Wrongthink on Race With Glenn C. Loury
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. Everybody's got to figure out how to make a life out of the raw material that they're given, which is their sexual orientation, and it is their ethnic and racial and national heritage. It is the culture. Everybody comes with a mother tongue and so forth. We are given these things. Those are the initial facts about ourselves. They are not a life. And today...

Glenn Lowry. They're just the raw material. We still have to make a script for our lives. We still have to fashion a vision for ourselves. We still have to be in the world. That's a challenge that everybody faces. And the reason that I can read, oh, I don't know, the great Russian novelists of the 19th century, the Dostoevskys and the Tolstois, the reason I can read them and be enriched by them

It's not because I see my life in their narrative, but it's because their narrative is in the service of this existential challenge that all of us face, which is how to grow out of where we start into the fullness of our humanity. That's what the university is there for. George Orwell said a lot of things so brilliant and so true and so plainly that by now they've become cliche. Among my very favorites is this line:

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

That's a line that comes to mind when I think of Glenn, a man who really, truly puts his freedom to use. A man who, in a time of lies told for the sake of political convenience, strives to tell it, even when the truth is hard, even when it's complicated, or even when it contradicts what we wish were actually true. Well, can I just observe that the hunt for heretics begins with mild-mannered people who simply are conventional in their thinking and want to expose deviance? Yes.

And it ends in a funeral pyre. It ends in people being burned at the stake. In 1982, Glenn became the youngest tenured Black professor of economics at Harvard. And since then, he's consistently made waves for his willingness to buck the Black intellectual establishment, for his iconoclastic ideas about race and inequality, and for his incisive cultural criticism. This is a question of narrative.

Are you going to look through the lens of the United States as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Are you going to see it for what it is, which in the last 300 years is the greatest force for human liberty on the planet?

In today's conversation, we talk about racism, race, Black Lives Matter, school choice, standardized tests, crack cocaine, sexual infidelity, Christianity, the Nation of Islam, neoconservatism, Harvard, groupthink, and pretty much every other hot-button subject you can imagine. We also talk a lot about Glenn, about his personal story and how it speaks to the broader American one. I've long adored Glenn, and I'm really glad to share this conversation with you.

Please stay with us.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Glenn Lowry.

Thanks for being on Honestly. Hi, Barry. Good to be here. It's really not an overstatement to say that you're one of my favorite thinkers. And I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. And we've had a lot of people on this show. And in general, I feel like these days I talk to a lot of people who are bucking the status quo. And I feel drawn to those kind of people. What distinguishes you is not that quality, but the fact that you seem...

kind of happy and comfortable with that position as a thought criminal. You seem to do it with a lot of style and grace, um, which is, which is a quality that I don't share, but I, I highly admire. So hopefully at some point in this conversation, we'll be able to understand why you're so comfortable in that position. I think it might have to do with the fact that you've been, um,

bucking the status quo for longer than a lot of us. Yeah, I'm comfortable in combating the nonsense. I mean, it just seems to me the world has gone crazy and I'm the only person, not really literally the only person, but we few who sees what's going on, things seem so obvious and it's actually kind of amusing. At some level, it's kind of amusing, even though the stakes are very high.

Well, by the time I encountered you and I remember encountering you around the time I was in college, you're already famous sort of for this persona. I find sometimes when we encounter people as adults, we imagine them like fully formed, like you came out into the world as the Glenn Lowry that I know. So when I went back.

years later and read about your personal story and the life you lived before you became, and I think it was in the early 80s, the youngest tenured black professor in Harvard's history. It was sort of astonishing to me. So I'd like to begin at the beginning. Let's talk a little bit about your

Glenn Lowry before he became the Glenn Lowry. Where were you born? Who were your parents? Oh, wow. Talk to us about that. Yeah, you know, I'm way into the memoir project that I've been promising the world for some years now. So it's a matter that I've been dwelling on. But I'm from Chicago, from the South Side, from a working class Black family. My mother and father broke up early. So my sister and I and my mother were a single parent family.

from my, you know, three years old, four years old. We moved around a lot. My mother's sister was a very accomplished churchwoman, businesswoman, and family matron. And she gathered us, the three of us, into her household, a big house in a

transitioning middle-class lawn in front of the trees and back of the residential properties on the South Side that had just begun to become integrated

And this is in the 1950s. And so I grew up in that household. We had a little place upstairs and in the back, a two bedroom. I slept on the couch in the living room kind of thing. Graduated high school at 16. Went to a technical institute because I was good at math. Had a girlfriend who got pregnant. She was quite young. She was 15 when she got pregnant. I dropped out of college in my second year and went to work at a printing plant.

She was 15. How old were you? I was 17 when she became pregnant with Lisa. Okay. And you dropped out and started working at this printing plant. I did. Our Donnelly and Sons, they had a village of factories on the south side on the lake near where McCormick Place is now.

They printed Life magazine and Look magazine and Sports Illustrated and Fortune and National Geographic. I mean, when you had real printing presses with, you know, massive rolls of paper on the end of them and where they were hand engravers who actually made the plates that had to be matched up in four color in order to create the photographic effect. This is before electronics. It was a massive enterprise.

It's completely gone now. Right. Now we've got blogs. It's offshored and it's technologically made obsolete, but it employed thousands. And I worked there as a clerk and went to school full time at the same time. I got back to a community college.

in 1969. And in 1970, I was admitted to Northwestern University where I studied mathematics and economics and philosophy. I got a tremendous education in two and a half years, two years in the summer in between as a transfer student.

scholarship student. You know, it was affirmative action. They were bringing in a kid from the South Side who showed some promise. One of my calculus teachers in the community college thought I was promising. He was a Northwestern alum. He brought me to the attention of the admissions people.

They gave me a full ride. But I continued to work this full time job. My wife and I had Charlene had another child, Tamara. And we were a family of four in 1969, 1970, 1971, as I struggled through my undergraduate studies. Wow. Fed by caffeine and, you know, four hours of sleep.

For two and a half years, I did this. So just give us a sense of your days here. So you're 19 and 20 years old. You're the father of two children. And somehow you're doing a full load at Northwestern and also working a full-time job. What did that actually practically look like? Well, the job is midnight to 8 or 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., depending on what department I was working in. And

You know, I'm sleeping basically like five or six o'clock in the afternoon till 11 o'clock at night. Maybe it's four o'clock in the afternoon to 11 o'clock at night, but you have to include time for, you know, brushing your teeth and so on.

And when I get off at 7 a.m., I get the Chicago Transit Authority rail up to Evanston and, you know, I go to my classes. I go to the library, which was this tower right on Lake Shore of Lake Michigan, where I'd sit in a carrel. And, you know, my first class might be at 10. I might have a break between 11 and 1130 or something like that. I might go to another class. I get home.

Two o'clock in the afternoon, eat, quote, dinner, close quote, you know, check in with my wife and kids and then do it all again the next day. What was what was your quote unquote dinner? You know, it was probably something coming out of a can. We didn't necessarily have a microwave in 1967, 1968. So, you know. So obviously I think of 1968, 1969, 1970 as some of the most tumultuous years.

I mean, that was a hinge point. You had, you know, the free speech movement on campus. You had the rise of the Black Panthers. You had Vietnam. Like, was that permeating your world or were you kind of just focused intensely on your family, your degree and keeping your job? Oh, my God. Of course it was permeating my world because it was everywhere. And it was a part of the time. It was the water that we fish were swimming in. Perhaps we weren't self-consciously aware of just how momentous it was.

Fred Hampton and Mark Clark got killed in Chicago when I was in the middle of this process. And the Black Panther Party was a real presence. The Nation of Islam, Barry, was a real presence on the south side of Chicago. It was radical, radical, radical. It was black nationalists. It was separatists. And my relationship to it was...

