Latest / Gil I Am / Robert Woodson and Glenn Loury...The Ethics of Black Identity

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Robert Woodson and Glenn Loury...The Ethics of Black Identity · Gil I Am

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  Speaker 1: Hello, this is Glenn Lowry. This is The Glen Show,
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  Speaker 1: the podcast coming to you from the Manhattan Institute in
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  Speaker 1: New York City, which sponsors the Glen Show. We have
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  Speaker 1: a special edition today. We'll be discussing with a distinguished
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  Speaker 1: panel the ethics of racial identification, and we have the
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  Speaker 1: honor of the President of the Manhattan Institute, Raihan Salaam,
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  Speaker 1: moderating the discussion. So I'm going to turn things over
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  Speaker 1: to him. Thank you for tuning in.
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  Speaker 2: Thank you very much for that kind introduction. Glenn. I
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  Speaker 2: am joined today by, of course, our host, Glenn Lowry,
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  Speaker 2: the Burton Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University,
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  Speaker 2: and the John Paulson Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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  Speaker 2: Also we have Camille Foster, founder and partner at Freethink Media,
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  Speaker 2: Bob Woodson, founder and President of the Woodson Center, and
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  Speaker 2: the Auster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University,
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  Speaker 2: Shelby Steel. I want to start by asking all of
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  Speaker 2: you to reflect on black identity, what it means, why
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  Speaker 2: it matters, why it has endured, why it should or
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  Speaker 2: should not endure. And Camille, I wonder if you could
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  Speaker 2: get us started.
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  Speaker 3: Right out of the gate with the controversy. Well, first,
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  Speaker 3: I'm grateful, Glenn for you to suggest that we ought
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  Speaker 3: to convene this conversation. I think this is critically important. Obviously,
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  Speaker 3: we have a lot of conversations about race in the
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  Speaker 3: United States these days, but I suspect what we all
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  Speaker 3: have in common is that we have a lot of
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  Speaker 3: concern about the way that those conversations are proceeding. I
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  Speaker 3: suspect where we also have some disagreement is around this
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  Speaker 3: question of racial identity. And what I think is important
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  Speaker 3: to bear in mind, and I should probably start by saying,
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  Speaker 3: I'm an individualist, like my own perspective of myself isn't
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  Speaker 3: rooted in my race, It's rooted in my person. I
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  Speaker 3: believe that all of us have a particular dignity that
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  Speaker 3: allows us to be entitled to the rights and privileges
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  Speaker 3: afforded to ourselves, and that dignity is rooted in our
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  Speaker 3: humanity and not in our race. And for so much
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  Speaker 3: of this country's history, the race has been an obstacle
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  Speaker 3: to actually getting allowing people to enjoy all of the
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  Speaker 3: full rights and privileges of being an American. And there's
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  Speaker 3: been this process over the course of many decades, centuries
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  Speaker 3: in fact, to allow the various benefits of freedom to
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  Speaker 3: be given out to a broader and broader portion of
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  Speaker 3: the population. But there are still these enduring problems in
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  Speaker 3: our polity, these defects in terms of the amounts of
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  Speaker 3: wealth and prosperity that has been crude, These persistent patterns
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  Speaker 3: of kind of disadvantage and underperformance that kind of obsess us,
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  Speaker 3: but they obsess us in a particular way, and they
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  Speaker 3: tend to manifest themselves in these conversations that are largely
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  Speaker 3: framed by race. And part of what I am very
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  Speaker 3: concerned about is the degree to which race obstructs our
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  Speaker 3: ability to have sophisticated conversations about important, difficult topics, the
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  Speaker 3: ways that we find to constantly reaffirm and re enthrone race,
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  Speaker 3: a concept that you know, twenty odd years ago, I
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  Speaker 3: had a particular set of views and ideals about race
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  Speaker 3: that I suspect were pretty compatible with most Americans. These
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  Speaker 3: these basic notions of kind of the content of your
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  Speaker 3: character being the thing that was important, and I suspect
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  Speaker 3: most Americans bought into that. But today it seems that
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  Speaker 3: there is a very determined effort to recenter race, to
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  Speaker 3: make people think first and foremost about the role of
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  Speaker 3: race and society and in their lives, to race themselves,
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  Speaker 3: to capitalize to be in black. And I think that
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  Speaker 3: that is an obvious move in the wrong direction. And
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  Speaker 3: I think part of what's enabled that move in the
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  Speaker 3: wrong direction is embracing a kind of notion of color
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  Speaker 3: blindness without really and full throatedly attacking the taxonomy of
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  Speaker 3: human races, the very notion that there are these differences
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  Speaker 3: that ought to be regarded or even formally or systematically
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  Speaker 3: or kind of casually ignored. I think we need to
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  Speaker 3: go a step further, and we need to really embrace
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  Speaker 3: an ethic of regarding one another as individuals, which doesn't
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  Speaker 3: mean that we have to sacrifice respect for history or
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  Speaker 3: an appreciation of culture, but it does mean that we
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  Speaker 3: have to think very differently about an ideology that we've
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  Speaker 3: all been very steeped in for a very long time
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  Speaker 3: and perhaps engage with frequently without even thinking about.
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  Speaker 2: Bob, You've devoted decades of your life to community uplift.
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  Speaker 2: You've been a civil rights activist, You've been someone who's
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  Speaker 2: worked in primarily black communities to help them foster these
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  Speaker 2: ideals of mutual aid and what have you. It seems
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  Speaker 2: that black identity is awfully important to you, and the
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  Speaker 2: idea of collective black uplift is very important to you.
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  Speaker 2: When you hear Camille talk about the idea of moving
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  Speaker 2: beyond race thinking primarily in terms of individuals, I'm curious
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  Speaker 2: to hear your reaction.
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  Speaker 4: No.
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  Speaker 5: I grew up was born in the Depression in a
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  Speaker 5: segregated South Philadelphia small community where ninety five per son
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  Speaker 5: of the households had a man and a woman raising children,
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  Speaker 5: where elderly people could walk safely without fear of being
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  Speaker 5: assaulted by their grandchildren, never heard a gunfired nor baby
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  Speaker 5: shot in their cribs, and so I grew up with
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  Speaker 5: this strong sense of being into secure. But at the
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  Speaker 5: same time, whenever I went to the movies and saw
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  Speaker 5: people having fun, they were always white, traveling places, eating food,
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  Speaker 5: and so there was this conflict between the reality of
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  Speaker 5: what I was living in what I saw, and then
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  Speaker 5: when I was able to leave and get involved in
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  Speaker 5: the civil rights movement, I ran into a conflict because
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  Speaker 5: many of the challenges that the civil rights movement I
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  Speaker 5: departed because it really sought integration and not desegregation. And
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  Speaker 5: when they were seeking a force bussing for integration, I
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  Speaker 5: was against it, and which made me a pariah because
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  Speaker 5: I believe the opposite of segregation is desegregation, not integration.
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  Speaker 5: And the very fact that we pressed it failed to
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  Speaker 5: distinguish the thing means that anything is all black is
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  Speaker 5: all bad.
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  Speaker 6: And so I believe that racial is critical.
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  Speaker 5: That's why I embrace the the Black power movement that
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  Speaker 5: I know that shall be challenges. It morphed into something
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  Speaker 5: not helpful, but we must also look at its contribution.
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  Speaker 5: Civil rights movement never dealt with personal identity, nor the
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  Speaker 5: distress uh upward mobility and and and and independence. The
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  Speaker 5: civil rights movement, the black power movement assumed equality and sought.
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  Speaker 6: The opportunity to pursue it.
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  Speaker 5: And so I think that, uh, that it is important
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  Speaker 5: to be agents of your own uplift, and we should
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  Speaker 5: instill in our people that you can be have uh
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  Speaker 5: be intricately involved with your own race. At the same time,
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  Speaker 5: we can be a part of a larger ethnic group too.
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  Speaker 5: In other words, saying that you're pro black doesn't mean
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  Speaker 5: you're anti uh post racialism.
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  Speaker 6: I think the two can coexist.
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  Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Bob Shelby. I wonder if you
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  Speaker 2: could share some thoughts you have spoken of the shock
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  Speaker 2: of freedom. You've written powerfully and movingly about the ways
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  Speaker 2: in which some of our racial boundaries are more psychological
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  Speaker 2: and internal in nature than they are societal, or about
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  Speaker 2: legal institutions. I wonder how you think about black identity
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  Speaker 2: and its role in our public life today.
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  Speaker 4: Well, today, I think that identity is often used as
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  Speaker 4: a I think racial identity always, almost always has an
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  Speaker 4: element of corruption in it. It almost always, not almost
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  Speaker 4: as always seeks power, and it's about power. Uh. And
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  Speaker 4: did you know and then for the last since the sixties, certainly,
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  Speaker 4: And I remember the black power movement very uh, very well.
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  Speaker 4: You know, none of us were really black enough. You
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  Speaker 4: were always trying to be black. And uh, I love
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  Speaker 4: Richard Prior's Joe Black was his poem one word. Uh.
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  Speaker 4: And you kind of, you know, if you think about
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  Speaker 4: you kind of said this is I grew up the
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  Speaker 4: same kind of neighborhood that Bob just described. Uh. And
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  Speaker 4: there was family life, and there were fathers in every house.
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  Speaker 3: Uh.
