Loading summary
Transcript37 lines
- [00:00]
A
In my view, structural and systemic racism are fuzzy, cloudy concepts where 99 out of 100 times I hear them used. I'm not sure what the speaker actually means, and it's not because I'm stupid, it's because they don't quite know what they mean. And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk.
- [00:31]
B
My guest is Coleman Hughes. Coleman is the host of Conversations with Coleman and the author of a great book. We talked about the last time he was on the podcast called the End of Race Arguments for a Colorblind America. Coleman has also been teaching a class on the legacy of slavery in the last months, and we had a really interesting conversation about that topic. To what extent is American reality today shaped by the legacy of slavery? Is the legacy of slavery the key explanation for phenomena like mass incarceration for the disintegration of a black family that Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously or infamously wrote about in his report in 1965? How should we think about questions like structural racism or systemic racism in light of that historical injustice? In the bonus part of the conversation, I also pushed Coleman a little bit on how to think about the subject of his last book. Today he made an impassioned argument for a colorblind society, one which we are not blind to the relevance or the existence of race, but rather refuse to treat people on the basis of their race. I ask Corman whether he has any hope that we may really be moving towards a new equilibrium in which we have a kind of broad social consensus about how to give people opportunity without engaging in those kind of practices, or whether American society is simply polarizing more and more with the Trump administration trying to dismantle a bunch of those programs and the next Democratic president going back in and using or those arsenal of executive power to reimpose them. Coleman and I also talked about the ways in which there was a genuine chill on free speech for the last years, but unfortunately the actions of the Trump administration are now themselves attacking free speech and academic freedom in very perilous ways. To get access to that part of the conversation, please support this podcast. Please become a paying subscriber. Colman recently participated in a debate about colorblindness at mit, and this podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the wonderful Civil Discourse Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Colman Hughes welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:19]
A
Thanks for having me on again, Jascha.
- [03:20]
B
So Colmen, I know that you've been in Austin for the last few months teaching a college class for the first time, so I guess I should at this point, call you Professor Hughes. You've been trying to think through in this class and potentially in some of your writing, the legacy of slavery, something that obviously shaped American history in a very profound way and continues to have real impacts today, but perhaps not quite in the ways that people imagine. What is your thinking on the subject informed by your research and your teaching?
- [03:54]
A
Yeah. So first of all, I was very honored to get the opportunity to teach at the University of Austin, which is that rarest thing, an actually new college in its first year right now. And I was teaching college freshmen. They weren't all the typical age. Some of them were older. But I wanted to create a course that I would have wanted to take at their age. In other words, you know, when I was at Columbia, I would have, you know, I took several classes on race related issues, and most of them, you could only read texts, basically from the center left to the far left. And so I wanted to read. I wanted to create a course where you could read everyone from Ta Nehisi Coates on the left to a Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele on the right, where the perspectives were balanced between those two poles and framed by an overarching question, which is, what is the legacy of slavery? This is a phrase that. That gets bandied about so often that we rarely stop to think about what exactly it means. And the way I frame the course is just, the legacy of slavery is a phrase that means whatever the long run consequences of American slavery are. And so then the question becomes, okay, what gets included in that and what doesn't Is the. Is mass incarceration. The fact that American, that America has such a high per capita prison population, is that part of the legacy of slavery? You'll get people like Michelle Alexander will say yes, and you'll get other people will say no. The breakdown of the black family structure and to some extent the working class white family structure as well. That is to say, like the high percentage of fatherless homes in the black community. Is that part of the legacy of slavery? Daniel Patrick Moynihan said yes in his famous report in the 60s. Herbert Gutman said no in a book in the 1970s. And in a class, in my class that was one week, you know, one week was reading Moynihan's perspective and then Gutman's perspective. And ultimately the students can decide, you know, what they think for themselves. But the idea of the course is not to teach them. Obviously, I have my own biases, I have my own opinions that I don't hide, but it's really much more about teaching them how to think about all of these arguments, how to evaluate all of these arguments critically versus teaching them what I think is the truth. So I had a great time teaching
- [06:39]
B
that,
- [06:42]
A
and I think it's an enduring and very important topic.
- [06:46]
B
So, first of all, I agree with that pedagogical approach. When I teach about the subject of my last book, about the identity synthesis and quote unquote wokeness, I do the same thing. I have a week, for example, about cultural appropriation, where both try to find the best philosophical arguments for why we should worry about what those authors call cultural appropriation, as well as the best arguments that celebrate cultural mixity as one of the good things in a diverse society that actually is something we should embrace. And I don't want the students to come out with my opinion. I want them to engage seriously with the material and ideally to change their mind in some kind of way. Not to change their mind to come to agree with me. But I think when you haven't seriously thought about a topic before and when you engage with it at a deep level, hopefully you will change your mind in some kind of way. So that's my ambition, not for them to agree with my particular view on the subject. But let's jump into some of those debates and it would be really interesting, I think, both to hear what do you think the strongest arguments on both sides are, but also where you come down. So you've mentioned, to start off with, when you look at the high incarceration rate in the United States and the high rate of violent crime in the United States, which is much higher than it is in many societies in Western Europe and much higher than it is in certain East Asian societies that have exceptionally low crime. Are these crime rates, and are the incarceration rates, which presumably are bound up with those, a downstream impact of slavery, or are they rooted in other aspects of American society, like individualism, like the Wild west, like all the other kinds of things that I imagine alternative explanations might point to.
