Coleman Hughes with Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson

[0] Welcome to episode 34 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Jordan's daughter.

[2] This is an actual interview podcast.

[3] The podcast is also available in video form on my YouTube channel.

[4] So if you want to see the video form, it's at YouTube .com slash Michaela Peterson videos.

[5] Or you can search Michaela Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Coleman Hughes into YouTube.

[6] I'll explain why.

[7] This is technically dad on my.

[8] my podcast.

[9] I thought if I set up the whole podcast and dad could just walk in and do it, it would be easier for him.

[10] So we ended up doing it together.

[11] We interviewed Mr. Coleman Hughes, a young, extremely intelligent man that dad will introduce when the podcast starts.

[12] I was so happy to see him able to work that it really ended up being more my dad's podcast than mine.

[13] It's probably 90 % him and of course Coleman speaking.

[14] As you know, dad has been incredibly ill with something terrible called acathesia and hasn't been able to work much, not like this, for almost two years.

[15] So this was an absolute thrill to do, and I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.

[16] Next week's episode features Wim Hof.

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[37] Hi there, everyone.

[38] We're privileged tonight to have, as a guest, Mr. Coleman Hughes, who is one of the most promising young intellectuals on the American scene.

[39] I met him a couple of years ago at a function, I think it was in New York, although it might have been in Washington.

[40] Was it New York?

[41] It was New York.

[42] where I heard him speak as well and was extraordinarily impressed.

[43] And so we're going to talk to him tonight about his ideas.

[44] Coleman, it's great to see you.

[45] Let us know what you're up to.

[46] Great to be seen.

[47] I'm here in New York hunkering down during the sort of second quasi lockdown that we're experiencing.

[48] I am happy at work on my first book, which I just finalized the contract for.

[49] and I'm working on my own podcast.

[50] We've released 15 or 20 episodes so far called Conversations with Coleman.

[51] And I am enjoying all of the work that I'm doing and very happy to be speaking with you.

[52] Do you want to say a few words about your book?

[53] The book is a defense of colorblindness, colorblindness with respect to race, the notion that we should strive to treat people without regard to race and eliminate.

[54] racial categories as a criteria on which to base public policy.

[55] It's something that is enormously unpopular in elite circles, but still enjoys widespread support in the general public.

[56] So I'm trying to make the best defense of the colorblind ideal that I possibly can, because I think it's an enormously important principle to defend and to have the language to defend.

[57] So if you made a case for the people who hold the contrary position that race, for example, or perhaps ethnicity or even cultural background might instead be regarded as a category of critical importance, how would they justify their particular perspective?

[58] I think you could justify the opposing perspective in a number of different ways.

[59] I would say the strongest would be to appeal, to critique the notion that racism is merely a psychological phenomenon in the minds of individuals, a deviation from rational and objective treatment because of somebody's skin color.

[60] You can make the case that because of the circumstances of American history, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, convict leasing, all of the ways in which black Americans were subjugated, given that particular history, it makes sense for black Americans to form a group consciousness and to practice group -based politics and that you can't abstract away from the circumstances of that history and to their individual status.

[61] That's right.

[62] Yeah, well, it's a tricky one, isn't it?

[63] Because race, at least some forms of race, racial distinctions are pretty obvious perceptually.

[64] And so to talk about eliminating their use as a cognitive category, let's say, or conceptual category seems, what would you say, problematic, at least in some, in some regards, right?

[65] It's some effort to become colorblind.

[66] And the argument that because of history, race might be used, at least in some circumstances, as a factor for promotion of, let's say, affirmative of action policies, it certainly struck many people as a powerful argument.

[67] So what do you do?

[68] In your book, you're obviously going to take this argument on despite its power.

[69] Yeah, so the very first thing I plan to do in the book is clarify what I don't mean by the admittedly misleading word colorblind.

[70] Colorblind is a word like warmhearted.

[71] When you describe someone as warmhearted, you're not literally talking about the temperature of their blood pumping organ, you're speaking about the kindness of their spirit.

[72] Likewise, with colorblind, it's a, it's a word that employs a physical metaphor of not being able to see color to name an underlying principle, which is to strive to treat people without regard to their race and to enshrine race -ne race -ne neutral public policy.

[73] The notion that we could ever completely get to a place where we are truly colorblind, blind, which is to say you almost, in the literal sense, you basically don't even notice people's color is naive and utopian, but, but it seems, it's funny too, though, you know, to argue the other side for a moment is that it, it doesn't seem logical in many circumstances to use race as a criteria for judgment, because race per se has little or nothing to do with, let's say desired outcomes for the task at hand if you're doing something like hiring or if you're engaged in any activity with someone else that has an end in mind you should judge the people with whom that pursuit is going to be undertaken on criteria that have something to do with their ability to manage the pursuit yes so it seems purely logical to in some sense to be race blind.