I don't know, maybe oblique. No, I didn't really have time for politics. I mean, I can tell you a story very briefly, which is I'm at the community college. They call it Southeast Junior College. It's now called the Olive Harvey Community or Junior College. It was a two-year junior college that met in the wing of Chicago Vocational High School, which is a large, large secondary school. And they had extra space. So the community college had set up

has set up there. And it's 1970, spring of 1970. This is the strike. This is the Cambodia incursion. You know, this is Nixon. And everything is up in arms and the kids are rabble rousing and they're demonstrating and they're, you know, and I'm trying to get into the library and the library has barricaded herself in to protect the intellectual inheritance of Western civilization from the mob. And I have to

negotiate and persuade her that I really am going to take that calculus exam on Friday and I need to study right now. That was kind of my relationship. I wasn't against them or for them. I guess I thought I would have, wouldn't I, that there was a certain amount of privilege and self-indulgence in there. You know, of course, now in retrospect, they were all on the right side of history, you know, but I thought at the time there was something

impractical about their excesses. Say more. I can remember, Barry, let me tell you this. Democratic National Convention 1968 Chicago.

Members of the Youth International Party, Yippies they called themselves, converged on Chicago. They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism and other social ills. And I'm working the midnight shift and I can get a lunch break at 3 and I get in my car, I've only got 45 minutes, I drive the 15 or 20 minutes down to the park just so I can see these kids smoking reefer.

I can see the cops bludgeoning them. I can hear the, you know, sex, love, drugs and rock and roll and the flower children and whatnot. I mean, it was a consumer excursion for me. Hundreds of marchers and dozens of policemen were injured. Restraint was absent on both sides. When you say on the right side of history...

I'm actually not sure if you mean it sarcastically or not. I mean, it's sarcastically. It's funny because I had an interesting conversation with Shelby Steele, which I know you guys have had an on and off sort of relationship. Oh, no, he's okay. But I mean, there was a time, obviously, where you departed from him. And in any case, he talked about...

Malcolm X and Black Power with a lot of admiration, actually. There was a lot of truth in it. Oh, no, I was talking about the flower children and I was talking about the SDS and I was talking about the weather underground. And I was talking about self-righteous, striking adolescents who don't have any understanding of the flows of history or the stakes, but they just know what's right.

And I was thinking of it in the context of our contemporary time, where I think this particular self-righteous presumption of the knowledge of what is the right side of history is run amok among us. And so that was the nature of my irony. But on the Black Nationals thing, I mean, I can understand why Shelby might take the position that you have ascribed to him in that

I mean, his whole thing is about responsibility. It's about the, I put it in my words, but it's about the kind of conundrum of freedom. I mean, so you're free. Now, what are you going to do? And the dead end, which is white people have to save us. The making of the issue, a kind of meta ethical discussion about freedom.

racial justice when the imperative is the existential fact of freedom. And when you hand over responsibility to the putative racist, I mean, you know, there's no grounds for dignity in that. There's no place to stand at the end of the day if you're dependent upon the largesse of a putatively racist white supremacist all-determinative power.

There's no equality in that. So this is Shelby's point. This is my point that Malcolm X and company in there, you know, I mean, come on, the Nation of Islam was mad, is mad. I mean, excuse me. I mean, with respect, I don't mean to. But I mean, Jakub, you know, the mad black scientists who invented white people, you know, devils. Yeah. Separatism, you know, separatism.

We want our own land. I mean, come on, that's a pipe dream. That's clearly preposterous on its face. But nevertheless, because they said, pull up your socks, stand up straight, Jordan Peterson echo, you know, will you please take responsibility for this is the nation of Islam? That appealed to a lot of people. It appealed to my Uncle Mooney. And he was my mother's sister's husband. And it was in his house that I grew up.

He was not a Muslim. He did not give money to Elijah Muhammad, but he brought home Muhammad Speaks and left it on the dining room table. And he cherished a book written by the, quote, honorable Elijah Muhammad called You Are What You Eat, which was simply saying, take responsibility for your life. Don't eat pork. Don't eat sugar. Don't eat salt. Eat green vegetables. Right.

You know, I mean, that's all it was saying. And he cherished that book because it was indicative of a certain attitude about the condition of, quote, the Negro that he admired. And I think is why Shelby admires that strain in African-American political culture. So take us from Northwestern to your decision to get a Ph.D. in economics. I'm curious about.

Why economics? And the phrase that I find on my lips constantly, which is the phrase social capital. I understand that you coined that phrase in your dissertation. I did. Tell us about that. So the thing was, I was good at math. I was always good at math. You know, I had mastered a slide rule and logarithms and stuff like that when I was like in sixth grade, you know.

We had an algebra course in the eighth grade of my grammar school, and the teacher got sick. And they had me lead the other algebra students through the exercises in the little booklet that we had for solving these equations because I was good at it. I was always good at it. And when I got to Northwestern and I got the opportunity to study serious scientific research

I mean, I got introduced to mathematics at a foundational level. I mean, we were encountering books like Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica in the mathematical logic course that I took. I was able to study with the first year PhD students in mathematics from Avner Friedman, who's a great mathematician.

Functional analysis mathematician has a book out there called Foundations of Analysis that I study from. This kind of serious engagement, I had the natural talent and this was really a remarkable transformative kind of thing because I discovered this whole world. But math was way too abstract in 1970. It was way too, you know, intellectual career in mathematics would have been to withdraw from the world.

What appealed to me about economics, and I had some wonderful teachers, some of them got Nobel Prizes now, when I was at Northwestern and at MIT, many, you know, is that while you were elaborating technically sophisticated and rich and deep questions,

logical puzzles. You were setting out a set of axioms, you were deriving something, you were deducing this is a high economic theory. While you're writing papers like that, the problems that you're engaging are the problems of the real world. They're the problems of climate change and limited resources. They're problems of intrinsic inequality between populations. They're the problems of

urbanization or of economic growth and development or a fiscal, you know, how do I raise the money without distorting the tax system, et cetera. They were all social problems, but they were pursued with mathematical rigor. I just fell in love with that idea. Frankly, I'm still in love with it. It's been the foundation of my intellectual life from my early 20s. And I was introduced to it at Northwestern. I had some very fine teachers who

And they saw my talent. They were afraid that I would end at the University of Chicago, which is a right wing bastion, although a great institution, a great institution. But it has a political coloration. And so they steered me toward Berkeley or Harvard or MIT. I got admitted at all these places and decided to go to MIT, which had the reputation, deserve it.

of more open doors of the great superstar faculty members. You could go in and talk to them. They were not inaccessible. At Harvard, they stood behind 10-foot oak doors guarded by secretaries who would tell you next month he may have 30 minutes. But at MIT, you could just walk in and these guys, and they were all guys, had their shirt sleeves rolled up and they wanted to go to the blackboard and, you know,

It was pretty cool. You said that you landed at Northwestern on a scholarship essentially because of affirmative action. Was that your sense of yourself getting into the Ph.D. program at MIT or was or was it the opposite, that you were some kind of, you know, wunderkind or the token? What did what what was your sense of your place there? Oh, my. I mean, you invite me to be immodest.

because I knew that I was fucking good. Excuse me. Can I say that on your podcast? I knew that I knew what I was doing. I knew that I knew what I was doing. I'm telling you, those people at Northwestern trained me. I was exposed to the very best. And, you know, I mean, I aced out the graduate record exam thing on the math thing. I got like a 790 out of 800 or something like that. So I knew I was good. I came loaded for bear. I came ready. My briefcase...

An olive green attache case had a bumper sticker affixed to either side, bright orange lettering on a black background, rise above it, exclamation point. And I would sit it down in the, you know, the little seats that they have in the classroom as I pulled out my pad and, you know, looked around the room and

And half the people were Jewish, Barry. I wonder what that's about. But those who weren't were from Russia and India and Japan and France. And they were the best people in their classes. And we were getting ready. I mean, you know, as I think about this, I mean, I felt, you know, not an affirmative action. I mean,

I'll tell one last story. Peter Diamond is a great economist. He is a Nobel laureate, and he was the second reader on my PhD dissertation. He was assigned to counsel me when I first came in

as a newly arrived graduate student the summer before we began studies in 1972. And they wanted me to get as a minority student coming into the program, some special boost of preparation before the rigors of the first year came. I went in the Diamond's office, we talked for about 20 minutes.

And he declared, he said, you know what, why don't you just go and spend the summer reading the books that you want to read? I don't think you need any extra help. We'll let you hit the ground running with the rest of the kids when they get here. Glenn, what is social capital? And how did you land on that idea as the subject of your dissertation? Social capital is an extension of human capital theory. This is in my mind.

