Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Racial Identity in Europe” with Thomas Chatterton Williams

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“Racial Identity in Europe” with Thomas Chatterton Williams · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  I'm Josh Zeps, and I'm fascinated by people who express controversial ideas, who buck conventional wisdom.
• 0:08
  Increasingly, we live in echo chambers that reinforce what we already believe and demonize what we don't.
• 0:16
  So I hunt down the most interesting people in the world to help us all glimpse things outside our bubbles.
• 0:23
  To prove we can still have constructive conversations about controversial topics that many people claim are off limits.
• 0:30
  Join my sub-stack list and follow me on Instagram and YouTube to never miss a conversation that might expand your mind and change your life.
• 0:38
  Today, we're in New York City, catching up with one of the world's most interesting thinkers on racism, social justice, and being black in America and in Europe.
• 0:48
  He's a New Yorker who lives in Paris, the son of a black father from the segregated south and a white mother from the west, and he himself is the father of two very white-looking children.
• 1:02
  Straddling the USA and Europe has given him a fascinating perspective that he is courageous enough to wrestle with in public.
• 1:09
  From Charlie Ebedoel to the Bataclan attacks, from Islamism, to racism, to racial profiling, to the American left, and the European right,
• 1:19
  he's one of the sharpest minds I know, and his must-read memoir is called Self Portrait in Black and White.
• 1:26
  His name is Thomas Chatterton Williams, and this is uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:32
  So my parents and friends are here, and then my kids are in Paris, so I'm kind of tore between...
• 1:41
  I'm home, both places, and not home anywhere.
• 1:43
  Right, yes, yes, the eternal foreigner, kind of in all places.
• 1:47
  But I like that. I like being a foreigner. I think that's actually been helpful for writing in all way.
• 1:54
  I left in the second Obama term, and I kind of was able to have a bit of a distance from the Trump administration, which helped me a little bit mentally sane,
• 2:06
  and close attention to it, but I could just... I could get off the internet, go out into my neighborhood in Paris,
• 2:13
  and nobody there was complacent in political drama, and it was kind of night.
• 2:18
  What I fascinated by it?
• 2:20
  Very much so. I mean, very much so. The first time I lived in France was during the Bush administration, the second Bush administration,
• 2:28
  and so people were quite fascinated with American wondering how on earth could you have this president, and they were very upset in Europe about the war in Iraq,
• 2:39
  and they just couldn't believe America would be so irresponsible.
• 2:44
  And then...
• 2:45
  What's a real election?
• 2:46
  It's just like, you look back on the Bush administration.
• 2:49
  I would take President Cheney.
• 2:52
  Oh, yeah.
• 2:54
  It's just a whole different thing.
• 2:56
  You know, people just... You know, I remember sitting on my dining table in Paris with some French friends who were visiting.
• 3:03
  They live in New York, and they were visiting us for dinner, and we were just like finishing dinner, and everybody was texting us,
• 3:09
  and we just said, something's going on in DC, and we turned on Twitter or something, and we were like, oh my god,
• 3:14
  did people climbing the walls of the country?
• 3:16
  Oh, right, yeah.
• 3:17
  Yeah.
• 3:18
  You know, and sitting there in France watching that people were like, is America okay?
• 3:22
  Yeah.
• 3:23
  You're like, no, but has it ever been okay?
• 3:26
  When was America okay?
• 3:28
  I'm... maybe I'm just too much of a...
• 3:31
  a normy lib tart, but I thought, like, the first Obama administration was like the high point of my political awareness.
• 3:39
  I thought, things were pretty good, you know.
• 3:41
  We have a president that the whole world, you know, even if they don't agree with his policy, they respect.
• 3:47
  Yeah.
• 3:48
  People were kind of, you know, people in Europe were singing our praises, they were saying this could never happen.
• 3:53
  Well, they loved him, but Europeans are communists, so of course they love black communists.
• 3:57
  Obama is really a communist.
• 3:59
  So, commuting back and forth, is there any way that you have to be different when you're in the States versus when you're in Paris?
• 4:08
  Well, I have to be more attuned to everything going on when I'm in the States because it's my society.
• 4:15
  And, you know, I have a stake in it in a different way.