[74] I mean, that's the argument that people make when stating that prejudice is its own punishment, because you lose, if you're prejudiced against women, for example, or if you're prejudiced against someone from a different racial background, then you lose the ability to hire them, let's say, and therefore decrease your pool of talent.

[75] Yeah, that's Gary Becker's, the economist's famous theory of discrimination.

[76] And there is certainly something to be to be said for that.

[77] I just I just read an MPR interview with a public health official who was talking about the coronavirus vaccine and how they plan to triage the vaccine once it's available.

[78] Who's going to get the vaccine first, second, and third?

[79] And what this person laid out made total sense.

[80] It was the people with, you know, conditions that comorbidities and the elderly would get it first, and then people like me, perfectly healthy 24 -year -olds, would be last in line.

[81] And then the NPR interview asked them, given the fact that communities of color are disproportionately affected, do you, you know, it was pressing her, this person to inject race as a category or criterion among the risk factors.

[82] And you can hear in the interview the public health official getting a little bit nervous and dancing around the issue a little bit, but saying not in so many words, we're just going to look at the risk factors themselves.

[83] And inevitably, if black people are disproportionately having comorbidity, are having risk factors, then our race neutral system will inevitably favor them as a side effect.

[84] But we don't need to use race as a proxy because it's such a poor proxy for any given thing in this world that you could care about, whether that is getting the best sound editor for your podcast or whether it's, you know, vaccinating the highest risk.

[85] populations first.

[86] So many of the arguments I make in the book are arguments to stop using race as an imperfect proxy for things like socioeconomics, public health, and merit.

[87] Why did you decide to take this on, you know?

[88] I mean, it's obviously not something that's going to make you particularly popular.

[89] And I think you have a history of taking on topics of that sort.

[90] I mean, what's driving you to do this?

[91] Well, I think there is something slowly slipping away from us as a culture that's worth holding on to.

[92] And I feel that from roughly ages zero to 16, I was living about as colorblind a life as one could.

[93] I effortlessly had white friends, black friends, Hispanic friends, and Asian friends.

[94] I didn't think of race as anything more than something to occasionally make a joke about.

[95] And when, you know, on the rare instances where I did encounter racism, I felt something closer to pity than anger for the racist, the small -minded bigot.

[96] It was obvious to me and everyone I knew why racism was evil.

[97] I grew up feeling goosebumps watching Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech, as many people do.

[98] But around the time I was 16, which would be 2012, I started to get a download of an entirely different kind of anti -racist ideology that explicitly rejected aspirational color blindness, which told me that by definition as a black person, I was a victim.

[99] of white supremacy, which encouraged me to focus on any way, no matter how minuscule in which I had been made a victim of white supremacy.

[100] And it seemed to me that this was not something that was encouraging a closer collaboration and a closer intimacy between people of different races, but was in fact creating neuroticism and paranoia around people of different races.

[101] Now there's an expectation, oh, you know, as I'm talking to this person, is this a person who's going to assume that I'm worried about microaggressions all the time and therefore keep their guard up?

[102] Or in the reverse, is this a person who is, you know, highly self -conscious of, quote -unquote, white privilege and now it just like it creates a space of nerves and anxiety around race and dishonesty that I found was not in any way, shape, or form fighting racism, but was making people racially neurotic.

[103] Do you think that the effects of that highlighting of race as a defining character, characteristic has particularly pernicious effects in like the white community or the black community or do you think that it's equally pernicious across communities?

[104] That's a good question.

[105] I suppose it affects folks in different ways.

[106] I know for for white people there's a I think there's a dividing line between white people who feel what is often called white guilt and those who don't and I think Shelby Steele's point is worth reiterating which is that white guilt is really misnamed it's not really guilt it's a terror at the notion that you might be racist that you might be part of the problem that and that you might be seen by others as racist it's a it's a a deep terror and I think those white people who do feel that often end up doing strange and unhealthy things in order to relieve that feeling of terror um they often end up you know debasing themselves and playing the masochist or um turning off the skeptical portion of their brain at any claim a black person makes um right which is a real debasing of the conversation yeah that's a terrible that's a terrible that's a terrible thing to do to an interaction to make it so that real communication can't take place yeah and and on the other side um with black people what it encourages us to do is to hone in on everything that's, to blame the world in society for everything that has gone wrong in our lives, which is, it encourages us to get a sense of meaning and identity out of the notion that we are victims, that society is arrayed against us, that we are part of a noble struggle against a society that is fundamentally hostile to people who look like us.

[107] You can see what a pervasive problem it is, because the last five or six minutes of this conversation, both you and I automatically assumed that there would be something in common about what the idea of race as a category does to white people and perhaps something different about what it does to black people.

[108] You know, I'm just bringing that up to show how tricky it is to manage the notion of colorblindness given the, given the perceptual presence of racial differences.

[109] So, I often find for what it's worth, that children tend to understand colorblindness intuitively much more easily than adults do.