When I use that word in my dissertation, and I'm given credit by Robert Putnam, the political scientist James S. Coleman, the late sociologist, and others of having introduced the term in my dissertation, Coleman cites me in a footnote in chapter 12 of his book, The Foundations of Social Theory, which is dedicated to the exposition about social capital.

So I have that to my credit. But it's just an extension in my mind of human capital theory. So what is human capital theory? It's an explanation of how people get wages based on their skills. And it says the skills are the results of investments. So human capital are investments in human skills that pay off over the worker's lifetime. That's the basic concept. And what I wanted to say was that the resources that people require in order to develop their skills are not all...

commodities that you buy in the market as you would through a transaction for human capital. Some of them are the byproducts of your social situation, the resource, that is to say, of your mother's time, of her attention to her health when you're in the womb, the resource of the peers with whom you associate and the things that they valorize, which then become important things to you and shape the choices that you make about your acquisition of skills.

the resources of the information that you have about what's possible in the world because of your connection to other people who have explored those possibilities. These are also factors or inputs into the production of skill, but they are not commodities to be purchased and the financial deficit doesn't fully reflect a deficit of these things.

This was the idea, and I wanted to use that idea to give an account of why racial inequality might persist even after the elimination of discrimination in the labor market. We were in the mid-1970s when I wrote this dissertation, a decade beyond the Civil Rights Acts and really quite early in this period, this new period that we've been in now for more than half century.

of relatively fair opportunity in the market for people irrespective of race. I'm not saying it's perfect. Obviously, it's not perfect, but man, compared historically, it is a relatively level playing field in terms of the valuation of skills. So the question was whether the disparity that history had produced for Black people would wither away under this new dispensation of

equal treatment and near equal treatment in the labor market, to which my answer was, no, it wouldn't. It needn't. Because in fact, the labor market is not the whole show. Peer groups, neighborhoods and communities, the structure of families, the nature of values and norms, the social resources and who you know, who you're connected to, who you can call upon,

who influences you, who informs you, would be a part of that. But books in the home would also be a part of that. And whether the mother turns off the television would be a part of that. And now the concept becomes so unwieldy because it encompasses so many different things. But I was using it kind of not just as a measurement thing, let's go measure social capital, but more like as a philosophical thing to say,

How do we think about inequality and about remedying inequality? Discipline our thinking to appreciate that not everything is under direct control. Some of the stuff comes about as a byproduct of other kinds of social processes. And perhaps to shift the conversation a little bit from a redistributive, I know this will sound conservative, maybe it is conservative, I don't know. But I think the redistributive focus is incomplete. I'm not saying that people who don't have money don't need it.

But I'm saying money is not the only thing that they need. And, you know...

Capitalism may be one enemy, but the death of God is not our friend, if you see what I'm getting at. Yeah, I do. And I want to, well, I absolutely want to get to your own faith. But I sort of, if it's okay with you, want to stay in time for a minute. Okay, yeah, you do the interview. So what happens in 1982? Well, I get the call, man. Okay.

I was at the University of Michigan. So my first job out of graduate school was Northwestern University, 1976 to 79, where I flourished.

I was in love with my marriage to Charlene with Lisa and Tammy, broke up in graduate school, and I met Linda, my second wife. And Linda and I were an item. We know we weren't yet betrothed, but we were dating, as it were, when I left graduate school and I came back to Chicago. And her job was at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and I wanted to be with her. So

I moved from Northwestern to the University of Michigan. And it was there when the call from Harvard came. I had a colleague, George Johnson, funny guy. I'm sure he's no longer living. He was a labor economist, colleague of mine at the University of Michigan. George, he once said at the lunch table out loud where everybody could hear, he said, Glenn, I really admire you, man. You're so good. You know, we would have hired you even if you'd been Jewish. Yeah.

He wanted me to know that I was not an affirmative action and that was his way of putting it. But anyway, George used to always make these jokes. He was a funny guy. And one of his running lines was getting the call from Harvard because University of Michigan was a well-respected but not quite fully top-ranked department.

So it recruited talented scholars, but often those scholars in their ambition would find themselves moving on up to the top right departments. And so a motif that George would go, you know, he says, hello, this is Dick Caves, because Richard Caves was the chairman of Harvard's department at that time. And all of us at the University of Michigan were striving to get that call from Dick Caves. I got the call. Could your parents believe where you had landed from where you had come from?

Yeah, that's a good question. I wonder how I was perceived by it. I mean, they were astonished and proud to be sure. My dad, a civil servant who had worked his way along. He and my mom split when we were quite young, my sister and I, as I mentioned. But he was, you know, he's constantly bragging on his kid. I mean, he was very proud of me. And my mother, who...

was struggling through her life on various fronts and whatnot, but loved her. Glee-glee, that's what she called me. I hated that. Glee-glee? Glee-glee, yeah, glee-glee. Can you imagine anything more foolish? LAUGHTER

But she would persist. And my sister, Leonette, picked that up, picked up that habit of calling me Glee Glee. And I guess I showed that I didn't like it. And that made them want to use it all the more. Two years after you get to Harvard, and I think of this as kind of your coming out essay. You published this essay in The New Republic. Yes.

And The New Republic was, you know, it was the first serious magazine that I read when I was sort of like in eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade. It had already changed somewhat, but...

You wrote this essay called, I believe it was called A New American Dilemma. That's correct. And in it you wrote of, and I'm reading from the essay, the social disorganization among poor blacks, the lagging academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of black-on-black crime, and the alarming increase in the early unwed pregnancies among blacks now loom as the primary obstacles to progress. I mean, you laid it

All out there. I want to hear about the decision to publish that piece. And my understanding is that that was kind of your explosion onto what I think of now as the neoconservative scene. Oh, yeah. Barry, you said it very well. That almost made chills run down my spine.

Remembering those words, those years and the whole thing, the whole thing that led up to it. You know, I made Coretta Scott King weep in a meeting of the urban coalition leaders and civil rights leaders in Washington, D.C. on the summer before that essay was published. It was published in December of 1984. And that essay is...

was years in the brewing. That essay comes out of my years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when I would get into Detroit a great deal. And I was seeing what was happening to Detroit in the late 70s and early 80s.

And it came out of my work in that dissertation that I described about, you know, trying to think about the post-civil rights dispensation and would the disparity narrow in the face of equal opportunity. It was very much influenced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family, The Case for National Action. I think that was the name of the Moynihan report. That's right. So, you know, there was all this talk in the air about,

And that meeting where Coretta, the great widow of the great iconic figure Martin Luther King Jr., wept, I was invited to give a praises of this essay and to hear from civil rights leaders in response before it was published. Did it feel like you were saying something out loud and in public that many people didn't

you knew and probably many people you grew up with believed, but it just wasn't allowed to be said out loud at a place like Harvard? You could say yes to that and defend that position because, of course, you could find ample evidence that the concern about the character of social life in the low-income Black communities was in the minds of people like ministers who were

trying to shepherd flocks in these congregations and these communities or business people were trying to scratch a living out of a corner store somewhere on one of these blocks. I mean, you go with a microphone and you ask them, they probably tell you, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think the official discourse was so much captive to the political imperative that

And the political imperative was to win legislation, to maintain the support for the programs that people... It's a great society. It's a latter-day great society by the time we get to the '80s, but it's still this kind of political... Big government, Democratic Party. Yeah, yeah. And I don't want to get too partisan about it, but I just want to say, I don't think the people around that table who led those organizations...

were like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with you. That's the problem, but we can't say it that way." I think they were more like, you know, "Come on. I mean, that's not how we talk. That's reactionary talk. That gives Aidan comfort to the enemy. We expected better of you than that." I mean, that's why I think Mrs. King was weeping at the end of the day. I was standing right next to her. There were only about 20 people in the room.

And I'm standing up extemporaneously, given a 20 or 30 minute exposition. And I looked down and there are tears rolling down her cheek. And I think it was a disappointment. You know, I am this Wunderkind. I'm, you know, I'm 34 years old, 35. And I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a full professor of economics at Harvard. I have all that cachet. And there I am. That's my message. That's what I have to say.

