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- [00:01]
A
Expedia and visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend. Walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com visitscotland.
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B
The reality is that it's always race and, and acknowledging that reality and engaging with that complexity rather than allowing ourselves to slip into a sensibility where all privilege is derived in this fundamental hierarchical way. And if you are in the intersectional sense, like woman plus your sexuality is one thing plus your race is another thing, then that gives us a sense of your disadvantage score. And I just think that obviously fraught to go about trying to understand the world in that way. You necessarily lose a lot of the nuance that's really important. And now the good fight with Jascha Monk.
- [01:14]
C
In about a month, on September 26, Germany will go to the polls. And for the first time in nearly two decades, Angela Merkel is not running to be chancellor of the country. Now, I think there are three things going on in these elections. One, very positive, two, rather more concerning. Let me talk you through them quickly. The good piece of news is that the far right populists, or the alternative for Germany, have stagnated. They are likely to get around 10% of the vote, which is too much for comfort. But after winning a significant amount of votes, increasing the vote at every election since their founding, they are for the first time likely to decline slightly in popular support.
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D
I think this is in part testament
- [02:08]
C
to the fact that the strength four years ago was driven by the refugee crisis. And as that issue has faded from public discourse a little bit, they're having bigger trouble recruiting new refugees voters. That is the good piece of news. Well, the second piece of news, but I suppose is neutral for some reasons to worry about it, and that is that the Great Volkspartein, as Germans used to call them, the great catch all parties that used to gain 35, 40, sometimes over 40% of the vote no longer exist. This was the phenomenon that many people talked about. It was Social Democratic Party in Germany and other countries that they were declining rapidly. The Social Democrats are now likely to end below 20% of the vote. But it turns out the same is true of a Christian Democrats. We have a big catch all political party that used to dominate in Germany. It is now quite possible that the Christian Democrats will get below 25% of the vote by far and away a Historic low for that party in Germany. So the era of catch all parties, whether Social Democratic or Christian Democratic, appears to be over. Here's a third and most worrying development. The Green Party had a choice between two candidates, Habeck and Baerbock. And even though Habig was far more popular, it ended up choosing Baerbock in good part because she's a woman. And the party has inscribed in itself that when two candidates are equally qualified, it will always choose. Baerbock has run a poor campaign, was far less popular than Habeck. At the time the party chose and is now supported as Chancellor by a very small number of Germans. The Christian Democrats did something very similar. They had a choice between Amin Laschet, the head of the Christian Democrats in most of Germany, and Marcus Soder, the head of the Christian Democrats in, in the state of Bavaria we start formally two separate parties. Soder, who I'm not personally a fan of, was much more popular with Werthers. And yet Laschet, for essentially institutional reasons, prevailed as the joint candidate of these two Christian Democratic parties. So as a result, Laschet too is running a poor campaign. Does not seem to be a particularly inspired choice as the likely future Chancellor of Germany. The Social Democrats, Olaf Scholz is running a relatively decent campaign where the Social Democrats just aren't seen anymore as a natural governing party in Germany. So as a result, a majority of voters now say that they don't particularly want any of the three major candidates as Chancellor of Germany. So even though the populists are likely to be contained in this election, there are structural problems in German politics. There likely is going to have to be a complicated freeway coalition at this point, not the kind of two party coalition that most politicians had hoped for. And whoever the next German Chancellor is going to be. And at this point it's likely to be Laschet, but it could well be Baerbock or even Scholz is going to start without the trust of much of a population, without any enthusiasm, without much moral on political capital. That is not likely to lead to a doom of German democracy or anything like that. But it will diminish Germany's standing in the world. It will diminish the Chancellor's ability to actually shape the country, to make reforms that are necessary after a couple of decades of Angela Merkel, to be more active on the international scene, to stand up for liberal democratic values face to face with Poland or Hungary, for example. So all of that is quite bad news. My guest today is Camille Foster. Camille is one of the most original and idiosyncratic voices on the American political scene today. He co hosts a great rollicking podcast called the Fifth Column. He runs and is involved in various media ventures. And he just has a very unique view of on the country. An African American, he is skeptical of our traditional concepts of race. He's a critic of Trump. He also is critical of a prevailing way of thinking about culture on the left, as you'll see. We had a really interesting conversation at the Persuasion Festival about a month ago about how to think about race and other key issues in the United States. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation.
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D
Camille Foster, welcome to the podcast, Yasha.
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B
It is always splendid to talk to you, always.
- [06:59]
D
It's wonderful to see you. The whole country for the last weeks seems to have been talking about critical race theory. And you have an interesting, slightly unique position in this because I take it that you're both a critic of critical race theory, but you think especially the way in which some of those concepts are taken and taught in schools is in fact worrisome. And you are one of the co authors alongside with dear friends of persuasion like David French and Thomas Chatterton Williams, as well as some people who are not particular friends of persuasion like Jason Stanley, op ed in the New York Times, criticizing the banning of the teaching of critical race theory in many state legislatures. Tell me, first of all, how should we think about critical race theory and why is it something that does in fact concern you?