[110] They understand how skin color is, you know, skin deep.

[111] It doesn't mean anything more than you make it mean.

[112] And so I often feel that we are miseducating our children or reiterating and reifying our own racial neuroses and perpetrating them on the next generation, generation after generation.

[113] I was going to say growing up in Toronto was pretty multicultural and I didn't, like my best friends were, is half black.

[114] I didn't notice.

[115] And like, and like you, I grew up with having friends that were, you know, Asian, black, whatever.

[116] And I don't think I noticed anything until I think I'm a little bit older than you.

[117] So I think it started in university when people started talking about race more.

[118] But I really didn't notice, especially when I was like little.

[119] No, it was one of the delightful things about being in Toronto was that that ideal of race blindness was really, yeah, had really been achieved, I would say, in many regards.

[120] When I went to Montreal, actually, and there were more Middle Eastern people and there were less black people, I actually noticed that there was like something missing kind of there when I moved to Montreal, but growing up in Toronto was pretty good for that kind of thing.

[121] So it does seem more recent, and I do agree that it's not good for people.

[122] It's made me uncomfortable about who I'm talking to, not based on their skin color, but based on what they think about skin color, whether or not I'm going to be blamed for something or whether or not there's already some animosity between us.

[123] That's exactly the kind of neurosis that I'm speaking of.

[124] And I think particularly in the past six months with the explosion of, uh, no. social justice and anti -racism as a result of the death of George Floyd in police custody and the protests and riots that ensued.

[125] There's a whole, you know, a whole underbelly of, you know, broken friendships and, you know, brand -new neuroses that people have developed as a result of seeing politics, political demands that cleave the world into good and evil imported into their Instagram feed every day and essentially been asked to pick aside in a very simplistic caricature of the problem and made to feel evil if they have any kind of, you know, skepticism about it.

[126] So that problem that you describe, I mean, I was reading some of the things that you wrote a couple of years ago today, and including your review of some of Thomas Sowell's work, the economist.

[127] And you talked about inequality, essentially, like it seems to me that what drives the continual discussion of race, particularly in the United States, because it's less intense here in Canada, is pervasive inequality, particularly inequality between, let's say, the Caucasian majority, although I don't believe it's a majority.

[128] anymore.

[129] It's still close to a majority and the and the black minority.

[130] The fact that that inequality continues to exist seems to be the motivating factor for the supposition that racial prejudice is still alive and well.

[131] But you reviewed documentation and I think this was from Seoul as well that showed that black immigrants to the United States weren't characterized by the same levels of the same levels of inequality did not obtain between black immigrants to the United States and Caucasians who were native to the US, so to speak.

[132] It was only the case for blacks who were born in the U .S. Yes, that's correct.

[133] Okay, so that's a real, that's really troublesome in about five different directions.

[134] It's troublesome because the fact of the inequality drives the presupposition that racism still exists but the fact that the inequality doesn't seem to exist in the case of immigrants casts doubt on the claim that it is in fact racism that's producing the inequality and then you're left with a question which is the question I wanted to pose to you you know you talked about you've written about cultural differences do you think that there are cultural differences among the black community in the United States that is driving inequality forward.

[135] Is it, I mean, I think that's even a more, what would you call, incendiary topic than the ones that we've been discussing.

[136] Yes, it is an incendiary topic, but it's also very plausibly true.

[137] And it's, I think people are very terrified of this topic and they really shouldn't be.

[138] They have a notion that, A, if, if there are, if cultural differences and differences in behavior patterns at the median or at the mean in different populations is the driving force behind unequal outcomes, then that means we can't possibly fix it.

[139] Whereas if it's systemic racism, then that's something we can fix.

[140] I think that's, uh, that's probably a, uh, a large exaggeration on both counts.

[141] Um, I, I, I, I, I, again, again, I'm not, I'm not necessarily the person that is going to lead a movement to, to fix behavioral, behavioral patterns.

[142] For example, how, how many hours the average black student studies per night compared to how many hours the average white student or, or Asian student studies, because there's also a large gap on that, on that score between whites and but I do think that local community groups can make a difference in those areas.

[143] Not only that, I think there's an unreflective assumption that fixing systemic racism and to give an example, or whether we want to call this systemic is a separate question, but fixing a phenomenon of racial bias widespread throughout an industry, such as real estate agents treating black homeowners different than they do white homeowners.

[144] I'm not sure that's so easy to fix or any easier to fix than a cultural problem because they both involve changing the behavior of people in private moments when they may not have an incentive to.

[145] Well, that's a big danger between reflexively assuming that prejudice is that the fundamental cause of the inequality that that that is driving the the the debate the fact of that inequality is that is tragic and it's not going to be remediated or repaired until we actually get the causal story correct and what that would mean if you were a good social scientist investigating this is that you would look at a whole array of potentially causal factors in an attempt to specify exactly what it is that is contributing, you'd probably find that there were multiple factors, you know, and hopefully they would be small enough so that some of them could be remediated.

