Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / COLEMAN HUGHES: Live At The Festival of Dangerous Ideas

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COLEMAN HUGHES: Live At The Festival of Dangerous Ideas · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Good day, humans. Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. Back in August, I brought
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  out to Australia's sunny shores the incomparable Coleman Hughes for the Festival of Dangerous
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  Ideas. It was a cross-collaboration between uncomfortable conversations and the iconic Sydney
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  Ideas Festival. And I also supplemented that with a show in Melbourne and you may have heard
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  that because we released that on the podcast feed. That was an uncomfortable conversations
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  event and Coleman and I had an incredible chat. What you may not have heard, in fact probably
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  haven't heard if I look at the numbers of our YouTube channel, accurately, is a Sydney show,
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  which is why I'm bringing it to you on this platform. We released it on YouTube, but the reason
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  I'm fairly confident in saying that you haven't seen it on YouTube is because a great, great,
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  great many people listen to this podcast and a great, great, great few people watch the YouTube
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  channel. So go to the YouTube. I just hate being one of those guys who's always like,
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  going, and you can't, when click and subscribe, remember to click the subscribe button,
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  ding, ding, and like, and share. I mean, my goodness, it's boring. So bloody annoying, but maybe
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  you can do me a solid and just go to your stupid YouTube and subscribe because it's good.
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  There's like you'll be able to see a nice, polished, well-produced, professional,
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  festival video of me and Coleman Hughes saying all the same things that you're about to listen to
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  anyway, which when I put it like that, it kind of makes me not want to go to the YouTube page
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  after all. I'm not doing a very good job of selling this. Am I? Listen, I'm going to be,
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  I'm going to come clean with you, all right? I'm sitting in a shack by a beach on an island,
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  and I'm talking to my phone. That's why it might sound a bit different. I don't know if you can
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  hear the waves in the background, but I'm literally looking out a window and the beach is right
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  there and there's water. So I'm a little, you know, distracted. I also have a headache,
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  but what are my Jewish grandmothers? You don't need to hear all of my problems. Enjoy this conversation
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  from the festival of dangerous ideas with the one. Oh, as you probably tell you,
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  Coleman's got a book. It's called The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America,
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  but you knew that. Enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Coleman Hughes.
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  Thanks for coming. I'm Josh Zetz. I have a little podcast called Uncomfortable Conversations of
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  which this conversation will be an episode. So you can subscribe and hear it back as many times
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  as you want on repeat. You can also get it on the YouTube page. Huge thanks to the festival for
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  facilitating this, for allowing us to do it. So Cecilia and Beck and Daniel, they've all been
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  amazing and this has been such a blast to be part of and thanks to all of you for coming.
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  We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Euronation on whose lands we are sitting.
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  Have you been struck by the fact that every event does an acknowledgement of country because
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  anyone over the edge of about 30 grew up in a country where that was not the norm?
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  Now anyone from outside of Australia is still living in a country where that's not the norm.
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  It's hard not to notice. I think if an alien anthropologist came to earth to learn about
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  homo sapiens, visited all four corners of the earth and then went back to Mars to report
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  to the secret civilization there. They would find something very interesting which is
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  they would find that all the groups of people have done terrible things in the past. We are all
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  trailing a history of brutality or colonialism. We often talk about those things as somehow a
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  European phenomenon, a Western phenomenon. I think that's just the most recent example. It's the
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  example that is taught most in school. Obviously the biggest contiguous empire was gangus cons.
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  There was slavery in Africa, Africans and Slaven, one another. 14 million African slaves
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  brought to the Middle East in the Arab slave trade. Empire and Slavement, it's not an exception
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  to the rule. It is the rule throughout history. That alien anthropologist would go back to his
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  civilization and say, these humans, they've done terrible things to each other. Every time a new
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  technology gets created, they use it to oppress each other and whoever has the most power at a
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  particular moment seems to lord it over the rest and there's been so much brutality. But there's
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  only one group of people that actually feels guilt for what their ancestors did. It's the descendants
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  of Europeans. For instance, I was at dinner once with friends of mine from Ghana. As many of you
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  will know, the dirty secret about the African slave trade is that they were already slaves when
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  Europeans got there. They were sold enslaved by other African tribes in raids and so forth and
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  sold for goods by Africans who profited off of the slave trade. I asked my friend from Ghana,
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  when you grew up in Ghana, how did you learn about this in school? Did you learn about it as something
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  that you should feel guilty for today? I'll never forget what she said to me. She looked at me like
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  I was crazy and she said, no, it's just a neutral fact for us. I thought to myself, that is about
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  the attitude that most human beings have towards the sins of their ancestors except for the one.
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  Well, you're making a descriptive claim there, but is that a normative claim? I mean,
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  couldn't you just say, we'll look on Amazon as enlightened as we are. At some point, they'll get
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  the memo that that was bad and they should probably feel guilty about it. Yeah, and then their whole
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  society will improve and they'll all benefit as a result, right? It's that last link in the chain
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  that I severely doubt. I think we should all speak reverently and with great respect and understanding
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  about the atrocities that have been committed in the past, whether in our own country or in another
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  country, I think it's imperative to speak about it with respect, to not speak about it flippantly,
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  to learn about it, to have museums dedicated to remembering it. All of that is to the good,
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  but there is a, the danger of a bottomless pit of guilt and apologetics that never ends,
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  and every time it seems like it's going to end, there's a new thing, right? There's a new thing
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  that must be done, a new apology that must be made, and we have to be very aware of that dynamic.