And Benjamin Hooks actually wrote me and asked me not to say something criticizing the NAACP for not taking a more proactive position against crime that was victimizing black people. Wow. And he had said something or his organization had done something I thought was silly. And I singled him out. I said, you know, for example, and I quoted from their report, I said, this is completely Mrs. LeBron.

misses the ball. This is not relevant to the actual circumstance. And he said, why don't you take that out? And I didn't. I didn't take it out. I think that the consensus among, let's call it the civil rights establishment, was to focus on the enemy from without. And you're here in this essay and in much of your work that follows, at least in your public work, things you wrote for the New Republic and in other places, you're focused on the enemy within. And

The thing that I find, I don't know, poetic, interesting, almost like something out of a novel is that you were facing also enemies from within. And later you told the New York Times about this period. I was castigating the moral failings of African-American life, even as I myself was deeply caught up in it.

What did you mean by that? And can you talk a little bit about the challenges that you came to face? Oh, my God. Well, you put your finger on it. I mean, that is my formulation, the enemy within.

And the ambiguity of that, the irony in that ambiguity, and you say it's novelistic, and I reckon you're right. It's Dostoevskian. Yes. You know, because there is a depth there, and there are stories inside of stories inside of stories, because it's about identity. It's about authenticity. I mean, this same guy that you heard earlier in this interview extolling his virtuosity with respect to things mathematical, right?

Felt that he needed to turn his collar around, put his hat backwards, get the bell-bottom pants. This you got to remember is the 1970s. Okay, and you should have seen the shoes. But it was disco, baby. You know what I'm saying? And I found in the dark spaces of black urban life,

a kind of vitality and validation is almost the word that I'm looking for of my, and not exactly what am I talking about here, of my authentic Blackness. Of course, that's perverse, okay? If that is where I see Blackness authentically, that's perverse. We're going to have to bring

I don't know, Freud or Jung or somebody to the table here. I mean, why would I look at it like that? But there was something throbbing there that I wanted to be in touch with. And the ability to navigate it made me feel empowered because that Southside community that I was talking about where I grew up with the leafy green and the

At least it began as racially integrated. It eventually became all black, but it became, it was a pretty stable community. Was cheek by jowl of phones thrown across an expressway from heavily occupied tenements, street gangs, street level drug trafficking, prostitution, and all that was going on. That was going on in the darker side. I mean, I knew the dark side and I prided myself on being able to

to negotiate the dark side. And again, there's all kinds of depths here. This is probably not the place for me to be confessional. For those who don't know your story, I mean, it's cheating and from what I understand, a drug addiction. Well, yeah, I mean, it ended up crack cocaine and those hotel rooms at three o'clock in the morning having exhausted my ATM. Yeah.

That's where it ended up. It started out with recreational marijuana, which was present in my social life from the time I was 15 or 16 years old. I didn't start using until I was 18. But the men who would gather at family parties and things like that, and there'd always be a room upstairs in the back, they'd be in there smoking and talking politics and

And their brand of philosophy. And when I was able to join those gatherings, I felt that I had stepped across a threshold in the manhood. That was a part of it. Philandering, again, I mean, the culture and people get mad at me. And I don't mean to be stereotyping anything. I'm not just tell you about my own lived experience and how to put it, the lived experience.

Getting laid was the first imperative of any real man. OK, and the more often you could do it, the more of a man that you were.

That was just the reality of the life that I was immersed in coming along in Chicago, even as I was doing what I was doing up there at Northwestern and everything else. And I'm not making any excuses. Now, my moral choices in life are my choices. I'm not saying I was predetermined to do any of this or that or the other. I'm saying the milieu out of which I came was complex. It was complex.

at war with itself on some level. I mean, you know, it was a working class migrant acquisitiveness. These great aunts, my mother's aunts, the generation that came out of Mississippi and Tennessee to Chicago on the IC Railroad in the years after World War I.

became wealthy women for their time and their station. They owned property. My aunt Rosetta had a summer place up on the lake in Michigan that we could go up to and retreated, Three Oaks, Michigan. She owned buildings and ran businesses and did various kinds of schemes and was a hustler and had made a lot of money. And they went to church every Sunday and they prayed and they were strict and conservative and whatnot.

But there was also a lot of stuff that was on the other side of the line. You know, I mean, a lot of stuff that was grafted, corrupt and whatever, which is what you probably would expect of a first generation immigrant strivers who are who are trying to make it in the world. I'm sure that story can be retold for other groups. But

But you're sort of like living a life in two lanes. One is this, you know, brilliant, wunderkind, tenured professor, and then you're doing crack cocaine in a hotel room at three in the morning. At what point do those lanes inevitably, as they always do in a story like this, converge? Okay, well, we have to tell the whole story.

if we're going to tell the story, we should probably tell the whole story because the crack cocaine is the end of the line. The counteruse of marijuana is the beginning of the line. Drug addiction is an issue. It's an issue in my family. It's an issue in my life. But

What led me to the darkest of dark places was the catastrophe with the young woman with whom I was engaged in an out-of-marriage affair. I was keeping her, she's in her early 20s, in an apartment in Boston. And she and I got into a fight. She accused me of assaulting her. I was charged. I was charged by the Boston Constabulary Police.

with assault with a deadly weapon because the young woman alleged that I had assaulted her. Well, I had not assaulted her, but we had fought and I had evicted her from this apartment where I was keeping her in the heat of that fight.

And the situation was awful. It was horrible. So it becomes public. My wife is humiliated. I'm this Harvard professor who's this conservative bad boy. I'm on the verge of Bill Kristol has got me. He's chief of staff to William Bennett, who is the secretary of education for Ronald Reagan.

And they've got me lined up to be Bennett's deputy. I'm going to be the second highest ranking Black in the US government after Samuel Pierce, who is the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the second Reagan administration.

I'm going to go to cabinet meetings when the secretary is traveling kind of thing like that. Had you met Reagan at this point? I met Reagan a couple of times. I went to a meeting at the White House and sat next to President Ronald Reagan. It's the Council for a Black Economic Agenda, one of these, you know, kind of initiatives of black conservatives to try to have a voice or something like that. And the Reagan administration needs to

Brand itself is reaching out to the sensible blacks and, you know, whatever. But I mean, that photograph exists. So you're the star of Harvard and now you're not just going to be this incredible star at Harvard. You're also going to be one of the highest ranking African-Americans in the Reagan administration and then president.

It all comes unraveled. Correct. This is before Clarence Thomas is even on the federal bench. All this is happening before Clarence. He's at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Wow. No, yeah, that was me. That was me. And it blew up in my face. The enemy within caught up with me, you could say. Or maybe, as one of my interlocutors has suggested very, very insightfully, I think.

Maybe I self-sabotaged because I really was deeply ambivalent about taking the path of the Reagan administration, you know, black young superstar. Maybe the longing to be accepted, to go home, you know, to go home to that South Side Chicago milieu, all those smoke-filled rooms with those guys who would have never understood. My Uncle Mooney would have never understood

how I could be, you know, a Black conservative. Maybe I wanted to go home and, you know, use the self-sabotage opportunity to keep that from happening. I mean, that puts it too patently. Surely it's not quite that. The novel wouldn't be right if that were the plot line.

But that would be something that should come between the lines of the novel to kind of leave the reader thinking, yeah, maybe that's the story. Maybe that's the story after all. I can tell you this. I thank God that I did not follow that path. The unraveling in public, this affair being charged, is that when you started to turn to the really hard drugs? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's, I mean, that pushed me over into the thing where I'm out there and I'm, you know, carousing and somebody says, hey, you want to try some of this? You know, you want to. And I run around the corner and I do, you know, and it's furtive and it's ugly. But I hit the crack pipe and I like the way it feels and I want to do it again. And I don't give a damn and I'm looking to escape and I'm self-hating. So...

There you are. And I mean, this is not a new story. That memoir has been written. That's not the one I'm going to write. But, you know, I had to crawl out of that hole. And there were some people, including my late wife, Linda, my second wife, who stuck with me through all of this. Your wife stays with you through this. Oh, yeah, she stays with me. I mean, people who supported me and who loved me and who believed in me through this horrible period.

And she was, of course, foremost among them. So your life unravels. You go to rehab. Yeah. I'm just curious before we sort of move on to the broader picture here, how that changed your politics, if at all, or your worldview. I mean, surely an experience like that changes a man or a woman. And I'm curious how it did for you. Thanks for asking. The change was profound. It was absolutely profound.