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  Speaker 4: There there was schools were terrible, but they even began
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  Speaker 4: to resist that, and there was a real fundamental human
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  Speaker 4: coherence that we shared with all other people. I remember
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  Speaker 4: my father asking me in the sixth is when I
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  Speaker 4: was in the Black Power well, what is identity? I
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  Speaker 4: haven't really answered him, Well yet, he's born in the
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  Speaker 4: South in third grade education, if he would doesn't know
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  Speaker 4: what the black identity is. I don't know what I
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  Speaker 4: think we use it for, particularly today. We well we have.
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  Speaker 4: We came to use it in the sixties as a
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  Speaker 4: kind of symbol of victimization. So when you were black,
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  Speaker 4: you were a victim. We've put into place this idea
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  Speaker 4: that to be a strong and down brother and sister
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  Speaker 4: you had to be fighting and protesting racism and this
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  Speaker 4: this it implied a kind of political activism the black identity,
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  Speaker 4: and to some degree I think that made some sense
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  Speaker 4: there because identity is always offensive, so it's defending against
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  Speaker 4: some larger force in the world. And so that's that's
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  Speaker 4: what it was in the sixties, and I sort of
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  Speaker 4: certainly was involved in it to a degree, but quickly
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  Speaker 4: grew out of it. You could begin to see that
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  Speaker 4: it really wasn't going anywhere. The problem today, I think
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  Speaker 4: the problem we face as Black Americans is not racism anymore.
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  Speaker 4: There's no doubt some racism out there, but that's just
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  Speaker 4: not That's way down the list of problems that we
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  Speaker 4: as Black Americans face, and to still worry about our
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  Speaker 4: identity in terms of our history of victimization and protesting
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  Speaker 4: and fighting for blackness, that proved to be a kind
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  Speaker 4: of wasted effort. It didn't lift us up. It confused us.
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  Speaker 4: It made us think race is really meaningful when there's
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  Speaker 4: really nothing to it. Uh, it's it's an empty it's
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  Speaker 4: a void. It's empty. It's something people go to when
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  Speaker 4: they want to when they want to do something a little,
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  Speaker 4: when they want to do something a little in the farios,
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  Speaker 4: if I try to tell you that I'm black and
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  Speaker 4: so forth, and therefore let's make a deal over here, uh,
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  Speaker 4: is the way it goes. Our black leadership today today
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  Speaker 4: is pretty much entirely devoted to precisely that use of
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  Speaker 4: identity as a wedge as leverage to gain power and
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  Speaker 4: money and to get organizations and corruct and universities and
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  Speaker 4: so forth to give us things. Well, my sense is
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  Speaker 4: that our great problem today, Uh, it's not victimization and racism,
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  Speaker 4: but freedom and we've used identity because we're afraid of freedom.
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  Speaker 4: Freedom is a fearful, awesome things you have to face
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  Speaker 4: up to, particularly after you've been through four centuries of
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  Speaker 4: oppression and have really very little experience with anything remotely
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  Speaker 4: like freedom. But freedom is demanding and it asks everything
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  Speaker 4: of you. It makes you responsible for yourself in ways
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  Speaker 4: that are always going to be difficult and challenging. And
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  Speaker 4: so if you don't do well, you don't know how
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  Speaker 4: to proceed down that path. And we as blacks, didn't
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  Speaker 4: in the sixties. How can you come out of four
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  Speaker 4: centuries of oppression and know precisely what to do. It's
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  Speaker 4: taken us seventy eighty years now to begin to really
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  Speaker 4: think about what Let's look at our real problems and stop,
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  Speaker 4: you know, thinking that somehow or other culture and identity
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  Speaker 4: is going to do anything for us. We have to
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  Speaker 4: understand those things don't count in freedom. What counts in
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  Speaker 4: freedom is all that boring stuff, really difficult, demanding values,
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  Speaker 4: hard work of family life, responsibility, same things that work
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  Speaker 4: for all human beings are the only things that are
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  Speaker 4: going to ever work for Black America. And the idea
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  Speaker 4: that our blackness is going to somehow help us or facilitate.
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  Speaker 4: That is a delusion that we need to move on
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  Speaker 4: away from at this point and be suspicious of. Understand
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  Speaker 4: this is this is one of history's little traps. So
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  Speaker 4: it seduces you into thinking that, well, your identity, if
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  Speaker 4: you're just black, that'll do it. No, it won't. You
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  Speaker 4: won't do it. And of course all the statistics that
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  Speaker 4: we are all aware of prove that we're behind it.
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  Speaker 4: Almost everything of meaning in American life, well, that's identity.
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  Speaker 4: Because identity is not it's not a muscle, it's not
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  Speaker 4: an active force. It's an avoidance of the challenges with freedom.
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  Speaker 4: Anytime I see hear anybody telling you about identity today,
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  Speaker 4: and it's avoidance, Glenn. And well, Glenn, go ahead, Oh.
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  Speaker 2: No, no, forgive me, Sorry for interrupting your shot. Glenn. You've
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  Speaker 2: informed how the world thinks about ethnicity and social capital.
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  Speaker 2: One observation you've made about Black Americans and the persistence
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  Speaker 2: of identity is a deceptively simple one. It's that if
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  Speaker 2: there were no barriers to intermarriage, if there were full integration,
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  Speaker 2: you would not see the persistence of a distinct, identifiable
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  Speaker 2: group with its own form of vernacular English with its
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  Speaker 2: own cultural practices. You know, when you're looking at Black
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  Speaker 2: Americans and indeed many other groups as well, there is
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  Speaker 2: a real persistence there that is a force that affects
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  Speaker 2: outcomes and social life, affects the distribution of resources and
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  Speaker 2: society and much else. One way that I think about
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  Speaker 2: this is that the force sustaining that distinctiveness could be
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  Speaker 2: status or could be stigma, you know, both forms of it.
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  Speaker 2: So think about Jewish Americans, for example, here is a
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  Speaker 2: group where you know, large numbers of Jewish Americans out marry,
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  Speaker 2: but perhaps less than you'd expect if they were just
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  Speaker 2: another European ethnic group. You know, that could be because
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  Speaker 2: this is a group where there are valuable goods, there
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  Speaker 2: is a kind of community specific social capital that exists there,
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  Speaker 2: there's an attractive pull to remaining part of the group.
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  Speaker 2: But you could also say that in some context and
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  Speaker 2: some environments, it's part of stigma. That partly it's because
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  Speaker 2: of the persistence of anti Semitism, and as Shelby was saying,
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  Speaker 2: that desire for some kind of defensive mentality we are
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  Speaker 2: going to support and sustain our community that is under threat.
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  Speaker 2: When you think about the persistence of black identity. I'm
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  Speaker 2: curious how you think about it in the context of
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  Speaker 2: status and stigma, How you think about it in the
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  Speaker 2: context of the rewards offered by belonging to this group
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  Speaker 2: with the rich and distinct history and culture, you know,
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  Speaker 2: versus the extent which that distinctiveness is driven by discrimination
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  Speaker 2: from the outside.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, first, let me say I have great respect
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  Speaker 1: for the positions that Camille and Shelby have given voice to,
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  Speaker 1: and I certainly agree that, you know, the long term
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  Speaker 1: endgame here has to be one in which we envision,
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  Speaker 1: if you will, the abolition of race or the transcendence
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  Speaker 1: of race. I don't want in America one hundred years
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  Speaker 1: from now or even seventy five years from now, in
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  Speaker 1: which we are in these silos based upon something that's
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  Speaker 1: relatively superficial that doesn't really define us. On the other hand,
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  Speaker 1: I think that you know, if I say the Black Church,
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  Speaker 1: that that's a meaningful thing to say, not merely as
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  Speaker 1: a matter of well, the whites won't let us sit
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  Speaker 1: in the pew, but as a matter of there's a
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  Speaker 1: foundation here. There are generations of cultural and spiritual rootedness here.
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  Speaker 1: There's a narrative in the black church. There's music in
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  Speaker 1: the black church, there's power in the black church. It
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  Speaker 1: reaches people. It's meaningful to people. If I say the
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  Speaker 1: black family, if I encourage people to adopt orphaned children
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  Speaker 1: who are black, based in part upon a sense that
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  Speaker 1: the black family needs support, that we need to pull together,
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  Speaker 1: that's a way of mobilizing people on behalf of a
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  Speaker 1: social good. It's an affirmation. So whereas the race hustlers,
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  Speaker 1: and they are plentiful, will strategically deployed, just as Shelby
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  Speaker 1: has said brilliantly and more than once in his books,
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  Speaker 1: they will deploy they will play the race card, they
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  Speaker 1: will use race as a dodge, as a power grabbing move.
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  Speaker 1: And we could give many examples. Whereas that's certainly true,
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  Speaker 1: and it is something to be objected to strenuously. It's bad,
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  Speaker 1: it's bad for even black people seen as a collective,
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  Speaker 1: but it's bad for our country and it's taking us
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  Speaker 1: in the wrong direction. Whereas that's certainly true. The collective
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  Speaker 1: action problem, how do you get people to pull together
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  Speaker 1: in the same direction on behalf of goals that none
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: of them can achieve on their own. Require some kind
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  Speaker 1: of narrative. I mean think about the role that nationalism
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  Speaker 1: plays in the construction of collective goods in the welfare state,
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  Speaker 1: or and on behalf of defending the country against external threat.
