PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Kmele Foster joins Isaac and Ari to race, Pope Francis, and judicial independence

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tangle – "PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Kmele Foster joins Isaac and Ari to race, Pope Francis, and judicial independence"

Release Date: April 27, 2025
Host: Isaac Saul
Guests: Camille Foster, Ari Weitzman
Description: Independent, non-partisan politics news featuring diverse viewpoints and in-depth discussions on current events.

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1. Introduction and Episode Overview

[02:42] Camille Foster:
The episode kicks off with Isaac Saul welcoming listeners to the Tangle Podcast, highlighting the show's mission to provide diverse perspectives on political issues. Camille Foster joins Isaac and Ari Weitzman to discuss recent topics, including racial discourse on Twitter, the recent passing of Pope Francis, and a surprising incident involving a county judge in Wisconsin.

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2. The Train Station Altercation

[03:20] Camille Foster:
Camille introduces an unexpected incident where Ari Weitzman had an altercation at a train station en route to Philadelphia. Camille narrates the event, emphasizing the tension between Ari and another passenger over a misunderstanding about a reserved seat.

[03:45] Ari Weitzman:
Ari recounts his interaction on the Amtrak train, where he confronted a man who claimed to reserve a seat for his wife. Ari politely challenged the man's honesty, leading to a tense exchange characterized by disrespect and escalation from the other passenger.

[06:02] Camille Foster:
Camille praises Ari's ability to handle the awkward social situation with high tolerance and commendable composure, noting that many would find the encounter distressing.

[08:36] Camille Foster:
Reflecting on the incident, Camille remarks on the bizarre behavior of the other passenger following the misunderstanding, highlighting the unpredictability of such interactions.

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3. Deep Dive into Race as a Social Construct

[10:08] Camille Foster:
Camille shifts the conversation to a critical analysis of race, particularly focusing on Ari's recent engagements on Twitter regarding race science and the categorization of individuals based on race.

[11:05 - 12:12] Ari Weitzman:
Ari elaborates on his perspective, asserting that race is an incoherent and socially constructed concept without biological or genetic grounding. He challenges the validity of racial categories, comparing them to arbitrary classifications like "stripy cats" or dog breeds, which have clear, selective breeding histories—unlike human race classifications. Ari emphasizes that genetic diversity within humans doesn't align with socially imposed racial boundaries and criticizes the misuse of race in scientific and social policies.

Ari Weitzman [11:15]: "Blackness and whiteness are similarly ridiculous. And I think the word that I would use is an incoherent concept to use to try to describe people."

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4. Implications for Policy and Affirmative Action

[20:28] Camille Foster:
Camille connects the theoretical discussion to practical policy implications, questioning the efficacy of affirmative action and racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes.

[28:32 - 47:04] Ari Weitzman:
Ari critiques affirmative action by referencing Musa Al Gharbi's book, We Have Never Been Woke, arguing that such policies often benefit those already in upper-middle or upper-class brackets rather than addressing the needs of marginalized communities. He highlights how racial disparities are frequently oversimplified and misattributed to genetics or systemic oppression without addressing underlying socioeconomic factors.

Ari further explains that focusing on racial disparities can obscure more nuanced and effective solutions aimed at improving specific socioeconomic conditions. He advocates for policies that target deprivation and specific community needs rather than broad racial categories.

Ari Weitzman [28:35]: "Trying to remedy those disparities between groups is generally misguided. Focusing on the actual deprivation is better than focusing on the general disparity."

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5. Addressing Stereotypes and Racial Categories in Media

[33:04] Camille Foster:
Camille brings up the issue of racial stereotypes in media, using himself and Ari as examples of how racial categorizations can be reductive and misleading.

[33:26 - 40:52] Ari Weitzman:
Ari discusses the superficiality of racial stereotypes, sharing personal preferences that defy common racial expectations, such as his affection for watermelon—a stereotypical trope associated with Black Americans. He emphasizes that individual identities and experiences are far more complex than any racial categorization can capture.

Ari argues against the capitalization of "black" in writing, a topic Camille references in relation to Tangle's editorial decisions. He shares a quote from Glenn Lowry to illustrate his point but notes a fundamental disagreement with Lowry on the right approach to discussing race.

Ari Weitzman [40:52]: "If all the disparate groups that constitute whites don't comprise a single people, why should all the disparate groups that constitute blacks?"

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6. Policy Recommendations and Moving Forward

[45:16] Ari Weitzman:
Ari offers policy recommendations, emphasizing the need to address socioeconomic factors directly rather than through racial lenses. He argues that eliminating disparities by improving overall conditions would inherently reduce any correlative effects tied to race.

Ari also touches on the pitfalls of focusing on racial categories in policies, suggesting that this approach can lead to unintended consequences or ineffective solutions. He advocates for a shift towards more nuanced and targeted policy-making that prioritizes individual and community needs over broad racial classifications.

Ari Weitzman [45:16]: "Focusing on the actual deprivation is better than focusing on the general disparity."

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7. Brief Discussion on Pope Francis' Death

[48:08] Camille Foster:
Transitioning from the intense discussion on race, Camille briefly mentions the recent passing of Pope Francis. He notes that while it's a significant global event, it hasn't been a focal point of controversy for them, contrasting it with more contentious topics like transgender issues or abortion.