I literally had to be saved by evangelical Christianity and by a nearly equal evangelical embrace of the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program. Two institutions, along with the loving support of my wife Linda, my late wife, two institutions figured prominently in this. One of them was the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

where the pastors Ray Hammond and Gloria White Hammond befriended and took us in. And the other was the Hamilton Recovery Homes. This is a halfway house on Mount Ida Road above the Fields Corner Station in Irish Boston. And Bob Brown, the proprietor of the Hamilton Recovery Homes, took me in

As a recovering addict, after I had exhausted my 60 days of paid insurance coverage at the McLean Psychiatric Hospital, where I was trying to stop using cocaine without success, I relapsed more than once. And Bob took me in as a resident of the Hamilton Recovery Home in June of 1988. And that was very instrumental in getting me a spiritually centered place

reaction to my condition. So my condition was that I was an addict, that in my case I was addicted to smoking cocaine, and that it had made my life unlivable. It had made my life unmanageable. It was killing me. And I was holding on by my fingernails. And I needed to be still. I needed to stifle myself.

I needed a routine. I needed a path. I needed a way of putting one foot in front of the other. I needed to get from today to tomorrow. There are a lot of silly little bumper sticker things, you know, one day at a time and all of that, that capture this thing. This thing when you've hit bottom, et cetera. I could go on. You've read these accounts of addicts in recovery. I was an addict in recovery. And the church, because...

What I did as an intellectual, you know, I mean, pretty sophisticated PhD from MIT and whatnot. I mean, I kind of took that inheritance of, you know, reflexive religion that I got coming up in Chicago. You know, we went to church not necessarily every Sunday, but the church was there and it was in the atmosphere. And I made it mine. I...

you know, I was born again. I mean, again, I could go into a description of what that is all about, but

The point is, in retrospect, as I now mature, you know, and I look back on it and the credulity, the credulity that I exhibited in embracing Christianity and in believing that Christ had died for me personally was a benevolent self-delusion. I say with respect to my Christian friends. I don't mean to disparage anyone's belief. I'm talking about my own experience. It was something I needed to believe, but it really did.

transformed my life, not just my politics. Our marriage was restored. The, you know, demons were put to some degree at bay. I was able to re-found my life. I went back to doing economics. I published three papers in the American Economic Review in 1993 that had been, you know, five years prior there to in the various stages of gestation.

I left Harvard because I couldn't bear the condescension of my glad-handing colleagues who were all too ready to forgive me and let me know that I was still a welcome and valued member of their number. This is not their fault. I'm sure they meant well. It was how I felt about being in that position of needing their affirmation. I didn't want to strike it on my own. And

This guy, this wild guy named John Silber was running Boston University. And anyway, he recruited me over there and I went over there and I started anew. I founded an institute on race and social division. I broke with the conservatives very, you know, very publicly. And now you're sort of on the center, right? I would say broadly again. So

You've lived a lot of life, Glenn, and you've managed to teach at Harvard. Then you go to Boston and Boston University. And you've been at Brown for how long now? I've been at Brown for 15 years. I came here in 2005. Okay.

So you've been on campus for several decades now, and you're now at Brown, which, for lack of a better word, is I would say has a reputation of being one of the most woke campuses in the country. We hear a lot about the state of college campuses these days. I've written a lot about the transformation of universities. You've had a front row seat to them, though. You've actually been living it.

Big picture, what kind of changes have you seen since the time that you began teaching at Harvard to what you're seeing at Brown today? Changes in the ethos of the university, but also maybe changes in your students and their cast of mind? My, that's a very large question, which I'm loathe to answer off the cuff. I mean, it invites you to reflect a little bit. I think standards have gone down. Yeah.

You ask me, I'm going to tell you, okay? I first set foot on an elite university campus in the summer of 1970. So that was 51 years ago. And I've not left. So I have some perspective. I think standards have gone down.

I think, for example, in math education, it's just one example. We're not serious. I mean, we in the United States of America are losing our edge. In fact, I just saw a paper where some mathematicians were making this observation about the structure of academic mathematics on a global scale, and they were pointing out that

Chinese universities were successfully recruiting not only Chinese or Chinese American, but also other incumbent faculty at American universities to go and pursue their mathematical research careers in China. And that's at the top end. I mean, when I speak to one of my classes, if I do anything that's the least bit demanding of abstract, analytical, logical framing,

I'm looking at their faces and I'm made to dumb down, in effect, what it is that I want to say. I don't want to quite go there.

And I'm not doing this subject justice. And I apologize because our time is limited, but I don't think the standards are as high. I don't think we expect as much of our students. I don't think we demand as much. Grade inflation is a horrible corruption. I was going to say, to what extent do you connect the decline in standards to the fact that schools are effectively now a political monoculture? Like, is there something about not being around that?

other people with worldviews that are radically different from your own and being forced to sort of contend with them. Does that make people stupider and perhaps lazier? Well, you said it. I didn't. But I think it sounds correct to me. It sounds like there could well be that argument made that we don't want to argue and therefore we forget how to.

I don't know if that accounts for the fact that if I write an equation on the blackboard during a lecture to undergraduates at Brown, a third of the class's eyes will glaze over. I don't know if I can draw the direct connection there, but

Groupthink is the enemy of rigor. I mean, I think that's a defensible place to take a stand. So one of the things that I think has happened is that our standards have lowered now. Another thing that has happened is that I think, you know, we are in the service of various nostrums or sort of believed to be certainties about moral issues that we then feel that we need to...

signal or express or show solidarity with through the work of the university, through its research, through its teaching, its pedagogy, through its composition of its incumbent members and how we select and what we define to be excellence and all that, that that has become captive to a certain political agenda. I mean, it's left. It's definitely left. We could go into it.

We could go into it. And if I get specific, I'll type myself in. I'll be written off as a reactionary. I'd like for you to get specific. Well, you know, the diversity thing is going to be one of the things that I'm going to say. The diversity thing is one of the hostility to American interest in the world is another thing that I could point to. We could make an argument about it, but whatever. The impatience with the fact that when you transform moral judgments about things like gender identity,

overnight, I'm talking about within a quarter century, in your country of 330 million people, everybody's not going to be on the same page at the same time. And the way you decide to talk about that is from some lofty, super-silliest, self-righteous, sanctimonious moral posture, and you condemn the people who are holding their Bibles or holding on to their traditions as if they were know-nothings? That's smugness.

infects the university. So, you know, but I think the diversity thing is related to the standards thing. See, I'm just going to say this. I'm going to say this now. You can't do affirmative action, maintain Black dignity and maintain the standards at the same time. That's a trilemma. You can't do all those things at the same time. If you lower the standards for Black people to admit them to elite venues of intellectual performance,

and the standards are correlated with performance, you assure as a statistical necessity on average lower performance of the Blacks whom you've admitted. You admitted them with lower standards. Standards are correlated with performance. If you insist on their dignity, which is to say you can't be Sandra Sellers, this is the adjunct lecturer at Georgetown Law Center. And you know what? I hate to say this,

I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks. Caught on an open mic lamenting the fact that most of the kids in her class who were at the bottom were Black. Almost every semester. And it's like, oh, come on. And then she was fired and the person listening to it left. And the whole brouhaha thing.

The whole navel-gazing conflagration that happened at the institution of Georgetown Law with the black faculty demand of the white faculty that they acknowledge their white supremacist, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's all a cover for black mediocrity. Yes, there I said it. You lowered the standards. You have a competitor. You think law is easy? Law is one of the hardest things you can do. They've got contracts. They've got con law. They've got torts. They've got civil procedure.

So you lowered the standards. Now, the black kids are at the bottom, but they have to have dignity. Therefore, you immolate yourself morally because of their failure, which is really your failure, because you insisted on diversity. And as a necessary consequence, you had to trash standards. That is a disease in the university. It's a disease. I'm going to say it one more time. Black equality cannot be had in this way. What do you mean when you say immolate yourself morally?

What I mean is they're going to now search under every bed for racist white people. Do you know that the grades of Sandra Sellers' previous classes were audited by the law school to see whether or not she had exhibited unfairness toward the black students? So what you're saying, let me say it back to you, putting the case of Sandra Sellers aside. There needs to be some explanation for disparity beyond the academic spectrum.

you know, proclivities or talents of the students. And so in order to explain for that disparity, racism needs to be found. Yeah, that is what I'm saying. After a short break, we'll be back with Glenn and what he makes of the term anti-racist, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more. Okay, so that's a perfect transition, I think, to the new meaning of the word racism.

and how that has been redefined, I would say, particularly by Ibram Kendi.