[146] There's some reason that black immigrants to the U .S. do better.

[147] There's something going on there.

[148] I don't know what it is.

[149] I don't know the literature well enough.

[150] I want to propose a reason why I don't think inequality is as tragic as it seems.

[151] I think truly poverty and intergenerational poverty is tragic.

[152] And we have to separate that from inequality because they're conceptually different.

[153] Inequality, you know, taking a snapshot of the country at a particular time where you're comparing this group of 40 million black people in a freeze frame to, you know, over 100 million white people.

[154] and looking at a single number that describes how they're doing, which is just a mean, what that doesn't capture is, for example, the fact that this generation of Black Americans is doing much, much, much better than their parents.

[155] So something like 70 % of Black Americans report on the Federal Reserve Survey that they're doing, they're better off financially than their parents, which is actually a higher percentage than of whites who say the same.

[156] Wow.

[157] So there's two ways, importantly different ways to look at this.

[158] You can compare a group to itself at an earlier point in time.

[159] And if you do this with black Americans, you know, huge progress on health, you know, rates of death from cancer going down, life expectancy going up, incarceration rates, especially for black Americans in their 20s, have more than cut in half since I was in kindergarten.

[160] Or you get a very different picture if you compare two different groups at the same time, where one group had a massive head start in every way imaginable.

[161] It could be the case that both are making rather fantastic progress, but so long as one is ahead, it will look like nothing's changing if you're only looking at the gaps between them rather than the objective progress they're making.

[162] So the racial issue in the United States is often framed too in terms of discrimination against blacks on the part of Caucasians and, let's say, the white supremacy that has emerged as a consequence of that.

[163] But that also seems to fail as a hypothesis given the staggering success, let's say, of Indian Americans and of Asian Americans in general.

[164] because if it was an issue that was somehow related to the Caucasian community, per se, you'd think that we, they would have been just as efficient at holding back the progress of those other groups as holding back the progress of the black community.

[165] I feel like Asian Americans aren't even involved.

[166] They're doing really well and we're squabbling about race problems.

[167] Yeah, it's strange that it does seem like.

[168] that.

[169] I don't, I don't really understand that.

[170] Their success is an embarrassment to the theory that white supremacy is crushing.

[171] How do you, for example, say what has been said about standardized test scores, standardized tests, rather, like the SAT and ACT, that they are, they are created by Europeans, for Europeans, and are culturally biased in very subtle ways that, you know, there's some hand -waving that's done here.

[172] But the point is the test is made by white people for white people.

[173] And then Asians come with no particular background in European culture and destroy the white people on this test, right, on average.

[174] So, again, it's an embarrassment to the theory that all of society is tilted in favor of white people in subtle and not -so -subtle ways.

[175] And a lot of that with the Asians, a lot of that does.

[176] seemed to be a consequence of work habits.

[177] I mean, I looked into Asian versus Caucasian performance in the U .S. a number of decades ago for a federal government project that I was doing at the time.

[178] And the Asians, this was the children of first generation Asian immigrants, because the effect seems to go away by about three generations, maybe because their Asians are more thoroughly inculturated into the American community.

[179] but the children of first generation Asian immigrants worked hard enough so that that served as the equivalent to 15 additional IQ points, which is roughly the difference between the typical state university student and the typical high school student.

[180] Yep.

[181] So that's a good example, too, of a situation where cultural differences really seem to play a role.

[182] Yes, and I've seen data to that effect.

[183] in the U .S. as well, which suggests that just, you know, it's not that there's, there's, uh, what's explaining it is a genetic difference.

[184] It's that, it's that, you know, it's like more hours spent studying on average.

[185] It's mom and dad over the shoulder, um, you know, making sure that you do your homework and you do it right.

[186] Um, that phenomenon is not equally represented in every culture.

[187] And it's underrepresented, among black Americans.

[188] Well, that's, that'll be a statement that'll definitely make you popular again.

[189] So what, what, what makes you, how do you know that?

[190] Good question.

[191] So that we do have, we do have survey evidence, you know, on self -report surveys of how, how much, how many hours per night students study?

[192] um brookings has done work on this it's a it's a it's a taboo subject so i think most academics understandably uh stay away from it um we have extensive data from nielsen which is a uh one of the leading market research firms and of the famous nielsen television ratings which um investigate everything from what people spend their money on to how many hours of tv people watch per day and breaks it down by race and you find big differences in all of these things differences that are consequential if you are concerned about closing gaps in say wealth accrual and income and and all of these things so do will your book contain solutions i mean to these to these cultural problems just be because they're cultural doesn't mean they're easy to solve, obviously, right?

[193] Any more than they would be easy to solve if they were a consequence of prejudice or biological factors.

[194] But it isn't, it isn't obvious how to get from the situation that you're describing to, to somewhere better.