- [08:28]
A
Yeah, so when it comes to crime and incarceration, I think this is. This is one area where I think the legacy of slavery has very little to do with our modern social ills. Big picture, the way I think of it is this. Most countries in the world are either like, if you picture crime on one axis and state capacity on another axis. Everywhere in Europe pretty much is low crime, high state capacity. By state capacity, I just mean the ability of the state to actually put people in prison if there were crime. Whereas you have places like you know, until recently, El Salvador and still most of Latin America that are high crime but low state capacity, meaning they have all this crime, they probably should have bigger prison populations, but they, they, you know, the cartels are actually just running wild. America is one of the few countries in the world that has both pretty high crime and high state capacity. And the best empirical research on why mass incarceration happened attributes probably half of it to a genuine increase in crime. And not drug crime, not low level drug crime, but like really the crimes people should be in prison for. And attributes roughly the other half of it to prosecutorial discretion, which is to say county prosecutors getting tougher and tougher and tougher over the years with decisions that are completely within their power, such as just like whether to charge someone with a crime in the first place. And so in our class, we read Michelle Alexander's the New Jim Crow and we read John Pfaff's book Locked In. He definitely, I think, wins the argument on the empirical side when it comes to the aspects of mass incarceration that do touch on racial identity and racism. I think Michelle Alexander and many others have made a true and an important point, which is, you know, after the 60s, there were many Republicans and Republican strategists that absolutely did try to appeal to Southern voters by replacing segregation forever with more anodyne sounding slogans that were meant to get at the same racist impulses. The Southern strategy. You have many, several Republican strategists, at the very least Lee Atwater and one other, basically admitting to this, this is a conscious strategy, and that this was part of why they viewed the war on drugs as a good thing. And no doubt this appealed to some voters who interpreted the war on drugs as basically an excuse to lock black people up and control black people. After the end of Jim Crow. My pushback on that argument would be when it comes to policies that are popular and often bipartisan, popular, multiracially popular, different groups have their different reasons for supporting them. And to put the microscope on a certain kind of Republican's reason for supporting the war on drugs actually doesn't really get you far in understanding why the drug war happened, why was it popular with the black community as well, and more importantly, what were the impacts of the war. Like, to use an analogy, different constituents have different reasons for favoring high levels of illegal immigration, like business interests, like illegal immigration because of cheap labor. You know, people on the far left like illegal immigration for various humanitarian reasons totally couldn't be more different, yet they kind of support the same Reality for totally different aims. To me, the more interesting question is, I guess you could look at why everyone supports it with their own reasons. But the more interesting question is like, what is the impact of the policy? And so Michelle Alexander in the New Jim Crow, besides all of the empirical sleight of hand that she does in that book, I think the other mistake is just obsessing over the mindset and intentions of a subset of Republicans rather than looking at the sort of mindset of everyone who supported the war on drugs policy and its impact.
- [13:07]
B
Okay, let's dive into this a little more deeply. I'll start with an anecdote, by the way. I spent some time in Hanover, New Hampshire, and I was there a couple of years ago sitting in a bookstore whose selection is kind of, you know, very well curated to the left and far left, you know, with impeccable progressive taste. They also have a very nice coffee shop. So when I'm up there, I tend
- [13:33]
A
to sit there and progressives do make the best coffee.
- [13:36]
B
It is true. And at one point I overheard this conversation where some must have been A Dartmouth student came in and asked for very sweet young lady who may well also have been a Dartmouth student at the counter about Michelle Alexander's new Jim Crow. And you know, that person typed the name into the computer and said, oh no, we don't have any copy in stock. Do you want to order it? And Ms. Huen said, sure, yeah, if you could order it, that would be great. And then she typed some more and said, oh, I'm sorry, that appears to be on our do not order list. And I went to ask why this book was on the do not order list of this impeccably progressive bookstore. And I got a very sweet response that she didn't really know and she could ask the owner. And I never followed up enough. So I, until today, have been puzzled by what on earth Michelle Alexander could have done to end up on the naughty list of this progressive bookstore. But I think you've been assuming a little bit of familiarity with that book. It's a book that was published to a small publisher, sold very few copies at first, and that sort of was a slow growing, huge publishing success. Many, many, many thousands and probably tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of copies over the course of the last year. And as the title suggests, the main thesis of the piece is that the function of mass incarceration in the United States really is to reestablish the Jim Crow system in some kind of way. Expand for us a little bit on what the main argument of that book is and what some of the empirical sleight of hand that you referenced might be about how it is that, for example, the claim that I believe comes from the book, or at least is amplified in the book, that a huge percentage of people in prisons in the United States are jailed for nonviolent drug crimes really is a misunderstanding of the empirical reality.