And the way that I hear that movement and specifically him redefining racism is, first of all, it's not about personal bigotry. It's about any system that results in disparity. Yeah. So if you have any kind of disparity between racial groups in any given institution, school, culture, system...

It is itself evidence of racism being present. Yeah, I think it's right. It's absolutely right. That is exactly what Kendi is saying. He's not mincing words about it. I mean, what it brings to mind is George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language, which I commend to the attention of every intelligent listener, in which he talks about how words and the meaning of words, you know, and this is a theme in 1984 as well, how the meaning of words changes.

falls in the service of political programs. And people think they can make reality by playing with words.

And that's what I think of that. I mean, I don't know why anybody takes Ibram X. Kendi seriously. I mean, why do you think he's taken so seriously? I have no I mean, OK, I can speculate. It would only be my speculation about the demand for a certain narrative in the larger political culture, which is fed by many things, including the interest of a professionalizing black community.

literate class who are embedded in institutions where their status is dependent to some degree upon the narrative that's adopted. The need by pretty much on its back heel, a liberal political movement, I'm talking about the Democratic Party, the left wing of American politics,

whose coalition desperately requires the support and who therefore look for hooks in ways of appealing to, you know, I mean, I could go into this. People will disagree. But I mean, there's there's a lot of I don't know about what's going on. Who runs the MacArthur Foundation? Who runs the, you know, the Ford Foundation? Who's at The New York Times? You could tell me. Tell me.

why editors at the New York Times do the things that they do. I mean, tell me about the 1619 Project. Explain to me why it exists. Who is Nicole Hannah-Jones? I'm not trying to put you on the...

On the hot seat, Barry, I'm just saying that's where I would go if I were trying to get an answer to the question, why does the liberal establishment love Ibram X. Kendi? Why are members of the United States Congress who are Black saying that the chaos of Haitians at the Texas border is like slavery? That's what Maxine Waters said the other day. That needs Orwellian deconstruction. That needs to be analyzed because she's appropriating

the, you know, narrative circumstance of African-Americans descending from slavery on behalf of a program that is completely orthogonal to it. I mean, whatever you might think about it, it's obviously not the same question. Why does that rhetoric go almost without comment by anybody? I could go on. I could go on in this vein. But it is, this is me. You asked me, why was I a happy warrior? I'm a happy warrior because I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. That's a silly book.

how to be an anti-racist, is Kendi's formulations are sophomoric. They don't bear up under the least bit of serious, rigorous social scientific scrutiny. He's not standing on any literature. He's not citing any intellectual development that has any deep root in anything. It's pablum. It's froth.

on the intellectual surface of our life. And it behooves us all to think pretty hard about why it is that we're content

with that kind of analysis when civil disorder in American cities is consuming the lives of Black people like a machine. Five-year-old and eight-year-old children are getting chewed up by it. And our political leaders and intellectual class and journalistic representatives haven't got a mumbling word to say about it. Black Lives Matter is almost completely irrelevant to

to what matters in Black lives. And they have not a word to say about it. And yet corporations and the entire elite establishment has taken up the cause of Black Lives Matter. And the cynic in me would say, it's just about the cheapest and easiest thing that they could possibly do.

I'm going to repeat myself from other appearances when I say read Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless. Attend to his metaphor about the green grocer under communist hegemonic ideological domination in the Czech Republic, who puts a...

Workers of the world unite, sign in his window. All of that Black Lives Matter symbolism from the NFL and the NBA and from the big banks and from the big manufacturing companies and whatnot is of that sort. Virtue signaling doesn't do it justice. There's a whole economy of

The ad people understand this about image management. And they're doing that at the expense of Black people. I mean, let me just repeat. Nothing that Black Lives Matter is about has any intersection with the things that actually matter in Black lives. What about education? The gap in the cognitive development of the human potential of African-American youngsters relative to others in this country widens. It's a yawning chasm. The 21st century rumbles on.

These kids are unfit to take a place at the table if they haven't mastered the basic cognitive functioning you need in the 21st century. Other people are doing it. The Chinese are coming. Glenn, if one really cared about Black lives and one wanted to insist on a movement that actually fulfilled the promise of Black Lives Mattering, what would be the top three priorities of that movement?

I think self-determination in some sense of what we mean by taking responsibility for our lives, that's in the Shelby's steel ballpark that we started this interview talking about. I'd say education. I'm sorry, and this is partisan. The public school unions are poorly serving on the whole in the places where Black students congregate, the intellectual needs of those students. Now, there are other people to be faulted as well.

Opening up that system to innovation is absolutely imperative to improving the quality of Black life in this country. People are going to dismiss me. They're going to say I'm anti-union and they're going to say I'm a right-wing ideologue. I'm going to say I'm looking at failure. I'm looking at multi-generational failures.

And the public safety piece of this narrative that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it, patriotism. And by that, I don't mean blind loyalty to a flag salute. I mean, seeing yourself as an integral part of the American project. This is our country. We don't stand off from it.

There is no United Nations where Black claims will be negotiated. We must make our peace with our fellow citizens here. That has corollaries. Like, two national anthems is a terrible idea. Like, reparations for slavery is a mistake. It wrongly places the nature of the moral problem. It creates these parties as between which...

A negotiation and a deal is being cut. There are not two parties here. There's only one party. I have to say on the last one, I feel very, very torn about the issue of reparations because I feel in lieu of some kind of organized government-run reparations program, and let's put aside the incompetence of the government and the rest. Instead, what's happening is a kind of piecemeal, hand-to-hand-like process

patchwork reparations program that is actually stoking incredible contempt and suspicion and tension among racial groups right now. Oh, gosh, that's such an interesting point. You know, I thought about that. And you have a point. I mean, it actually is not inconsistent with my point. My point is that if you bundle it up in a package and put it on the table and, you know, you have an act of Congress and a couple of hundred billion dollars move,

Then you will have gone, you know, you'll be done with it. You will have executed the transaction and the Negroes will have been paid, which is another unkind way of putting what you just said. That is, we can have that ceremony, we can do that deal, and then we'll be done with all of this genuflecting and virtue signaling and so forth and so on. But my point, my point is, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is organic money.

Everybody has to own this together. And we don't commodify this. We don't make this into an arm's length deal. This is not what we should be doing, which, by the way, means that the corporations genuflecting and virtue signaling is also not good because we're all in this together. We should we got to be solving the problem, not showing ourselves to be on the right side of history. Well, what Shelby would say if he were in this conversation is that the reason reparations are bad are for all the reasons you've said, but also because no amount of

can ever stand in for the injustice and the brutality and the pain of that original sin of this country. Yeah, it's not a commodity. It's not like 300 pieces of silver or 300 billion pieces of silver are going to get that done.

Glenn, you mentioned public safety and the fact that during the protests of the last summer, we were not allowed to say things that we were seeing with our own eyes. We weren't allowed to acknowledge things.

the truth of the nature of not all of these protests, but some of them as being violent. And there's this chyron from CNN that was unbelievably memorable to me, where you have this anchor standing in front of a conflagration. I mean, the whole background is fire. What you're seeing behind me is one of multiple locations that have been burning in Kenosha, Wisconsin over the course of the night, a second night. And the words at the bottom of the screen are mostly peaceful protests.

Where do you think that fear of acknowledging the truth or really just the inability to say it out loud, where is that coming from? This is like a question you asked me previously about why Ibram X. Kendi was taking it seriously as he is, because it's a really important question. I think it says a lot about our culture, and I'm not sure I've got an answer. I mean, at some level, your guess is as good as mine, but I can try.

I mean, I could blame Donald Trump to a certain degree.

I mean, contrast the reading, the narrative, the narration of the civil disorder associated with the George Floyd riots, which were many billions of dollars and which were, I don't know, dozens of lives and which shook the foundation of our social cooperation. I mean, if I lived in one of these cities, if I were somebody who supported Donald Trump, I'm sorry to say this, but they actually exist in our country. And I would contrast that.

how the mainstream organs of public communication treated the "insurrection" of January 6th with what they had to say about the civil disorder attendant to the George Floyd protests. It would cause me to lose faith and trust in basic institutions. I would think that people are lying to me. There's a lot at stake here.