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8. Closing Remarks and Final Thoughts

[50:47] Camille Foster:
Camille summarizes the episode, mentioning upcoming topics and thanking listeners for their engagement. He reiterates the importance of addressing complex social issues thoughtfully and avoiding oversimplified categorizations.

[51:34] Isaac Saul:
The episode concludes with acknowledgments to the production team and credits, ensuring listeners know where to find more information about Tangle and how to support the podcast.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Ari Weitzman [11:15]:
  "Blackness and whiteness are similarly ridiculous. And I think the word that I would use is an incoherent concept to use to try to describe people."

• Ari Weitzman [28:35]:
  "Trying to remedy those disparities between groups is generally misguided. Focusing on the actual deprivation is better than focusing on the general disparity."

• Ari Weitzman [40:52]:
  "If all the disparate groups that constitute whites don't comprise a single people, why should all the disparate groups that constitute blacks?"

---

Concluding Summary

In this episode of Tangle, Isaac Saul, Camille Foster, and Ari Weitzman engage in a profound discussion about the validity and implications of racial categorizations in modern society. They challenge the biological basis of race, critique the effectiveness of affirmative action, and advocate for policies targeting socioeconomic deprivation over broad racial classifications. The conversation emphasizes the complexity of individual identities and warns against the oversimplification inherent in racial stereotypes. Additionally, the hosts briefly touch upon the global impact of Pope Francis' passing, maintaining the show's commitment to covering a wide range of political and social issues.

For listeners seeking in-depth, non-partisan political analysis and diverse perspectives, this episode of Tangle offers a thoughtful examination of race as a social construct and its repercussions on policy and societal interactions.

Transcript

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[Isaac Saul]

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[Camille Foster]

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[Isaac Saul]

From executive executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

[Camille Foster]

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast. A place to get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. I'm here in Philadelphia in person with our dear friend Camille Foster, who's been going to war with the race IQ people on Twitter, which I cannot wait to talk to him about, and our managing editor, Ari Weitzman. Fellas, how are you doing?

[Ari Weitzman]

Doing very good, thank you.

[Unnamed Speaker]

To clarify, you two are together? I'm by myself out here.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah. That's. Sorry, man.

[Ari Weitzman]

Sorry.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Sorry. Looks like you're having fun, though.

[Camille Foster]

Well, it sounds like Camille had an eventful experience getting here to Philadelphia, so maybe we should start there. I've. Through the. I. You know, I wasn't. I wasn't in the office when Camille arrived, or I was. I was actually talking to the Nieman foundation journalists, which was really interesting and fun. And then by the time I got out here, I was hearing office rumors that you had an altercation at the train station on your way in here.

[Ari Weitzman]

I just would be. I would be very clear because it's been an eventful week for our podcast. There was an altercation on there as well. I won't go into detail about it now, except to say it wasn't my fault. Similarly, this was not a physical altercation. It's just one of those things. You jump on the train and you are getting ready to ride on the Amtrak, and you ask someone, is the seat taken? Because they've got a backpack sitting in it, and it's clear that they just don't want someone to sit there. Then the guy says to me, I'm holding the seat for my wife. I said, okay. And I just turn the other direction and I sit right across from him, aisle between us and an empty seat, which remains empty all the way to Philadelphia. So I say to the guy after this hour long ride, because I knew it was going to bother the hell out of me, sir, that's a kind of a weird, embarrassing thing to lie about. And all I hear as I turn around to walk off the train like a normal human is, I didn't lie. And I just. I didn't pay any attention to it, didn't acknowledge it. I'm leaving and it's outside while I'm waiting for my Uber to come over to the office, that the guy, like, suddenly is behind me again and is telling me that I personally, Camille, like, you shouldn't judge people. You shouldn't be so quick to judge people. I said, one, we're not having a conversation. Two, I don't Need a lecture from you, sir. And he escalated from there. And later on, like moments later, middle finger wagging in my finger. Exclaves are flying from him, not me. And I just, I assured him that it was a bad idea to do this, that he didn't really know who he was getting involved with and that this would probably end in embarrassment for him. Walked away. And he walked away, continuing to be upset. And it's entirely possible I was wrong and he made an honest mistake and his wife just couldn't make the train. But the fact that you behaved like a vulgar lunatic when I politely informed you that I didn't really like our interaction and you never. In the hour plus long ride from New York to Philly. Hey, that was weird. I'm sorry. My wife just missed the train. I totally would have let you sit here because I'm not a jerk, but. No, sir, you were a jerk and hopefully not a tele subscriber because they wouldn't have done something like that.

[Camille Foster]

I love. First of all, I think you have to have like a high tolerance for an awkward social interaction. To go up to somebody to be. To do what you did and say, like, that was a weird thing for you to do. I would never. I would be thinking that in my head and it would bother me the rest of the day. But I don't think I would have had like, the chutzpah to.