- [15:28]
A
Yeah. So Michelle Alexander, in this book she makes two big claims. One is that the reason for mass incarceration is the war on drugs. What she means by that is in the 70s and 80s, all over the country there is a, you know, a war on drugs, which she dates either to Reagan or to Nixon. And she sees that as responsible for the massive ballooning of the prison population that happened in America between roughly the 1970s and you know, like 2005, 2010, which when the prison population peaked and started going down. So according to her, politicians just start locking up, basically creating a moral panic about low level drugs like marijuana. And that's the reason we have mass incarceration. And then her second claim is that the war on drugs was basically an extension of Jim Crow by other means. After Jim Crow was destroyed by the civil rights movement, all of that racist energy got re channeled, redirected into the War on Drugs. And it was a way of controlling basically black men, young black men, putting them in a situation, a status situation, similar to what they would have been under Jim Crow, which is to say once you're a felon, you can't vote similar to how you couldn't vote under Jim Crow. You were stripped of certain rights and so forth. So the big problem with this is, and it's really, I don't, I think I could, you could say more than borders. It really is basically intellectual malpractice. This aspect of the book is that she talks only about the federal prison system. Of all the prison inmates in the country, only about 13% are in federal prison. Federal prison is like where Sam Bankman Fried is because he, you know, interstate crimes, financial crimes have no, you know, state border. And so certain crimes are if you're trafficking drugs across state lines, etc. But that's a minority of the people in prison. And it over indexes for drugs, drug crime. 87% of the prisoners in America are in state prisons. The state prison system is virtually unrelated to anything really Congress can do or the President can do. It's controlled by state legislatures and governors and so forth. And not only that, about half of people in state prisons are there for violent crimes. So, and you know, something like 20% or less are there for state crimes. So the numbers just don't add up. There's no way you get to mass incarceration with the number of people who are in prison for drugs. It just doesn't make any sense. And it can only make sense if you ignore 87% of the picture, which is almost the entire picture. And that's what she does in that book. And so a lot of people got the false impression that the drug war was related to mass incarceration, which it really, really was not.
- [18:39]
B
And one of the problems with this, which is, I think, very prominent in progressive analysis of policy, but of course there's equivalence of that on what James Lindsay might call the woke, right, is that if you have a wrong analysis, you're just not going to solve the problem on the basis of that analysis. So there is a gender pay gap, for example, a lot of people under the misimpression that the gender pay gap is mostly owed to the fact that women doing exactly the same job just get less money than men doing exactly the same job, either because employers just discriminate against women or perhaps because their social norms, women are less good at negotiating and so on. And that probably makes some small part of the difference, but the primary difference is much more structurally complicated. It has to do, for example, with the fact that in professions like the law or other kinds of professions where you need to make a partner Normally in your 30s, often women who choose to have children then are off the partner track and they just never recover that earning potential, that's a genuine problem. It's a genuine injustice. Women should be able to, to have kids in their 30s or in their 20s and nevertheless go back onto the partner track and be able to make that contribution to the economy. But if you have the overly simplistic analysis of what caused that problem is not going to solve it. And the same is true for mass incarceration. If you claim that a huge percentage of the prison population is nonviolent drug crimes and you're just picturing the local guy who likes pot being jailed for decades, then you think, well, let's fight to release that population and we can really cut down on a prison population, but that's just not going to work. And I think we saw that in an interesting way when the Biden administration clearly was quite motivated to make a significant, but still obviously symbolic in the proportion to the number of prisoners in America sort of move towards de incarceration by pardoning a bunch of people at the end of Biden's term, and they ended up pardoning people. That caused a lot of outrage even, and especially among progressives who said, no, no, those are the bad guys. How can you be pardoning those people? But that's in part because it's not all that easy to find people in federal prisons who have very long sentences for obviously trivial crimes. And that's before we get to, I think, a further level of analysis where actually a lot of the time, because of the genuinely unjust role that plea deals work in the United States, where defendants are under enormous pressure to take plea deals because they would face even longer sentences in jury trials, what they're nominally in jail for often isn't what the state thought they had on them. So even some of the sort of people who are in jail nominally for nonviolent crimes were persecuted, were prosecuted because the state thought they had committed violent crime. So that's a kind of additional complication there. So what does that mean? So if you think that part of Michelle Alexander's story is wrong, what is actually telling the underlying story? And to go back to the interesting conceptual point you made earlier, if you're saying that some places are high crime and low incarceration, then that's because they don't have a state capacity to prosecute the criminals and often means that those criminals basically run the country. That's always not the solution we want. What about the other part of it, though? Why is it that the United States, one of the richest societies in the world, has a crime rate that's so much higher than in Europe and in Japan? Ideally, we would want that equilibrium, right? We would want high state capacity. We want to lock up violent criminals that do bad things. But we'd also want the crime rate to be pretty low to begin with, so that that wouldn't translate into mass incarceration. So what do you think is the best explanation for why the underlying crime rate in the United States is higher than in those places? And just to throw out some possibilities, I mean, the easy availability of guns is one kind of argument that progressives would make that I, as a European, find somewhat tempting. But something that might be a brawl or a serious injury in Europe can more easily translate into a murder in the United States. I wonder whether it's to do with historically low state capacity, the fact that much of American society was formed at a time when state capacity wasn't very high. And so the ability to kind of impose a culture of norm following and law following is somehow less than in societies that have had high state capacity for centuries earlier. Perhaps the fact that it is an immigrant society with people bringing in cultural norms from all over the place, that also leads to a kind of anti authoritarian streak. What do you think the explanation is? I'm just throwing out possibilities here.