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  I'll give an example from the American context, because I'm very wary of coming to somebody's
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  country and judging the way they usually as an American. We all love that when Americans come and
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  tell us how we should be living exactly. So to speak in the American context, there are many
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  demands for reparations for slavery, for instance, for acknowledgments for apologies, and what strikes
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  me as so strange is that people demand apologies for slavery, not realizing that they've already
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  happened, actually not knowing, okay? One time I was talking to a journalist and I laid out to her
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  why I oppose reparations for slavery, and she was writing an article in a major magazine.
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  And at the end of the conversation, after trying to get me to budge in any way, shape, or form,
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  she said, well, Coleman, would you at least support some kind of documentary, some kind of event
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  that the whole nation tuned into watch about slavery? And I said, well, absolutely, but isn't that
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  what roots was? She had never heard of roots. Explain roots.
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  There's only what many in the audience have. So roots was one of the most popular television
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  programs in American history in the 1970s. More people watch the finale of roots than watch the
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  Super Bowl that year. And it was a story about an African man named Kuntikintay who was violently
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  stolen from his home in West Africa, made a slave in America, and eventually made to submit after
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  attempts to escape. And he's the hero of the story. And the story is about the brutality of slavery,
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  right? In 1970, and it was the most popular thing on television. And now I had a journalist telling me
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  in 2020, well, wouldn't you at least support doing something like this for once? And she had never
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  heard of it. And the moral of the story I'm trying to tell is that there is a kind of amnesia
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  about everything that has been done. And the demands renew themselves. And we're on a kind of cycle,
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  a kind of cycle of folly. I mean, in America, both houses of Congress have issued national
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  apologies for slavery. And as some of you will know, students of American history slavery was a
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  state-specific issue. You know, a dozen different states have issued official apologies for slavery.
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  And people still demand it as if it's never happened. So what is this if not a, you know,
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  between people, if you do something wrong to me and I ask for an apology and you give me one,
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  and it's sincere, and I accept it, that's the end of the issue, right? But there is something far
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  more toxic happening where the ability to continue demanding the apology is worth more than actually
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  getting the apology. But the ability to continue demanding the apology is predicated on the continued
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  existence of discrimination. That's the theory that there is still massive inequality and income
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  in wealth. There are income disparities. There's, you know, no matter what metric you look at,
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  you look at almost whether you're talking about indigenous Australians or you're talking about
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  black Americans as a disparity there. So the insistence on kind of repeating the request
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  the demand for the apology is like we're floundering around here and we don't know what else
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  exactly to do or that you allow us to do. How does the demand for the apology address the modern
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  day system? It presumably is not a demand for an apology and isolation, right? It's presumably
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  a long way. No, often it is. I mean, so this is a very interesting question because there is a
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  sharp divide between symbolic issues and bread and butter kitchen table issues.
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  Symbolic issues are the national apology, the land acknowledgement and so forth. This is
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  and I don't mean to dismiss them by saying symbolic issues because symbols are important.
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  But these are fully different from the issue of, you know, are people going to a decent public
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  school that is well funded? Do you grow up in a neighborhood that where you have to dodge bullets
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  walking down the street? Of course, but I think these are very few people who, by the way,
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  solving the latter issue cannot be predicated on the former issue. In other words,
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  but no one's arguing for the former issue in isolation. No one's arguing for the symbolism without
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  action. It's presumably the theory as generously as I can articulate it would be
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  it's no skin off anyone's nose to raise awareness about the injustice, about the historical
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  treatment of these communities. Therefore, you're likely to get the kind of buy-in that you need
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  to get to the bread and butter stuff if everybody is on board with the symbolic stuff.
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  I think it's precisely the opposite. I think that if you go up to a typical American
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  and you say to that person, I'd like you to pay more taxes because there's someone on the other
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  side of the tracks who comes from a fatherless home, crime in their community, public schools,
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  the, you know, the water frowns don't work at the public schools. I think you get a lot of buy-in
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  by saying, absolutely, I'll pay more taxes to solve that problem. And then if you then say,
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  and also, I'd like you to acknowledge that you benefit from the history of slavery that that
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  person's a great, great, great, great, great grandfather. And that moral stain is somehow inherited
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  by you. I think right then you've lost them. And you didn't need the second thing to ask for
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  the first thing because why should it be predicated? Why should a decent standard of living and
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  be predicated on whether or not someone's ancestors experience trauma in the country, right?
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  Simply being a citizen enough has to be the entry card into a decent standard of living.
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  And it really, it does not serve the general, the long-term well-being of a multi-racial,
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  multi-ethnic society to try to relitigate sins that none of us individually participated in.
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  And the reason I talked about the example of my friends from Ghana in the beginning
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  is because the attitude that I'm not to be held responsible for things I had nothing to do with.