[195] Yeah, you know, my book is, is for adults.

[196] It's not, it's not it's not for children that want an easy solution to everything.

[197] It's for people who recognize the inherent tradeoffs and the complexity in the world.

[198] And it's not to say that there will be no solutions offered.

[199] I think there are probably more clear -cut solutions to problems like problems of policing and criminal justice than education.

[200] But I do think incremental progress is possible.

[201] And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not selling a solution, really.

[202] I think, um, um, I think, you know, many people have just understandably grown skeptical of people who come and say, oh, well, I've got the solution.

[203] Um, it's, it's simple.

[204] I've done all the analysis.

[205] I know everything that's wrong.

[206] And the solution is simple and it just requires us to, not be evil, right?

[207] I think the world is far too complicated and has far too many tradeoffs for that.

[208] So the book is about defending a different kind of anti -racism to go against the tide of the one that's currently sweeping, at least elite circles in academia, journalism, you know, Hollywood, corporate America, and so forth.

[209] but it's it's not it's not a you know if you want a if you want a simple solution this is not going to be the book for you so you don't think anti -biased training based on critical race theory is the answer so far the evidence has not shown that implicit bias trainings reduce any kind of racism that we could measure and um you know i think what it does do is it it alienates a lot of people you know, I'm not, I'm not saying that there should be no kind of diversity training in the context of a workplace, but if the sum total of the training is to tell people you are subconsciously racist in ways that you can't possibly, you know, by definition, consciously grab onto, and the solution is a kind of Robin DiAngelo -S.

[210] groveling, you know, there's nothing to suggest that that's the path forward for harmonious relations between people of different races.

[211] I spoke with Chloe Valdry and she had worked, you know Chloe Valdry probably, she'd worked on a kind of an anti -racist or diversity, I guess you'd call it, course.

[212] And I looked through her course and it was way more reasonable than.

[213] And the like part of the problem with this anti -bias training, I've had friends who go through it or if they're working at Starbucks or something.

[214] And it makes people angry to be to sit there and be talked at about how they're inherently racist.

[215] Like I feel like it's more likely to, I don't know if there's any, there probably aren't any studies on this, but I feel like it's more likely to increase racism than decrease it if you're just talking at people about how they're evil.

[216] Like I'd be mad about it if I had to sit through.

[217] that for a couple of days, especially if it was based on Robert DeAngelo's stuff.

[218] I mean, you know, I've been in a classroom at Columbia where a professor who happened to be white, though I think I would have been angry either way, said that all people of color are victims of oppression.

[219] And, you know, I was furious.

[220] I was furious that she would characterize it that bluntly and that broadly.

[221] I have to imagine the experience of being told that you are by definition of racist, which is what Robin DiAngelo proposes in her massively successful best -selling book, White Fragility.

[222] I have to imagine that that's also, it's a non -starter for many people.

[223] Yeah, I don't think that, you know, many of these social justice -inflicted bias trainings are inflected with a kind of dominance and, you know, it's a kind of, so, for instance, in DeAngelo's book, you know, the thrust of the book is that if you're talking to a black person about race and you're white, you cannot disagree with them.

[224] You can't do it.

[225] It's immoral.

[226] It's unethical to disagree with them about anything related to race, right?

[227] So what that essentially sets up is a completely unequal relationship.

[228] And I know what people will say, well, let's say in the broader context of, you know, a white supremacist culture, how can you possibly say that, you know, how can you possibly complain about, you know, white people being mistreated in any context?

[229] since, you know, whatever abstract ideas about, you know, white supremacist culture you have can't possibly justify a local explicit dominance of one race by another.

[230] How does that help counter the alleged white supremacist culture outside?

[231] There's never any proposed link even between the two.

[232] Well, and there is no indication that those implicit bias training programs, programs have their desired effect.

[233] I mean, it's not, it's very difficult to design psychological interventions that produce positive effects.

[234] And it's very difficult to do the studies necessary to demonstrate that those effects exist.

[235] And when you're dealing with a phenomena that's only weakly linked to racial attitudes, which would be, say, implicit bias as measured by the implicit association test, that's only weakly linked to actual behavior.

[236] And then, The training programs, at best, have a weak effect if it's not entirely negative.

[237] It's not a solution to the problem that we're discussing, although it has the advantage of looking like it's a solution, which, well, which is often something that's saleable, right?

[238] Something that looks like a solution that's actually implementable is saleable, even if it doesn't have the outcome that's desired, because what is being purchased isn't the outcome.

[239] people purchasing it like who knows it if they even care they might just want to look good right it's a lot easier just to look virtuous than to actually be virtuous well you could give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they're likely to be as virtuous they're as likely to be virtuous as the next person you know but these are very difficult problems as as coleman already pointed out they're not going to be solved simply and if you're a corporation that's pushed to take noticeable action on problems of race, the implicit bias training programs at least offer you the possibility of appearing state of the art. And you might say, well, you have a responsibility to assure that what you're doing works.