- [07:46]
B
I appreciate you asking. And yeah, the past week has actually been quite interesting, having recently co authored this piece with a bunch of people that have very different perspectives on the world in general and on any number of issues. We could disagree with one another sharply, but generally we all have good relationships with one another that are pretty respectful both in real life, as we say, and online, despite the fact that we can have sharp difference agreements with perhaps other people who are not cut from very different class from some of our collaborators. But on this particular issue, I think we all had some concern about the approach that people are taking to address what has become kind of a central issue in America's like ongoing, it seems, and ever evolving culture war. And I do think there's kind of one culture war that's been happening and just a bunch of different issues that kind of slot in for the major point of contention. This month or the past couple of months it's been critical race theory, which I think is kind of the first problem. I mean, we know the distinction that, you know, someone like Joy Reid might talk about critical race theory and say, oh, you know, that's just something they talk about in law school. But as it happens in the culture now, critical race theory, like alt right or any number of other phrases, has now come to mean a bunch of different things, like a universe of different concepts. They're all loosely associated with, like racial essentialism. And in the current debate, there are questions about the degree to which these things ought to be involved in K through 12 education and the ways in which they can be involved in K through 12 education. And unfortunately, rather than just having a conversation publicly about how we ought to be approaching education and what can be included there, this has become a circumstance where there are some people, some activists, I think, who have been kind of advancing critical race theory in different ways. Again, whatever that basket of things is in classrooms and sometimes in ways that have been disturbing and concerning to some parents. And the response on the right largely, but not exclusively has been, well, we're going to ban critical race theory, which once you get into the process of outright bans on ideas, not methodology, not pedagogy so much, but on ideas, this becomes just a really thorny issue. And K through 12, there's obviously a lot of autonomy that states have to make determinations about what can be included in curriculum and what can't from a legal standpoint. But the Times opinion piece that we authored together was really about the principle. We live in a society where we have very different values, and to the extent we have this project of public education that we are all corporately funding, then we have to have very serious conversations about what that institution is supposed to be doing, what its values are, and how we adjudicate actual disputes about what is true and what is the best way to talk about our history and what is the best way to deal with issues related to identity, and how do we address genuine concerns and actual abuses when it comes to, say, racial discrimination or any number of other things that may cause students discomfort in an environment where they're necessarily going to be confronted with difficult, challenging topics.
- [10:54]
D
So perhaps let's get away a little bit from the term of critical race theory, because at least in the way in which the debate has played out over the last weeks or months, it's frankly been silly season with even supposedly serious writers and intellectuals just making, I think, very strategic, very partisan arguments about what is or isn't critical race theory just to serve whatever the point seems to be at any one moment, when we focus on what's actually being taught in K to 12 education, how is that changing? What about. Is this good? And what about it should we be worrying about when it comes to topics like race in the United States?
- [11:29]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's like a universe of other things that have happened over the last 13 months where this quote unquote, racial reckoning has taken place. And race has become a center point for so many different conversations where we're reframing every aspect of American life and various conflicts that we've been having forever and different considerations, our sense of the country's place in history, our sense of our individual responsibility to one another. We're framing it all with respect to race. It only makes sense that in the context of public education, the same thing is beginning to happen. And I think there's a sense in which it is good to scrutinize these concepts, these ideas. They're a part of our milieu, and they're often a part of our relationships with one another in the world and our institutions. But I don't think that the conversations we've been having about race become more sophisticated as a result. I think there's kind of this veneer of sophistication. We don't challenge the ideology of race. We assume it to be true. And there are a great many different essentialist threads that have been woven into the fabric of our conversations about these things. The inherent disadvantage of black people, the necessary, quote, unquote, racist proclivities of white people, and a flattening of the world when it comes to outcomes that is now pervasive in terms of beliefs about outcomes, that when there are disparities in outcomes, that all of those disparities are necessarily by definition racist. Like essentially a changing of the definition of the word. And what's important is that we've changed the way that we use it in a practical way, but we haven't taken away any of the sting of racist being primarily attached to people and things that are kind of actively harmful or derogatory with respect to someone's opinions or perspectives on an issue. And I think that that's created no shortage of problems. And virtually every context and in the context of public education, it's certainly no different.
- [13:28]
A
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- [13:49]
D
You mentioned the term essentialism, which I think is important in this context. I mean, one of the Strange things that has happened is that when you look at some of the academic and intellectual origins of what people now are calling critical race theory, there's an emphasis on strategic essentialism by people like Gayatri Spivak who say, look, race is a social construct and all of these identities aren't real in any biological or other sense. But in a society in which some people are victimized on the basis of a perceived identity, it makes sense for them strategically, strategically to rally around that kind of banner and fight back. And I think that there's something convincing to that. Spivak herself has disclaimed the term because of the way it started being used in part in India by Hindu nationalists. So there's an interesting story there. But I guess what I most worry about when it comes to something like K12 education is the way in which the strategic element of a strategic essentialism has dropped out and there is now often just essentialism with a capital E. The thing that just most shocks me, which I think is more prevalent in private schools and public schools, is these imposed racial affinity groups, which is not 14, 15 year old students saying, hey, I want to be part of the African American club. I want to be part of whatever club. That's freedom of association. It is teachers telling sometimes 10 or 9 or 11 year olds, hey, you're Asian, you're Latino, you're black, you've got to go over in this group or in that group, or in that group, and then we'll talk to you as a group. I know you are a strong critic of essentialism and a strong critic of race as a concept. In a way, how should we be thinking about the real way in which race structures our social relations, but without rarefying a concept that can be very harmful?