[Ari Weitzman]

But that's why I did it. That's why I did it. Because it is expensive to have these things running in your head over and over again. What you wish you had said in the moment. There are two things that I have committed to. One is I tell the truth, which is not to say that I've been lying before that. But if you ask me a direct question, I'll do my best to give you a direct answer. And I'll be polite if it's criticism, but I'm going to be honest. And the other is I do my best to not, like, leave myself with regrets. And if there are social norms or even the risk of embarrassment or fear that are preventing me from saying something that I think is important, I, I forced myself to do the thing and I just, again, I was respectful enough. As respectful as one can be when they're saying you lied. But hey, that's a, That's a kind of an embarrassing thing to lie about, I think is the best possible formulation of something like that. And because I'm a stranger, you don't have to care what I think about you. If you were in the right. You can just move on with your life. You'll never see me again. Unless you. Again a fungal subscriber. You're watching television, whatever, you know, he'll be fine.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I want it.

[Ari Weitzman]

I didn't watch you in a row, and I feel good about that.

[Unnamed Speaker]

So verbal mental altercation that did not escalate despite maybe attempts of this other.

[Ari Weitzman]

Person otherwise, in this particular conversation, to be clear, you know, like. Like linguistic jiu jitsu.

[Unnamed Speaker]

But let me ask this, though, because you said you didn't want to have it linger because that's expensive. Do you think it's less expensive now in that. In using that formulation?

[Ari Weitzman]

No, it's a great story.

[Unnamed Speaker]

We are still talking about it.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, no, but it's a great story. I mean, I totally.

[Unnamed Speaker]

It's not.

[Ari Weitzman]

Eating it about everything that happened here. It is entirely possible that I misjudged him. That's fine.

[Unnamed Speaker]

But so maybe saying you lied about it might have been wrong. Might have been the imperfect formulation, if it's possible. Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

I could have said if you lied about it, but all I said is, that's an embarrassing thing to lie about, isn't it? And then left it at that. There's the presumption that you lied. It certainly is true that it would be an embarrassing thing to lie, but we could just leave it at that. Again, I don't know who he is. I hope he's okay. I hope he thrives, and I hope he does better next time.

[Camille Foster]

The following out of the train station is bizarre behavior.

[Ari Weitzman]

It's strange.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

Especially because you had to follow me over here to the east, when in fact, you're heading north. Just go north. You don't have to follow me. We don't have to talk anymore.

[Camille Foster]

There is. I can't imagine, I wonder, the moment that you sat down in the seat right next to him if his blood pressure just spiked like 50 points, where he's just like, fuck, dude, this guy's going to see that their wife isn't coming. All right, well, that is a fantastic story. I'm sorry that happened to you. Or congratulations. I don't really know what the appropriate sounds like. Yeah, great. Now you have that. A good Philly interaction. Welcome to the city of brotherly love.

[Ari Weitzman]

It happened in New York, so at least he got on in New York.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true.

[Ari Weitzman]

Maybe he's from here.

[Camille Foster]

All right, well, I, you know, didn't bring you on for Amtrak stories today, as entertaining as they are. Yeah, we've roped you back in here just weeks after having you on the podcast for a few reasons. One, you know, lassoing you into the Tangle family, as it were. That's always the objective.

[Unnamed Speaker]

But I like that Isaac buys a house in Texas and now he's lassoing people.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, that's my dad, baby. But two is because, as I understand it, you were quite sick last week, which somehow induced a fever dream of incredible content on the platform Twitter.

[Ari Weitzman]

Thank you.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, I asked you to come back because I, A, I want to chop it up with you about some of the news this week, but B, I want to talk about some of these race related tweets I suppose that you've been engaging in. We'll get to some of the current event stuff after we kick off here. But you've been going to battle, I suppose one could say, with some folks online, on Twitter, on X, who seem very focused, maybe obsessed, one would say, with race as a particular paradigm or lens to look at things through. I think maybe one bit of important context here. People who can't see you are listening. Camille is what some people might describe as a black man in America.

[Ari Weitzman]

I really would prefer Isaac if you just try to describe the actual color of my skin.

[Camille Foster]

Deeply uncomfortable.

[Ari Weitzman]

Camille.

[Camille Foster]

He's got beautiful mocha. Brown. Lighter than a mocha. Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

Quite a bit of milk in there.

[Camille Foster]

Chocolate color. I'm blushing.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Isaac's skin color right now is like.

[Camille Foster]

A sunburn, which is. Yeah, sort of like almost too on the nose. But you don't describe yourself that way. You don't believe in what you might call the myth of this conception of race. And the long story or the short story is that some of this stuff is so interesting I couldn't help myself but want to dig in on it. And when I talked to Ari about it, I think he agreed that there was a lot of really interesting meat on the bone here. So maybe my opening salvo before you get into some of these tweets and some of the characters you've been responding to is just if you could give us a little bit of the context on how you think about and view race and maybe your own race, as it were.