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  That is a very deeply ingrained thing in human nature. The one exception, which is essentially
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  liberal westerners, liberal members of European offshoot societies is struggles against the much
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  more powerful urge in human nature to say, what does that have to do with me? Let's talk, let's talk
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  about things that are happening today and what we can do about them. And so I think it always,
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  it's always a seductive temptation and a threatening one to go too far on the cycle of
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  demands for apologies and kind of faux forgiveness that never actually resolves the relationship as
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  a true apology and forgiveness would. Okay, let's grant then for the sake of argument that symbolism
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  is useless and we shouldn't be doing welcomes to country and talk about the bread and butter
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  stuff then. You know, I'm not necessarily saying you shouldn't do it. What I'm saying is if you're
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  do it or don't do it, but you can't have it both ways, right? You can't be the most
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  the most affected by guilt of any group of homo sapiens to ever exist and then also say that
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  you're terrible because in fact the opposite is true. My point is that offshoot societies of
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  Western Europe care more about the sins of their ancestors than any other group of homo sapiens
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  ever and we all have sins that in theory could be cared about, right? So you can't have it both
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  ways. You can't call yourself terrible people and do the welcomes to country because the fact
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  you care so much isn't care so much more than any group of humans has ever cared is proof that
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  you aren't that the hearts are in the right place. So, you know, what I'm really saying is do it or
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  don't it's not for me to decide that's for you to decide, but understand what it says about you
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  that you do do it and don't don't be bullied by the the next person that comes along and says
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  you should do it for twice as long. Right, but didn't because it will come but didn't somebody have to
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  say something equally audacious in order to get us to do it in the first place? Sure, but what is it
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  actually, I mean my point is not that go ahead. Well, I was just going to say I mean, you know,
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  take the United States where this is not the norm but like doing a land acknowledgement as they
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  called in the States would still be considered would still be looked at the way that
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  acknowledgments of country might have been here 20 years ago where it's like, oh, here we go again
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  here's some kind of tokenistic virtue signaling person doing this thing to make them look good,
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  right? If you're going to normalize it, if you're going to, I mean, what you're saying is that
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  the normalization of this in Australia is a credit to our country and makes this more moral than
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  other civilizations have been. Therefore, isn't that an argument for doing it? It's not quite what I'm
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  saying. It's not quite. Here's what I'm saying because it is, it's a nuanced point. I am,
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  I am for, to the extent that something becomes an important tradition and an important symbol,
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  I'm for keeping it. What I'm arguing is that there is going to be a next time that someone says,
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  well, we'll really, we'll really reach Nirvana as a country if we do it for twice as long.
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  There may even be policy demands. We'll really reach Nirvana as a country and cure our guilt
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  for the sins of our ancestors if we do this thing and that thing might be a bad idea. When that day
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  comes, you ought to have to, you ought to have the spine to say no. And I'm not just speaking
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  in the Australian context. I'm really speaking about America. I'm speaking about Europe. I'm speaking
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  about all the places on earth that have this rare temptation towards ancestral guilt to begin with.
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  I'm not saying you roll back all the symbols you already have that are already traditions. I'm not
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  saying you, you, I'm not saying you tear down the museum. I think what's done is done. The
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  symbols that are there are there and they're valid and they're traditions at this point. And I
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  respect that. But that doesn't mean you must go endlessly in that direction. You get what,
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  get what you're saying. And to pivot up back to the American context, which is the audience for
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  whom you wrote your book, it's quite clear that you don't just think that this is unnecessary,
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  that the symbolism is merely window dressing. You actually think it is counterproductive in the
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  sense that one of the things that you point out is that opinion polls have shown over the past
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  decade, the number of Americans who respond to the question, how are race relations going in
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  America has dramatically turned negative. I mean, people are much, much more pessimistic about race
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  relations now than they were 10 years ago. You say that your peers sound more pessimistic about
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  race relations than your grandparents do who grew up during in the segregated south. So what's
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  happening? So you're exactly right. If you go back to 2013, Pew asks or Gallup rather ask
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  Americans every year of all race, how are race relations going? And a majority of all races said
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  good or somewhat good, including a majority of black Americans, Hispanic Americans. Then in 2013,
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  it starts to take a total nose dive. So by 2021 or so, about half the people who thought it was
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  race relations were good would say the same. The question is what happened? As always, partisans of
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  each side like to blame the other. So Republicans like to blame Obama. That explanation makes no sense
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  because it should have started in 2008. Democrats like to blame Trump. Again, doesn't make sense
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  to start it before years before he got in office. The real story, I think, is that around 2013 is
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  when everyone and their mothers had an iPhone and was on Facebook. And this fundamentally changed
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  the way information spreads, what got into your brain, and what narratives you believed as a result.
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  So in the American context, we have a country with more guns than people. We have a country with
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  lots of gun crimes and so many illegal guns that even if we got rid of the legal ones, we would still
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  have a gun homicide problem unlike any other similar nation on earth. And so a cop is shot
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  roughly every day in America and cops are quite paranoid about being shot. I think this is one thing
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  many non-Americans don't really realize about why American cops seem so trigger happy relative
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  to say cops in the UK. It's because actually a lot of criminals do have a gun in the glove
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  compartment and a cop gets shot every day in those kind of situations. What happened before 2013
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  is if a cop shot someone in a small town in an altercation in an arrest, a journalist would come
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  get a comment from the cop, get a comment from the family. Maybe you would see it on the six o'clock
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  local news at most. Maybe it would make the state newspaper at most the next day.
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  What happened in 2013 is that if that same thing happened, somebody probably whipped out their
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  iPhone halfway through, probably missed the first half of the interaction and therefore everything
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  that comes after is out of context, uploads it to Facebook where it gets millions of views before
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  a journalist has had an opportunity to give it the proper factual context. And what happened is
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  because that's how people got their information, people began believing this narrative that
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  it was open season on the cops killing unarmed black people. In reality, your odds of being killed
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  as an unarmed black person in America at the height of concern about the issue, 2020 if you want to
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  put it there or earlier, was roughly your odds of getting hit by lightning, okay? That was the
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  factual reality. Just to throw another stat in there because I was just leaping through your book
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  before we came on and saw it again. I think you say that a majority of people who of Americans who
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  described themselves as very liberal, meaning very progressive, very left-wing, when asked to
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  estimate how many unarmed black people are killed by police in a year, estimated over a thousand.