- [15:27]
B
I mean, for me, I think it's about engaging with the genuine complexity of the world and the genuine complexity of the historical circumstances that we come out of that brings us into the present context. And I think, unfortunately, rather than, again, engaging with that complexity, it's very convenient to allow ourselves to slip into this thinking where, well, it's just about the primacy of race. Race has been the force that has been principle with respect to oppression and repression and disadvantage in this country. So we'll talk about things in that way primarily from now on for the rest of time. And the reality is that it's always race and, and acknowledging that reality and engaging with that complexity rather than allowing ourselves to slip into a sensibility where all privilege is kind of derived in this fundamental hierarchical way. And if you are in the intersectional sense, like woman plus your sexuality is one thing plus your race is another thing, then that gives us a sense of your disadvantage score. And I just think that that is obviously fraught. To go about trying to understand the world in that way, you necessarily lose a lot of the nuance that's really important for understand. And I think in the context of education in particular, when you're dealing with kids, I've been thinking about just the notion of education more broadly. Like, what is that project about? It seems to me that it's about helping young people be able to kind of discover the world and make sense out of it. Not merely transmitting our beliefs from one generation to another, giving them an approved catalog of things that we know to be true, but really allowing them to get particular tools about art, about culture, about science, so that they can probe those different subjects. And I think race is kind of another social concept that we ought to be probing and asking serious questions about. What does this mean to who we are? How does it inform our understanding of different contexts and different circumstances? And I think it's interesting that that's kind of what a project like the 1619 project is supposed to do. But unfortunately, it only gives you one lens on that. And as a result, I think it loses a lot of the important details that complicate that story and make it even more fascinating and interesting, like all of those stories. So the sensibility that I have is to view race as one thing among many things that are important historically and give us a sensibility about what is actually happening in the real world today and allowing ourselves the ability to engage with those things in substantive and critical ways. And I mean critical in the broadest sense of the word there. Not in any sort of we're tearing this down and breaking it down, but we're tearing it down and breaking it down for the purpose of understanding how it works and what it means and why it might be valuable, harmful, disadvantageous in different circumstances, depending on what our goals are.
- [18:27]
D
So you were mostly talking about how we should think of race today in analytical terms and how it does. It doesn't shape our society at the moment. I guess another way of getting at a similar question is to think about what we should hope the role of race to be in 50 or 100 or 200 years in the United States or in other democracies around the world. It seems to me that there's broadly four positions, two that are on the very essentialist end. So there's the ethno Nationalist or the white nationalist position that race is real and it'll always be there and societies will thrive insofar as the supposedly superior group manages to stay in charge. That's obviously something that neither of us has any sympathy for.
- [19:11]
B
Yes, I would say so.
- [19:12]
D
I think there's a second position that's actually in some ways structurally surprisingly similar, which is that race is so essential and it's so deeply baked in that it'll always define communities and societies. And rather than having liberal democracy, in which we primarily are seen as individual citizens with the same rights and duties, we should primarily be seen as members of our racial or perhaps religious communities. That is our prime identification, and that will always be the case. That tends to have a more left wing valence, but I think it shares some ontological commitments, as it were. I think neither of us has much sympathy for that position either. I want to hear where you fall between the third and the fourth. So I think the third position is something like humans are deeply tribal creatures, and so questions like race or religion deeply structure society, and they likely will for a long time. But the project of institutions is to push against that, to allow us to have solidarity with each other, to allow us to maintain a complicated project like the United States of America that is a multi ethnic, multiracial democracy. And so, yes, we need to recognize these groups and the fact that they'll never go away, but we need our institutions to some extent to push against them precisely so we don't end up with one of the first two scenarios, neither of which is attractive. I think a fourth position is even more sanguine about the possibility of pushing back against groups and saying no, Actually, ideally we should aim for an America 50 or 100 years from now where people really don't in any big significant sense think of themselves as a member, certainly of an ethnic or racial group, perhaps not even in a religious group. So that's a slightly different question. How do you feel about options 3 and options 4? Would you put it differently? Do you think I've cut up the space in the wrong way?