• 4:17
  I have a stake in French society, but I can also just tune out and I'm a guest.
• 4:21
  And, you know, people are hospitable to guests, so I don't have to actually...
• 4:25
  I'm not responsible for, you know, paying attention to everything happening.
• 4:30
  Right.
• 4:31
  You know, you can kind of tune out and absolve yourself of certain...
• 4:34
  I don't have to have a stance on everything happening.
• 4:36
  Yeah.
• 4:37
  In French society.
• 4:38
  Do French people need to have a stance on everything that's happening in French society?
• 4:41
  The way that Americans have to have a stance on everything that's happening in American society?
• 4:45
  Well, that's a good question.
• 4:47
  I think that they're very politically aware and they care, but, you know, things aren't.
• 4:53
  I don't feel that every aspect of French life is politicized in the same way.
• 4:57
  So, it was actually quite nice to be there during COVID.
• 5:00
  You know, nobody liked lockdowns.
• 5:02
  We had not as bad as Australia, or as intense and severe as Australia,
• 5:06
  but we had one of the most severe lockdowns in the Western world, especially during the first wave of COVID.
• 5:13
  And, you know, people didn't like being locked down.
• 5:17
  I didn't like having a curfew, but it never got politicized.
• 5:21
  The epidemiology wasn't a way of, you know, if you believe it or rejected it.
• 5:26
  It wasn't a way of signaling how you voted.
• 5:28
  There is no French, Joe Roguelo or Brett Weinstein.
• 5:32
  There's no French Brett Weinstein.
• 5:34
  Yeah.
• 5:35
  There was nobody that was saying, you know, this is a conspiracy because it's taken control of you.
• 5:42
  Nobody, nobody nearly as influential.
• 5:45
  I'm sure there was somebody, but it wasn't a thing.
• 5:48
  And wearing a mask was not a symbol of allegiance or of independence, you know.
• 5:53
  Yeah.
• 5:54
  When the science about masks changed, you know, people just stopped wearing masks, but it wasn't a marker.
• 6:01
  I feel like this is the same in Australia that there was a certain opposition,
• 6:05
  but the opposition was a fringe, was an extreme fringe opposition.
• 6:09
  And most people were just like, well, you're going to have to do what you're going to have to do.
• 6:12
  That's going to happen.
• 6:13
  That's all you have to do what you've got to do and we're in a pandemic.
• 6:16
  And just, you know, to what do you attribute that difference?
• 6:20
  Well, American culture is much more Balkanized than French culture is.
• 6:27
  You know, we're really a country that's on the life's edge lit between people who vote for Democrats and people who vote for Republicans.
• 6:36
  And it's kind of infected our sports culture who you root, what teams you root for?
• 6:41
  What's well, but what's done?
• 6:42
  Get me started on the Taylor Swift conspiracy.
• 6:44
  You know, that doesn't make sense.
• 6:45
  It doesn't look like this pop star is divisive, right?
• 6:49
  Yeah, yeah.
• 6:50
  And I don't know if it's because it's a European culture that's old and it's, you know, people share more culture.
• 6:58
  They do more of the same things regardless of how they vote or what it is.
• 7:03
  But maybe it's also that there's not, you know, this kind of racialized element that's always present in American life, which is, you know,
• 7:13
  in society that formerly enslaved part of the population.
• 7:16
  And that's still kind of, you know, infects a lot of our politics, whether it's, you know, implicit or explicit.
• 7:24
  I mean, is that, to some extent, though, not a good thing in the sense that you need that there's been a raising of racial awareness in America that maybe France and Europe are going to strive to have in hand?
• 7:36
  That's a good, I mean, I wrote a long piece about this in the Atlantic a couple of years ago about how America's gone crazy with, quote unquote, wokeness.
• 7:46
  But society like France actually could be a little bit woker because they were, they repress it to such an extent that it can explode sometimes or just people really some parts of the population lack recognition.
• 8:01
  And it creates problems in a different way.
• 8:05
  Isn't it in some ways welcome that America has had a racial reckoning? Couldn't Europe do a bit more of that?
• 8:11
  Well, yeah, I actually, I wrote a long piece in the Atlantic a couple of years ago about this that there's a kind of lack of recognition America's you could easily make the case.