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  Yes. The real number is 12. Yes, the real number for that year was 12. So,
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  and the reason I included that fact in my book is because a lot of people make the argument that
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  probably some people are thinking it right now. Okay, so social media showed us all of these
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  examples of cops killing unarmed black people, but isn't that a good thing? I mean, don't we want to
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  know about it? Aren't we being more informed and educated and learning about things that were
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  swept under the rug prior to social media? Well, if it were true that social media was making
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  us smarter and more accurate about the world, then you would expect in the age of post-social media
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  that people would have an accurate estimate of the scope of the problem, right? And yet in 2020,
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  when that poll was conducted, people overestimated the problem by two zeros. Okay, so social media is not
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  educating us. It's miseducating us. That goes to the question of police violence and, you know,
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  the 2020 riots and George Floyd and the pushback against that, but there's something deeper that you're
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  criticizing in your book, which you call neo-racism, which is a whole way of thinking about race,
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  essentially, which is a dominant kind of elite social justice university-educated way of thinking
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  that has shifted a lot. And I mean, I'm sure a lot of people here have kind of just felt it or
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  smelt it since they were kids. When I grew up, the standard position on the left was don't pay any
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  attention to anybody's race. Don't be racist. That's the worst thing that you could be. Just treat
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  another person's skin color like it was their hair color or like it was their eye color, you know,
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  just treat everybody absolutely equally and try not to pay any attention to people's race.
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  That now is regarded as naive at best and sort of white supremacist at worst because it dishonors
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  the, both the intergenerational trauma, the historical marginalization of certain communities,
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  the respect and reverence that we're supposed to have for the lived experience of people who come
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  from backgrounds that are not ours and so on. How would you articulate the current mainstream
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  understanding of race in America? As you said, I grew up in a liberal town outside of New York,
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  buried racially diverse town. I had friends of every race and I didn't think of them as belonging
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  to a race. I thought of them by their first names and their qualities and that was those were the
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  values of the people around me for the most part. Not to say there was not the occasional racist,
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  but they were exceptions that proved the rule. When I got to Columbia University in 2014,
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  2015, I encountered a very different philosophy about race. It was a philosophy that said that
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  I as a black person was by definition a victim of systemic racism and that in some deep way,
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  a non-black person could never really understand me and what I've been through. In orientation
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  at college, we didn't exercise where we were asked for each person to go to a corner of the room
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  based on their race. Now, I'm black and Hispanic, so it immediately had to choose between those,
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  which is, I think, not altogether healthy, but once that was over, I encountered a new discomfort,
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  it was being foisted upon me that I'm a victim. We were all taught to go in a corner and think about
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  how you have either participated in or suffered from systemic racism. I thought to myself,
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  I actually feel rather lucky to have been born upper middle class, frankly, like most of the other
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  black kids at Columbia, half of whom are really have more of an immigrant experience or from places
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  like Nigeria and so forth. I don't think I'm a victim of systemic racism, absolutely not,
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  but that's being foisted upon me. Moreover, we're being made to think of all of one another who we
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  haven't even met yet, really. We're in the process of meeting other human beings for the first time,
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  and we're being asked to see each other first as members of a race rather than as individuals. Before
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  we have even gotten to know each other, and I thought something about this, the purpose of this
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  is to sensitize us to racial issues and so forth. The effect of it is to actually alienate us from
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  one another. Its intentions were in the right place. Its effects were precisely counter to its
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  intentions, I think, and there were so many instances like that in a place like Columbia, and all
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  of this, it may sound like Greek to people that haven't been in a space that obeys this particular
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  religion, and that's kind of what it is. It's a new religion. So forgive me if I sound like I'm
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  reporting from another planet, but it exists. It's overrepresented in elite institutions like
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  the American Ivy League universities, corporate America, and so forth.
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  It certainly exists here in the academy, and it exists to some extent in the media. One of the things
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  that you're most agitated about is ensuring that it doesn't guide public policy, and that when
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  governments make rules about who's eligible for what, that that doesn't cleave down racial lines,
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  but it seems that it is doing that. I mean, both in the United States and also here,
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  the delivery of COVID vaccines, which is one example that you cite, was cleaved along racial lines,
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  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, were... Well, I mean, I was going to say justifiably,
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  but you tell me if it's not justified. I mean, this is a cohort of people who statistically were
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  particularly vulnerable. We know that they die at younger ages. We know they suffer from higher
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  rates of diabetes and so on, so they were put into a cohort where in the delivery of the vaccine,
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  in terms of who gets it first, they were old people and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
• 29:24
  people of NEA age, and then it would go down the list. Is that not appropriate?
• 29:29
  So I'll talk about... I'll stick to what I now talk about the American context, and you can
• 29:36
  translate and apply whatever less anything is worthwhile to the Australian context.
• 29:42
  In America, at the beginning of the pandemic, black Americans died at a higher rate than white
• 29:50
  Americans, and all the usual suspects said, bam, they're systemic racism right there,
• 29:58
  and shouldn't we therefore prioritize African Americans in getting the vaccine?
• 30:04
  When the CDC, the American Center for Disease Control,
• 30:09
  went to recommend how the vaccine would be distributed. There was a panel that was choosing between
• 30:15
  two alternatives. They were choosing between so-called essential workers, which included everything
• 30:21
  from, you know, waiters and even bank tellers and this sort of thing, baristas, and the category
• 30:29
  of elderly. They determined in their own analysis that prioritizing the elderly would save more
• 30:37
  lives total, more white lives, more black more everything, more lives total. But the problem is that
• 30:43
  in America, the elderly as a class skew white. Okay, the average black American is like 10 years
• 30:51
  younger than the average white American, so you can do that math. Average Hispanic is even younger.
• 30:58
  So they recommended that we instead prioritize essential workers because that's a more racial
• 31:03
  racially diverse population. Give it to them first rather than the elderly as a class because the
• 31:09
  elderly are too white. Knowing full well that this was a more deadly recommendation now, thank God
• 31:17
  it became public and there was so much backlash that it didn't end up happening for the most part
• 31:24
  though every state had different policies and certain states did prioritize by race.
• 31:30
  But the fact that you could have the highest governing medical body in the country recommends such
• 31:36
  a thing, knowing that it was a more deadly option, shows you that this ideology of neo-racism
• 31:42
  has poisoned what would otherwise be any kind of rational, compassionate, sane policy.