- [20:56]
B
No, I think that's a fabulous delineation and I especially value the way that you talked about the first two categories together, which is essentially like the racist and anti racist paradigm. And the important thing, the unifying concept there is the primacy of race. That is the most important thing about our experience or among the most important things about our a spirit. And yes, I reject it wholesale because it's obviously false. And I think the third one is interesting and I Think it does pay attention to the reality that people do have a natural proclivity to sort of gravitate towards those differences, the delineations that they're able to detect that we're innately tribal in some sense, and that perhaps this will always be with us. The difficulty I have with that is there's a bit of the naturalistic fallacy that's in operation there. It's kind of. It'll always be there, so we can kind of get used to it. And there's a sense in which, like, you know, we have a child. My daughter yesterday slapped me in the face and kicked me. She's three. I have an expectation that these things will happen. Like, we have violent urges from time to time. And one of the great things that we've accomplished as a civilization is developing the capacity to cooperate with one another, to see one another in ways that are more than potential things to be used to our advantage so we can attain some ends or obstacles to the ends that we want to attain. And sometimes my daughter doesn't see me as more than either of those two things. And developing the skills, developing the restraint necessary, all of the things that we need. The acculturation to the three liberal traditions that Jonathan Rauch talks about in his new book, in terms of both economics and our social order and in terms of our ability to sort of grok what is true about the World and the Constitution of Knowledge is a great book if folks haven't read it. For those insights in particular, I think we have to have kind of aspirational values. And I think only the fourth one really contains that. And the fourth one that you just laid out is about granting one another the dignity of our individuality. And I think only an aspiration towards a world where we are regarding race in precisely the same sort of way that we regard height or eye color or hair color, perhaps more precisely because you can change your eye color and hair color with some assistance. And no one comes to think, oh, no, now you're a totally different person. You're blue today. This is remarkable. And it's not colorblindness as an aspiration. I've always thought that colorblindness didn't quite go far enough. Also, colorblindness sounds like a defect, like we're trying to ignore something which I think is very different than recognizing racecraft for what it is, which means appreciating the ways that it's sort of changed us and altered us and altered the way that we thought about the world and had an impact on people's actions and the aspiration to move towards a world where we recognize those phenotypic traits for what they are and the degree to which they may correlate with certain kinds of outcomes and patterns and social realities that we have to exist alongside, but we understand that they can be completely meaningless, that in many instances that when we add race to the conversation, we're obfuscating things that are actually true about the world as opposed to actually illuminating things. And various thinkers have a very difficult time actually getting to the point where they can make that recognition. It's what leads you to a world where Ibram Kendi becomes a leading thinker and intellectual by giving you all sorts of clumsy solipsisms and circular logic as bold insights where he can say vacuous things like racism and capitalism are twins that need to be separated. And it can't be separated. If you love capitalism, you love racism. It's insane. But he's celebrated. So the fourth is the only option for me for sure.
- [24:43]
E
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- [25:01]
F
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- [25:37]
E
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- [25:44]
D
That's interesting. Tell me a little bit more about your skepticism towards the idea of colorblindness. I quite like the distinction that I believe Tom Olade drew in the pages of persuasion between race blindness and racism blindness. He says that the critics of something like colorblindness want to say, well, you just want to Blind yourself to the existing realities of racial discrimination. And he says, well, the answer to that is to say we shouldn't be racism blind. We shouldn't be blind to the way in which racism deeply shapes society. But by and large, we should be race blind in how we ourselves act, which is to say that we shouldn't make how people are treated, especially by the state in various circumstances, depend on the color of their skin. It seems to me like you find that still insufficient. But there's a third thing we need to do which is to actually try to reduce the way in which race even determines our mental categories. Explain to me how you would go beyond this race, racism, blindness, distinction and how we do that without becoming racism blind.
- [26:48]
B
Well, there's two things. One, I think there's just kind of aesthetics here. There's a sense in which, like, anti racist offends me because I don't know what you're in favor of. And in much the same way, kind of race blindness, colorblindness. Well, in the real world, if we were talking about colorblindness, this is a deficiency of yours. You're unable to do something. And that just seems strange to me. So I know that what I want is a world where we're talking about equality under the law and a genuine sense of respecting the dignity of people's individuality. And there's a sense in which race conceptually just does not actually allow us to do that. It's an obstacle to that project. So I would prefer for us to better define our terms in that respect. But I don't know that I disagree with the sentiment that it's important to be aware of racism. But I don't have to be aware of racism or to be aware of the effects of race historically and how it correspond to people's outcomes today. But I don't think that one needs to a kind of willful or deliberate or kind of learned race blindness alongside a conception of the ways that disparities have injured people. And maybe I can illustrate it in this way. I have a friend, for example, who is a government contractor, and he has an 8A certification because for African Americans you get sort of preferential treatment in contracting. I wonder if I should tell this story. I'm doing it anyways. And he happens to be first generation American. He's Ghanaian. And there's something perverse and absurd about a system that allows a guy who is very bright to leverage a system that was built for the descendants of disadvantaged persons, slaves, to be able to get a leg up in today's society. Well, his family, his ancestors were capturing and perhaps selling slaves into slavery. He immigrates here, is among the brightest people in the country, most advantaged, and is taking advantage of a program that is supposed to help the descendants who his ancestors kind of helped to deprive. It's an obvious absurdity, and people pat themselves on the back about this. And the move that we've made in recent months is not to better understand the various ways in which this concept is convoluted and confuses things. It's the capitalized B in black in the New York Times. And to imagine that by further emphasizing these concepts, by further committing ourselves to the pernicious fiction of the ideology of race, we can kind of liberate ourselves from something. I think that race blindness for a while seemed to be the kind of prevailing ideal in this country, but because we weren't trying to liberate ourselves from race, craft from race as an ideology, I think it's set a bit of a trap for us. It allowed us to slip back into this fixation with this idea. And I think it's very frustrating and disappointing. And in the worst forms, it's probably a bit dangerous.