• 8:19
  And I do the America has gone too far with the kind of obsession about identity and recognition for every kind of niche identity that can be imagined.
• 8:29
  But France could actually extend more recognition to people who feel, I guess, unreflected in the larger culture or feel diminished.
• 8:41
  And, you know, there's no perfect society in France is out of utopia.
• 8:47
  And America is out of utopia. They kind of, there's a synthesis between the two where there's a middle ground where there's some kind of degree of wokeness, which is beneficial.
• 8:57
  But then if it goes too far, they become counterproductive.
• 9:02
  I wonder why that middle ground is. I mean, maybe Australia actually.
• 9:07
  Yeah, I think possible. I don't know enough about that, but it seems like Australia.
• 9:13
  There's some, there's some.
• 9:18
  How do I say this? There's a native population there that feels quite.
• 9:22
  Certainly, certainly. Yeah. But the recognition of that as a problem and a national stain and something that needs to be aggressively addressed has emerged.
• 9:37
  And there's a consensus around that now that I think doesn't exist in European countries towards their colonial past, for example, which is closer, which is more analogous to what's happened here with the black population.
• 9:50
  France really does struggle to acknowledge aspects of its own history that are pretty.
• 10:01
  It's indisputable. Right. You know, it's only recently that.
• 10:07
  Was the president that recognized the massacre of Algerians in the sixties that took place in the middle of Paris, you know, people were being thrown into the sand into the river.
• 10:20
  Is it serious? Like people killed and that was never officially.
• 10:23
  Wait, would they kill them then thrown into the sand? Because the sand is not very deep.
• 10:28
  So if you throw me into the sand, I'd be fine. And then thrown into the.
• 10:31
  Okay, that's that's bad. Yeah, that's bad. That's really what being thrown into the sand was it was not just bad.
• 10:36
  It was then not not acknowledged. Right. Well, because it was an anti riot was the claim that it was a riot test that was suppressed quite violently.
• 10:48
  How does that affect the populations who currently live there of Algerian French people? Have what do I think about it?
• 10:57
  I think that there's quite a lot of anger. You know, France is also, you know, Europe and France in particular, you know, when I was there in 2015, that was such an extraordinarily violent year.
• 11:09
  I mean, they have to deal with the fact that there are a number of native French citizens who feel no allegiance to the country.
• 11:22
  And that has, you know, by native, you mean they were born in France, but they're North African. Yes, they said their parents are grandparents would have immigrated. But these are these are French.
• 11:35
  And she has anybody else in the society, but will you say that bridge of the French think that not all of the French think that and not all of them think that, you know, they've done.
• 11:45
  It's really sad they've been in schools that are in the boundary or the, you know, these kind of enclave suburbs suburbs.
• 11:53
  And, you know, they'll ask kids about themselves and they'll say, well, you know, I love living in France, but I don't have any French friends.
• 12:02
  And by saying French, I mean white friends, but they're French citizens, but they say I don't know any French people.
• 12:10
  Whereas, but you know, obviously with all the caveats, most people don't do anything violence. And most people are just trying to live their lives.
• 12:19
  But there was a disproportionate number of people, especially in this moment around 2015, who rose up and committed extraordinary acts of violence.
• 12:29
  You know, this wave of terror that started with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which is 10 minutes from my apartment.
• 12:34
  And then by November of that same year in 2015, became this kind of roving massacre with the Bataclan and, you know, the slaughters in in cafe terraces and things.
• 12:49
  I mean, it was, it was really shocking. You know, I was in college during 9-11. I was in DC, so not in New York, but, you know, from my rooftop in Georgetown, we watched, you know, the Pentagon burning.
• 13:02
  I mean 9-11 was pretty spectacular, but for me, the violence that happened in France was much more terrifying.
• 13:10
  You know, it wasn't cinematic, like a movie, and you're seeing explosions. It was very intimate, like ISIS style moving from restaurant to restaurant, mowing people down with plastic hubs and things like that.
• 13:23
  You know, it was extraordinary. And, you know, you have to wonder, like, how does a society produce, you know, not one person that will do this, but, you know, entire groups of people that think this is, you know, not just.