- [23:22]
A
Yeah. So the short answer is I don't know, but I do. I suspect it has deep cultural roots and also has to do with immigration. If you just look at the crime rate among white Northerners as opposed to white Southerners, there has always been a disparity where the south has been more violent and that has deep cultural roots, maybe even having to do with where immigrants came from in different parts of the British Isles. And people bring cultures with them. And you see certain immigrant groups have virtually no crime. But throughout American history, other immigrant groups have had very high crime. So I don't actually know what the answer is in the abstract. And one puzzle is that the biggest crime wave and crime decline in American history starting around 1963 and peaking around 1990 and then, you know, where the murder rate just absolutely skyrockets and then comes all the way back down, that there isn't a one accepted explanation for what caused that. I think that's one of the great scandals of social science. Is that such a massive trend and then the trend reversing isn't well understood. And so I can't really give any answer that's that's better than the few books I've read on the subject, which amounts to 10 possible different causes and a lot of question marks.
- [24:51]
B
Yeah, it strikes me that, I mean, dieting seems to be one of the academic fields that people just have no good answers for. We just don't really understand how nutrition works. And the consensus changes its minds every 10 years and it looks like we could just throw up our hands. And it's similar, strikingly similar in criminology to some extent. I mean, one of the basic questions that I've been asking myself is not just why is it that there's this very rapid decline in crime in the 90s and early 2000s across the United States, but why is it so much stronger in some places than in others? So you look at the big cities from the East coast in 1990, let's say, or 1985, and New York City, Washington D.C. baltimore, Philadelphia are genuinely dangerous places with very, very high murder and violent crime rates. Over the next 30 years, New York City and Washington D.C. completely transform. Philadelphia becomes much better, but not quite to the same extent. And Baltimore improves a little. But now is clearly the most dangerous out of those four cities in a way that wasn't true 30 or 40 years ago. Why that? Even if we can't answer why there is this broader change in the 1980s and 1990s, you'd think that we would have a good answer for why the trajectory of Baltimore is so different from the trajectory of New York City. And I've asked that question to a lot of people, and I don't really feel like I have a good read on that question either.
- [26:20]
A
Yeah, no, that is. It's one of the great puzzles, and there's no doubt it's enormously consequential because this goes back to what you were saying earlier. So many people, especially on the left, actually sincerely believed that you could shrink the prison population by making marijuana legal. The truth is the prison population has shrank. In fact, for black men in their 20s, it cut in half between 2001 and 2017, which is amazing. But that was largely the result of an actual decrease in crime. So whatever. Actually decreased crime is the thing that mass incarceration prison abolition activists should care more about, and it's just not well understood.
- [27:16]
B
That's very interesting. What do you think that means for policy going forward if we want again, a state that ideally is high state capacity and low crime, a place where if you commit a murder, you're much more likely to go to prison than you are right now. America's murder clearance rate is way lower than Germany's or Japan's, and we want those murderers to be in prison. But ideally, we also want so many fewer murderers that there's not a ton of people sitting in federal jail for violent crime. I know that that is a huge policy prescription, but, you know, even if we're not able to completely change that equilibrium, you know, what are your thoughts on the basis of the reading and thinking you've been doing for how we should think about criminal justice policy in 2025?
- [28:01]
A
Okay, so there's two things. One is, I think I agree with the instinct. I'm taking this from Alex Tabarrok, the Economist, that there should be more police and less incarceration. Meaning every time we've tried depolicing a city, it's been a disaster. And there were enough experiments after 2020, I think, to prove this for all time. If you cut the population of. If you cut the police force from 800 to 500, you're just going to get more crime and you're going to get 911 ringing off the hook and people waiting two hours for a police car to arrive long after the scene is cold. And that's just. And criminals are not idiots. Like they understand the incentives. They understand that some level for them it is cops versus robbers. And if there's half as many cops, they have a much better chance of getting away with things. They're to some extent rational. That said, when I hear, like to take a high profile example, Sam Bankman freed in front of sentenced to over 20 years in prison strikes me as harsh. It strikes me as unnecessarily long. I don't know that there is. The research has definitely shown that there is diminishing returns to longer sentences in terms of whether it actually deters crime, because people don't actually really consider seriously the possibility of going to prison for decades as opposed to just years. It's arguably inhumane to put people in prison for that long, except for truly like repeat violent offenders. And so that would be one thing my instinct towards more police and less, less prison. And then the second thing would be, you know, John Pfaff, I think probably more than anyone broke the argument that prosecutors is. The discretion of prosecutors is the real meat of the issue here. And there's no oversight. It's incredibly difficult to study, incredibly difficult to reform. And prosecutors have just this enormous amount of power and nobody really knows what goes on in prosecutors offices except the people in them. And to the extent that their incentives changed a lot over the past 50 years and pushed them to be tougher and tougher, we don't really understand why that is or how to change it even if we wanted to. So somehow understanding what's going on with prosecutors would be seem to me to be important.