[Ari Weitzman]

Well, how I think about my own race is fairly straightforward. I'm a human, human race. We're all members of that race. We all have our origins in Africa. So I suppose you could call me an African American if you like, but only insofar as you're willing to apply that label and that weird hyphenation scheme to everyone in exactly the Same way I find it interesting that most people haven't ever really bothered to scrutinize these categories that we're seeing traffic in. Even as you were describing me earlier, I'll encounter people, and there is this, well, Camille is a black man. Well, what does that mean? It's not the same as simply saying, well, he's kind of tall or short. Like, there's a sense in which we all know that that's an abstraction that could mean any number of things. It probably means if you say tall, like, bigger than five, nine, and if you say short, shorter than five, nine. Okay, what on earth does it mean to insist that someone is black or white or Asian, which is my actual favorite racial designation? Because it is the most absurd on its face. Like, does that mean Japan? Does that mean the Middle East? Does that mean parts of Russia? Does that mean China or Japan or North Korea, India? I don't know what we're talking about. And in truth, blackness and whiteness are similarly ridiculous. And I think the word that I would use, generally speaking, is incoherent word, an incoherent concept to use to try to describe people, given not only what we know about human history, but what we've come to know about biology and genetics. What we know is that the human family is this incredible diverse spectrum. And that in general, what we see when we look at the human genome is not these clear, definitive breaks that separate black from white or anything else. It's just these interesting kind of climbs and hills. Are there distinct populations with respect to continents? Kind of sorta. But even the best commercially available genetic ancestry tests that people use, the results that it gives you, they're not telling you how much of your DNA came from Africa, because there's no such thing as African DNA or European DNA or Asian DNA. It is the street map effect. There is a sense in which our beliefs about race, which predate our knowledge of biology and predate our knowledge of genetics, are in a way informing those consumer products and in a way, kind of sort of informing the way that the science is done amongst people who are not rigorous. And it certainly is informing the way our social science is done. And there's this concept in programming garbage in, garbage out. If you have a concept that is vaguely defined, where the parameters are profoundly uncertain, where across time and space, this notion of blackness and whiteness are changing. I mean, in. In South America, they had a CASTA system. And the CASTA system, you would recall, you would look at someone and you say, are you an octoroon? Or a quadroon or black or white, or in some cases, you're talking about 16, 20 different dimensions of human difference that are being described. And when I talk about that, people immediately kind of start to smile because they see the absurdity of it. And what they don't appreciate is that going from a system of kind of 20 different layers of apparent quote, unquote human categories or kinds to one where there's like five or six isn't better. It's equally absurd. To the extent there is diversity that we can talk about in humanity, it is individual diversity. And the dignity of individuals is the thing that I think that our notions of, like, human freedom are founded on. And the way that we actually do things in common parlance and oftentimes in science and politics, I think is just kind of absurd on its face. So to have conversations about race and IQ is something that I found not to be offensive because it's impolite not to be offensive because people's feelings or senses of themselves might be hurt or wounded or not that it's embarrassing to be a black man who perhaps has a very high IQ but is part of a population that has a low iq. It's absurd and it's wrong because you're doing a procedure by which you take this incoherent concept and you put it into these contexts where you're supposed to be doing sophisticated analysis of the world, and it is necessarily the case that the resolution is lost. Race is not a precise something. It is a proxy for many things. And as such, if you're doing these comparisons and contrasting of various things on the basis of race, what you're actually doing is far removed in most instances from the actual substance of your concern. And I think it has a lot of other kind of philosophical and moral implications as well. But I've been lecturing for a little bit and can do that for quite some time on this topic.

[Camille Foster]

We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

[Isaac Saul]

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[Ari Weitzman]

Cozy.

[Isaac Saul]

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[Unnamed Speaker]

I think I see Isaac's giving a little bit of a pause and I've got plenty to say so I'm going to jump in on it.

[Ari Weitzman]

There's more stuff, so.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Oh, I'm sure. I mean it's such a small concept so we can.

[Ari Weitzman]

Well, most people, that's the thing, I.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Think when the thing that comes out to me right away because I've got like personal relationship with race as far as like being Jewish and what that means that I kind of want to talk about a little bit. But the concept of the individual being having a race and that informing their identity I think is something that I remember like when I was in college reading about that and we read France Fanon's book about the way that there's hierarchies in the Caribbean based off of the color of skin and the pigmentation of the hue and how that similar, I think to what you're talking about about the caste system in South Africa. But the, the thing that is interesting to me is we can say, see how this stuff kind of fails at an individual level, but with a concept like you said with race where it's multifaceted and it isn't precise when you get, when you broaden out and you look at things at a larger population scale, it does seem like that there's some larger trends that you can map onto and to make it, you know, something that's not just about skin color but is also about larger conceptions of identity, like being Jewish. A thing that frustrates me that like I have a hard time grappling with is a higher proportion of people who identify as Jewish or who you can call Jewish end up in this field. Like where I am with Isaac right now in journalism, like the two of us are here and it always annoys us. Like we're like, we're Jews in journalism. We did it.

[Camille Foster]

We're, we are the media.

[Unnamed Speaker]

But like at an individual level, I see my, my, the path I took to get here. I know that I wasn't labeled at some international cabal of Jews and assigned this profession. I know what happened to get me here. Maybe, maybe I forget. Yeah, I was just programmed. But, but there's something, there's something broader there and I have a hard time putting my finger on it. But I don't think things, ideas have to be precise to have value in aggregate, I think is what I'm saying.