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  Speaker 1: People are called based upon their sense of fealty and
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  Speaker 1: connection to the country. We are Americans. We're not citizens
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  Speaker 1: of the world, although we are citizens of the world,
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  Speaker 1: of course, but we're not only that. We're Americans, and
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  Speaker 1: that has meaning to us in terms of our history,
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  Speaker 1: our culture, our narratives, and our self definition. Likewise, we
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  Speaker 1: black Americans in the twenty first century, the descendants of
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  Speaker 1: those who had been enslaved and who labored to become
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  Speaker 1: fully equal citizens. There's a story there. I want my
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  Speaker 1: children to know that story, among other stories. I don't
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  Speaker 1: want that to be the final word. I don't want
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  Speaker 1: that to be there defining, if you will. Here's a
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  Speaker 1: suit of clothes adequate to the task at hand that
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  Speaker 1: we wear lightly, not that we wear as a shroud,
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  Speaker 1: that we wear with the ability to take it off
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  Speaker 1: and to stand outside. But I don't think yet, even now,
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  Speaker 1: in the year twenty twenty two, we're at the point
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  Speaker 1: where we can afford to give up the leverage and
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  Speaker 1: the power that Robert Woodson in his work in terms
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  Speaker 1: of grassroots organization, has leveraged on more than one occasion
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  Speaker 1: of getting people together encouraging to do hard work on
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  Speaker 1: behalf of collective goals like raising our children, maintaining order
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  Speaker 1: in our communities, and doing honor to the sacrifices of
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  Speaker 1: our ancestors.
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  Speaker 6: May I just.
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  Speaker 5: Add to that, I agree with with Shelby, But I
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  Speaker 5: think the reason that this debate got going is because
• 21:40
  Speaker 5: of our request of Shelby to sign the letters supporting
• 21:43
  Speaker 5: Clarence Thomas, and he objected because we were all black signatures.
• 21:47
  Speaker 5: And I think it's because this was a tactic that
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  Speaker 5: we're applying. It wasn't a philosophical statement. We were making
• 21:55
  Speaker 5: that the white elitist left has appropriated the wounds and
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  Speaker 5: suffering of Black America and weaponized it against the values
• 22:05
  Speaker 5: of this nation, and they're using it in the black
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  Speaker 5: civil rights leadership and the black carcasses are allowing that
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  Speaker 5: appropriation to occur, and so they're using it to say,
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  Speaker 5: in the name of black people.
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  Speaker 6: So since they.
• 22:20
  Speaker 5: Attack Clarence Thomas in the name of black people, we
• 22:23
  Speaker 5: think we thought that the messengers pushing back against that
• 22:27
  Speaker 5: sho should be black that's why we came together as
• 22:30
  Speaker 5: blacks to write this letter, and as a consequence, has
• 22:34
  Speaker 5: got about twenty five different organizations, most of them black,
• 22:40
  Speaker 5: who published it and gave it. They gave it some publicity.
• 22:45
  Speaker 5: So the point, and I agree with you, Shelby, but
• 22:49
  Speaker 5: what's happening is these these race hustlers are using the
• 22:53
  Speaker 5: conditions the birth defect of this nature, slavery and as
• 22:58
  Speaker 5: a bludgeon against the country, and so therefore we need
• 23:01
  Speaker 5: to push back. But it's also doing happening at the
• 23:05
  Speaker 5: expense of those at the bottom. Anytime you generalize about
• 23:09
  Speaker 5: a group, you cannot generalize about all black people or women.
• 23:14
  Speaker 5: Whenever you then try to apply remedies as the right
• 23:17
  Speaker 5: as the left does, it always helps those at the
• 23:21
  Speaker 5: top at the expense of those at the bottom. When
• 23:24
  Speaker 5: the me too movements start talking about women and so
• 23:28
  Speaker 5: who benefited from him? The women who are in the
• 23:31
  Speaker 5: casting coultues in Hollywood. Women are to get on boards
• 23:35
  Speaker 5: of directors, women are to be hired. But what about
• 23:40
  Speaker 5: the Black women who are in prisons being systematically raped.
• 23:44
  Speaker 5: There was a two hour special documentary on where they
• 23:48
  Speaker 5: call it these women. Every one of the victims were black.
• 23:51
  Speaker 5: Every one of the victimizers were black, but it did
• 23:54
  Speaker 5: not generate any outcry for support for justice for these
• 23:58
  Speaker 5: women because it didn't fit the racial narrative. And that's
• 24:02
  Speaker 5: how And you're understanding how race is being used to
• 24:06
  Speaker 5: really a disadvantage people who are poor and black, and
• 24:14
  Speaker 5: so I agree with you that we can't allow it
• 24:16
  Speaker 5: to happen, but our use of it, we have to
• 24:19
  Speaker 5: be strategic. There are times, as in the case with
• 24:22
  Speaker 5: Clarence Thomas, and we must come together to push back
• 24:25
  Speaker 5: against the black left who are misusing race. But we
• 24:30
  Speaker 5: also should concentrate on we're doing this in the service
• 24:35
  Speaker 5: of eliminating race, so we can concentrate on the real
• 24:38
  Speaker 5: crisis based in this country, and that's the moral and
• 24:40
  Speaker 5: spiritual freefall that is consuming low income people in others.
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: Shall please, I mean, I agree with ninety nine percent
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: of what you said. Well maybe eighty nine.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: Two strikes nine three two cheers, not three.
• 25:03
  Speaker 4: But my my feet after wrestling with this for a lifetime,
• 25:08
  Speaker 4: I my feeling is very simple. Race is absolutely, always,
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: with no exceptions whatsoever, poison. You can't understand it. If
• 25:23
  Speaker 4: you don't understand poison, and what you say there for example,
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: that you know that, well, a little bit of poison
• 25:31
  Speaker 4: over here is okay, and a little bit and you
• 25:35
  Speaker 4: you start to make distinctions. Uh. I want to see
• 25:39
  Speaker 4: some white people support the media being fair to Clarence Thomas.
• 25:45
  Speaker 4: I want them, I want them to to on a
• 25:48
  Speaker 4: human level, by using race to to attack Clarence Thomas,
• 25:56
  Speaker 4: that's the evil, that's the poison and a group. I
• 26:02
  Speaker 4: certainly want them to treat Plans Thomas in the right way,
• 26:07
  Speaker 4: but but not by using not by committing the same crime,
• 26:13
  Speaker 4: not by using using race all over again, now the
• 26:16
  Speaker 4: name of the good rather than bad, but but using
• 26:19
  Speaker 4: it all over again. It's it's too it's dangerous, it's
• 26:24
  Speaker 4: it's none of us are smart enough to find a good, effective,
• 26:28
  Speaker 4: you know, morally cleaned way to use race. It's always
• 26:32
  Speaker 4: a little dirty, and that dirtiness, over time envelops the
• 26:37
  Speaker 4: whole institution, whatever it may be. Uh So it's poison.
• 26:42
  Speaker 6: Sometimes the venom of the snake.
• 26:44
  Speaker 5: Sometimes the venom of the snake has to be used
• 26:47
  Speaker 5: to develop the anti venom.
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: Sometimes sometimes it's not obvious that that's necessary here. I mean,
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: I want to just say that I've one I recognize
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: all of the goodwill in the conversation, and I recognize
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: a lot of the you know, extraordinarily hard work that's
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: been done. You know, Bob, the work that you've done
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: with your organization is laudable, and I don't take anything
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: away from that by adopting the perspective that I have
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: now with respect to race, I would have to say
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: that I stridently agree with Shelby though that there is
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: a very real sense in which I think it is
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: impossible to divorce a concept, a notion like blackness, for example,
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: from the toxic milieu that it was forged in and
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: the purpose that it was forged for. It was meant
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: to divide, it was meant to dehumanize, and there's a
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: very real sense in which a lot of that ideological
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: baggage is always carried along with it. However we deploy
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: the concept. And I greatly appreciate as well, Glenn you're
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: rousing speech, encouraging us to support one another's families and
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: to come together to find terms upon which that we
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: can come together an agree to work towards on common purpose.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: But I think two things are also Two related. Things
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: are true that relate to that. One is that it
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: is entirely possible to forge those bonds in other ways
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: and in deeper, more meaningful ways. I think local communities
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: are largely the ones that are actually bearing the burden
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: of suffering through the spikes in crime, and not kind
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: of black people corporately. I think there's a lot of
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: senses in which especially I think the point I can't
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: remember who made it a moment ago about all of
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: the benefits that accrue to people kind of at the
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: top of the pyramid, when you have a racial reckoning
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: and a couple of people move up a couple of offices,
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: and they were already making several hundred thousand dollars a year,
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: and now they're making half a million a year, And
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: it's great for all of them if you can launch
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: your new DEI business or get some new government contracts,
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: but it does not help people at the lower end.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: And thinking more specifically about the kinds of problems, the
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: more practically about the kinds of problems we're trying to address,
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: having a much higher resolution is going to require us
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: to get beyond the confines of race. The disparity that
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: interests me isn't the disparity between white kids and black
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: kids in elementary school. It's not the disparity between white
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: teenagers and black teenagers in attaining acceptance to top flight
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: into universities. It's the disparity between children who are succeeding
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: in children who are not. It's the fact that we
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: recognize the success sequence actually gives us the keys to
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: what's necessary to succeed. And there is no way to
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: unrace yourself and to take advantage of the benefits of
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: rightness to kind of put things in the way that
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: someone from the left might frame it, and in much
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: the same way, to frame it in a way that
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: might be a little bit more palatable to someone who
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: would regard themselves as conservative. I don't know that trying
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: to build alliances of concern along racial lines isn't likely,
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: it's actually likely to win out against the kind of
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: dominant prescon respective when it comes to blackness in America.