• 31:50
  Okay, we had the same thing in America around making sure restaurants survived COVID. During restaurants,
• 31:58
  you know, during COVID, restaurants left and right were going out of business for obvious reasons.
• 32:03
  And the government allocated $28 billion to help save these restaurants. And you know,
• 32:10
  how did it do that, right? There are two ways that were proposed to go about it. One would be
• 32:15
  restaurant, you tell me how much you're suffering this year as opposed to last year.
• 32:20
  And the ones that are suffering the most will help you guys first. It makes perfect sense.
• 32:24
  That's the logic of a hospital triage, right? Instead, what they did is they said,
• 32:30
  anyone who is not a white man, you are in the priority group. If your restaurants own 51% by a woman,
• 32:38
  by a black person, Hispanic person, etc., or veteran, they threw veterans in there.
• 32:42
  You will be helped first, white men who are not veterans back on the line.
• 32:51
  You know, there was backlash, needless to say. But by that time, by the time the policy was
• 32:56
  reversed by a judge who found it unconstitutional and it was clearly unconstitutional,
• 33:02
  most of the money was already gone. So would it not have been better to simply allocate resources
• 33:09
  based on the financial need of the restaurants involved? And if black restaurants were hurting more,
• 33:15
  then black restaurants would end up getting help sooner, but not on the basis of being black,
• 33:22
  on the basis of an objective metric like how much you're hurting. So when I say that you have to
• 33:28
  be able to resist the demands of neo-racism when it comes to policy, this is what I mean.
• 33:35
  You have to be able to not be gilted into stupid policies because of a noble impulse.
• 33:43
  This is what I mean. And I mean, just to give a last example, which I thought was fascinating in
• 33:48
  your book, the unions are now on board with this. I mean, traditionally, you would have expected
• 33:53
  that unions would defend workers, you know, equally on the basis of their need as workers,
• 34:00
  but in many states in the United States, now there are either proposals or actual rules where
• 34:06
  unions think that they're doing the right social justice thing by changing the order of who gets laid
• 34:12
  off. For example, if a public teacher's union, for example, the Department of Education needs to
• 34:18
  lay off teachers, traditionally it's done through some kind of hierarchy system, now it's done
• 34:24
  according to who's not black. Yeah. Well, this is Minnesota Teachers Union in one of the new
• 34:32
  contracts, this is probably a year old or so, said instead of doing last hired first fired
• 34:41
  in case of budget cuts, we're going to do last white person hired is the first fired in case of
• 34:48
  budget cuts. And, you know, this, the impulse behind all of these policies, the pretext for these
• 34:58
  policies is that we are redressing the history of discrimination. The effect is that you're creating
• 35:04
  a new kind of discrimination. Ultimately, the cycle of discrimination has to just end. Okay, it has
• 35:13
  to end at some point and we have to, we have to make colorblind public policy the norm. What's
• 35:21
  wrong with saying that it should end when we have roughly equal distribution amongst the
• 35:26
  races? Because in a multicultural society, you're never going to have statistically equal outcomes
• 35:33
  across the board. It's a contradiction in terms. No, but it could be better than the vast disparities
• 35:38
  that we currently have. So, yeah, it could be. And the way to get there is to address it on the
• 35:45
  basis of class. Okay, is to say, rather than Jerry Rigg, who gets fired once your, you know,
• 35:54
  a, you know, 25 year old public teachers, Jerry Rigg, who gets fired according to race when the
• 36:00
  state cuts a budget, how about we look at the fact that from zero to 18, a lot of the kids in
• 36:07
  those classrooms grow up in terrible conditions? How about let's focus on the time in life when you
• 36:15
  can actually have the most impact on people, which is to say zero to 18. Okay, that's the conversation
• 36:22
  that's totally missed when it comes to neo-racism, right? People want to look at someone at 18 and say,
• 36:32
  okay, we're going to get rid of meritocracy completely, judge you according to race. And this is
• 36:38
  somehow going to balance the, what is at bottom a huge human capital gap between the African-American
• 36:45
  community and the white community to say nothing of the Asian community in America. That is not a
• 36:52
  wise way to address the problem. The wise way to address the problem is to say, let's do everything
• 36:57
  we can to address the human capital gap at its roots between the ages of zero and 18 where we can
• 37:03
  really make a difference. And then once your adult, we are going to, we are absolutely going to
• 37:08
  judge people by meritocratic yardstick not according to the race. We're not going to reverse
• 37:13
  discriminate against people because that is the, that's the only way in the long run to,
• 37:21
  to have a fair multiracial society. The, the, the ethic here is that I agree to not discriminate
• 37:29
  against you on the condition that you agree to not discriminate against me. It's all it is is the
• 37:34
  golden rule applied to the question of racial discrimination. Right, but the sense is that the golden
• 37:41
  rule gets invoked. The instant, you know, they, you have 400 years of oppression and then the,
• 37:49
  you know, the instant we get rid of Jim Crow laws, all of a sudden we go, great, are we good?