So this issue came up recently in two instances involving the Republican candidate who was running in the recall election here in California, Larry Elder. Yeah. And the first was this op ed in The L.A. Times, which unbelievably called him the black face of white supremacy. I saw it.

And then, like days before the vote, he was walking through a neighborhood here in L.A. And a white woman wearing a gorilla mask came up and attacked him, throwing eggs at him, trying to hit him. And this went almost completely ignored by the mainstream press.

And this is the same mainstream press where a fight in Central Park about leashing a dog inspires literally thousands of stories.

a mainstream press in which a poorly worded tweet is taken seriously as being the equivalent of violence. No, you got it. I mean, you're right. I said we could blame Donald Trump in the sense that all of this happened during the buildup to a presidential campaign in which the hated figure and embodiment of white supremacy who happened to be elected with a minority of the vote president of the United States was

stood for exactly the kind of condemnation of the disorder and the violence, the throwing projectiles at police officers, the looting, the arson, the violence that should have been condemned. And I agree about Larry Elder as well. The silence, this is, you know, the dog didn't bark. You know, I mean, why didn't it bark? Why is it not an unacceptably racist political act?

to caricature Larry Elder in that way and to assault him. I mean, and I'm sorry, I think many of us black people are not fools. I mean, this is not a plantation. You can't tell me what I'm supposed to think. Larry Elder is a conservative. I'm not, you know, whatever. I'm not advocating for him here. I'm just saying to use his race in that way as the Los Angeles Times did, that's unspeakable. That's despicable. But it went without comment for most people. So I, you know...

Is that because he's just not the right kind of black man or the right kind of black politician? Okay, now you're asking a partisan. I'm critical of the Democratic Party's use of race in its larger political strategy. I hinted at that earlier in my comments. And I think you have to keep black people afraid of racism. And I think he's a threat. He's a threat to a certain...

way of seeing the lay of the land in American politics. And, you know, I mean, I could go on in this vein. Michelle Obama says casually to one of the news anchors that she worries about her daughters, what with the threat of police violence and so forth being, you know, stereotyped. And I don't actually believe that she worries about

I believe she says that because that's a trope. Black people need to be afraid of the police. I think that's absurd. I frankly tell you, I think it's a madness. We're 330 million people in the country. We're 40 million black people in the country. We've got dozens of cities with 500,000 people in them with large urban areas. There are tens of thousands of encounters between the police and citizens on a daily basis.

You've got a handful of incidents of the George Floyd variety, and even many of those are ambiguous. So you construe that as open season on Black people. This is Benjamin Crump. You make that the lead of your characterization of order in American urban life when, in fact, homicide is through the roof. And, you know, again, I could name the cities and we could go over the cases. And yet when I watch the video of George Floyd...

And when I watched sort of just the passion and rage of the past summer and really the past year or two years, I was shaken by it. Meaning I watched that video and thought, how the hell could this be happening in America right now? And maybe I was taken by... I didn't march in the streets, but I felt...

Shaken by it. And maybe I was taken by, we've referenced him now a few times in the conversation, strangely, by what Shelby Steele and his son referred to as the poetic truth of it. Yeah. And maybe that's one explanation for why something like that goes so viral is because

Whatever the circumstances that happened in the Michael Brown shooting or the George Floyd murder, it represents maybe in our collective consciousness the truth about the fundamentally racist history of America. And that's why we cotton on to it. I don't know. What do you think of that? Well, I think Shelby does make that point in reference to Michael Brown poetic truth. I think that's a very brilliant way of putting it. And I think you have a point. He has a point.

that reading these events in a particular way resonates with a larger narrative about American society that feels true

to many people. I would point out, I mean, I know it's inconvenient for every George Floyd type situation, there's a Tony Tempa type situation. This is a white guy who got similarly abused by police officers under similar circumstances. And the numbers just say that. The numbers say that it happens to white people too. So we have to choose to read what happened to George Floyd as a racial matter. We're choosing to interpret it that way.

It happened to him. He was black. The guy that had his knee on his neck who killed him was white. And that's true. But the extent to which we say that's something that happens when bad acting police encounter desperate and vulnerable people under those conditions or to say that that's a reenactment of Emmett Till, that's a choice we're making.

And my point about 330 million people, 40 million black people, dozens of big urban areas, tens of thousands of arrests, is that we have to actually stretch to interpret George Floyd as Emmett Till. If George Floyd were Emmett Till, you'd have to keep me away from the barricades. But that's not in my reading of the actual objective sociological circumstance. What's going on? We're in the 21st century, et cetera. I could go down the litany of

of evidence to the effect that the race relations situation in America in the 21st century is completely and radically different and improved relative to what it was at mid-20th century. And I think we have to begin to entertain a possibility, which is that the actual success of American history, not its failures, not its warts, the fact that we overcame the warts

is the problem because the fact of that success in the face of the continuing failure of a large chunk of black society to get on the escalator of opportunity, which defines this country,

It's just too much cognitive dissonance for a lot of people to grapple with. It is the success. It's the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. It's the fact that black women are the mayors of a half dozen big cities that I could name. It's the fact that there are black billionaires, that Oprah Winfrey is Oprah Winfrey and that LeBron James is LeBron James. It's the fact that every corporate personnel office has an Ibram X. Kendi-loving president

executive running it. These are realities of America. Now, in the face of that, you still got jails overflowing with Black people. You still got massive poverty and disparity. People do not know to go in the 21st century with those facts. And so they end up like infants throwing tantrums in the corner. And sadly, too many people, even Barry Wise, are seduced by their tantrums.

I don't know if I'm seduced by their tantrums. Good, good. I'm provoking you, Barry. I'm messing with you, as you say. No, but it's... Listen, I think that there is... I think it's important for people to contend with the nugget of truth that lies at the heart of the woke critique. Okay. And...

I guess that's what I mean is that I've never had a negative experience with a police officer. I've never had an experience of being profiled. I've only ever thought of police officers as being there to protect me. And I know that that experience and maybe Glenn, maybe you'll say that I'm wrong and I'm drinking the Kool-Aid. But what I would say is without using the word privilege and all of that.

It it puts me out of step with the experience of a lot of people in this country. Would you not say that that's true? Yeah, I'd say it's true. And I'd say it's to your credit that you're aware of that. And I'm thinking of a letter that I just got from someone who's on the school committee of a town close here to Providence where they're having some critical race theory kind of disputes within the school district.

And the guy's begging me to come to the meeting because he says I'm white and I can't, you know, I can't say the things effectively that need to be said here because I don't have the standing to do it. And the quote unquote lived experience, you Lowry have that lived experience as a black man in America. And I have had unpleasant encounters with the police over the course of my 73 years. But but yeah.

You know, there's the poetic truth and there's the larger truth is what I want to say. And it's just not, in my opinion, and this will be disputed, a healthy place for Black people to be to cling to this security blanket of invoking the history of our marginality and mistreatment. I mean...

We're to the point where, I mean, George Floyd was given a state funeral. George Floyd squared. George Floyd, this and that and the other. Gosh, I mean, I hesitate to even finish my thought here, which is that the heroism of George Floyd, the iconic meaning of George Floyd, if that's what we're celebrating, if that's where we take our stand,

That's our story. We're sticking to it. It's a weak hand. It's a profoundly weak hand. So the cops in Minneapolis or any place else are not the issue here. George Floyd may rest in peace. They're not the issue. The gangbangers with pistols prepared to shoot wildly into crowds are the issue. The 70% of kids born out of wedlock, and if I go down this list, people will just get infuriated. But

An 11-year-old in Chicago on the streets at 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning with something that looks like a gun, and the cop shoots him when the kid turns around and doesn't respond to the command. And the way we read that is, racist cops strike again. And the real story is, oh, my God, what is the nature of a community in which 11-year-olds, unbeknownst to their parents, wander the streets with weapons?

That's the real story. And we just can't see it because we don't know where to go with it and what to do with it. One more break and then back with more of Glenn. So this idea of, you know, what's really happening versus the narrative being spun about what's really happening. To me, this comes out most starkly in the debate over elite public schools in cities like New York and San Francisco.