- [29:45]
D
You said something on Twitter recently which
- [29:47]
B
made it a lot of terrible things there sometimes get myself in trouble. I'm sorry.
- [29:52]
D
No, no. This is something that resonated with me. It was basically to say that so many people aren't driven by their own substantive beliefs, don't look at a particular political controversy in light of their values, and try to think how the value should inform a response to it. They simply look at what people they dislike say and try to say the opposite. Describe that phenomenon, how you see it playing out in the public debate, but tell us how you, as somebody who's a committed libertarian, try not to do that yourself. How is it that you look to your guiding principles in a way that hopefully allows you to fall into the trap of what I, at the suggestion of Ahmed Yofi, has started to call one atism.
- [30:31]
B
One atism is a great term for that. I'll start by saying. And we kind of talked about this briefly before, but after writing the Times editorial, I got some interesting feedback, very intense feedback, and in a couple of instances, received text messages from friends who felt deeply betrayed and who were outraged that I would do this. And I've had to tick through what the reasons are because my perspectives haven't changed. In many instances, we kind of interact with one another privately, and I've shared my perspective on these issues. And in other instances, I've talked about these things publicly. But in this particular case, I'm kind of doing it alongside other people and perhaps doing it a bit too successfully in the sense that it causes some genuine headwinds, winning the argument sort of way. So I can understand that. But I've also noticed that there are three things that happened beyond the occasions where I'm getting some sort of substantive, like, interesting critical feedback arguments that I think make me genuinely reconsider my position and wonder if there isn't specific ways in which the other side of this might be right. But beyond that, it's guilt by association. It's folks kind of misleadingly interpreting things in a way that I think is, like, misguided. It's a misreading. And sometimes those things are willful and deliberate, and other times they're very understanding. And those deliberate readings, I'd say, are just misinterpretations that I think veer into being misrepresentations. And some of them seem pretty deliberate, maybe even strategic, in kind of a Bannonite sort of way, where you're flooding the Zone with shit. You're publishing a screed, a tirade against this piece, this editorial insisting that there's a defect in the way that it interpreted a law, which means that you can't trust this thing in the hopes of making certain people don't read it. And I think all of that is just kind of a reflection of this weird hyper polarization that has been happening increasingly, which I think polarization probably doesn't even go far enough. You and I both talked to Martin Gurry about this, and I'm partial to his observations about the decline of our ability to kind of trust in institutions. And as a result, I think people have kind of found something to their ideological commitments, their commitments to particular partisan factions that's been reinforced and has kind of replaced some of the other mechanisms that they might have used to determine what's true and not. And as a result of that, policing the boundaries of your group and enforcing these kind of senses of loyalty has become really indispensable to people. And as a result, I think that creates some real problems. And interestingly, for me, being someone who has heterodox politics, I certainly describe myself as a libertarian, probably anarcho capitalists in other contexts. Spoonerite is another thing for anyone who knows who Lysander Spooner is. But it's one of those things where that tribe is sufficiently small and diverse that I don't have the same tribal Loyalties that motivate me to rush to defend a position on behalf of my team. I have friendships and partnerships with people and associations across the political landscape, and we disagree vehemently on a ton of stuff. And as a result, I think that there's kind of a necessary bit of pragmatism that comes to the forefront of all of my thinking about different political issues. I know that I have very good, smart people who disagree with me forcefully on virtually everything. And as a result, naturally curious person that I am, I'm always trying to understand their point of view. And that commitment to trying to understand this very smart person's disagreement with me, in sharp disagreement with me, makes it very difficult, I think, to lurch into the deliberate presumption that someone is operating in bad faith or that they're making things up or that they're just stupid because they disagree with me. And it's possible that someone does all of the disagreeing with me for all those bad reasons. But I think being aware of the fact that it's possible that I'm wrong in virtually every circumstance is enough of a break, at least for me, to avoid the same trap.
- [34:38]
D
Yeah, I think there's something very telling about this political moment where people always describe anybody whose positions they dislike and who gets a little bit of attention as grift. There seems to be, you know, an inability.
- [34:50]
B
It all goes to motive. Yeah.