• 37:52
  Is that fine? Can we just be equal now? Well, no, maybe you need to balance the books a little bit
• 37:56
  because there's been so much imbalance in the past. Okay, so is the core, the, the, the logical endpoint
• 38:01
  of that argument is it should be 400 years of Jim Crow in the other direction. Okay, so when,
• 38:07
  when you actually take that argument to its conclusion, that argument sounds ridiculous. Okay, the,
• 38:13
  what it, and we have to get to a place where we get rid of the fantasy that we are going to
• 38:22
  balance the scales of, of human history. It is, because that's what it is. It's a dangerous fantasy
• 38:29
  to think that the effects of slavery can somehow be undone. It can't be done. What, what, the,
• 38:37
  the tragedy, the, the reason these things are tragedies is because we can never give back
• 38:44
  the lives that we're stolen from people. It can't be done. Okay, that's true of every instance of
• 38:50
  slavery across the world. It's true of every instance of needless war. It's true of famine. It's
• 38:56
  true of genocide. It's true, it's true of, it's true of all of these things. What you can do is,
• 39:01
  as I said in the beginning, you can speak about such things with reverence. You can teach them in
• 39:06
  schools. You can make sure people never forget by enshrining them in museums. And we have done
• 39:15
  all that and more when it comes to slavery in the American context. But what you can't do is use
• 39:23
  public policy today to undo or reverse the effects. That is a dangerous fantasy and all it is is a
• 39:30
  recipe for creating more resentful victims of discrimination in the present.
• 39:38
  Let's talk about how we're getting on as a society and as a people in multicultural societies.
• 39:43
  And in about five minutes, we'll start taking some questions. If you start thinking about questions,
• 39:47
  we'll put up some microphones shortly and you can, you can come to the mics. If you work in a big
• 39:56
  company in Australia or the States now, you go through mandatory anti-racist training. You are
• 40:02
  sent, you know, we've all clicked through those things that you have to click through to say, you
• 40:07
  know, is it okay to touch another person's hair if they're a person of color? Is it okay to
• 40:14
  call a female colleague toots or whatever it might be? And you go, no, that's a bad thing to do
• 40:18
  and you sit there and you click through. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of inclusion training.
• 40:23
  There's a lot of quotas in the media to make sure that media, the media shows and programming
• 40:30
  reaching a certain amount of diversity, both of race and also of sexuality and sex. There's a lot
• 40:35
  of conversation just more broadly about how we need to have a conversation about race. We need to
• 40:40
  get real about race. We need to have a reckoning. We need to, you know, especially in this country,
• 40:46
  grapple with our history. We need to get real about it in a way that we supposedly haven't
• 40:54
  so far. And yet the first sentence of your book says, you've always found race boring.
• 41:01
  You've written a book about it. You've flown halfway across the world to talk about it. Why write
• 41:07
  a book about it and is it helpful for us to talk more or less about race? It's not a topic I
• 41:14
  came to. It's a topic that came to me. And what I mean by that is, as a kid, I had absolutely no
• 41:21
  interest in the race of the person. Like I said, I grew up in a very diverse place. Friends of
• 41:31
  every race didn't care about their race. It didn't occur to me to care about their race.
• 41:36
  But as I entered the elite, woke social justice spaces, all of a sudden, people were labeling me a
• 41:49
  victim without my permission, right? So that's when race became interesting to me. I said, what is it
• 41:55
  about the... I'm sitting in Columbia University. The most progressive square mile you could possibly
• 42:04
  imagine. There is not a white supremacist beyond insight. I think they would bounce off the
• 42:12
  force field of campus. And yet, people in the campus newspaper are writing that they experience
• 42:20
  white supremacy every single day. That is when I became curious because there was a mismatch between
• 42:26
  narrative and reality. And I was a college student doing what college students do,
• 42:33
  drinking too much, running around campus. Plenty of opportunities for me as a black man to have
• 42:38
  experienced this white supremacy that I was hearing about so often. And yet, all I encountered were
• 42:43
  basically just nice people that pretty much had the right instincts about anti-black race.
• 42:50
  What's going on then when we're told, you know, repeatedly that I walk through the world with
• 42:58
  a privilege with a sort of a halo of naivety about me. And this is a claim that I have to give
• 43:05
  credence to because epistemologically, I can't put myself on the shoes of not being a white man,
• 43:11
  but that I walk through the world completely unaware of just how dripping with privilege,
• 43:16
  my whiteness and my maleness is. Like, if that's not true, or if it's only a bit true,
• 43:25
  what's going on? Okay, so it depends on the context. If you are a black kid,
• 43:33
  especially if you're a poor black kid and you walk into a deli, they might think you're stealing
• 43:39
  something even if you're doing nothing at all. Okay, that's real. And that's not going to happen
• 43:43
  to Josh Steps if he walks into a deli in Harlem. If that's white privilege, then yeah, I believe in
• 43:50
  white privilege. My problem with the way this gets talked about is that people are just so dishonest
• 43:59
  about the full landscape of privileges. So I have no problem with a person that just wants to be
• 44:07
  honest about the way people can be treated differently in certain contexts. But it's often the
• 44:13
  same people that complain about the proverbial black kid being trailed at the supermarket who's
• 44:21
  doing nothing wrong, who will then deny that black people experience any advantage from the college
• 44:29
  admissions process in America, right? When every study that's looked into it finds that to be
• 44:35
  black is to be given an extra two or three hundred points basically or the equivalent on the SAT
• 44:44
  when you're applying to colleges. So I'm absolutely fine talking about real instances of racism. I
• 44:51
  think that that's healthy. I think it's a good thing to point out when there are real examples
• 44:55
  of racial discrimination against black people, against Hispanic people in ways that white people
• 45:01
  may rarely experience. But let's also talk about the reverse. Let's be honest about everything. Let's
• 45:07
  talk about the fact that in America, many white people have been told, I'm sorry, you're a great
• 45:17
  employee. In any other case, you'd be the first I promoted, but we need to diversify. I'm getting
• 45:24
  a lot of pressure to diversify and I need a Hispanic candidate for this role. But you're actually the
• 45:29
  best, I'm sorry. How many how many white people have been told that in America? Countless, okay? So
• 45:35
  that's an example of something you're not supposed to talk about in this so-called honest conversation
• 45:41
  about race. I feel that I am principled and open to talking about all of it. However, really the
• 45:49
  people that usually say let's have our honest conversation about race, usually that's code for
• 45:55
  sit down and shut up and let me tell you about how bad black people have it, which can only be one
• 46:01
  part of a truly open and honest conversation. You can't only air your grievances and expect the
• 46:07
  rest of the world to listen if you're not willing to listen to theirs. I mean, the question of
• 46:14
  exactly how much we should be talking about it at all is also silence and it's something you
• 46:18
  wrestle with in the book. You have an analogy about baseball, which I think is cute, which will
• 46:22
  completely go over the heads of us as Australians, not fans, but you could probably make the same
• 46:27
  analogy to quick it or rugby. What's the point you're trying to make about whether or not we talk
• 46:34
  about race and focus on race or try to turn the volume down on it? So there's a famous interview
• 46:41
  of Morgan Freeman. You may be familiar with where Charlie Rose says, how are we going to get past
• 46:52
  racism? And Morgan Freeman says, stop talking about it. And he says, I'm going to stop calling you a
• 47:00
  white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I'll call you Charlie, you call me
• 47:04
  Morgan. And what he's alluding to is the way that a kid like me grew up, the natural attitude of a
• 47:13
  child towards race is not to care about it. Children are born with many flaws. I think often they have
• 47:19
  to be taught to share. They have to be taught. They have to be socialized in many ways. One flaw they
• 47:24
  are not born with is racism. They genuinely, they may notice color differences, but they don't care.