- [30:37]
B
And that by the way, implies that part of the problem here may be too much democracy. Which is to say that one obvious difference between prosecutors in some places, judges in the United States and in other countries is that often they are elected here and they aren't in other places. And so rather than mass incarceration being this kind of foreign imposition either by some kind of political system or even by an ethnic majority, often what's happening is that communities vote for those prosecutors. Now, sometimes that may be communities that are 60% white and 40% black and there's some kind of racial dynamic there. And I'm sure that's true in parts of the American South. But in many places, as you were saying, ethnic minority communities strongly supported harsher sentences. And in many places we're dealing with counties in rural Texas that might still be 80 or 90% white. That vote for very tough on crime judges and very tough on crime prosecutors. That then lead to high incarceration rates in those places as well. And certainly the incentive for those judges and those prosecutors is always to say, do I want to take a risk on somebody who has committed a piece of violent crime, an act of violent crime? But I actually think that the risk of recidivism is low, that they are learning the lesson that I can give them a relatively lenient sentence and hopefully they'll be able to reintegrate in society. But perhaps it'll cost me reelection. So let's put them in jail for a safe amount of time. I don't want my career to be ruined over this.
- [32:11]
A
Right.
- [32:12]
B
Let's switch to the other topic you mentioned that I think is really interesting about the disintegration of originally the black family, but then a lot of working class families across the United States. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous or infamous report about the black family, he was accused of harboring some kind of racist motivation of speaking about a topic in ways that are very racially charged. But one of the very interesting things is that all of the observations he made about the black family then very quickly were emulated among lower class white families. And so the sort of average white family, particularly the average white family where the parents don't have college degrees, particularly ones that have origins in Appalachia or Ascot's Irish, have much higher rates of family disintegration than black families did at the time that Moynihan wrote his report. So tell us about both the social phenomenon and the kind of debate over the ways in which it might or might not be tied to the history and the legacy of slavery.
- [33:20]
A
Yeah. So in 1965, I believe, Daniel Patrick Moynihan publishes his famous or infamous report on the quote, unquote, Negro family, as it would have been called at that time. And it's important to understand the context of the conversation he was entering. He was entering right on the heels of the high point of the civil rights movement when two years after Martin Luther King has given his famous I have a Dream speech, right around the time, just after the Civil Rights act of 1964 is passed, right around the time the Voting Rights act of 1965 is passed, and kind of before most of the worst riots of the later 60s, that really dampened optimism for race relations. So he's coming in at a high point of optimism about, you know, the moral progress America can make, black and white, on the race issue, and basically Taking a huge crap all over that optimism by saying essentially black people are never going to experience actual economic and social equality with all of this happy legislation unless we figure out what is going on with the family structure. And he basically sounds the alarm saying there is the beginning of a crisis happening of, of fatherlessness, and no amount of legislation or happy talk is going to actually translate into economic equality if we don't solve this issue. And so this is unwelcome for many, many, many reasons. This is a message that's unwelcome to 10 different parties for 10 different reasons. Obviously, it's unwelcome to people that want to claim victory in the civil rights movement because he's essentially saying, you know, what you just accomplished matters a lot less than you think it does. Secondly, he is pointing to a reality that a lot of people are uncomfortable looking at, which is if you go up to, I mean, if you go up to a typical person on a street and say such and such, this man abandoned his family. Most people don't. Wouldn't even be tempted to think one step beyond, well, he's just an asshole. He abandoned his kids. What more is there to talk about? And Moynihan. And so obviously that becomes very touchy because then black people feel their community's being blamed. White people feel they're being accused of racist, being racist for pointing it out. And Moynihan kind of comes in the middle of and tries to make this argument where he's pointing at the phenomenon, saying it's a crisis, saying that it undermines the possibility of equality, in fact. But he's also saying that the reason for this is the legacy of slavery. He's not saying the reason is some character defect, some innate defect in black people. He's saying the reason is the legacy of slavery. And he's very clear about that. Has a whole chapter in his report on it.
- [36:26]
B
In fact, it's like a spell out that argument for us. What exactly is it about slavery that he says causes this cultural phenomenon in the 1960s?
- [36:38]
A
So it's very much under theorized, but it's something like basically black families were routinely separated during slavery. This is a fact. People often grew up several plantations or perhaps many, many miles away from their own parents. De facto husbands and wives were separated. It was one of the most tragic aspects of slavery. And yeah, I mean, you could read about this in Frederick Douglass's memoir. He like, met his mother like once or twice in his young life through visiting a plantation fairly far away. So this was common and the idea is basically that this stamped a kind of cultural pattern of broken families that we trace down to the modern day. And then he has a whole section where he talks about the fact that because Brazilian slavery was Catholic, it was like a lot nicer and this didn't happen there. And because American slavery was Protestant, it was a lot crueler. And that's the reason this did happen here.
- [37:48]
B
And I imagine some historians of Brazilian slavery would have words to say about that.