- [34:51]
D
Yeah. There seems to be an inability to think that people can be smart and good and have a different position than you. They can be smart and good and have the same position as you. They can be smart and have a different position and be a bad person, or they can be stupid and perhaps a good person have a different position than you. But the three things together, it's a sort of classic dilemma, I suppose. What do you think about the way in which, in the current discourse, that pressure is, I think, sometimes especially strong for black writers or for Asian or Latino writers, when sort of there's this idea that who you are by terms of identity should determine how you see the world. And it's a view that political elites in the United States seem to hold on to even as reality keeps telling them that is not the case. I was not just struck by the mayoral election in New York City, which was won by Eric Adams, a former cop who made his name by being very critical of police misconduct and police violence, but who also insisted New Yorkers need good cops on the street and as many cops on the street rather than fewer cops on the street. I was even More struck by an article in the New York Times in the days after his election which said, oh my God, you know, it's so strange that progressives have trouble winning over voters of color. I mean, what can possibly explain that? And it made it sound like this is the first time that anybody had asked this question of that possibility had been raised. Even Joe Biden won on the support of African Americans, even for polls showed that a huge majority of African Americans and other groups rejected ideas like Defund the police. Describe a little bit what that sort of in group pressure is like and how we can go against it, I mean, within communities, but also how we can disabuse, you know, frankly, white liberal journalists at places like the New York Times from the notion that a black intellectual has to be somebody who agrees with Ibram Kendi rather than somebody who agrees with Camille Foster or Thomas Chatterton Williams or any number of other writers and thinkers.
- [36:41]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. We've seen this dynamic before. I mean, this is that old trope what's the matter with Kansas? And in this particular case it's what's the matter with Brooklyn? It's the same sort of thing like these people don't know what's good for them. They're voting against their own interest. And I think there's a pair of problems there. I mean, one is the ideologically driven presumptions about what is imagined to be best for a collection of people in a particular area by some elites who they have their opinion. And then the second thing is what we've been talking about all along here, just the essentialist aspect of it and presumptions based on the characteristics of those individuals. And you know, there's the fact of people who self identify as black voting in a particular way over time. And then there's the reality of the many distinct reasons why they choose to vote in those ways and the degree to which, you know, having a two party system creates this sense of like false cohesion and a sense that these people are kind of their senses and their beliefs and convictions are easily discernible. That's just wrong. Is factually inaccurate. As for my own personal experience, it's interesting. I mean, I'm a first generation American as well. My family is from Jamaica, I happen to be born in the country. And as a result I've always had a tension between the notion of blackness, as I thought of myself as a black person for many, many years before reaching the epiphany that I reached at some point to disregard all that kind of racial nonsense personally. But I always had a tension between black as kind of like African American and black as Jamaican. And as time gone on, I went even further to have this real tension between any enforced rigid identity that's imposed on me versus an identity that's kind of born out of things that are actually relevant and say something about my life and my experience and necessarily true about my life and experience, like I'm a father and I'm a husband. Like these are things that are literally true. I'm an entrepreneur, literally true. I'm libertarian. These are my actual beliefs. To say I am black, what on earth does that mean? Even to say I'm Jamaican? It's kind of like, well, not nationality wise, but yeah, some of my ancestry comes from there. These are very crude concepts that we often treat in a very serious way. And again, that is the lack of serious scrutiny that we're actually attributing to these things that we've given so much power and prominence in our society. We imagine we're being sophisticated when we talk about criminal justice and criminal justice reform and structural racism. And we forget that just like race, I mean, this is just our instinct to categorize things. We've done absolutely nothing. When we recast a reality that we discover in the world, these racial disparities that may even be repeating patterns as systemic racism. And imagine that we've arrived at some kind of eureka moment. All your work is still ahead of you. To quote Christopher Hitchens, some follow the noise.
- [39:52]
E
Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or for crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [40:08]
D
so you pointed out that it's a mistake to ascribe all differences in outcome between groups to racism. And I think when you look around the world, there's good indication that you have different outcomes between all kinds of groups in countries from Germany to Japan to Malaysia. And you could go on at the same time, it's obviously true, I think in the context of the United States that particularly when you look at the group of descendants of slaves, as you're pointing out, often actually black immigrants to the United States and the descendants are very successful. But when you look at the descendants of slaves, they do suffer real disadvantages as a group. And it has obvious historical reasons that are rooted in deep and abiding injustices. How should we balance the recognition that not every difference of outcome by group is in Itself pernicious with the awareness that in the American case, one of the reasons why a large portion of a black population of the United States continues to be less well off and have less wealth is rooted in the history of slavery and that injustice. And what does that mean for what kind of government policies we should adopt, what kind of social norms and morals we should adapt, how we can hope to overcome what I sometimes call long shadow of past domination without reifying race in all the ways that I agree with you would be quite harmful.