• 47:33
  What Morgan Freeman was getting at is we ought to capture that a little bit more. We
• 47:37
  ought to reinforce that a little bit more as adults. And my baseball analogy was that if I gave you a
• 47:45
  mission to reduce the hatred between two rival sports teams, I use New York and Boston.
• 47:55
  And you came up with a plan that said, we're going to constantly talk about sports as much as
• 48:00
  possible. We're going to use sports analogies in every math class starting from grade one onwards.
• 48:07
  We're going to make sure everyone is educated as to the history of sports. Do you think that would
• 48:12
  increase or decrease the rivalry between those two sports teams? My point is that it would certainly
• 48:18
  probably increase it because now people just care more about sports, so they're going to care
• 48:23
  more about the home team. And they're going to hate the away team more. My point is that if we
• 48:29
  emphasize how important race is from a young age and do Woke kindergarten, which is actually a
• 48:36
  real government funded program in San Francisco, is that going to increase the amount of racism or
• 48:43
  decrease it? I would argue it's probably going to increase the amount of toxic racial hangups people
• 48:47
  have because the more they care about their race and others, the more race will become a container
• 48:53
  for all of the bad aspects of human nature from hatred to envy, to simpler things like neuroticism
• 49:03
  and paranoia. So my view is that, yes, talk about real examples of racism. If you can point to me a
• 49:11
  system that is really racist, yeah, let's talk about that. Let's get rid of all of the toxic race-based
• 49:18
  obsession that has nothing to do with actually fighting real racism and just gets us all hung up
• 49:24
  and helps nobody. Well, I'm glad to learn that San Francisco is literally just a conservative cartoon
• 49:30
  version of what San Francisco is if it has Woke kindergarten. Let's take some questions if people
• 49:36
  want to come up there. If they have one, go for it. Go for it, sir. Hi, Coleman. You wrote about
• 49:42
  the voice and the vote. There was a lot of voice posters for voting. Yes, particularly even in
• 49:47
  this summer, they're even still up. I just saw some outside that referendum failed quite
• 49:53
  dizzily. How do you explain, well, you've kind of talked about the silent majority aspect.
• 50:00
  How do you look to fix it? Is it a question of courage? Yes, so I won't talk too much about the
• 50:06
  voice because I think you guys will know more about it than I do. But it does mirror a lot of
• 50:15
  phenomena in America where, for instance, we were blindsided by Trump's victory. Many people have
• 50:26
  been blindsided by the fact that affirmative action in America has lost many referendums,
• 50:34
  including in two referendums in California, which is a blue state and a very diverse state.
• 50:41
  And there is this phenomenon where, because elite institutions, most mainstream media outlets
• 50:49
  outside of Fox News, lean so far left that people who consume that as their news are often blindsided
• 50:58
  into thinking that everyone agrees with those views or that if they disagree that they're alone.
• 51:04
  And I understand that the voice referendum here from the polling I've seen began as quite a
• 51:11
  popular proposition and lost support over time. What was your take on the substance of it rather than
• 51:18
  the polling of it? As an American, I can't imagine having a feature of a state's constitution
• 51:27
  that acknowledges one race or ethnic group as having any different privilege than another.
• 51:37
  It would probably just be a non-starter in America. And again, it's one of the cases where
• 51:47
  because it was a symbolic thing, primarily, it was an advisory role. It was not an extra vote.
• 51:53
  If it had happened and it had gone through, it would be probably a tradition I respected in 10
• 52:00
  or 20 years. But it was a symbolic issue and it was a matter of preserving the principle that
• 52:10
  constitution should not recognize race. And I very much understand why Australians voted that way.
• 52:16
  Interesting. Thank you. Go for it.
• 52:20
  Recently, Trump tried to get Kamala to pick whether she was Indian or Black, and I guess
• 52:28
  are you suggesting that voters should perhaps ignore that? And do you think Kamala will
• 52:35
  be that Trump so we don't have to put up with him for another?
• 52:39
  Yes, I think in general voters should ignore stupid things.
• 52:42
  Now, the reason Trump did this is you may recall we have a well-known Senator Elizabeth Warren
• 52:52
  who was a serious contender. She claimed to be Native American early in her career many times.
• 53:00
  And Trump called her Pocahontas ironically probably one of his best political jokes ever.