- [37:53]
A
Yes, yes, definitely. He really bases this on like a few block quotes from one book that is like, really dubious. And, and I can't all. I also can't help but know this, that he himself is Catholic. So he may have a bias towards seeing Catholicism as like a lot more humane than Protestantism. But in any event, he basically says that slavery happens and then Jim Crow happens, which humiliated the black male in particular, not the black female. This is his kind of Freudian gender analysis of what, what Jim Crow did to black men. Because at some level he wants to explain, all right, why black men have abandoned their families in some number, but black women haven't. So what's, what's going on here? There must be a gendered aspect. He says something like, it's in the nature of the male to strut right, to be prideful and to be. To stick out one's chest. And Jim Crow, by insisting on this kind of subservient, second class, don't make eye contact attitude, humiliated the black male in a way that it did not the black female. This is his argument. And so all of that combined basically leads to black men having a higher rate of abandoning their families. And he doesn't blame them, he blames slavery. None of that actually helps him in the court of public opinion where he is called a racist, nevertheless. But what's interesting to me is you look at the numbers he was worried about, they were absolutely nothing compared to what the numbers would be 20, 30 years later. He was really seeing a crisis at its very beginning and sounding an alarm. And he was made to look totally prescient by the trend line that, that, that eventually happened. So regardless of like. So just to close the loop on this, about 10 years later in the 1970s, this guy, Herbert Gutman, he spends basically 10 years doing research on this question because he was provoked by the, the Moynihan Report. He gathers every scrap of evidence from 1865 to 1970 on the Black family structure and actually finds that really this trend didn't really start until maybe the 1920s or 30s. And actually before that, all the available data suggests a pretty similar rate of fatherlessness between black and white communities. And he finds, which I think is a solid finding, that just because slavery broke apart black families, actually what that did is the second slavery was over, over, black people were incredibly hungry to reconstitute their families. They were, you know, like, you know, like Django Unchained, trying to find their husbands and wives and their children. And it's, it's like a policy like that is just as likely, more likely to engender a backlash after it's over than to, than to stamp a pattern of, of. Of like not constituting the family. Similar to how, because slaves weren't allowed to read the second that they, they were freed in 1865, they. They were obsessed with learning to read precisely because they were denied it as slaves. So Gutman writes his 400 page book basically really laying into Moynihan, and though he doesn't really give a totally good account of why this disturbing trend started, and this will sadly be like another example of the crime decline, is that I don't think there is a great explanation that social scientists really understand for why you began to see such a high rate of fatherless homes.
- [42:02]
B
So, you know, this is certainly one of the areas where initially I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the legacy of slavery may have made that difference as you describe. You know, the ways in which black families were torn apart during slavery is incredibly cruel, and it's plausible to think that that might have an impact on cultural norms in some kind of way. But as you're pointing out, there's sort of these two pieces of evidence that seem to speak against that. The first is that it's hard to fully understand why it is that slavery would start to produce that effect in the 1920s and 30s and then accelerate it over the course of the 20th century. If until around 1920, let's say the rates of black family cohesion are very similar to the rates of white family cohesion, you'd have to find a quite subtle argument to try and explain that perhaps somebody has done so, but it's not obvious what that might be. And then the second point is one that I mentioned earlier, that when you sort of look at a snapshot in the mid-1960s and say fatherlessness is more prevalent in the black community than it is in the white community, and you seem to have this very stable white family, and you start to see a kind of degradation of black family, then factors that uniquely explain the black family might seem to be very pertinent. But if you see over the following decades, but actually you have a set of parallel developments, particularly in the white working class. And today, when you just look at Scotch Irish families of people who don't have a college degree, you would probably see, I don't know statistics exactly, but I believe that there would be much higher than the rates of fatherlessness, where in the 1960s, when Moynihan was worried about that, in black families. Well, that truly is not because of slavery. So at least to some extent, there has to be a common cause that explains those phenomena. The one obvious explanation one might want to adduce is to say that it's something to do with the advent and then the decline of the industrial society. There's something about both rapid industrialization and then, of course, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs that changes the environment in such a way that it's easier to abscond from your family without social judgment. Later on, perhaps, it becomes very hard to hold down jobs that give structure and meaning, particularly to men without college degrees, and that can tempt them more easily into alcoholism and drug abuse and all the other kinds of things. Some conservatives might make arguments about the welfare state that it just becomes easier for women to subsist without the father present, and that therefore one of the adverse consequences of a generally humane institutions of a welfare state might actually be to encourage that kind of absenteeism. But you're saying that sort of. You think it remains, for the most part, an unsolved puzzle?
- [45:01]
A
Yeah, I do, but I think I definitely tend towards the explanations that look at urbanization and industrialization and deindustrialization, because, you know, the welfare state arguments could. Could totally be true as well. It's just that when you get welfare reform in the 90s, you don't really see a reversal of the trend. So, you know, it's. It's complicated. I don't think it's well understood. But I do see how if you get working class guys that get for a few decades just these enormously valuable jobs that they're able to do and support families, and then that gets ripped away too quick for them to adapt, that men do have a tendency when that. When that collapses to, like, men need a lot of structure and. And responsibility. And if they're not able to just retrain and get jobs and support families, a lot of men do turn to alcohol and. And I think we've seen so many communities in America, black and white, go that direction. And. Yeah, I just. I don't think It's. I don't think it's as well understood as it needs to be.