- [41:30]
B
Yeah, well, it's interesting. I have a number of different thoughts about this, and I'm actually interested in yours because I think there's a sense in which I don't have any desire to kind of prioritize suffering on the basis of how it was arrived at. To the extent you are a child who lives in an impoverished household and you lack resources and you have only access to a crappy school, it doesn't matter. To me, if I'm describing a kid who lives in East New York or Appalachia, the concern is equivalent. These are fellow human beings who are suffering. This is a societal problem that needs to be addressed. And the fact that a greater proportion of black young people find themselves in that circumstance than the proportion of white people that find themselves in that circumstance. I think there's something obscene about presuming that this is kind of more or less important to address the disparity between the racial groups and not regard those children as individual and to think collectively about how we can address really hard social problems. And for that reason, my fixation is on the problems themselves and what we can do technically to address them. And it's essential, in which, of course it matters why a car accident happens, but obsessing over that to the detriment of our ability to actually address the injuries of the parties involved in the car accident, where you're not even loading up the injured people onto gurneys and getting them into ambulances and getting them off to the hospital is just. It gets me a little worked up. It's beyond dispiriting, which I think is what we're doing precisely with this critical race theory debate. I think it is insane that in a country where we have so many underperforming schools in cities like la, New York, Atlanta, like the greatest cities in America, we have school systems that are failing in some instances, more than half of the students that go to them, they can't teach them to read or do mathematics. And instead of talking about that issue, that very hard problem, we are obsessing over whether or not we're talking about the Tulsa race massacre in school. Well, I imagine most of these kids don't know anything about Bacon's Rebellion either. Is that a function of us trying to hide the truth from them and obscure facts? Or is it a function of like something else that is actually gravely wrong with our educational system? And are we actually able to marshal the resources and the will to address those fundamental, difficult problems as opposed to engaging in this preposterous theater where one of the largest teachers unions in America brings in Ibram X Kendi to talk to them about racism, to spit these baseless tropes about the idea that any racial disparity is necessarily racist and that alone we're anti racist. We have to fix the disparities. It's obscene. This is a Harrison Bergeron style worldview. And I'm astonished that it has achieved the kind of dominance that it has amongst elite intellectuals and amongst elite culture in this country. It's kind of frightening in some respects, because if they can embrace such an impoverished and frankly dangerous idea like that, like what other corruption are they capable of, of embracing? And this is to the detriment of children. And it allows the teachers unions and other factions to try and impose this crap through the schools. And the response from people angry about this for the most part is we have to ban critical race theories and get our schools back. They weren't working before they were broken. This is an inadequate solution, and it's certainly an inadequate solution to insist that what we need are bans on particular bad ideas that in no universe in the world will be able to pass. In most of the states, where these things are perhaps the most ridiculous, where there are the most obscene and egregious iterations of quote unquote, critical race theory bad ideas. You can't pass these ridiculous bans. You cannot. This will not fix the problem. I think I saw someone on Twitter say, and it really resonated with me that laws don't make you safe. And it's true, you know, they create criminals. They don't make you safe. I think for anyone who is a proponent of these bands, to bring it back around to that topic, I feel like I'm doing a lot of monologuing today. I'm sorry, Yasha.
- [45:56]
D
It's very interesting monologuing, and that's the point of having you on.
- [46:00]
B
But for anyone who's a proponent of these bands, the challenge that I have for you is like, how many pink slips do you have? How many Handcuffs or whatever else do you have? How many teachers are you willing to kind of frog march out of these buildings for saying things that you deem inappropriate? How many show trials are you willing to have to adjudicate? Whether or not a teacher who insists that a student should read, say, ta, Nehisi Coates or James Baldwin for that matter, who have scathing things to say about America in cases where you don't necessarily give them a competing view, should people be fired over that sort of thing? I imagine that's not the world that we want to live in. But trying to adjudicate this on kind of an issue by issue basis, like one problematic book at a time, I think ignores the fact that there is a genuine cultural defect. And you cannot drive out that cultural defect that makes us obsess over race in the way that we do this obviously unhelpful and counterproductive way that we do. You can't drive that out by making things illegal. You actually have to address it. You have to address the culture, I'm saying.
- [47:01]
D
Yeah, that seems right. I mean, speaking of the culture, how optimistic or pessimistic are you about where America is going? I always find myself torn between being very pessimistic about everything on the level of politics and media and increasingly what's taught in schools, how universities are run. I'm also relatively optimistic about the actual life of Americans. When you look at all kinds of indicators, you know, progress is not as fast as we might wish, but there's a lot more intercultural, interreligious, interracial friendships, marriages. There's a lot more people founding businesses together, really being in each other's lives in a real way. And of course, all the indicators of public opinion about the attitudes towards each other are improving as well. Do you think that this is the last kick of a society that was founded on race and we're trying to see everything for a racial lens and perhaps in 50 years that will all look quite antiquated and will have moved more towards what you call option 4. Or do you think that the way in which both political forces and some institutions are now trying to actually drive home the importance of race, including, of course, on the ethno nationalist right, that it's going to win and preserve racecraft for another generation or many more generations of Americans. What's the outlook in your mind?