• 13:39
  Something they could do, but something that it should be strove for. And, you know, there were neighborhoods near me that produced, you know, 19 men who went to fight for ISIS and things like this, you know, training in the park like this, you know, doing calisthenics and getting ready to go fight.
• 13:54
  And, you know, France sent, I believe, by far, the most native citizens to go fight for the Islamic State.
• 14:02
  Right.
• 14:03
  So, you know, that's a part of, you know, you have to do some self-reflection when you have a society that produces people who can feel so alienated.
• 14:12
  It's not to say that that's justified in any way, but you know, if you don't self-reflect, there's also something wrong.
• 14:20
  Yeah, the mainstream culture. I mean, what does that self-reflection need to look like?
• 14:25
  That's a good question, and I don't certainly have all the answers, but you have to make people feel invested in society. I mean, that's all of these multi-ucket societies that we're living in.
• 14:34
  You know, this is, you know, rather new, you know, before World War II, for all intents and purposes, there was not a Muslim Arab population.
• 14:44
  And France is just a fact, and now it has the largest population in Europe, and you know, it's a secular society.
• 14:52
  There are ideas of secularism predate, having a Muslim population that's really a kind of rebellion against the dominance of the Catholic Church.
• 15:03
  But, you know, you have to find ways to have a flexibility that integrates people and gives them incentives for, I would say, assimilating.
• 15:13
  And, you know, that's a negotiation. It's certainly incumbent on people that come to societies to assimilate, but the society has to be assimilable.
• 15:23
  Right.
• 15:24
  But, when you say assimilate, wouldn't that be offensive to people who value their own culture and to the, I don't know, modern ideals of social justice, which say that you, that the goal should not be to try to take on the attributes of the population of French people.
• 15:43
  Like, why do I have to assimilate?
• 15:45
  I mean, that's certainly a point that gets made, but I, you know, I think that the assimilation that, well, is a two-way street, but, you know, a host society can't fully accommodate losing its own identity either.
• 16:03
  You know, the host society has to maintain, you know, its sense of self and its way of doing things while being hospitable.
• 16:12
  I mean, it's funny that you say a host society, because in the case of a European country like France, there very much is a host society that regards itself as having a very specific culture and a way of doing things in a lifestyle instead of beliefs and aspirations.
• 16:27
  Well, yeah, I mean, the thing about a new country, you know, notwithstanding the genocide of the native populations, but in America, and Australia, and Canada, and New Zealand, you know, you're talking about places where the whole experiment is immigration.
• 16:41
  The entire thing is what do you build out of the pieces of people who come here?
• 16:46
  So the host is this amorphous kind of ephemeral, ever-evolving thing, which it strikes me maybe it's not in.
• 16:54
  And when we're honest, there are selves we admit that about America and society that it's always been, you know, a mixture of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture,
• 17:04
  the culture coming over from the African slaves, the Native American culture that was here, and in the waves of immigration from all around Europe.
• 17:16
  Also, you know, the Spanish culture that was here before, you know, when America had, you know, French and Spanish influences.
• 17:25
  I mean, we've always been among raw society, but, you know, you can make the point that France has never been a monolith either, and that, you know, the people living in Britain are not the same people that were living in the South of France.
• 17:39
  No, but the Brittany people are still have more in common with the people who were living in Brittany 200 years ago.
• 17:46
  And the people in the South of France still have more in common with the people who were living in the South of France 200 years ago.
• 17:50
  That's right.
• 17:51
  And so, you know, the idea that France is now, you know, the society of immigration in a melting pot is something that is not as, you know, natural as it is in a place like America, although,
• 18:08
  but the interesting similarity between France and America is they're the two societies that think of themselves as universal culture.
• 18:15
  This, you know, France has this idea of itself as, you know, a universal, you know, identity, identity, anybody can be French.
• 18:23
  It doesn't have the blood and soil on it of itself that, you know, that Germany did have, or are there.
• 18:29
  And Germany does have, I mean Germany still has it to look at the Turkish population of Germany.
• 18:34
  It's almost impossible to become a German citizen if you're a Turkish migrant.