[240] Yeah.

[241] You do.

[242] Yeah.

[243] And I think corporations can't afford to adopt a tragic vision of human nature like a writer can.

[244] Corporations can't throw their hands up and say, well, listen, we actually don't know.

[245] The honest truth is we do not know how to take someone who is biased racially or otherwise and change their fundamental, you know, neural chemistry or personality or whatever you want to call it so as to make them less biased.

[246] That is something our species has not yet figured out and frankly may never figure out because it's not just inevitable that we will be able to fix, you know, any problem.

[247] Of course, corporations can't be seen.

[248] People mistake that for callousness.

[249] They mistake a perhaps like a sober assessment of what is possible and what's not for not caring about the underlying issue.

[250] And, you know, people in, whether they're at corporations or in academia or otherwise, they lose face if they can ever be construed as.

[251] not caring about an issue.

[252] Yeah, yeah.

[253] Well, that's partly why the implicit bias training programs have proved so popular.

[254] No, in the absence of an alternative solution that's easily implementable and in keeping with the spirit of the times, they dominate the marketplace.

[255] And it's probably not useful to be too cynical about that, even though I think the tests, the programs are reprehensible.

[256] I understand why they're being employed.

[257] Yeah.

[258] A question I wanted to ask, just so I can sneak it in here, if you are, I guess, mandated to take one of these diversity trainer, training or anti -biased programs, say, as an employee of somebody, and you're not comfortable doing that, or it's based on Robin DeAngelo's work, are there suggestions you have for those people?

[259] I threw up a couple of questions on my Instagram, just asking people if they had questions for you.

[260] And one of the main ones was, as a student or as a worker, how do you, they use the term fight back, but what do you do if you're stuck in one of those anti -biased things?

[261] Is there anything you can do?

[262] I really, I really feel for, people.

[263] This is another area where I'm afraid I have to say I don't have a solution to that problem.

[264] All I have is sympathy with the problem itself to be stuck in a scenario where you are asked to hold your tongue when you have eminently reasonable things to say about the underlying issue.

[265] But you know that the moment you open your mouth, there is nothing you can say clear enough or profound enough to prevent you from being labeled, you know, a bigot or an Uncle Tom or what have you.

[266] And the reputational cost you pay is likely to outweigh, you know, the benefits of having, you know, of having diversity of opinion in the room.

[267] And it's so much easier to just stay silent, go along.

[268] That's one way in which the faulty information is so harmful, right, is once a false theory gets instantiated and a false treatment program, if you question it, your reputation is at stake.

[269] But if you don't question it, it can never be replaced by something that might actually work.

[270] So a bad theory in that sense, at least of this type, is worse than no. no theory at all, because standing up against the bad theory appears to make you a bad person.

[271] Yeah.

[272] And ultimately, it's a coordination problem.

[273] If there were enough people to stand up to it at the same time, it wouldn't be a problem.

[274] But what self -censorship does is it makes every person in that implicit bias training who is having skeptical thoughts in their mind feel like they're the only person in the room having such thoughts.

[275] Yeah, and they're not.

[276] They're not.

[277] Right.

[278] Right.

[279] That's why these kind of conversations are important.

[280] That's why what Coleman's doing is important too.

[281] If you talk about some talk about topics, even you remember that black box thing that happened on Instagram where everybody put a black box up, which I thought was ridiculous but I woke up that morning and I looked at my phone and everyone had this black box up and I thought oh my God now I have to put a black box up on Instagram and then I thought that is a ridiculous thought to have now because you have to know that everyone is noticing who doesn't put up the black square that's the most crucial part about the black square yeah so I didn't end up putting up a black box because I had that thought about no now I have to and thought like no I don't black box on Instagram it's not going to make a difference to anybody um but it is hard when you get this like anyway i didn't put up the black box and then i had a whole bunch of people messaged me who had put up this black box saying oh i really didn't want to but i did anyway and i at some point i mean it's different i guess if you're going to lose your job but if you don't talk if you don't speak out about some things that you think are wrong you corrupt your soul well that and isn't that how entire society get totally screwed up?

[282] Like, doesn't that, can that potentially screw up entire societies?

[283] Yes, it, it certainly, it certainly has that propensity across time.

[284] Well, Coleman, you're standing up to this.

[285] Like, how is it that you're able to manage that?

[286] Practically and philosophically, because there's a practical side to it.

[287] There's an uncanny valley of, that I have successfully escaped, which means when you come out as a heretic on these issues, you, there's a price to pay, an immediate price to pay that can last a long time in terms of your reputation, your friendships, your career, and so forth.

[288] but yes your mental health no doubt um your family um and but on the other side of that valley valley if you're if you're if you're if you're someone like me which obviously you know most people most people aren't and can't can't be because of circumstances um and you have a podcast like i do that's grown a lot over the past six months and you know i've put myself in position where I'm successfully my own boss and I'm I'm known as a heretic.