- [48:20]
B
Yeah, you know, I have to be optimistic, I think, for the reasons that you indicated. I mean, when I think about the enormous progress that we've made as a species, the fact that We've spent so much of our history collectively at war with ourselves. Profound disadvantage to ourselves not collaborating, not innovating, not building things. And we've just had this incredible explosion of innovation in very recent years, really because of our ability to cooperate, to barter and exchange. And for that reason, I have to be a bit optimistic about our ability to continue in that vein. And I think it is incumbent upon us to be profoundly aspirational in that respect and to really talk about the world that we want to live in and the terms that actually capture our ambition, as opposed to limiting ourselves to thinking about what seems achievable. The reality is that when you think about the horrible conditions of revolutionary America, the profound disadvantages that were placed on people who didn't own property, who had the wrong gender, who had the wrong skin color, who came from the wrong family backgrounds, who didn't have access to the profound aspirational vision that is outlined in the founding documents of this country, like, there's a way to look at that and imagine, oh, that's really sad. Like, it's sad that this country didn't live up to its promise at that point in time and hasn't lived up to its promise throughout most of its history. But looked at in the right light, it's profoundly inspiring that out of the milieu of thousands millennia of subjugation and awfulness and superstition dominating our species and keeping us down, there was an ideal that was born, that took root, and that has constantly and steadily been improving outcomes for us and making our lives better. And there's this James Baldwin quote that always comes to mind, which I haven't committed to memory yet, so I had to go look it up. I don't want anyone to think I'm too smart, but I always think about it. And it starts out, I know what I'm asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand. And one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general and the American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible. And I mean, for me, I don't know how you can not want to do that. And for that reason, I can't not hope that we will rise to the occasion, because the alternative is just. It's simply too bleak to even consider.
- [50:54]
D
One of the things that I've started thinking about recently, and perhaps I'll ask you about that to round off a conversation, is that there's a Lot of cynicism at the moment about what kind of diverse democracies we can build. And a lot of that cynicism comes across as a kind of world wiseness. Look, you know, you want to move away from these groups being important. You want to have a society in which we emphasize the commonalities and the shared interests between members of different groups. That's just not how the world works. We're always going to be divided into these groups. These groups deeply structure society to such an extent that, you know, Princeton is a racist and a white supremacist institution and so on, as its president said last year. And therefore that's just the world to which we have to resign ourselves. And you know, I've been doing a lot of work in history and comparative politics and social psychology in writing my next book. And most of those societies in which people's loyalty was most strongly to the ethnic or religious group than to the state of a nation ended up in really violent forms of conflict over time. And so I wonder whether the thing that comes across as worldwide and that sets itself up against naive people who want to emphasize the need to go beyond primary association with groups in that way. Well, there's not actually them who are quite naive about how those societies will work out in the long run. And that's certainly how I think in the concrete example, these 10 year olds being split into affinity groups.
- [52:26]
C
Right.
- [52:26]
D
Like you're thinking that these white kids who then form one of the affinity groups whom you're telling to feel bad about themselves and to engage in anti racist activism are going to become these super enlightened, self abnegating people. Everything we know about groups throughout history is that it's much more likely that they'll say, well if you're telling us the most important thing about us is that we're white, then let's identify as bad and fight for our interests. That's how human groups usually. So I guess my question is who's being naive here? And is there a conflict between idealism and the best chance to create a fair diverse democracy? Or actually do those things go hand in hand?
- [53:05]
B
Yeah, I feel like you're asking me a question that you already know the answer to. You loaded it up there. I don't know how anyone can guilty as child. I don't know how anyone can't appreciate the degree to which they're good intentions when they segregate children by race and tell one group of kids you're privileged and there's a problem with that and you need to do something about it. You need to work on your problems. And the other group of kids are encouraged to say, well, yeah, that's right. Also I'm disadvantaged and there's so much wrong and everything is working against me. And you can't imagine that this will breed resentment and a lack of self esteem and less empathy, not more. And it's bottomless awfulness. I have a very difficult time with that. And again, I know I have smart friends who disagree with me and I want to understand their perspective and I try to, but I think that they're profoundly wrong about this. And I think that anyone who is concerned about racial issues and thinks that we need to place more emphasis on those things, I mean, the question I would put to them, the thing I would ask them to contemplate, is what does it look like when we're doing too much of that? What are the drawbacks of over concern with respect to these issues, with respect to race and identity in particular. And at the moment for the ascendant ideas related to racial equity and racial justice, et cetera, there doesn't seem to be any appreciation whatsoever for the degree to which there could be some sort of adverse unintended consequences related to this push beyond the sensibility that it will create some sort of racial backlash and will fuel white racist ethno nationalist violence, which again, I think there's some naivete in that and it's profoundly counterproductive. Yeah, just need to think a bit more clearly about what their project is and how best to help people. And perhaps it's appropriate to view people as people and not to imagine that focusing on Original Sin in the Garden can actually help to liberate us today from the challenges that we actually face.
- [55:11]
D
Camille Foster, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [55:14]
B
Thank you, Yasha. You bring out the best in me. I appreciate you.
- [55:23]
D
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight.
- [55:25]
C
Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like, rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about
- [55:33]
D
it, share it on Facebook or Twitter.
- [55:36]
C
And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to
- [55:41]
D
goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [55:50]
B
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [56:05]
G
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