• 18:38
  Citizenship is harder in a place like Germany and, you know, France thinks of itself as a place where your identity, whatever it is, is a private matter that, you know, that is fine, but everybody is equal as a citizen of this society.
• 18:56
  And there should be no discrimination based on that now in practice.
• 19:01
  It's different than in theory, but, you know, that actually makes France quite theoretically a hospitable place for, for people's consume.
• 19:09
  I'm intrigued by your reminiscences about the 2015 attacks in Paris and saying that it was more traumatizing and away than 9-11 for you.
• 19:22
  We're sitting here in New York City where, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, if you'd told me that in 2024, I'd be sitting in New York, and there wouldn't have been a single other major terrorist attack in the United States.
• 19:41
  I wouldn't have believed you, and I would have been incredibly relieved.
• 19:48
  Was 2015, like, I'll know not this all over again, was it like, what if this thing never stops? Explain it to me.
• 19:57
  I was really feeling like, what if this never stops? This is really an untenable situation. I'm on the train, you know, I'm taking a TGV and with my family, with my...
• 20:08
  You didn't call it a TGV, weren't I?
• 20:10
  TGV, with my young kids, and, you know, someone's suitcase falls and makes a loud bang, and all I'm thinking is that here's another person trying to shoot up the train, or someone's going to explode something.
• 20:21
  I mean, there's something about, you know, the small-scale violence, I think, that's more terrifying, just the quotidian aspect of it that, you know, you can...
• 20:31
  If you want to, you can really shoot up a train, or you can...
• 20:35
  And remind us also that you mentioned the train, and it's worth probably reminding people, just all of the shit that was going down in 2015,
• 20:43
  in addition to the Bataclan attack on the concert where jihadist with machine guns, you know, devastated a pop concert and then shot up people in cafes,
• 20:53
  and the Charlie Hebdo attack, where Islamists shot up a satirical newspaper that had published offensive cartoons of the Prophet.
• 21:01
  There was also the train from Amsterdam to Paris.
• 21:05
  The train from Paris to Brussels.
• 21:08
  Okay.
• 21:09
  Brussels to Paris, I heard.
• 21:10
  What happened?
• 21:11
  Two American soldiers, and I believe a British soldier, as well, were involved in thwarting a guy who went to the bathroom and came out with an assault rifle,
• 21:23
  and knives and multiple weapons who seemed poised to massacre people in the train.
• 21:31
  I believe that one of the Americans actually grabbed his knife with his hand and, you know, had...
• 21:37
  And it was just an accident. I mean, had it not been for the fact that they were off duty and they were on holiday or something, right?
• 21:42
  Yeah, yeah.
• 21:43
  If they weren't there, they would have been another...
• 21:45
  Yeah, that was terrifying. That started to make me feel different about train travel, which is, you know, so common in France, you know, that you get around the country on these trains.
• 21:54
  You know, it just undermined...
• 21:56
  At that moment, a lot of us undermined our sense of just, you know, normalcy and feeling like this was a, you know, a functional situation.
• 22:06
  And as there was someone drive a truck into a crowd of people...
• 22:09
  That's right. On the promenade, I mean, just mowing down pedestrians.
• 22:13
  What was going on then? Why then? Why them?
• 22:16
  I mean, it was at the peak of the kind of Islamic state propaganda, and that was seductive and compelling to a surprising amount of Europeans in both Belgium and France.
• 22:30
  I don't know if these things, you know, if it's, you know, something is going on on the mnemetic level where people are just, you know, you know, the copycat effect.
• 22:41
  It's like a social contagion.
• 22:42
  There was a social contagion, and I, you know, you talked about, you know, will this ever end? I really felt like, you know, if this just is a way of life in contemporary Europe, then I can't stay here with...
• 22:55
  I can't raise a family here.
• 22:56
  What would you go in New York? I already got a sex.
• 22:58
  Come back to America. You know, live in Wyoming.
• 23:02
  And then your kid gets shot in the school or something.
• 23:05
  I mean, it was really like, it was, it was, you know, I don't want to, you know, overstate the case.
• 23:10
  But it was something that happened multiple times in the span of a year, and it was certainly, it was on my mind.