[Ari Weitzman]

I think that's true.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I think I struggle with that.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, I think that's true. And look, I won't deny that when we zoom really far out, we start to see these patterns. But also importantly, we're pattern seeking animals. We see patterns everywhere. We see patterns in the clouds, we see patterns in photos that we get back from Mars of rock structures and we imagine their faces. And in much the same way we imagine, we see similarities where profound differences exist. I can remember distinctly spending time in Asia. I've spent a decent amount of time there actually when I think about it in aggregate. And it really only takes a few days in my experience wandering around the streets of Hong Kong, talking to a lot of people to be able to look at them and see the differences in their appearances and be able to say, oh, okay, I think Thailand, oh, Singapore, oh okay. Especially in an international city like Hong Kong where people are kind of coming together. Because in mainland China it might be a little difficult, a little more difficult, but it's actually just different. Like there are differences there as well. And there's a sense in which if you were to take this and apply it to some other species of animal, like let's say cats, and you were to say, well, what is common to all stripy cats? We would again like see the absurdity of it. Could there be commonalities in some sort of average similarity amongst stripy cats? There might. But does that mean that there's going to be really deep fundamental similarity among stripey cats? To the extent that we should create a category of stripiness and we should talk about stripiness at all times, it in all contexts. I mean, I don't there, there is.

[Unnamed Speaker]

A concept of breed though, especially with dogs. Dog breeds vary so much.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah. And what's funny is the race science people who respond to me like when I'll post about this sort of stuff.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I know I kind of walked into a trap.

[Ari Weitzman]

Are dog breeds and gender and neither one of those fit because they're so fundamentally different from race with gender. You've got chromosomes. And while I know we've got very huge public debates and conversations about this, I'm going to be controversial and say look, XY and YY or X sex chromosomes. That's most people. And we know that that generally corresponds to biological man and biological woman. Are there some things on the margins like intersex and other sort of chromosomal things? There sure are, but it is, generally speaking, much smaller. There is no such corresponding reality to even our popular notions of race or in genetics, like these notions of population. It just isn't the case. The base pairs that they use in those commercial ancestry tests, it is a black BO box is very weird. There's all sorts of reasons why it doesn't make sense. The one that I like most highlighting for people is if you go back just a couple of generations, doesn't take long for there to be people who are your ancestors in the same way as anyone else who contributed nothing to your genome that is actually detectable. When we look back into our ancient past in genetics, we're looking through time with a straw. That is not who we are, and we've never been our genes, and we know that in a true, profound way. But we are still, in many respects, holding on to these notions of human difference being buried in quantums of blood. There's a profound absurdity to that. I think I spoke to both things, actually. No, I didn't speak to dog breeds. The difference between dog breeds and human races is that dog breeds were deliberately created very recently, selectively bred for specific traits, and maintenance of those breeds even is something that takes a hell of a lot of effort. You're doing the same sort of cross breeding. It is not remotely the same as human genetic biodiversity, which, as we know, and I don't know that we all know, but I certainly know is something that is far more recent and has always included people traveling between groups, intermarrying, interbreeding. We've always done this. And certainly the case that there's nothing like an African diaspora where people in Africa are kind of more like me than they are either of you two. There's a sense in which my son was born. And while I do have brown skin, this rich, beautiful brown skin, my hair is what you would perceive as black. My son was born with red hair, and he has red hair because my mother had red hair. My grandfather had red hair because I'm Scots Jamaican. To look at someone and imagine you can kind of put them into one group or another, and that there are all sorts of things that you can essentially derive about their character and their person and their personality and even their intellectual capacity is beyond absurd in a way that I think deserves to be ridiculed. In the same way that we ridicule people who are promoting notions like flat earth or fake moon landings. We know enough theory this point to not be intimidated by circus clowns who are promoting ridiculous notions like race science. Again, not because the data is wrong, but because their conceptual frameworks are absurd on their face. The end.

[Camille Foster]

I'm curious because one of the things that strikes me that's interesting is like the, I'm seeing you interact with a lot of people on this issue right now, like sort of the race science people, you know, the, like they're anonymous.

[Ari Weitzman]

Spokespersons for the truth.

[Camille Foster]

Right. Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

There's a conspiracy in academia.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah. Who are like, they have a hobby of like measuring skull sizes or whatever, you know.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, we love phrenology.

[Camille Foster]

But there is, I mean, to take the position that you're taking, there are some real world implications that I find interesting, compelling. Like, like, I, I. So first of all, I'll just say I find your position obvious and compelling when you articulate it. I mean, it makes total sense to me.

[Ari Weitzman]

Did you just call me articulate?

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, yeah, I did. Dangerous.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah.

[Camille Foster]

Twitter bio, I think. But the, there's a lot of implications there for, you know, not the kind of skull measuring, maybe low key neo Nazi crowd, but like the, the progressive left too, which is like very interested in looking at things through this kind of racial lens and categories and categorizing disparities between groups. Yeah, yeah. So I guess that's sort of, my next question is like, what does this mean to you about that whole area of inquiry? Like, is it worthwhile for us to be thinking about or talking about why, you know, categories of black Americans have certain outcomes, you know, the patterns we notice there? Or is that to you like a useless endeavor? Because sort of dividing people into those categories is kind of a distraction from like what the environment was like at home or what sort of, you know, economic situation they were born into? You know, like, how do you think about that? And then I guess, I mean, there are like, there seem to be things where the race question is sort of unavoidable, like racial disparities in policing where, like what a cop sees or perceives maybe will actually impact how he'll act though.