So in both of those cities and also many other cities besides, there are these famous specialized high schools, schools like Stuyvesant in New York, schools like Lowell in San Francisco. And they produce some of the most impressive and successful members of our society. And, you know, these are called gifted schools, high achieving schools, but they're public schools. And the way that you get into these schools is by taking one test, a test that's free to everyone.

And the idea is that, you know, you don't need to be connected to this to get this test. You don't need to know anyone. There's no such thing as legacy admissions. It's not for the rich. It's not for the connected. It's just whoever does great on the test. And historically, this has been this pathway, especially for children of immigrants and lower income residents of a city like New York to make their way up in the world. Yeah. But there's been a lot of focus and stress about the fact that

For example, in a school like Stuyvesant, the makeup of black students in the school is far below the proportion of the city that's black. And so despite the fact that these schools are some of the most diverse schools in the country, there's something often like 70 percent Asian, also incredibly low income, the majority of kids low income.

They have somehow been labeled as segregated. I know, that's terrible. Including in the New York Times. And that test that I described, the test that's open and available to everyone, has been painted as a tool of white supremacy. And to me, this gets back, Glenn, to this idea about the distortion of language. I mean, imagine being an immigrant parent from Pakistan or Korea or China.

trying to comprehend that huge swaths of the elite media are calling your family a tool of white supremacy and the school that your child goes to a segregated. Yeah. Well, this is your wheelhouse. This is not your first time speaking to this issue. I think you have your finger on something that's really very important. Again, I remind everybody of George Orwell, Politics in the English Language, 1984. The Asians are non-whites. Duh. The Asians are non-whites.

The Koreans, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, they're not white people. White supremacy, if it means anything, will apply to them just as much as it would apply to anybody else. They're not white adjacent.

that's playing with words. They have cultural inheritance, and it's specific. You can look at it. There's this book that I admire very much called The Asian American Achievement Paradox by Min Zhou, Z-H-O-U, and Jennifer Lee, two Asian American women sociologists who interview these families in Southern California trying to find out how these kids get into Dartmouth and Cornell and Harvard and such at such high rates. And they chronicle the

filial piety and the extreme emphasis on hard work and the valuation of achievement and the etc. that is at the root of the achievement of these young people. This is America. This is the story in the late 20th and early 21st century yet again of the vitality of our society.

Now, to call their overrepresentation and the concomitant underrepresentation of Black people, or they would have said people of color, excluding Asians, as segregation is, of course, a bait and switch. It's a trick. It's a rhetorical move. They're trying to appropriate the moral authority of the overcoming of Jim Crow.

on behalf of a completely different program, which is the anti-meritocratic leveling impulse to compensate for the lack of performance in the African-American population by pulling down the standards. That's what's happening. White people are nowhere to be seen in this picture. You know...

It's New York City. It's an immigrant town. I mean, you know, this is an old story. It was Jews before it was Asians. What do you make, though, of the critique of the meritocracy? I think, you know, lots of people today, certainly the chic thing to say is that the meritocracy is rigged.

That the meritocracy has been a trap, that the meritocracy has been a shorthand for a kind of racial attachment to a sort of racial status quo. And I have to say, when I see Jared Kushner's SAT score and the fact that he got into Harvard, or I see the fact that, you know, people I know with.

middling level talent kids get into these schools because their parents went there. It's not hard for me to understand why people are enraged about the state of the so-called meritocracy, because it doesn't seem to actually be a meritocracy. Well, I think there's much merit to that critique more generally a meritocracy. I'm not sure how it would apply to the exam school situation in New York City, but

Michael Walzer, The Tyranny of Merit, I think that's what he calls this book, raises a lot of these questions about the celebration of the best and the brightest having the necessary condemnation. I think it's Michael Sandel, but yeah. Oh, you're right. It is Michael Sandel. Thank you for the correction. I got my...

We got your Michael screwed up. Yeah, they're both good guys. But Sandell is at Harvard in the government department. This is his book. But I think I think it's about the politics of solidarity undermined by the sense of entitlement. And I got mine, Jack F.U., that that goes along with being able to get to the top of the heap.

But I don't blame you about Jared Kushner and that college admissions scandal where people are buying their way in with all these schemes was atrocious. And I see it. Of course, I see it here at Brown. I'm at one of the citadels. We accept one in 25 or 30 applicants at this place, as far as I can tell. But for the underdog, I mean, don't take away the markers that allow me to measure my success by declaring in a fit of relativistic...

you know, self-loathing, that nothing matters and calculus and math are not really calculus and math. And what your LSAT score is should have no bearing on whether or not you occupy a seated Georgetown Law Center. And Stuyvesant should be on a proportional basis to make sure we get ethnic balance. Don't do that. We need Stuyvesant to keep the bar up there so that we know where it is that we should be aiming for. Don't patronize us.

I'm not sure I get as much criticism as you, Glenn, but I get a lot of criticism. And among the most frequent and consistent critiques that I get is that I focus too much of my energy on the problem of, you know, I don't, I hate using this word, but the problem of wokeness. And I hear that. I think the thing that I maybe haven't made explicit enough is I

Part of the reason I think it's worth reporting and writing about the problem of wokeness is because I think it's a dishonest and bad and divisive ideology. But it's also, and this is the point maybe that I haven't made enough yet, it's because I'm concerned with the backlash that wokeness is generating. A backlash that some people say is coming, but that I already see. And this continued push of,

to overly racialize all of the problems in our society, to casually call people and things and institutions racist until that word loses all meaning and all power, to push for politics driven primarily by our identity, this seems to me incredibly, incredibly dangerous. And for all of the talk that we've heard since 2016 about the danger of the alt-right,

Frankly, I don't think that we can even comprehend what a true alt-right, what a true right-wing reaction, what a true white identity politics that comes in reaction to woke politics could actually look like. And that's the thing beyond the threat of wokeness that I think is also at stake here. No, I think you're spot on. You've said it very, very well. I've tried to make a similar point myself.

I've said, for example, you racialize thoroughly a discussion of crime, punishment, policing and prisons in this country. And you are inviting the whirlwind. OK, you're inviting some things that come out of the box that you really don't want to come out of the box. And I gestured at this earlier in saying this is not just race, but this is the broader wokeness.

that not everybody is on the same page about cultural change at the same time, and yet you have command of the cultural institutions. You're alienating people when you are so intolerant of them, when you're so dismissive of the fact that they have a different view of the world that breeds... I can't help but think, I can't prove this, I'm not a political scientist, but the phenomenon of Trump, whether the particular electoral result of 2016 could be laid at the feet of this or not,

But the phenomenon, durability of the attractiveness of Trump to a certain part of this electorate, you can go ahead and write it off as madness, white ring, white ring, unrelentant, unreconstituted, segregationist, you know, slavery loving white supremacy if you want to.

A lot of it is people who just sat there. They watch what happened in the George Floyd riots of a protest. I'm sorry, uprisings. I'm sorry. What's the right word? What's the correct word? And they think and they know good and gosh darn well what happened. OK, you can't just pull the wool over his eyes. You can shut him up. I admired this book by a German political scientist from the 60s. Elizabeth Neuland Neumann was her name. The book was called The Spiral of Silence. And what she argued in the book was that

You can suppress, you know, with censorship, the expression of opinion, but it doesn't go away. It just festers underneath and it leaves you vulnerable to revolutionary uprising. So the people who want to hunt down every white supremacist inside the U.S. military or police department,

I don't begrudge them because domestic terror is a real threat and there are things to be concerned about. But that's not really the sword of Damocles that's hanging over our head. It's not...

self-consciously white supremacist racist militias, I think, that's hanging over our head. It's a sleeping giant of opinion amongst many people that is now being suppressed because they'll be told that they're in bad order if they express it. But what am I not supposed to believe? My lying eyes is kind of their attitude.

We've mentioned Orwell a few times in this conversation, Glenn, and obviously one of his most iconic quotes, it's become a cliche at this point, but it's become a cliche because it's just so good, is that to see what is in front of one's nose, you need a constant struggle. And I don't know if there's anyone that fulfills that line better than you do. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Oh, gosh, that was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening.

As always, you can drop us a line or send us a tip at honestlypod.com. And if you like what we're doing and you want to support this and every other project we have cooking up, the easiest way to do that is to go to my sub stack, verywise.substack.com and subscribe. See you next week.