- [46:10]
B
So so far we've sort of double clicked on two very interesting subtopics of a larger question of a legacy of slavery. Right. What takeaways do you think we should take? We should draw about the question more broadly. I'm torn on this because I see in many aspects of American life that slavery obviously does have a massive influence until today. And given how shaping a role it play made in the history of a country, that is perhaps unsurprising. One topic, for example, that may seem trivial and may seem a little bit abstruse, but where I really feel that difference is in the difference of the attitude of American women, and particularly perhaps American white women, about hair. In Europe, curly hair is often seen as something positive, perhaps a little bit exotic, you know, something that many women take pride in. And I'm just struck by the extent to which a lot of Americans think of curly hair as somehow unprofessional, as somehow something negative. And it does strike me that the likely explanation for that has to do with racial and internalized racialized attitude. So, you know, the history of race relations more broadly and slavery specifically in America can wind itself into all kinds of elements of American life in ways that might not be obvious now. On the other hand, I think that there are real problems with the invocation of terms like systemic racism or structural racism to explain all kinds of things in a hand wavy way. But anybody who's interested in a firm understanding of the social world should be very skeptical about precisely because it is plausible that slavery may have had influence on so many different aspects of American life, it becomes tempting to just look at anything that's happening in society and say, oh, that must be because of structural racism. But as we learned, when we are thinking about Michel Alexander's explanation for mass incarceration, if you just wave your hand and say structural racism, A, it's very hard to know what to do about that, and B, it may be the wrong explanation, in which case you're not going to fix whatever underlying problem or injustice you're addressing. So what advice would you give to listeners or to readers about how to think about this question more broadly and the extent to which we should be alive to the possibility of things like structural racism? The extent to which we should be careful about using those terms because it may occlude rather than help our understanding of specific social problems?
- [48:58]
A
Yeah, in my view, structural and systemic racism are fuzzy, cloudy concepts where 99 out of a hundred times I hear them used. I'm not sure what the speaker actually means. And it's not because I'm stupid, it's because they don't quite know what they mean. And you know, like if you're talking about.
- [49:23]
B
As a side note, by the way, this has become a general intellectual assumption of mine and it's generally different from when I was 18 or 20 years old. Back then I assumed that if somebody says something I don't fully understand, it must be because I'm an idiot. Now I understand that there's many domains in which that's the case. If somebody talks about the algorithms behind AI in a highly technical lecture or podcast, it's likely because I haven't done the work to fully understand the mathematics of artificial intelligence. And it's not because they're being deliberately unclear. But when we're talking about many social questions, many philosophical questions, where both I have more background in a way I think it's possible to express yourself in such a way that non experts can understand what you're saying. If I genuinely just don't get what somebody is saying, I have come firmly and strongly to assume that it's because they deliberately or inadvertently are being confusing or perhaps confusing themselves, not because I somehow am not smart enough to understand what they're saying.
- [50:22]
A
Yeah, yeah, same. So just to put some meat on that, if someone says if, if I ask you what's your evidence of systemic racism? Most times the most common response I will get is statistics about how Black people are 14% of the population but more or less than 14% of X. Black people are 14% of population but 30 some odd percent of the incarcerated population, 14% of the population but hold, you know, single digit percent of wealth for instance. And the reason this is, I mean those disparities are interesting and worth discussing, but they are not necessarily caused by systemic racism. And obviously Thomas Sowell has written 10 different versions of the same book just showing that it is the most common thing in the world for ethnic groups and races to have different, have, have non, like non equal statistical outcomes across, in, in every possible circumstance where discrimination can't be the cause. And so that's actually to be expected. It's a further question whether that's the result of discrimination or, or not. And then I guess the second kind of if I ask you what's your proof of what do you mean by systemic racism, someone might give me a study about how people have implicit biases or white people on average have these biases that I've shown in laboratory settings and so forth. And I think a lot of that evidence is suspect, but some of it is very much real. But then I don't quite know what you mean by the systemic part of systemic racism, because I understand what it is for someone to be biased, right? To just have a racial bias. Like if, you know, you enter a shop and buy some chips and then a black kid enters a shop and buys some chips and they think he's stealing, but they don't think you're stealing. Bam. That's just racism, right? That may not be ideological racism, but it's a racist behavior. It's a biased behavior. If what you mean by systemic racism is just that multiplied throughout society, then we're not actually talking about systemic. We're not talking about a system. We're talking about people and their feelings and beliefs, I think. And so the purveyors of the systemic racism concept are, I think they tend to be very unclear about what it is that they are talking about. And there's something about it that is hand waving in a way, because this is one of those situations where because academia is so left wing there, there are quote unquote experts that can go for decades just saying the term structural racism and never having a student or professor ask hard clarification questions about what they mean. So you can just go a long time realizing, without realizing that you have no idea what you're talking about or like you actually can't define a concept. And I thought it was telling in Ibram Kendi's book How to Be an Anti Racist that he deliberately avoided using the word structural racism or systemic racism in the whole book because he found that he couldn't explain it to normal people. I thought that was very telling because it's actually not rocket science, as you say. It's not the finer points of artificial intelligence. It's like if you can't explain to a normal person what systemic racism is, it's possible it's just a bad concept. It's a concept that doesn't really mark out anything that isn't already marked out by other simpler words.