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: I think we actually have to have a more ambitious
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: goal and strategy and to have a higher resolution approach
• 30:11
  Speaker 3: to thinking about problems and talking about problems.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: I want to underscore something here. I'm struck by the
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: fact that, actually, you know, among the four of you,
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: there's actually a fair bit of agreement about what we
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: see as an attractive moral outcome over the very long term.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: I think that all of you agree that you know,
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: being seen as an individual has value. But one thing
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: I detected both in Glenn and Bob's remarks is this
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: idea that there's certain kinds of sacrifices that are appropriate
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: to make in the name of solidarity. That is, you know,
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: one version of your sensibility, Camille, and this will be ungenerous,
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: but I'm curious to hear your reaction. But also Glens
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: is that you know, essentially what you're saying is that
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: we live in a much forer society now, we live
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: in a society in which one can have more agency
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: and freedom of action, and that it is a moral
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: imperative to claim that and to claim that individualism to
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: derace oneself. But another view is that that poses a
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: kind of collective action problem in which you have people
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: who have the ability to capitalize on those opportunities through
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: the kind of attenuation of those rigid racial ties, and
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: then what you see is the defection of people like
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: you from this kind of larger collective public good of
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: acting on behalf of a racial group that has been
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: stigmatized and excluded. I wonder if that makes sense to
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: you what your reaction to that is. And I also
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: want to hear from Glenn if that sounds roughly right
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: to him. That part of what we're saying is that yes,
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: it's a good and healthy aspiration to be free of
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: those group obligations, but those group obligations really bite right now,
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: and that there is a responsibility for those Well, well,
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: I'm gonna just want to throw out the idea.
• 31:51
  Speaker 4: To I mean that it seems to me a key
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: point you bite. Do you mean racism? That people are
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: still being victimized by racism. I'm just trying to really
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: get all.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: I'm trying to kind of advance what I take to
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: be part of GLENSI. So maybe he.
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: Would be, well, the collective action problem just very straightforwardly.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: You have goals toward which you would like to mobilize
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: people to achieve those goals. Each one individually might not
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: have the interest to make the sacrifices if they only
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: thought of it in their own terms, but if they
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: see themselves as part of a collective And I gave
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: the example of nationalism, you have a country, you have
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: people asked to sacrifice, to pay taxes, to fight and die,
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: if it comes to that. And underneath that is a
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: sense of identity. It's a sense of in this case
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: americanness to which they feel a certain degree of obligation
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: and responsibility. It's just what I'm saying, is the Black Church,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: I give that as a concrete example, is an institution.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: It has a history, it has a narrative, it has
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: a sense of self rider standing, and it gives meaning
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: to people's lives.
• 33:03
  Speaker 4: It's not will never, it will never be the same man. Okay, freedom,
• 33:09
  Speaker 4: We're in freedom now. The Black Church was formed when
• 33:12
  Speaker 4: we were in naked oppression. Today we're in freedom. Racism
• 33:17
  Speaker 4: is not there. You can worship any way you want.
• 33:21
  Speaker 4: We're so free with you don't know what to do
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: with it.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: We're in agreement about that. We're in agreement about that, Shelby.
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: But I'm a I'm a I'm a jazz fan. I
• 33:29
  Speaker 4: love I love the music following way too much because
• 33:36
  Speaker 4: it's it's it's to me and it's a rare, magnificent
• 33:40
  Speaker 4: creation that does come out of black, the black experience.
• 33:43
  Speaker 4: But that experience doesn't exist anymore. Racism is simply not
• 33:48
  Speaker 4: not a problem. It's not a it doesn't deserve the
• 33:51
  Speaker 4: whole a cultural response.
• 33:55
  Speaker 5: But what what I find disturbing is that the left,
• 34:01
  Speaker 5: both the elite left and are using race disadvantage of
• 34:07
  Speaker 5: poor people and they are dying as a consequence of
• 34:11
  Speaker 5: their misuse of it.
• 34:12
  Speaker 6: Yea, so it's it's.
• 34:14
  Speaker 5: But if you're not going to confront that reality with
• 34:17
  Speaker 5: some idealized version of post racism and just say, well,
• 34:21
  Speaker 5: it's just it doesn't exist anymore, so they'll we'll just
• 34:24
  Speaker 5: act like it doesn't exist. You've got to take action,
• 34:28
  Speaker 5: I think, in those places to confront those who are
• 34:31
  Speaker 5: misusing race. And the way we do it is to
• 34:35
  Speaker 5: gather groups who are suffering the problems, like the mothers
• 34:38
  Speaker 5: who lost children to homicide, to stand up to the
• 34:42
  Speaker 5: black left and say we are against defund the police,
• 34:46
  Speaker 5: and we and so it is, it is. It is
• 34:50
  Speaker 5: important to have those suffering the problem.
• 34:53
  Speaker 4: Why would you exclude weights from the letter appropriate because.
• 34:59
  Speaker 5: It doesn't have have the same power when black. In
• 35:02
  Speaker 5: other words, you when someone derives their moral authority by
• 35:06
  Speaker 5: saying they represent you, when you stand up yourself and
• 35:11
  Speaker 5: say they don't represent me, that undermines the marral authority.
• 35:15
  Speaker 5: But if I go in and say, oh, I have
• 35:16
  Speaker 5: to have a white person on my arm to walk
• 35:19
  Speaker 5: in to claim it. No, I mean it's a strategic move, Shelby,
• 35:23
  Speaker 5: it's not a.
• 35:25
  Speaker 6: Strategic move.
• 35:26
  Speaker 4: You're saying you have to have a black person only
• 35:29
  Speaker 4: black people on your arm.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no, no no. What you're saying is they
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: don't speak for black people. The message that we want
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: to give is those blacks who have appropriated race on
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: behalf of race card playing nonsense, don't speak for black
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: people exactly. In order to say that, there are two
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: things you could do. One of them is I'm black
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: and they don't speak for me. The other is blackness
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: is a fiction. Nobody speaks for black people. We opted
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: for the former move.
• 36:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and again, well, well identity, No, it's perfectly fun.
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: I'm happy to defer to you. No, no, please, I
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: appreciate that that's the decision that's being made. I just
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: think that it's impossible to not well, no, it's not impossible.
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: It's imperative that we take a look at what the
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: costs might be and to the extent we are refurbishing
• 36:24
  Speaker 3: sustaining notions of racial difference, a notion of there even
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: being any authority whatsoever or respectability, and asserting that you
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: are speaking on behalf of a particular group of people,
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: that there is a particular opinion that is held by
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: all people that look a particular way, and that is
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: something that we ought to be wary of. And I
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: would go with step further and say, you're absolutely right, Bob.
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: It is imperative that you are pushing back against, you know,
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: dangerous currents in our culture, and that you're confronting people
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: who insist on and framing things with respect to race
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: in order to derive some sort of culture or political power.
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: At this point, we can't even talk about student loans
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: without invoking race and talking about it because it's a
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: powerful tool. That said, the best way to actually undermine
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: that is to acknowledge that this tactic is being deployed
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: and too not to give even the appearance that this
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: is a respectable way to conduct business. To focus, I think,
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: very narrowly and specifically on the defects of the policies
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: that are being proposed, and to provide affirmative solutions like
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: better alternative approaches. And I think you've mentioned a few times, Glenn,
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: the Black Church and other kind of valuable institutions that
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: exist that have some sort of a racial context. I'm
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: not interested in obliterating the Black church. I'm not interested
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: in telling people that they shouldn't think about their church
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: as a Black church. But I do think a lot
• 37:50
  Speaker 3: about a young pastor who's planting a church today, a
• 37:54
  Speaker 3: brand new church, who insists on it being kind of affirmatively,
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: unapologetically black, and a lot of things go along with that,
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: And that is something that happens today, and most of
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: those people are buying into a set of kind of
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: ideological priors that are wildly inconsistent, I think, with progress,
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: and certainly wildly inconsistent with an individualist perspective of how
• 38:18
  Speaker 3: to think about free people operating in a free society.
• 38:21
  Speaker 3: There's a real sense in which our embrace of this concept,
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: whatever the advantages we imagine we're deriving from it, are
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: an obstacle to some of the broader philosophical projects that
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: we might want to engage in. And I think, at
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: a minimum, it's it's worth contemplating. You know, we had
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: the March on Washington, we had King give his I
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: have a Dream speech, and it was it was and
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: is beautiful and powerful. But at the same time, it's
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: imperative to note that no, they're not white girls and
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: black girls, they're just girls. And that is a that
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: is a that's a step in a particular direction. There's
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: a particular line that's being on in the sand there,
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: and I think it's that it's worth.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: A whitewashing of history.
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: Look, I think that's.
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: I'm asking us to change our perspective on what happened historically.
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: I'm talking about the way forward.
• 39:11
  Speaker 5: You know, the reason the reason why the left that
• 39:14
  Speaker 5: we are counterculture now is because our inability to communicate
• 39:22
  Speaker 5: important values and convince people that those values are important.
• 39:28
  Speaker 6: And that is what the left does.