• 23:17
  And, you know, these were things that were happening, you know, Paris is small and central Paris is, you know, nothing as far away from anything else.
• 23:24
  You know, where these attacks were happening, or that's a walk, you know, from, from my apartment.
• 23:28
  And what is the state of jihadism and Islamism in Europe then?
• 23:31
  Because, you know, if you watch right wing talk shows, then you'll hear that, oh, you know, there are no-go zones in London, and like Sweden has capitulated into the Islamists.
• 23:45
  And I always sort of scoff a bit, because I know London pretty well, and I don't see that.
• 23:49
  But, like, it must be there.
• 23:54
  The state of jihadism, it doesn't feel, I don't know why.
• 23:58
  And I have never spoken to anybody who had a clear answer on why, but it doesn't feel like 2015, and it hasn't for a while now.
• 24:06
  There haven't been more attacks, and this kind of Fox News hysteria that was saying that, you know, like I've street, the boulevard magenta, which is very close to, like, my daughter goes to school around the corner from there.
• 24:17
  That was described by Sean Hannity and people in Fox News as one of these no-go zones, and I mean, that's laughable.
• 24:25
  But, you know, there isn't, there's a kernel of truth that there are, you know, neighborhoods and enclaves where, you know, many people in the population were seduced by, you know, this, this call to the Islamic state, and, you know, multiple people actually went abroad.
• 24:46
  And then, you know, there are neighborhoods in Brussels where, you know, an enormous amount of the neighborhood was hospitable to some of the attackers, and, you know, there are people that were complicit in hiding them and things like this, and, you know, that's an uncomfortable tension to live with knowing that, you know, that exists within the society.
• 25:05
  Come back to the question of buy-in, of, like, buy-in to the society, buy-in to the host society, feel it, I mean, it may be a stretch because maybe one will say that, you know, anyone who's tempted to become a jihadist is mentally unstable or something.
• 25:17
  But, I mean, they are the tip of an iceberg of dissatisfaction or, you know, there have to be underlying reasons why people do things in addition to Islamist ideology.
• 25:28
  We were talking earlier before the tape was rolling about littering, and my bafflement walking through New York and seeing people, like, eat a hamburger and just drop the wrapper on the ground, which is not something that happens in Australia.
• 25:44
  And you said that's about not having buy-in to the society.
• 25:48
  Yeah, not feeling like you have ownership in the society or that it's...
• 25:52
  Would I be totally crazy to see jihadism and dropping a wrapper on the street as, like, opposite ends of the same basic spectrum of detachment from...
• 26:04
  No, I don't think that's a crazy spectrum to draw. I think that jihadism would be the superlative of whatever that small rebellion is of just disrespecting the, you know, the local environment by seeing no reason to invest in upkeep of it.
• 26:26
  No, it's probably coming from a similar impulse of...
• 26:30
  To know I get to call literars terrorists.
• 26:34
  Like Thomas said it.
• 26:36
  I would say that it's very... Right authority on this.
• 26:38
  Violent rebellion is the superlative of that same impulse.
• 26:42
  Right. How unified do you feel America is? How unified do you feel Europe is? Is there a difference?
• 26:50
  I don't think you can call America unified, so there must be some type of a difference. America doesn't feel very unified to me.
• 26:58
  I mean, it feels more fractious than at any other moment that I'm aware of.
• 27:02
  You know, I'm in my early 40s and this to me feels like the least cohesive cultural and political moment.
• 27:10
  You know, it's not just a left-right divide. It's the fragmentation, you know, within the left or the fragmentation within the right is really extreme.
• 27:20
  I don't have that same sense in France. I mean, there certainly are divisions, but it does seem to me that people essentially share a unified national culture more than we do here.
• 27:34
  I mean, that's also, you know, always been the case in America. You know, regional differences are really salient here.
• 27:40
  You know, if you're from the South, it really is different than being from the Northeast. If you're from the West, that is different.
• 27:46
  But those are not where the differences, where the fractiousness is cleaving.
• 27:50
  Right? It's not that the South hates the West Coast. I mean, they do, but that's not the salient thing that's going on.
• 27:59
  Like, the fracturing seems to be that you have a social justice left that would say, yes, we're fractious. That's because we're facing an existential threat from fascism.