• 53:08
  Because when she tried to prove him wrong, prove that she was Native American,
• 53:12
  she did a DNA test that found that she was at most 1% Native American. And by that standard,
• 53:20
  my 6% makes me practically a Native American chief. So Trump stupidly thought that he could
• 53:26
  repeat this successful tactic on Kamala, but the problem is Kamala has always been honest about
• 53:31
  being half-black and half-Indian. And so he's trying the same tricks that I've worked before,
• 53:37
  but it's not going to work. In this case, as for the election, it's a total throwing cost,
• 53:43
  coin toss right now. Thanks. Go for it.
• 53:48
  Thanks, Coleman. Thanks, Josh. I guess these are all really new and interesting points.
• 53:52
  I also feel like the average everyday Australian, I mean, thinking about how we veer away from
• 53:59
  any conversations about the accountability regarding race, like it's still so hard,
• 54:03
  the country nearly had a connection when it came to the voice and the vote around that,
• 54:07
  talking about race. Do you think that everyday Australians are ready for these conversations
• 54:12
  without using them as an excuse of, oh, like I'm kind of off the hook, I'm doing an acknowledgement
• 54:17
  of country, I can take it and run that I know that I'm trying to be better. I guess this is more
• 54:21
  so a question directed to you, Josh, do you think we are ready, not just people in Redfern,
• 54:26
  at the festival, dangerous ideas, but an average everyday Australian listening to these points?
• 54:31
  Ready for what, exactly? Ready to take on these kinds of perspectives where it's a really...
• 54:36
  Like Coleman's, you mean? Correct, yeah, and nuanced perspectives around race.
• 54:39
  Yes, yes, absolutely. I think I have faith in people generally. I mean, the success of my
• 54:44
  podcast, not to big note myself, gives me faith. There is a hunger out there for people to have
• 54:52
  bullshit free conversations about important provocative things without treading on quite so many
• 54:56
  egg shells and worrying about the trip-wise that might get triggered. You know, people are getting
• 55:00
  bored of the legacy media the way that they're doing things. People are bored of going to an HR
• 55:04
  meeting on Zoom and there are four middle-aged, white middle-management women and they all start
• 55:10
  by doing a welcome to an acknowledgement of country and you're like, why are we all masturbating
• 55:14
  each other with this? Like, let's do some real stuff for Indigenous Australians if we want to.
• 55:18
  Yes, let's listen to First Nations people figure out what they want and like work together.
• 55:24
  I think the tokenism is grating to people, so I think we are up for it. Thank you.
• 55:29
  Yeah, that's why we're here.
• 55:32
  Got for it. Thank you. Love the conversation and as for you perhaps as a corollary to your point
• 55:37
  there, Coleman, as a bit of a macro question in context, I say, the pendulum swing, so to speak.
• 55:44
  What's your sense at the moment? Especially in America, because I'm mindful we see so much
• 55:50
  through the news which tends to report on the extremes no matter which side it is.
• 55:55
  Do you feel like it is greater nuance? I mean, at what point do you get to stop talking about race?
• 56:02
  Oh yeah, let's do rapid fire now because we're running out of time, but yes, I think with this issue,
• 56:08
  the peak in its badness around 2020-21, it's been getting better in America in the past three
• 56:17
  years, but it's not as good as it was when I was a kid. I'm just going to go really quickly. Diversity
• 56:24
  hides the basics of the idea that because of current discrimination, it's aimed at giving
• 56:29
  marginalized people an opportunity. Do you disagree with them and do you have an alternative?
• 56:35
  Yeah, the alternative is colorblind hiring. If you really want to be smart about this,
• 56:42
  you blind yourself to the data. There's tons of studies that show when you send out two identical
• 56:48
  resumes, there is quite a bit of discrimination, not just against black applicants, but against
• 56:54
  South Asian applicants, against East Asian applicants, so forth. To actually try to do everything
• 57:01
  in your power to actually blind yourself, the analogy is like an orchestral audition behind
• 57:09
  a veil. That should ultimately become the norm. The strange thing is in these studies, they find
• 57:18
  that black employers are no better. It's actually not true that making an organization diverse
• 57:28
  inherently makes the organization less racially discriminatory. I think ultimately colorblindness
• 57:35
  is the best principle to shoot for how you implement that in any given circumstances is going to
• 57:40
  be context dependent. Thank you. Last question, go for it. I have many questions, but I only
• 57:48
  going to ask one. Now, you were talking before earlier about you are bringing and being in the middle
• 57:55
  class and everything else. Don't you think that this affects the way you look at racism?
• 58:02
  If you didn't come from a middle class and from a diverse society or you know, you're
• 58:08
  neighbor who whatever you leave, where you come from, don't you think that that would have
• 58:12
  perhaps affect you view on racism? Because you haven't experienced it, you're not any different
• 58:20
  to any white person. Great question. Yeah, great question. So it's about the
• 58:27
  thousandth time I've got that question. I never heard you book so I'm sorry. I didn't expect it.
• 58:37
  I didn't expect you to be either. So there are tons of people that come from nothing that have
• 58:43
  the same message I do. Glenn Lowry come from the south side of Chicago, Thomas Sol, the most famous.
• 58:49
  I don't consider myself conservative per se, but he's really a black conservative and comes from
• 58:55
  Jim Crow South without running a house without hot water and grew up in youth homeless shelters and
• 59:03
  stuff. A lot of the most articulate purveyors of my ideas are people that come from nothing.
• 59:14
  Ultimately, I don't think that the truth depends on where I come from. I think that there is a
• 59:20
  world out there that is the way it is. And we have to try to describe that truth as accurately as
• 59:26
  possible, regardless of our background. Yeah, I agree. Just one more question. Thank you.
• 59:34
  That's a way of time for a thank you so much for coming by Coleman Hughes's book. It's called
• 59:39
  The End of Race Politics. Subscribe to our uncomfortable conversations. Thank you all.