• 39:31
  Speaker 5: And I think Ralph Mader is a perfect example of
• 39:33
  Speaker 5: how you market ideas and principles. When he comes for
• 39:37
  Speaker 5: the Congress to convince the Congress that we need to
• 39:40
  Speaker 5: regulate automobiles, he comes with a weeping parents of a
• 39:45
  Speaker 5: sixteen year old who was lost in a pinto a
• 39:48
  Speaker 5: wrinkled fender of a Pento with blood on it, and
• 39:52
  Speaker 5: then he says, this is the consequence of that policy. Now,
• 39:56
  Speaker 5: let me tell you what changes have to be made
• 39:59
  Speaker 5: by con Conservatives will come with four white guys with
• 40:03
  Speaker 5: blue suits, with ties, with charts, with data. Who wins
• 40:08
  Speaker 5: that fight? And so I think it's important that you
• 40:12
  Speaker 5: have to have the right symbols. I choose to take
• 40:15
  Speaker 5: the people suffering the problem, who've lost children, and when
• 40:19
  Speaker 5: they say that we must stop talking about white people
• 40:23
  Speaker 5: for a year and address the enemy within that is
• 40:27
  Speaker 5: that has much more power than if I were to
• 40:30
  Speaker 5: come with some interracial group armed with some niceties of
• 40:36
  Speaker 5: post racialism.
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: I just want to get a word in here, because
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: so much is flying by. I think you guys are overacting.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: I think you're basically right, and I think the long
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: run that you envisioned and I envision are very similar
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: long runs. It's just that I think that the abolitionist move,
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: the principal rejection of the category race on behalf of
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: an ideal, is, as Bobby said, strategically surrendering too much.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: And I also think it's a little bit a historical.
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: I just wanted for a moment the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: I'm talking about Richard Allen, Absolon Jones. These guys at
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: the end of the eighteenth century in Philadelphia, with slavery
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: was still running strong, found it an institution that is
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: now a global institution of black people striving to do
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: exactly with their freedom what Shelby would have them do.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: Determine their own fates, take responsibility for their lives and
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: for the raising of their children, and so forth and
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: so on, nested within a certain narrative, a certain sense
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: of our quote unquote our history. Now, I have many ancestors,
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: and some of them are European twenty three and me
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: tells me, some of my ancestors are European. But the
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: account I give from whence I have come is deeply
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: nested within this African American history. And all I'm saying is,
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: it's not yet time to throw that over, even as
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: we understand the deeper philosophical truth of transracial humanism as
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: the goal toward which we should all be striving.
• 42:10
  Speaker 4: Well, you're fighting a strong man. We would never throw
• 42:14
  Speaker 4: it over. How could you? Why would you want to?
• 42:16
  Speaker 4: I would? I've been studying Black American culture all my life.
• 42:19
  Speaker 4: I love it is. I'd be a word stronger than identification.
• 42:27
  Speaker 4: It is how she made me who I am, and
• 42:30
  Speaker 4: I'm grateful for it. And yet the world works by evolution.
• 42:38
  Speaker 4: It evolved, it transforms. We won our fight, long fight
• 42:45
  Speaker 4: against racism. For example, in nineteen sixty four, when the
• 42:49
  Speaker 4: Civil Rights Bill was passed. What is that sixty seventy
• 42:52
  Speaker 4: years ago we won. It wasn't manifesting reality yet entirely,
• 42:58
  Speaker 4: but increasingly we have been. It just become, you know,
• 43:03
  Speaker 4: more and more and more and more free. Uh. And
• 43:07
  Speaker 4: at this point it seems to me we are we
• 43:11
  Speaker 4: are balking in the face of freedom. We are intimidated
• 43:16
  Speaker 4: by what it asks of us. And it's some of
• 43:20
  Speaker 4: that is that we're gonna be sort of ripped away
• 43:24
  Speaker 4: from that narrative that you mentioned, and and we're gonna
• 43:29
  Speaker 4: we're gonna have to invent ourselves as free men and women,
• 43:33
  Speaker 4: and we're gonna have to change what it means to
• 43:36
  Speaker 4: be black. And I would, I would. It doesn't just mean,
• 43:40
  Speaker 4: it doesn't just mean responding to racism and hatred. That's
• 43:46
  Speaker 4: it did at one time. But today we black people
• 43:52
  Speaker 4: our biggest problem is modernity, the modern world. We're unprepared
• 43:58
  Speaker 4: to live in it, to thrive in it. That's a problem.
• 44:03
  Speaker 4: And maybe there's a little racism in there somewhere, but
• 44:06
  Speaker 4: the real problem is California. Last year, black kids who
• 44:13
  Speaker 4: graduated from high school read at an eighth grade level.
• 44:17
  Speaker 4: That's the problem.
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: But Shelby, you address yourself to black people, you say
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: weed that has an antecedent the we that you're talking to.
• 44:26
  Speaker 4: How but you see this is what I'm saying false man.
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: Well, I'm I mean, I'm suppose I'm guilty of that
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: because I would generally, I would generally not advise regarding
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: them primarily in that way because there is I mean,
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: we could talk about California schools, LA schools in particular
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: and the underperformance that we see, and we know that
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: blacks are overrepresented in those statistics that they're more likely
• 44:50
  Speaker 3: to do poorly, but there is a bunch of other
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: kids who also do poorly in those school systems, and
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: the reasons that they do poorly. Generally speaking, I have
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: a lot of the same components. They're not reading, they
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: aren't reading in their homes, they're watching too much television,
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: They in many instances don't have two parent households. We
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: can observe the same sorts of stuff when we talk
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: about criminal justice issues. Incarceration, for example, we know that
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: it's not that you know, ninety percent of inmates are black,
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: but close to what I think. It's eighty odd percent
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: of inmates come from these fatherless homes. They don't have
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: fathers in their homes, particularly young men who end up
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: getting incarcerated. That is actually a far more meaningful insight
• 45:32
  Speaker 3: than talking about the kind of racial disparities there, which
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: doesn't suggest that there aren't community and cultural dynamics that
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: are at work. But you know, we're here in Manhattan now,
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: at least you and I are. Glenn and I've lived
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: in New York for most of the last fifteen years,
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: and I don't know that it serves anyone particularly well
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: to talk about kind of black outcomes in New York
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: City and to include myself and my wife in those
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: data points, and also to be talking about people who
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: happen to live in Bedstie. In fact, I was a
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: resident of Bedsty, but I was a gentrifier. I was
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: paying an exorbitant amount of money to live in those
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: communities hoping that they would change in a positive way.
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: I wasn't one of them. So even the use of
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: the kind of us and the we in those contexts
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: is a bit odd. And I think that we looking
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: for I'm not looking to close a door and to
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: ignore history. My goal always is opening doors. I want
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: more people to be able to imagine that that rich
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: history at the Ame Church is something that they can
• 46:35
  Speaker 3: imagine themselves as a part of. And I want young
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: people who imagine themselves as black, who are told, you know,
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: during Black History Month, these are your heroes, to know that, No,
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: you're not limited to that. Those can be some heroes
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: that you adopt, but there's a universe of other people
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: who don't look anything like you, who come from distinctly
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: different backgrounds, but with whom you might be able to
• 46:54
  Speaker 3: find some sort of sense of solidarity. There is a
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: kind of a built in limitter.
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: So your cultural inheritance is the inheritance of the world.
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: You know, what you're saying is that you want to
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: claim ownership and you want your experience to inform that
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: of people, regardless of you know, their ethnic origins, their
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: ascribed grace.
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: That's certainly part of it. And I could probably be
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: more specific and talk about the classical liberal tradition that
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: I'm most interested in the progress that's been made in
• 47:23
  Speaker 3: Western societies. More broadly, I mean, I think there's a
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: narrative about the progress of black people in America since
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: the period of slavery overcoming civil rights, and it is
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: an extraordinary and important story that all Americans ought to
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: take an interest in. But there's also this broader narrative
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: of the struggle for human freedom, the fact that most
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: of our ancestors, regardless of where we come from and
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: what we look like, were subjugated in some way, shape
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: or form, were deprived of the right to live the
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: kinds of extraordinary lives that we do today. And I
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: think that there's something very rich about nesting that story
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: of struggle for freedom in America by the descendants of slaves.
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: In that broader story of this struggle for human freedom,
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: writ large that this is always something that has had
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: to happen, that this is always something that we've done together.
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: I think that it makes it actually more valuable and
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: not less. It enhances it.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: But you can do that without effacing your own ethnic identity.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: And I just want to, with the moderator's permission, play
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: a devil's advocate here because I can hear what a
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: critique might sound like. A critique of the position that
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: Camille and Shelby have adopted might go as follows. Look
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: at other ethnic groups Look at the Jews, look at
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: the Irish Catholic I mean they have suffered discrimination, whatever, whatever.
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: You'd never tell them. The solution to your problem is
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: to forget about your identity and forget about your history.
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: You tell them that there are two different things. There's
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: the civic Okay, then you can answer the critic with that.
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: But let me just finish making a statement. There's a
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: civic realm. We are citizens of a republic. We have
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: duties and obligations as such, they transcend our race. Then
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: there's the communal realm. Marriage patterns are what they are.
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: Residential communal patterns are what they are. Religious affiliation is
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: what they are. Cultural orientations are what they are. The
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: two things are distinct. We can insist on blindness to
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: race in the civic realm and nevertheless affirm the importance
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: not of race as a physiology but physiognomy, but of
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: race as an ethnicity. We can affirm the thickness and
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: the content of that inheritance at the same time. We
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: can do both of those things at the same time.
