that used to drop airplanes out of the sky, but now they're wind shear metrics that wind shear caution and the computer adjusts and the plane avoids it. All of this goes on. If I knew that when disaster happened, there are responsible people making sure it will never happen again.

[Coleman Hughes]

This is why, this is why I'm pushing independent review boards, Neil, actually, because you know the air. When an airplane crash happens, the airline doesn't investigate itself because we wouldn't trust. We wouldn't trust their investigation. But the status quo is that a lot of police departments, a lot of police chiefs are deciding whether to discipline their own officers, you know, so that would help.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So thanks for bringing that up again. That. So the review boards, however, are what you should do about the officer rather than how to avoid that in the future. I would bet, as initially conceived, it's not so much an analysis of the situation so that best practice can be modified and shared with all the cities across the country. So that for me, is the role of the FAA in a plane crash. And maybe there ought to be. That could have been one of my other bullets that I, no pun intended. My outline points in my notes about analyzing every single bad incident. Unpack it. Explore how A went to B, went to C, went to B, to D, went to someone dying and then you revamp so that that doesn't happen again. That's got. And again, what matters is your confidence that people care, that they're trying to not have it happen again. And we haven't seen that. Just haven't.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I've taken up a lot of your time. Thank you so much. Do you have any final parting words of hope? Because I don't want to leave my audience on such a despondent note.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Great changes in society, particularly progressive changes, are never just handed to people. Oddly, you have to fight for it. I think that's one of the great shortcomings of modern civilization, that to do the right thing requires bloodshed. And so the fact that that one too many people died in the hands of the police this past month has led to this level of protest. Maybe people will. People, US culture, society will wake up. They woke up in 1968. I can tell you that they. A little bit. There's a lot of. Some waking up in the early 60s as well. They woke up when they saw Emmett Tibbs. Was that his name? The full name.

[Coleman Hughes]

Emmett Till.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Emmett Till. They woke up when they saw Emmett Till in the casket. Open casket. After he'd been fished out of the bayou. Okay. There were changes that you can say it was just one death and it's just one. There's you need. And it's unfortunate that this doesn't happen peacefully around a circular table. It happens when those in charge realize how seriously people care about outcomes. So, yeah, I don't want to see the rioting and looting continue. The protest will continue, I think, until somebody speaks in a way that gives people confidence that change is imminent. And I think it will happen. I just don't know when.

[Coleman Hughes]

Be nice to have a president who could do that at a time like now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. It's not his portfolio, really.

[Coleman Hughes]

Well, anyway, thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No settling differences.

[Coleman Hughes]

No.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Haven't seen that in his catalog of speeches. So, yeah, maybe we need. Maybe the president shouldn't be that singular in the influence of our attitudes. That's another. There are other elected representatives out there who are not without power of influence. Governors have a big role. Mayors too.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. Obama made this point in his. In his statement, which I completely agree with, that tend to focus too much on. On federal. When a lot of the relevant policies are local governor, county, da, et cetera.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Coleman Hughes]

But. Okay, Neil, thank you so much.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Dude. I don't mind doing this again. There's a topic I know you've thought deeply about. Education and.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And you may know I'm a product of the New York City public schools.

[Coleman Hughes]

As is my mother. My mom went to Stuyvesant.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, she did.

[Coleman Hughes]

And she was also from the Bronx. And one year older than you. One year younger. She would have been. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. All right. So I'd be happy to get back in conversation with you.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, that would be amazing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Coleman Hughes]

All right, thanks.