• 28:12
  And there were other eras that were fractious as well, like the 1960s. And it was important that they were fractious because they were overturning, like historical wrongs.
• 28:23
  And they are shooting an era of civil rights. And the right would say, we have to be fractious because there's a crazy ideology that's trying to pervert our children and convince them that there's no such thing as men and women.
• 28:37
  And, you know, I don't know, whatever else, the right would say both sides feel like the stakes are high.
• 28:43
  Yeah.
• 28:44
  Yeah. You know, it's not that Oregon and Alabama are at odds because of their geography. They're at odds because they think they're fighting for the soul of the, the name.
• 28:57
  Well, I do think that there are real regional differences that manifest politically. If you think about questions like access to abortion and things like that, that really is, it seems to be that certain regions of the country really see that differently.
• 29:10
  But you're right. Like the other stuff is a matter of, it doesn't matter where you are in the country. It divides people based on which ideological camp they align with.
• 29:22
  And what do you make of the social justice claim that the stakes are higher than ever?
• 29:28
  And the analogy I suppose to the 1960s, like, you know, I get criticism for being a moderate and being like, what would you have been sitting on the sidelines of monthly thinking speeches? Well, no, of course not.
• 29:41
  Here, I think that Alexi Datoqueville, the first and probably still the best observer outside observer of American culture was really right when he said that, you know, it's as society grows more equal that slight differences become unbearable.
• 30:00
  And so, you know, when you have highly unequal societies like aristocracies, profound inequality is unremarkable and people don't take much notice of it. But as people become more and more equal, then the slightest discrepancy and status or recognition really sets people off.
• 30:19
  It's a way that that is in many ways where we are and that's like a claim that would infuriate people, but my father is 86 years old black man from Texas group in the 30s and 40s under segregation.
• 30:32
  I live in a different country than him, you know, inequality is obviously still a factor in American life, but this is the most equal society.
• 30:45
  And, you know, status is extended to groups that wasn't even thought of to extend to in the not so distant past.
• 30:54
  And I think that, you know, this kind of hyper focus on any type of discrepancy between racial groups is like evidence of racism.
• 31:04
  And this kind of hyper focus on any discrepancy, even discrepancies in, you know, in test scores and things like that is evidence of systemic racism.
• 31:13
  You know, this seems to me that that's like what you latch on to when actually the major injustices have all been eradicated.
• 31:22
  I mean, the major injustices that people seem to be focused on at the moment have largely been eradicated in the sense that it is no longer acceptable in polite society to express overtly bigoted opinions towards people on the basis of their color or sexuality or sex.
• 31:40
  But you mentioned the word inequality, the economic injustices have not been resolved.
• 31:48
  And it always perplexes me a bit that there is such a focus on the left at the moment on identity differences when there's this elephant in the room, which is that we're more economically unequal and ever.
• 32:00
  If you solve the problem of economic inequality, a lot of those in those differences, those racial differences would disappear.
• 32:10
  You know, a lot of it has to do with the fact that black people in America are disproportionately poorer than white people.
• 32:16
  So, you know, well, I have less media and wealth at least.
• 32:19
  If you correct it for that, then the yeah, then all the risk would be the basis of solidarity across identity groups.
• 32:26
  But, you know, that's something I've been writing about and kind of, you know, screaming into the void for years now.
• 32:33
  But it's something that, you know, Marxists and people really on the left that's not the identity left like Adolf Reed have been saying for decades.
• 32:44
  And just, you know, wondering why is it so much easier for Fortune 200 companies to get behind the identity left and to diversify their boardroom or to hire more people of color, you know, at investment banks or whatever, because that's obviously less of a sacrifice than actually addressing class inequality.
• 33:08
  So, you know, Adolf Reed has made the argument quite convincing. I think that like identity politics fits extremely well with neoliberalism and, you know, with regimes of gross inequality that just as long as you have 13% of billionaires be black, then you can say that, you know, that has been solved.
• 33:29
  And where you make of these sort of diversity and equity and inclusion move that, I mean, it seems like some universities are pulling back from it now, but certainly corporate human resources departments are still a monolith, an ideological monolith when it comes to the importance of scrupulously managing precise quotas of, you know, people on the basis of their sexuality or sex or race.