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: So what critic might say, and it's only blacks, just
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: to finish this, here's how the critic would go it's
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: only black people that we see up there saying that
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: we have to eschew our blackness in order to solve
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: this problem. Everybody else, you wouldn't tell Jews not to
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: be Jewish. If we applied the logic of this argument
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: to the national identity and aspirations of the Jewish people,
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: we would get I think something that would be a
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: historical absurdity.
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: So what we're talking about is leveraging group identity, leveraging
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: a sense of pride in group identity in this collective
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: cultural inheritance for uplift, and that begains the case for defecting.
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: So there are some people who are in a position
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: to defect who don't have to kind of contribute to
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: that common store. And what you're saying is, no, don't
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: do that actually sustain that as a vehicle for uplift.
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: I'm saying that's one way list. I wouldn't judge the
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: defect They're free to make whatever choices they want. But
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: I want to affirm the dignity and the legitimacy of
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: embracing the ethnic heritage.
• 50:47
  Speaker 5: Let me just say that I had some many years ago.
• 50:50
  Speaker 5: I debated Julius Chambers, who was Harvard lawyer Black, who
• 50:54
  Speaker 5: had a NAACP legal defense fund. We were doing this
• 50:57
  Speaker 5: before the New York Bar Association and was over the
• 51:00
  Speaker 5: issue of desegregation versus integration. And I midway through the debate,
• 51:05
  Speaker 5: I said, Julius, we've got two circumstances. Circumstance A where
• 51:09
  Speaker 5: the school is all black, where there's a presence of excellence,
• 51:13
  Speaker 5: school B with its it's integrated, where there's diminished excellence.
• 51:18
  Speaker 5: Where should we send our children? He said, school B.
• 51:21
  Speaker 5: I said that that's what you believe, then then this
• 51:24
  Speaker 5: debate is over that. And so that's that's that's one element.
• 51:30
  Speaker 5: But that's to Glenn's point. The Vietnamese came here after
• 51:35
  Speaker 5: the war. Those who were sponsored by by families didn't poorly,
• 51:41
  Speaker 5: but those who struggled and they and it is a
• 51:44
  Speaker 5: section in Houston, the bel Air Section where Vietnamese both
• 51:48
  Speaker 5: people came and congregated and they established an entrepreneurial enclave.
• 51:53
  Speaker 5: Today they are about twenty thousand of them there. They've
• 51:56
  Speaker 5: got newspapers. It's called Little Vietnam. In Los Angeles, there's
• 52:01
  Speaker 5: Little Tokyo, China townsmen every other ethnic groups. You can't
• 52:06
  Speaker 5: know what it's like to have dual citizenships. Why can't
• 52:09
  Speaker 5: blacks have dual citizenship? Why can't we affirm the fact
• 52:13
  Speaker 5: that we are black and and and and and all,
• 52:16
  Speaker 5: but also we are a part of this country. I mean,
• 52:21
  Speaker 5: why do you say that anytime that there is a
• 52:24
  Speaker 5: call lessons of blacks are coming together in solidarity, that
• 52:28
  Speaker 5: somehow that we shouldn't do that, but other groups are
• 52:32
  Speaker 5: are celebrated.
• 52:33
  Speaker 4: Well, it sounds so innocent, doesn't it. It just sounds
• 52:39
  Speaker 4: so innocent. What's the now? You know, use certain examples
• 52:44
  Speaker 4: of us skip, but that's the way poison spreads. It's
• 52:49
  Speaker 4: just a little bit. Is that a big? Come on?
• 52:54
  Speaker 4: What about the signity? Because that won't work. That won't
• 53:01
  Speaker 4: get you anywhere. Identity is the result of human behavior.
• 53:06
  Speaker 4: It is not the creator of great things. It doesn't
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: create a damn thing. It is the result. And I
• 53:14
  Speaker 4: am proud of of what Black Americans have contributed to music.
• 53:19
  Speaker 4: There's nothing comparable in the in the on the whole globe.
• 53:23
  Speaker 4: I mean, I mean, it really does, in the most
• 53:26
  Speaker 4: simplistic emotional way, make me feel proud that that that
• 53:32
  Speaker 4: does not mean that the nation I live in has
• 53:35
  Speaker 4: any any obligation to me and my race. They don't.
• 53:40
  Speaker 4: And when they when they did, you saw what what
• 53:43
  Speaker 4: what that was about? We one does not preclude the other.
• 53:49
  Speaker 6: That's my point.
• 53:50
  Speaker 4: You can you can celebrate, you can be happy on
• 53:55
  Speaker 4: Saint Patrick's a lot a lot of people out there
• 53:59
  Speaker 4: drinking who That's very true.
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: I suppose my perspective is probably a bit more not
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: probably it is more strident than that. And I don't
• 54:10
  Speaker 3: I don't believe in unearned pride. I believe that pride
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: is something that you earn, and it's something that you
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: earn through action. And I also don't believe in in
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: collective achievement in that way.
• 54:22
  Speaker 4: I don't.
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: I don't really believe that black people anymore than Jewish
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: people or white people kind of have a collective ownership
• 54:28
  Speaker 3: of music that they've kind of made or well, the
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: phrase that was used a moment ago was that black
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: people have made these contributions to music. That is certainly true,
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: that there are these kind of cultures that can, in
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: some way, shape or form contribute to music. But the
• 54:44
  Speaker 3: important delineation, like making a real distinction between individual achievement
• 54:50
  Speaker 3: and cultivating a sense of pride in oneself and the
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: kind of counterfeit pride that I've actually seen. I've encountered
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: it amongst younger people who talk about their blackness and
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: how their young kings or something along those lines. There's
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: something very empty and hollow about that. And again, at
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: a minimum, one has to recognize that there is a
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: very real possibility that people who will feel encouraged to
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: pursue that sort of rather cheap, counterfeit sense of their
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: own self worth and dignity as opposed to really embracing
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: the possibility of creating something grand yourself. I don't think
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: there's a need for there to be any kind of
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: competition between kind of black cultural contributions or white cultural contributions.
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: There's this beautiful passage from Zorneil Hurston and Dust Tracks
• 55:40
  Speaker 3: in the Road where she talks about this notion of
• 55:44
  Speaker 3: race pride and race consciousness and says explicitly that you know,
• 55:48
  Speaker 3: there is no that Einstein is the one who who
• 55:53
  Speaker 3: achieved particular results, that Carver achieved particular results, and they
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: didn't do that on behalf of a race, and that
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: in a very real sense, if we have this sense
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: of collective achievement and this sense of race pride, then
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: we should naturally have this sense of collective failure and
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: race shame, and that either both of those things are
• 56:10
  Speaker 3: in a very real sense wrong and disadvantageous, and that
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: there is a better way for us to cast ourselves
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: into the world. And again, I think we were having
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: lunch earlier righthand and I said that I have this perspective,
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: and perhaps it's a little idealistic. I will acknowledge as much,
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: and we enter the world as we find it. But
• 56:32
  Speaker 3: that's said, we can certainly articulate a certain philosophy, embrace
• 56:37
  Speaker 3: the philosophy of our own. And I mean, in my
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: particular case, I've decided that I will not race myself.
• 56:43
  Speaker 3: And it's not a matter of being ashamed of being
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: black or having any sort of hang ups about that
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: at all. It's a determination to live my life on
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: my own terms, to have my dignity be rooted in
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: my individual person. And it doesn't rob anyone else of
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: their choice to live in a particular way. But I
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: do think that there are real meaningful advantages to thinking
• 57:06
  Speaker 3: about issues in a race neutral way, or perhaps an
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: abolitionist way, maybe eliminationist is a better word to use
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: in that context.
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: I got to say something, because we started here with
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: Bob's reference to the letter that he and I authored
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: and that we gathered co signatories for supporting Justice Clarence
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: Thomas and denouncing those who would call Justice Thomas and
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: Uncle Tom because they disagree with his jurisprudence. And I
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: want to call to our attention the fact, the historical
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: fact that when the National Museum of African American History
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: and Culture was stood up, there was no recognition of
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest serving member of the High Court,
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: highest Court of this country, as an African American whose
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: achievements deserve to be honored. Now, some of us here,
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: like Shelby and me, are black conservatives, Okay, unabash it, unapologetic.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: That's a meaningful category, as is Justice Clarence Thomas. I'm
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: proud of him. Okay, No, not in something metaphysical. He's black.
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: I'm black, and therefore I achieved when he achieved. But
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: in the concrete, historical narrative sense. And he came up
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: out of Benpoint, Georgia, he thought for himself, through Yale
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: Law School and all the rest, and he achieved what
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: he has achieved on behalf of this country and his people,
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: his people.
• 58:32
  Speaker 4: Then why would you preclude white people.
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: I don't preclude white with me proud of him. They
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: can also be proud of him. But I'm proud of him.
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: What I'm gonna let Bob answer that because.
• 58:48
  Speaker 5: You know, you know, because it would if black people
• 58:53
  Speaker 5: have signed it, it would have been dismissed and he
• 58:56
  Speaker 5: would have They would have just math fished. He would
• 59:00
  Speaker 5: have just contributed to this narrative He's just a share
• 59:04
  Speaker 5: a shill for conservatives. It would have been totally dismissed.
• 59:07
  Speaker 5: People would have expected a conservative to do have a
• 59:12
  Speaker 5: multi racial response. But the power of it came from
• 59:16
  Speaker 5: the fact that the left was saying they are a
• 59:19
  Speaker 5: legitimate spokesperson for Black America and they are against Thomas.