[Ari Weitzman]

I know, although the data there is actually really complicated and doesn't justify a lot of the concern that's actually been expressed with respect to those issues, like police involved shootings in particular. And I won't go into the details, but that only suggests that actually what's useful about that particular example is that it illustrates what is actually going on here. There's a sense in which America has something of a monomania when it comes to race. Part of my unique concern about the issue is the fact that we have attached a kind of primacy to race in our thinking about policy and in our thinking about science, and even social science as a result, and policy, social science are related. And I think that what we don't appreciate is that when you're using this proxy to do all of this different kind of research and to kind of inform your sense of the world, because you're necessarily obscuring detail, you're making it harder, not easier, to have sophisticated conversations about, say, the risk of sickle cell anemia or hypertension. You people will start to say as shorthand, well, you know, black people have a much higher. But that's not actually how that works. And if you care, then you do a little bit of digging and look into it, and you'll learn a little bit more. And in much the same way that you can create a sense of unique concern about sickle cell amongst black people, you could create a sense of unique invulnerability among white people about sickle cell, despite the fact that there are parts of the world where there is a high instance of sickle cell anemia trait because of their particular region, and the fact that there happened to be a lot of mosquitoes there, which is what you'd expect. And there are a bunch of other examples that are just like that. So the question becomes, are we interested in the finer details of particular issues where we can really zero in on the actual causes of things that are specific? Or are we more interested in kind of having this faux sophistication, this veneer of seriousness and position where we reference race and we talk about black people categorically, when, in fact, even if you want to talk about race, regional differences matter a lot. Neighborhoods, when you get to places like Philly and New York, matter a lot. Like you talk about a black person from the Bronx and a black person from, you know, Bushwick. These are different. And you can even say, brooklyn, Manhattan are different. But again, neighborhoods are different. Blocks can be different. There are profound differences. And I think that that part of my concern here is just getting us to really think in a more sophisticated way about the problems of the world. I think the defect in thinking here, the category error when it comes to race, is something that is shared on the left and the right, and the worst manifestation of it, perhaps on the political right, but not uniquely, are, I think, related to this kind of race science stuff. And in certain respects, the renewed prominence of it is almost certainly a result of the prominence of this obsession with racial disparities that emanated on the left for, I think, ostensibly good reasons. People were concerned about the well being of black people and systems of oppression, but again, they lose a lot of sophistication as well. And I do think that when it comes to education, for example, it's probably better to worry not about the distance between the outcomes for blacks and outcomes for whites and to worry more specifically about the fact that today some kid is going to wake up and have their first day of school at a new school. And that new school is chronically underperforming and underfunded and it's dangerous. And most of the kids who graduate from there won't have any chance of going to university. And by that description, you don't know whether I'm talking about a school in Appalachia or in Baltimore City. And I think that's what matters. And when you focus on it that way, you'll know that the remedy for the problems I just described has nothing to do with race whatsoever. And a lot of the crazy abstractions that we traffic in that we make real, that we concretize, like black culture. And this is a nonsense concept. I don't even know. I can't begin.

[Camille Foster]

I was gonna, I was gonna bring this up because I'm like, sort of the gotcha version of this would be like, like you're a stereotypical black dude. You love rap music. Last time we were here, we're debating Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

[Ari Weitzman]

Like, and you have opinions and Drake is Julius.

[Camille Foster]

But like, how do you. Yeah, what do you. What's like your reflection, I guess, on, on that element of it where it's like. Or the question I was going to ask was like, what do you think about or what comes to mind for you when you think about the ways in which you're like, fulfilling the stereotype?

[Ari Weitzman]

I don't, I don't think about it at all. I don't think about it at all. Like there's, I mean, there would just be things that are true. I like watermelon. It's kind of delicious.

[Camille Foster]

I like watermelon too.

[Ari Weitzman]