[289] Right.

[290] So I have, I have nothing to lose from further heresy at this point.

[291] Because I've lost everything that I'm, that I'm going to lose, which makes it paradoxically easier.

[292] Right.

[293] You have to put yourself in a position where you can sustain yourself during that initial period of loss or you have to be fortunate enough to be in that position.

[294] And that's not a situation that characterizes many people.

[295] Correct.

[296] So what do you hope your book will do?

[297] That's a good question.

[298] I mean, I hope the book will be persuasive to people who are on the fence.

[299] I hope it will give people who have a gut -level doubt about race -conscious, anti -racism, the language to express where their doubt might be coming from.

[300] I hope it enlightens, and I hope people get joy out of reading it.

[301] I hope people learn something.

[302] It helps me, writing it helps me clarify my own thoughts.

[303] And I really hope for it to be a book that people can read 20 and 30 years from now.

[304] It would, it would, you know, hopefully some of the issues in question will have gotten better by then.

[305] But I hope the book will still make sense and resonate because, you know, this issue isn't going away.

[306] And I hope to write about it in a way that isn't merely responding to, you know, events of the past six months, but is actually getting to philosophical bedrock on the issues in question.

[307] Do you think things are going to improve in the next couple of years?

[308] In terms of the prevalence of colorblindness versus race consciousness.

[309] Yeah, just the tensions that we're having now.

[310] I mean, it's definitely gotten worse in the last six months.

[311] So do you see that continuing?

[312] Do you think that if Biden becomes president, which seems to be a virtual certainty, that the racial tensions that characterize the United States are actually going to decline?

[313] So there are, I think, two countervailing trends.

[314] One is, you know, the problem of woke anti -racism proceeds Trump and is a, by and large, a trend that occurs independent of who is or isn't in the White House.

[315] so that will keep that the engine of wokeness is going to keep running and seems to have only been getting more powerful in the past six years especially on the other hand I do think that there were there are lots of liberals and centrists who especially among elites that were so alarmed and appalled by Trump's rhetoric and his, you know, authoritarian tendencies and, you know, his style that they felt, they felt that they couldn't, you know, given the choice between criticizing Trump and criticizing the far left, they felt more cautious criticizing the far left under a Trump presidency than they might now under a Biden presidency.

[316] Oh, that's an interesting, that's an interesting idea.

[317] So you think a Biden presidency might give people the opportunity to liberal people, let's say this opportunity to separate themselves from their more radical compatriots, say within the Democratic Party?

[318] It certainly offers that opportunity.

[319] Whether or not people take it is anyone's guess, frankly, and I wouldn't, I don't want to signal too much optimism.

[320] on this score, but it's certainly an opportunity given that Biden has been fairly good in rejecting most of the policy prescriptions and sensibilities of the far left.

[321] I think it would make sense for people of influence to rally around him as a president that hopefully will embody actual liberal values rather than that.

[322] than illiberal social justice values.

[323] I was hopeful about that.

[324] And then Harris put her pronouns in her bio on Twitter.

[325] Seriously, I was like, you know, this actually, maybe this isn't so bad.

[326] I think Biden might be more center than he's putting on, you know, given his past.

[327] But then Harris put her pronouns in her Twitter.

[328] I didn't know that.

[329] Yeah.

[330] Yeah.

[331] So that's not good.

[332] He's phony.

[333] No. She doesn't mean it.

[334] Yeah.

[335] Not that that makes it, uh, no, that might even, that might even be worse.

[336] Yeah.

[337] I mean, isn't it, I, what I find to be strange is the word, the, the, I have an obsession with this word Latinx.

[338] Oh, yeah.

[339] That's a bad one.

[340] Um, I have an obsession with this word.

[341] I think it's, it's partly because, um, as a kid, I grew up around my Spanish speaking family members on my mother's side often.

[342] and, you know, by the time I was adolescent, I wasn't fluent, but I had enough of a familiarity with the language to communicate.

[343] And when I got to Columbia, I heard this word that I had never heard before in all my days speaking to my Puerto Rican family members.

[344] And it was sold as a word, you know, the new polite term for Hispanic Americans that, you know, Hispanic Americans are demanding, much like the succession of African American and black from the earlier Negro and colored, which used to be the polite terms.

[345] Of course, it's, it couldn't be further from the truth, right?

[346] When Pew polls Hispanic Americans about what they prefer to be called, they find 95, 96 % say, please don't call us Latinx.

[347] Either I haven't heard of that or I've heard of it and I don't like it.

[348] And so the, you know, so it's one thing for there to be an elite bubble.

[349] How could there not be?

[350] There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

[351] Everyone lives in a bubble.

[352] But what strikes me with particular force is when the elite are completely unaware of how their peculiar, I should say our peculiar moral sensibilities are not shared by the general public and therefore force their sensibilities on the general public.