• 59:25
  Speaker 5: But a substantial number of blacks stood up and stood
• 59:30
  Speaker 5: for him and pushed back against that, and it had
• 59:33
  Speaker 5: the impact that we were looking for, just like when
• 59:36
  Speaker 5: he went, let me just finish when Tom for six
• 59:39
  Speaker 5: months when he was nominated, I spent NonStop in low
• 59:44
  Speaker 5: income black southern neighborhoods and getting black parents to go
• 59:48
  Speaker 5: to those senatorial offices to lobby to get him. That's
• 59:52
  Speaker 5: why the polls were sixty percent of low income black
• 59:55
  Speaker 5: supported Clarence Thomas's ascension to the courts. They and that's
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 5: one of the reasons why it happened. Now, should I
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 5: have not done that and say, well, I want to
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 5: get white people to come with me also, No, that
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 5: would have been strategically we made an impact because sixty
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 5: percent of black people polled, low income blacks supported this
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 5: man's nomination, and that's why strategically it worked. Now, you
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 5: might not have done it that way. You would have
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 5: first said, no, I got I can't just go him
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 5: with all black folks. I gotta have some white folks
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 5: to show, to show solitarity so that we're transracial.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 4: No, no, you keep a signing to me both sorry,
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 4: some idealism, some idealism. You're right, you read it the
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 4: right way.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 6: You read it the right way.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 4: Show you got the wrong man, I'm still back in
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 4: nineteen sixty four black power. You know that's that's more
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 4: of my actual cast.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 2: Uh.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 4: But that's that is my point why class Thomas is
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 4: a good friend of mine, has been for thirty some
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 4: years now. I love to see him support it and everyone.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 4: I think he's the best mind on the court period
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 4: and so forth and so on. I don't need to
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 4: write a letter that excludes white people in order to
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 4: support that.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 6: We would have been ignored work. That's the point.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 4: No, but you're using race as a point.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 6: No.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 4: No, you're saying, if I can't white people, No, I
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 4: got a little black.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 6: Use the venom of the snake and white people.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 5: The venom of the snake to create the anti venom.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: I wonder if I can just move on.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 6: That's what you do.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 4: That's what you That's what anybody who's been.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 5: Written by a snake, they tell you.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 4: Doctor, I don't know about They.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 6: Would have died if you were in the physician.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 4: Man, Okay, we can't use a snake.
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: I'd like to raise a different set of issues. So,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: if you're looking at the Black American population, it is
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 2: markedly different today than it was twenty or thirty years ago.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 2: You now have a rising proportion of the Black population
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: that is foreign born. You have, particularly in younger cohorts,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: more and more intermarriage. When you're looking at the black elite,
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 2: when you're looking at the most highly educated, affluent Black Americans,
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 2: this is a group, particularly when you're looking at younger cohorts,
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 2: that looks very different from the multi generational community of
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 2: Black Americans who are the descendants of American slaves. And
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: I wonder, Camille, if you could offer some thoughts, and
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 2: I'd like to hear from all of you on this
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: on what that might mean for this language of solidarity,
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 2: cultural persistence, what we're talking about about the politics of
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 2: black identity. Camille, what do you see happening as the
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: black population is looking much more diverse and where there's
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: much more integration into what you might call the multi
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: ethnic mainstream.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: Well, it's funny. I have this uncomfortable sense sometimes where
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: I'm like at a dinner party and there's a you know,
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: everything is set up really nicely, and there's a tablecloth,
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: and I just ripped the tablecloth off and then all
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: the plates go sprawling as well. And the reality is
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 3: that I just I do not think about populations in
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 3: that way. I mean, the diversifying of the kind of
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: black people in America is precisely what you would expect.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: Black people, as James Baldwin said during his debate with
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 3: William F. Buckley, just like everybody else, Like they want
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: the same things as everybody else. They are inherently diverse
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: because are individuals, and this is the appropriate way I
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 3: think to think about them and to think about data
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: like that. The reality is that the similarities between young
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: college educated pre med black student and high school dropout
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: black student living in a completely different part of the
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: country are probably not all that great, and they likely
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 3: have far more similarities with people who are part of
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 3: their cohort, who live near them, who speak the same
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 3: sort of English they do like. This is the reality,
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: and there is a real sense in which much of
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: our conversation about important issues like diversity, for example, have
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: been completely hijacked by the way that we think about
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 3: race and identity in this country. We have a very narrow, myopic,
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: kind of shade obsessed notion of diversity, when in fact
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: we have perhaps ceded far too much to the people
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 3: who talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion these days by
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 3: allowing that definition of diversity to be the one that dominates.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 3: The one that to dominate is one that recognizes that
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: in any room, even amongst the four of us, as
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 3: we've demonstrated very ably during through our conversation, there is
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: profound diversity amongst individuals, regardless of what they happen to
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 3: look like. And if you apply for a job, the
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: notion that we have too many of those people here
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 3: right now because we've got our quota of black people
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: because it's sort of demographically in line with the population
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 3: in the community, like that can't be the way that
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 3: we want to sort of have society work.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: So this abolitionist sensibility that you bring to these debates
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 2: about the ethics of black identity, is it fair to
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: say that in this world in which this drive for individualism,
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: individual distinction, the call it, the weakening of some of
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: these collective ties, is it your view that your way
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: of thinking is ultimately the wave of the future.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 3: I don't know if it's the wave of the future.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: I certainly hope it is. I do think that recognizing
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 3: seeding our sense of people's dignity in their individual person
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: and not attaching it or attributing it to their race,
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 3: like I think a celebration, for example, like Pride Month,
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 3: for example, there is a sense in which one can
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: totally understand the desire to assert your pride on the
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: basis of something that you've been discriminated against with respect
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 3: to for a very long period of time. But beyond
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 3: some point this could become deletarious. And I think that
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: we probably surpass that point with respect to gays in
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: this country who have secured the right to marry one another,
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: for example, and perhaps we need to rejigger the laws
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: around that. But I think in general like there has
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: been a cultural shift there that is one that is
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: worth celebrating. I think much the same thing is true
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: about race in this country. I have the autonomy to
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 3: be able to live my life on my own terms,
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: and to the extent that there are societal and social
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: problems that need to be addressed, even ones that disproportionately
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: impact black people. The remedies to those problems are almost
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: certainly not resting in whether or not they regard themselves
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: as black, or discrimination active racism and discrimination that it
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: has something to do with any number of different policies.
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 3: But it can be harder to get to those remedies
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 3: and harder to identify those problems if the thing that
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: most consumes us are the fact that these disparities exist
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: at all.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: Glenn, I wonder if you have any thoughts.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeap, excuse me. First of all, as I've said,
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: I think we, in the long run are warning the
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: same thing. The question is whether or not as a
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: practical matter, the abolitionist move is a sensible move to
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: undertake at the moment, and I say no. I want
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: to say, with respect to innermarriage and the diversity amongst
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: the African descendant population resident in the United States, the
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: future is assimilation. One hundred years from now, I think
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: you're going to look at blackness the way you look
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: at Irishness or italianness in terms of ethnic descent. It'll
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: be a coloration, but it won't be a defining feature.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: And there's all the action is at the boundaries. You
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: can have a man brock Hussein Obama who has no
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: African slave ancestors, who's nevertheless a tribune of quote unquote
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: black people. You can have that in the first part
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: of the twenty first century. You're not going to have
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: that in the latter part of the twenty first century.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: I agree with the stipulation that as individual freely choosing
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: autonomous beings, we must not allow ourselves to be put
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: into a box defined by our race. I agree with that.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: I agree that much of the political representation under taken
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: on behalf of blackness is a category mistake, because the
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: real issues are classed and they're not race and they're
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: elighted when you put it in those terms. And I
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: agree with Shelby that often that's a move, a corrupt
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: move done for the sake of power. So you know,
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: that's kind of that's kind of where I'm coming from.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: I'm saying, let's make use of the cultural inheritance that
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: we have here in the United States in terms of
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: the narrative and the accounts that we give of who
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: we are and where we're going. I want those kids,
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: with those orphan kids without parents to be adopted. If
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: white people would adopt them, I'd be happy. That would
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: be fine by me. We don't live in that world.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: I want them to be adopted. I want Pastor Cory
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: Brooks of Chicago, who's on the South Side fighting gang
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: violence and trying to give hope to people through his
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: Project Hood, helping others obtain destiny. I want him to
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: get the money that he needs. I want him to
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: be able to build the community centers that he wants
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: to build to serve those people. And I want him
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: to inspire those youths. And if he can do it
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: in a color blind fashion, that's fine. But we're in
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: the year twenty twenty two, and that's the South side
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: of Chicago. So could you say a word.
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 3: I was going to ask you if you would say
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 3: a little more about where the culture is now. I
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 3: can't pick up the New York Times and read stories
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 3: about rais without seeing very aggressive affirmative nods towards racial identity,
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: the determined, determined effort to make us think about those
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: things and frame things in that way.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm with Shelby on that.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 3: I mean, but but you said a moment ago that
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 3: you have an expectation the culture is headed in one
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 3: direction and the reality is But that's true, but amongst elites,
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 3: like even even with inner marriage, I've heard Halle Berry
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 3: and Barack Obama talk about the way that they self identify,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 3: and they both invoke the one drop rule and insist
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: that they view themselves as black, and I suspect that
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 3: the tendency is more in that direction, especially amongst elites.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 3: That's the way that these issues are are often presented
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 3: in these very binary white lowercase W white and.