I think most people do. Do I like fried chicken? Actually, I kind of don't because I just find it cumbersome. I don't really like eating with my hands. I don't know if that's weird or not. Generally speaking, chicken skin, again, weirds me out. Find it strange that people want to eat that. So I don't eat fried Chicken. But I do like watermelon, and I don't have a problem eating it in front of people. I wouldn't be offended if I went someplace and someone asked me if I wanted watermelon. Although these are the kinds of things today that certain people worry about, I think that there is an abundance of concern. Most of it misguided, plenty of it informed by good intentions. But because it's misguided and because it's ill informed, it's misspent, and in some instances, even harmful. And I think especially it becomes especially pernicious when it involves young people and when it involves notions of, like, pride, and whether or not a young person should be reared to have pride in their inherited characteristics, like, I'm proud to be black, black girl magic. Or they should be reared with an expectation that pride is something you earn and it has something to do with the things that you achieve. And it doesn't even have to be a big achievement for you to be proud of it. It just needs to be important to you. And again, being born looking a particular way isn't an achievement. It isn't something worth being proud of. Even if other people want to shame you for it, the correct response to that is to understand that it is a ridiculous thing for them to try to shame you for. They are wrong, and the overcorrection is actually a hindrance. So, again, I can talk about this a lot, and I think there are a lot of dimensions to it and a lot of good reasons to ask questions about it. And it's certainly appropriate to say, well, you know, what about actual racism that's out there in the world and bigotry? I think we can address those things and have concern for it without indulging in the fantasy that this is real. And we can do that without reifying the concept. It's like, I care about the Salem witch trials. I will talk about this, the number of people who were harmed as a result. But I will never say, oh, well, you know, a dozen witches were executed. Because then you're indulging the fiction. Then you're doing something actually harmful to reality, and you're participating in it in a way that is not helpful. It's harmful. So I just think we need to be a little bit more thoughtful. We need to scrutinize these things a little more. And in 2020, I think particularly around then, a lot of people got a lot crazy about these matters. And in certain respects, I think the fact that there are a lot of growing communities where people are like, we got to push back. We have to tell the truth. The reason for all the racial disparities is actually genetics. And other people say, well, no, it's white supremacy. And my perspective is, no, you're both absurd. This isn't the way to do things. It's not binary in that way. It's not similar. And if we care about people, then let's care about people on a meaningful basis, on an individual basis with a particular concern for their particular injuries and hurts and challenges.

[Camille Foster]

We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

[Unnamed Speaker]

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[Isaac Saul]

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[Camille Foster]

You said something about the kind of the difference between, you know, like a black person in the Bronx versus Bushwick or whatever that reminded me of this, this excerpt that we pulled actually in a piece entangled because we made the decision in our editorial standards not to capitalize the B in black. We broke from the ap. Yeah. And we published a piece like explaining why we did this. And part of it candidly was informed by some of the stuff that I had heard you talk about and being like a fan of the fifth column and hearing you touch on this issue. But it was also like as a team we went, you know, we just like stress tested like why we did the AP says to do this, but like why are we doing this? And then we went out looking for these arguments and the one, the argument to not capitalize to be in black were like so obviously more compelling to us where it's like we, like we are playing the same game that like the white supremacists are playing by like categorizing this group. But I came across this quote from Glenn Lowry, who I know is a friend of yours. Yeah. And he said, if all the disparate groups that constitute whites don't comprise a single people, why should all the disparate groups that constitute blacks do? So to be honest, I don't think they do. I would probably have a hard time seeing the sociological similarities between say, a wealthy member of Lagos's business class and a man on Chicago's south side working three part time jobs just to pay his rent. Learning that both are black would tell me precisely nothing, which I found like a very compelling and straightforward way to put it.

[Ari Weitzman]

Although interestingly, I will say importantly, Glenn and I actually disagree pretty profoundly on, on the right way to think about race from his standpoint. It's like, am I right about this? Sure. But ain't nothing wrong with a little bit of race. Pride is kind of Glenn's perspective. This is still our people. And I love Glenn, I respect him and I admire him. But I do think that the lies we tell ourselves have consequences. And I think that that is true universally. And we talked about this at length in different contexts that folks can actually find. And I always find him richly, our conversations richly rewarding and compelling. But he does still just say explicitly learning that they're both black. Again, I don't know what it means and it matters if it's not completely contentless. It may be incoherent, but we attribute some sort of validity to it through our continued use in it, through our continued participation in a taxonomy of racial difference and the fact that we are omitting all of the stuff from the CASTA system that was popular in South America and the Caribbean that no longer seems sane to us. Like mulatto. You don't really say that. Oh, he's a mulatto. Oh no, he's great. You know, the straight octoroon kid down.

[Camille Foster]

The street that would turn some heads.

[Ari Weitzman]

But the other thing is similarly weird. It's weird if I have to wonder when I send my 7 year old daughter to school and it's February, if there's going to be a strange interaction in class in Marin where she is the only brown girl in the class with hair kind of like hers, is she going to be feeling singled out for an entire month while everyone is obsessing over this one thing? And there's never a month where any of the Rest of her classmates are singled out on the basis of race. And history is talked about as though they all are either, you know, the oppressors or the oppressed. It's strange. And I think we can have an interest in history that's robust and an interest in who we are and who one another are and our unique, distinct past that's robust without indulging in this mythology that becomes a kind of prison for us. So I just think that that is a healthier way to move forward. I think conservatives who are trying to push back against excesses on the left by indulging in this stuff or making a profound error, they're only making things worse. And I think that it's always possible to imagine a moral horizon beyond the one that we have been past. What I'm advocating here for is not colorblindness. What I'm advocating for here is fidelity to reality. I'm not blind. I don't have any problems with my vision whatsoever. I'm very fortunate in that regard. I don't need to pretend that race doesn't exist. I think it's important we acknowledge that it doesn't exist in a meaningful.