- [54:30]
B
How do you think people who might experience discrimination should think about particular situations they experience they're faced with in which that may or may not be what's going on? I've asked myself that question sometimes growing up in Germany as a Jew, where there's good reason to think both that there are some prevalent anti Semitic attitudes and that there's a very strong social taboo to expressing them. Of course, one difference Is that if I walked into a shop or a bakery, for the most part, people had no idea that I'm Jewish. But I was thinking of it also the other day in the context of racial minorities, perhaps particularly African Americans in the United States, for a very stupid reason, which is that I accompanied a friend to a USPS and a small town post office in Jackson, Wyoming, which is a very white place. Both I and my friend are white. And you know, the person in the post office just treated us incredibly rudely. I mean, it just really felt like she was going out of her way to be unhelpful and unpleasant to us. And of course, given that she was white and we were white, you know, our assumption was this is just a really unpleasant lady or she's having a really bad day or, you know, whatever it is. Right. But it's nothing to do with our race. And I thought, you know, if I was black and I had that experience, I would probably jump to the conclusion that she must be a racist. And it would be very reasonable in that situation to jump to a conclusion that she was being racist because her behavior was just sort of so needlessly antagonistic. Now, you know, I don't mean to suggest by that that people, whether it's Jews in Germany, often the Marx in the United States, or other racial minorities in other contexts, should jump to the conclusion that nothing could ever be discrimination because that would also be naive. Right. In this particular case, this woman just was a particularly unpleasant employee. But in other cases, that really may be what's going on. So in your own life or sort of an advice that you would give to other people, how do you think about this kind of structure beyond the obvious recognition that that's actually one of the injustices of living in a society where some amount of racial prejudice persists? That one of the injustices is that I can go into that interaction and come out of it and think, well, that lady sucks and sort of move on with my life. And somebody else hopefully would also move on with their life, but would have to ask themselves that question, have they been targeted in this kind of specific way that somehow does feel more meaningful than just having to interact with somebody who's bad at their job and an unpleasant person?
- [57:01]
A
Yeah, okay, that's a tough question. I mean, I think that my view is that you, you know, in order to be successful in life, you have to have, you have to have a glass half full attitude. In my view, it helps to have a glass half full attitude. It's not going to help you to, you know, when you're treated shitty in life, to assume that the person is also a racist in addition to being just a dick does that then that you create a model of society that is like rejecting people like you. Which makes it, I guess you could react to that multiple ways. You could say, well, I'm going to try even harder even though they don't like people of my skin color. But the more human and typical reaction is to reject the thing that you think is rejecting you. So if you interpret every gray area interaction as racist, which sadly a lot of black people and minorities in general do, and you know what, what, what bothers me is that in private, black people and other minorities I think rarely like challenge each other about those, about those interactions. Like there's a lot of affirmation of like, oh yeah, this racist UPS lady treated me like shit. No one ever says, well, how do you know she was being racist? How do you know she wasn't just a disgruntled, sad, pissed off UPS employee like many of, many of, many of them are. There, there was, I know there was an interesting hidden brain episode about, about this where they kind of came to the conclusion that it actually benefits you to take the glass half full attitude towards these interactions because then you have a higher sense of agency, a higher sense of the idea that I am able to succeed in the world if I keep trying to do things and putting myself out there, putting myself in situations that is extremely healthy. If you want to become wealthier, if you want to get a better job, you have to have that sense that I can keep doing at bats at this game of life and it's going to lead somewhere. And the more you think people hate you because of your race, the less likely you are to want to do that, the more likely you are to become bitter and pessimistic. So my view would be, my view would be, yeah, like whenever someone is mean to me, unless there is, unless there's just like a clear comparison case, like he treated the guy in front of me really nice who was white and then treated me shittily. Unless there's a comparison case like that, I assume people are just in a bad mood and I move on with my life.
- [59:49]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. Don't miss the rest of this conversation, which I think was some of the most interesting part. In that part of the conversation, Colman and I talk about the legacy of his book, about whether or not his argument for a more colorblind America an America were not blind to the realities of race, but stopped treating people on the basis of race is succeeding. Whether he thinks that we're moving towards that new equilibrium or whether we're just gonna get whiplash from one Republican to Democratic administration going back and forth and how these things work in the United States. We also discuss about whether universities and other institutions are actually listening to the law, whether universities like NYU are obeying the judgments of the Supreme Court, or whether they're defying those judgments, continuing to engage in affirmative action. And finally, we talk about the attack on free speech from the Trump administration, the ways in which deportations of student visa holders and green cards on the basis of their political views are undermining the core promise of academic freedom in the United States. If you want access to that part of the conversation, and if you want to support this podcast, support the work we do for less than the price of one Starbucks coffee a week. Please become a paying subscriber, Please go to yashamonk.substack.com and support what we do today. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [61:52]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces. It.