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: I'm against that, and I'm against that in Black Lives
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: Matter is another instantiation of the phenomenon that you're talking about,
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: and I'm against.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: That, but I'm saying that that's where the culture actually
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 3: seems to be headed. And does that not you mean
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 3: towards sharpening racial distensions.
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: That's where the talking heads are going, That's where the
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: elite Democratic Party based advocacy community is going. I don't
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: think that's where the people who are actually making decisions
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: about whether or not to marry somebody who's in a
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: different racial group than they're going. I think those numbers
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: are going up inexorably, they're going up. So you know,
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: my long run forecast is that we won't be able
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: to have this conversation in fifty seventy five years.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true. That's true. I have a grandson, can
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 4: you hear?
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: Yes?
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I have a grandson who is Mexican, Jewish, white,
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 4: black and black. Actually granddaughter as well.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: We should mention Thomas Chatterdan Williams here. Everybody should read
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: his book Portraits in Black and White. Isn't that what
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: he calls that book. He's an African American of mixed
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: racial heritage who is married to a woman who is
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: not black, and he thinks about his own children in
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: terms and he says, these categories make no sense whatsoever
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: for my kids, and it's time that we think beyond them.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: And yes, it is time that we think beyond them.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: But I'm still you know, I've got my story and
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: I'm sticking to it.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 4: Well that's that that that is your story, and that
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 4: is your identity. But you know, uh, and you have
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 4: every right to stick to it. But there are people
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 4: who are whoever different, they have different rivers running in
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 4: them and understood.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 2: I wonder if.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 4: Because the bottom line here is that within the group itself,
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 4: when I was growing up, I go out to play
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 4: in the morning and they say you think you white,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 4: don't you? And then on the and then on the
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 4: way home from school, they would say, you and a
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 4: nigga like the rest of us.
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: Those are black people talking to you like that.
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 4: I grew up in an entirely black world.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: I wonder if everyone would be willing to offer some
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 2: concluding thoughts. Bob will turn to you first, just.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 5: Some concluding thoughts. Well, just to answer the question then
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 5: that is. I think that what the left is done
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 5: effectively has really hijacked the rich legacy of the civil
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 5: rights movement. I think blacks have worn the thorn, worn
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 5: the thorn of crown, crown of thigns of slavery and discrimination.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 5: But others are appropriating that. I saw a cartoon many
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 5: years ago of a black man with an afro holding
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 5: black powers aren't and and you had gays and women.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 6: And all that, and what is he doing in our movement?
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 5: But again, my political philosophy is radical pragmatism. I'm a
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 5: cardiac Christian. My desire is to work within my community.
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 5: I did the Doctor Phil show that will air the
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 5: first week in November, and on it, I said, we
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 5: need to have a one year moratorium and winding about
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 5: white folks, and we need to use that time to
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 5: adjust the enemy within. And I'm using it to reduce
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 5: gang violence as we have in the past by leaving
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 5: white folks out the room for a whole year when
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 5: we can adjust the enemy within. We have a moral
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 5: and spiritual freefall that everybody's in that is consuming white kids.
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 5: And in Silicon Valley that's the suicide rate is six
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 5: times the national average, the highest death rate in Appalachia's
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 5: prescription drugs and this homicide in the inner city. We're
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 5: not going to address that crisis if we have to
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 5: look at each other through a so I think there's
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 5: we have a larger crisis to face, and that's why
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 5: I'm trying to deracialize race.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Bob Shelby.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 4: Well, I'd be brief with it. My feeling is the
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 4: biggest problem that we have in Black America is and
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 4: what keeps us down and distinguishes us in a negative way,
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 4: is that the one thing we don't have fourth centuries
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 4: of experience with is freedom, and and that that it
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 4: just simply is not a part of that. That's that
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 4: is what oppression is is the denial of freedom. When
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 4: you are not free to agent your own future, you
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 4: adapt to whatever is. One of the problems of Black
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 4: American culture and history is that we adapted, probably way
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 4: way too much. We we and it's it's a it's
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 4: a kind of negative in our in our cultural history
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 4: that we didn't fight to the death, that we didn't
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 4: Patrick Henry, that we found a way to adapt to
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 4: a system that completely oppressed us in every conceivable way.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 4: We carry that, I think, Uh, And and it's it's
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 4: it's a source of bad faith within the group. Uh,
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 4: it's it's a source of Uh, you know, I can't
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 4: I can't swear in this dignified for him. Uh and person,
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 4: ain't you know what is something? I also grew up
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 4: within the black community, as though, don't tell me I'm
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 4: I'm I'm like everybody else. There's a sort of says no,
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 4: I'm you know, I'm on the low down. We have
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 4: a lot of we have a lot of work to
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 4: do there. Uh. And we but the main problem, I
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 4: mean that's straight. We history denied us, weakened us so
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 4: that we are not able to join the modern world,
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 4: uh in an easy way. And we keep putting the
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 4: emphasis on racism and collective action, whether race and all
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 4: that sort of thing, when the problem is we are
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 4: we are not competitive, we're under educated, we're culturally backward,
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 4: we have some some values that are self destructive. We
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 4: have a lot of work to do before we get
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 4: we we we actually have the dignity win for ourselves,
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 4: the dignity that makes us on par with with other groups,
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 4: with other with other elements of society. That's entirely on us.
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 4: And uh, we we need to get busy with that
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 4: at this point in time. But I want to say more,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 4: but time is passive.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 2: Well, turn it over to Camille and then we'll have
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: Glenn conclude, Camille.
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's so interesting to be in this conversation
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 3: because there's so much being said by everyone that I
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 3: find myself in deep agreement with. But then there are
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 3: aspects of it that I want to critique without being
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 3: too forceful, because again there's this deep, this deep agreement,
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 3: But I think that there is there's a very real
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 3: sense in which and Barbara Fields, I think her and
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 3: her sister Karen's book Racecraft is essential reading, especially chapter four,
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 3: for most people, because it's a book that forces us
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 3: to wrestle with the way that race operates as in ideology,
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 3: the way that it infects our thinking, the way that
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 3: we reinforce it in various ways, and even the the
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 3: things that I just heard you saying, Shelby about us,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 3: and the the difficult things that need to be exercised
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 3: and addressed. Those aren't my challenges. They are challenges that
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 3: need to be addressed, undoubtedly, but those are challenges that
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 3: we can perhaps address corporately in some sense.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 4: But only a.
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 3: Particular individual, taking particular actions in their own life, can
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 3: actually rectify these these problems. And to the extent and
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 3: to the extent we're concerned about the children at Appalachia
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 3: and the children in Baltimore City. The reality is that
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 3: the problems they're confronting oftentimes are very much the same,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: and the deprivations that they're experiencing are very much the same.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 3: And it isn't amplified or diminished by the fact that,
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 3: you know, more white people are actually economically well off
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 3: in this country relative to the number of black people.
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: That doesn't do anything for that kid in Appalachia. I
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 3: think there's a there's a challenge perhaps that I'd like
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 3: to issue, which is just for us to all be
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 3: more cognizant of the way in which we engage with
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: race and we talk about race, and we even race ourselves.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 3: How that can have a meaningful impact on the kind
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 3: of policy prescriptions that are that we come up with,
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 3: and the ways that we approach particular problems and talk
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 3: about the issues that are of most importance. So I
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 3: don't like the phrase black on black crime. I don't
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 3: think the crime is being perpetrated because people are black.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 3: It's being perpetrated in particular areas. All crime is not
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 3: all crime, but much violent crime is intra racial. But
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 3: there's something about acknowledging that fact that I think can
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 3: be very powerful and can undermine a lot of the
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 3: potential shortcomings of having people obsess over kind of what is,
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 3: in many respects of kind of cosmetic attribute of a
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 3: problem that we're all deeply concerned about.
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 4: Glad.
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: Okay, guys. First of all, what a wonderful conver station.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 4: Thank you.
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: I'm very proud here at the Glen Show to be
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: hosting this convocation. Secondly, I want to see the big
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: point about we individual human beings are not our race.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: To Camille and Shelby, you're right about that. I mean, Ellison,
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: and I know you know this. Shelby Wespas say skin
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: and blood. Don't think something like that. I mean, I'm
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: not my race. I think of James Joyce and Portrait
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: of the Artists as a young man. There's a patchage there,
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: he says. You know what happens to when the soul
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: of a man is born in this country? There are
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: nets thrown at it to hold it back. I'll try
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: to turn these nets into wings and fly by them.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: Do you know what Ireland is? This is Joyce. Ireland
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: is the old sow that eats her pharaoh. And yes,
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: hyper race consciousness is something that can consume and extirpate
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: the individual spirit. I'll just stand by this. If you
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: want to do something not about black on black crime,
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: about the god awful level of violence on the ground
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: in cities around this country, you want to change that.
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: You want to actually get them to put down that
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: gun and to stop killing each other. You want to
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: reach them, you want to move them, teach them who
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: they are, where they've come from, and what they owe
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: to their God, into their country and to their people.
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: I would use race in that catechism, even as I'm
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: affirming the long run ideal of eschewing race altogether. We're
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: not there yet. Thank you very much, everyone, all right,
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: it's been to Glen Show. Thanks for listening.