[Unnamed Speaker]

It does create a little bit of dilemma when I think about saying I can acknowledge some things that I can observe in the world, but also race as a construct that's been superimposed upon it. When you get into the realm of policy, there's something. One of my superpowers is that I've dropped out of so many graduate programs, and it's given me a great ability to quit things, but also like a sampling ladder and a lot of different subject matters. And one of the things where I've learned a bit but still remain sort of a fresh mind that isn't super informed but still learning is about the way that the logic behind affirmative action was developed, which I got from my time before I dropped out of a PhD in statistics and education. And the way that I was taught this was there are disparities that have grown over time that are unjust, that are arbitrary, based off of a concept that you can fuzzily describe as race, but it's based off of skin color disparities. That's unjust. That's happened. As a government, we want to take actions to correct injustices when we see them. So if I'm somebody who's interested in making fair policy, and I see there is a statistical significant effect on this one attribute, if we call it race and we should try to correct it in some way, it affects outcomes and learning, and it affects outcomes in socioeconomic status. If I then zero in on it, then my goal as a policymaker is to make that effect no longer exist. And one of the things that I remember my professor at the time telling us was it's easy to say we should therefore make steps that are going to counteract this principle. But, and this is the takeaway that I had, what if we instead focus on the outcome and say, if we attack the socioeconomic outcomes and say we want to do more to help people in all this entire bucket of poor learning outcomes and the entire bucket of poor economic outcomes and try to make that bucket addressed, then eventually we're going to make the causal effect disappear. If there is one that's just correlative. So not causal, but correlative effect about like some racial marker, some arbitrary marker that's making people end up in this bucket. But if I'm talking about it, if I'm engineering policies in a way that's trying to address this concern, I'm sort of reifying it. Like it's really hard to address the concern, but also not reify it. And I wonder when we get into the realm of policy, how people should act, like, what makes sense. If there's a policymaker listening to this podcast, what's a good step for them? What's a good way to think about it?

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, I would say that trying to remedy those disparities between groups is generally misguided is my perspective, and that focusing on the actual deprivation is better than focusing on the general disparity. And I would also direct people to Musa Al Gharbi's book We have Never Been Woke, which is not a book that is written against all people on the left who are woke and terrible. It's a book that I think does a better job than almost anything else I've been exposed to of demonstrating how a lot of these affirmative action programs tend to benefit people who are already in these kind of upper middle class, upper class brackets. They're the ones who get the eight A set asides. It's the kid who's actually Ghanaian, whose dad is an electrical engineer, who starts the contracting company that is getting these really lucrative government contracts. And it's not helping the fifth generation American whose parents were enslaved in the south, who is suffering today because that's generally not how things work. It's similarly the case even amongst native born black people who are the ones who, who get these slots at prestigious universities, who get the promotion from one side of the C suite to the Other better side of the C suite because they needed a black person. And I think the other problem with the disparities, the obsession with disparities, is the Harrison Bergeron conundrum. It is entirely possible to eliminate the disparities by making everyone materially better off in a world where we.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I think it was what I was trying to articulate poorly, because I'm not articulating it.

[Ari Weitzman]

Is a worse world. It is just worse. And I think it's not a coincidence that focus and obsession with disparities has that double edged problem associated with it. Either the wrong sort of people are gaining advantage or it's possible that we're making people worse. And by measuring disparities instead of actual progress and outcomes, we are not actually focused on whether or not that humans are thriving collectively. So I think we just need to choose better policies and make better policy. And we don't do that by trying to embrace some new heterodox, which is a word I hate, but I just used appropriately, a new heterodox approach.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Take notes, Isaac. We use that word all the time.

[Ari Weitzman]

Well, I mean, I just hate the way that people are collectively lumped into it because I know a lot of people in the quote unquote heterodox community and they're genuinely diverse and I don't think it actually makes sense. And we learn more and more that that's the case, I think as time goes on. So yeah, the heterodox community is a.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Challenging concept too, whatever that means.

[Camille Foster]

Culture. Next week we should just start putting black in quotation marks throughout our Tangle articles and see if anybody notices or has any questions about it.

[Ari Weitzman]

I didn't advise that, but okay.

[Camille Foster]

All right. Well, we spent a good bit of time on this and there is a ton of other news and some navel gaze tangle controversy that I want to get to before we get out of here. So we'll pivot from one controversial issue to a really non controversial issue, the Catholic Church and the Pope, which has never been a point of any contention anywhere. We covered this. So first of all, let me just say one of the things we love doing on the podcast, like we like using this as a space to respond to some of the reader and listener feedback we get throughout the week. It's one of the benefits of doing it at the end of the week is we get to see people's reactions to the stories we publish and we get some challenges to our arguments, our writing, our coverage, and then we get to talk about them on the show. And it's one of my favorite things to do here. And and we covered the Pope's death on Monday. Obviously it was a huge global story. I sometimes know when we're gonna cover something. You wait into the trans issue or you wade into abortion wherever you're like, all right, there's landmines everywhere and we're gonna start some shit. I did not feel that way about this story. I was, you know, like, the pope died. Sad. He's a controversial figure.

[John Law]

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription. Or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription, which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend. Y'all.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Take care.

[Camille Foster]

Peace. Our Executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our Executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate Editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey saw Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and John Law and to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our [e-mail].

[Isaac Saul]

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[Ari Weitzman]

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