[353] You know, and there's nothing, there's almost nothing more philosophically repugnant.

[354] It's almost spiritually repugnant than the attempt to force a particular language usage.

[355] You know, there's something about that that's a deep violation of individual freedom.

[356] It's not obvious how language evolves and how we all accept new words, but to have them coined by ideologues and then forced into, usage by moral threats, let's say, there's there's something about that that's it irks you.

[357] Yeah, it irks me too.

[358] I, yeah, I mean, that, yes, it irks me very deeply.

[359] It's an active domination, but it's an active domination that is all the more pernicious for the fact that the people doing the dominating often.

[360] and don't even know it.

[361] Like, you know, Elizabeth Warren in her presidential campaign, use the word Latinx.

[362] If you think about it, from her perspective, she should be desperate to win over the 95 % of Hispanics.

[363] She should be desperate not to alienate them, right?

[364] She has every incentive to, and she still uses the word Latinx.

[365] The question is why.

[366] And, you know, I can only think it's because the Hispanics in her immediate circle are all themselves elites within the bubble who like this word, right?

[367] So, so the, the, the bubble that is not aware of itself ends up imposing things on, on, on, on everyone else.

[368] And, um, just alienating the popular, I mean, so that, so Kamala using, putting her pronouns in her, her, her, her bio is, is the example that, that made me think of this.

[369] I mean, who are, who are, what are you, who are you, who are you signaling to when you do that?

[370] I think you're signaling to my peers at Columbia are going to like that.

[371] Um, but is the Democratic base going to like that?

[372] Hell no. You know, the, the, the democratic base and, and the wider country, of course not.

[373] What you're signaling to, what you're saying is, I'm perfectly, perfectly fine alienating, you know, 70 % of the country, say, um, if it means ingratiating myself to this particular minority that has a lot of cultural power and sway right now.

[374] And that sends a very bad signal.

[375] If Democrats keep doing that, they should be very worried about just losing.

[376] It sends a signal of weakness too, I think, you know, that it would seem to me to be more logical in this early stage of the new regime to signal the ability to resist that sort of temptation rather than the willingness to be preemptively intimidated.

[377] Do you think she's, maybe she's not even intimidated.

[378] I mean, maybe she is, but maybe she's just surrounded by so many people telling her that that's the right thing to do that she believes it.

[379] Is that possible?

[380] I mean, her circle might be a whole bunch of people who all have their pronouns and their bio.

[381] No, I think that that is likely true.

[382] And who knows?

[383] Maybe they're trying to play a split strategy where Biden plays to the middle and Kamala appeases the woke.

[384] True.

[385] But we'll see.

[386] Yeah, well, I hope that things go well.

[387] I mean, obviously this transition is a mess.

[388] Yeah.

[389] I hope that the vast majority of people up here in Canada wish everybody in the U .S. well, while you go through.

[390] this convulsive process of of changing your government and that it's a change for the better.

[391] That would be something.

[392] It should not be convulsive.

[393] I'm personally embarrassed as an American that a sitting president is declaring victory, like as if we're a third world nation that struggles with, you know, authoritarian dictators coming to power.

[394] It's embarrassing to me. Well, it is striking, though, how close your elections have been.

[395] what, for the last four elections?

[396] Your country is so evenly split down the middle, but it's a kind of miracle.

[397] Or you could say that the parties just do a very good job of competing with one another.

[398] Is another way of thinking about it.

[399] Yes, yes, fair enough.

[400] And equally valid way of thinking about it.

[401] Any idea when your book is going to be finished and then also published?

[402] A depressingly long time from now, so much so that it's not worth dwelling upon.

[403] Oh, well, that's good.

[404] It gives you something important to do continually.

[405] And the opportunity, as you said, to clarify your thoughts.

[406] There's nothing like protracted writing to help you manage that.

[407] Absolutely.

[408] Well, that's usually when I call time at about an hour.

[409] If you want to continue, we can continue.

[410] But I think we should probably call it.

[411] tonight, especially with first podcast in two years.

[412] Well, I think, I think, um, let me say on behalf of, you know, of everyone that, you know, the world is very glad to have you back.

[413] Yes.

[414] Well, I'm very glad to be back if I am in fact back.

[415] So, but it was certainly a pleasure to be able to do this tonight.

[416] And, and as I said, to see you again and to hear about what you're up to, I hope that your endeavors continue to breed success and that you have the best of luck with your podcast.

[417] Thank you very much.

[418] That podcast is Conversations with Coleman, by the way.

[419] You can subscribe to that on all the normal channels and routes.

[420] Where else can people find you?

[421] You can find me on Twitter at Cold X -Man.

[422] You can find me at Colemanhues .org.

[423] And yep, those are my main avenues.

[424] Well, thank you very much for coming on.

[425] My pleasure.

[426] Yeah, thanks a lot.

[427] Absolutely.