• 33:56
  I mean, I'm uncomfortable with, you know, racial quotas. I'm all for, you know, the idea of inclusivity and diversity and equity is a different question because it depends on what people mean.
• 34:10
  I mean, you know, part of the problem is that we use a lot of these words and people have very different meanings of the same terms.
• 34:17
  A lot of things sound good in principle, but it's not the, there's the kind of, what Raymond Dauron or somebody would call, there's like the, there's the explicit meaning and there's the esoteric meaning.
• 34:29
  And so the explicit meaning of diversity, equity and inclusion sounds great. The esoteric meaning that outcomes have to be engineered, you know, not equality of opportunity, equality of outcome has to be engineered, you know, that becomes something else.
• 34:44
  Litmus tests that happen at universities that you must have a kind of statement that professes the approved ideology, even if it has nothing to do with your field or your line of work that you must commit yourself to, you know, the official line of thought.
• 35:03
  That's very dangerous for academic freedom. That's very dangerous for just having, you know, an institution that promotes critical thinking.
• 35:10
  And just in case people don't know what you're talking about, I mean, this is actually something that happens where a professor of some, you know, some science scientific discipline, for example, will be required to sign on to literally sign a statement to pledge.
• 35:23
  So pledge support for diversity, equity and inclusion as defined by university administrators.
• 35:31
  Right. And if they don't do so, I mean, it's in your job application. It's in your, I mean, you, it's part of how you would get the job in the first place. So it's, it's kind of, it's a strange thing to impose. I think there's been a lot of scrutiny on that.
• 35:45
  But recently, I think, you know, in a way, with both Asians and Jews, it's, it's, it's an interesting question in slightly different ways, you know, with Asians having to be artificial, artificially kept at lower levels of admittance to places like Harvard, you know, you had to come up with, you know, neologisms like white adjacent, they couldn't be.
• 36:10
  Another group of people of color, because people of color are supposed to have, you know, different standards of admission to diversify the student body. But when Asians are out performing white students, that rationale falls apart. So how do you explain that if they're also minorities of color, well, they're actually, they're this other category, they're white adjacent essentially. So, you know, so, so, so.
• 36:37
  So, so, so then, so then, so then, so then Jews in a different way, you know, throw a wrench in that because you have all of these organizations, you know, coming up with every sense of nuance for the word harm.
• 36:53
  And, you know, Yale, you know, on the level of Halloween costumes have to be micromanaged so as not to be a form of harm for certain groups.
• 37:06
  Because you might dress up as a native American or something.
• 37:09
  And, and, and, and that becomes something unacceptable within the institution, you have to then have a way of explaining why speech that seems quite harmful to this group is deemed something that the institution must have a sense of neutrality on when when students are saying things that make Jews feel attacked for their identity based on, you know, a slaughter that just happened in October.
• 37:36
  And so, once that kind of became a topic of discussion, I think that, you know, the DEI kind of the argument became a lot less compelling to people that were not inclined to closely scrutinize it before people that just, you know, because it sounds good.
• 37:56
  You want to be a decent person and you say, what's the harm in that? And then, and then suddenly you see these like massive contradictions that seem deeply unfair.
• 38:06
  And you, you take a closer look at the thinking and the ideology behind the whole program and you say, wait a second, I think that's where we are right now.
• 38:13
  You know, from 2020 until, you know, October 7th or so, I think there is just a kind of sense that certain it was in polite to, you know, to scrutinize certain things to closely like what's the motivation behind looking to closely at that.
• 38:27
  And then I think that kind of fell apart. I'm writing a book at the moment about the summer of 2020 and the kind of impact it had on institutional decision making.
• 38:38
  So the era seems to me more and more to have been bookended, but Trayvon Martin in 2012, you know, black teenager walking home in a gated development in Sanford, Florida, with a hoodie on coming back from the convenience store and being followed and stalked really by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, vigilante called George Zimmerman, who confronted him, obviously terrified him.
• 39:04
  And when Martin tried to defend himself, shot and killed him and then claimed self defense, I mean, that's really a moment when, you know, black lives matter and these things had existed prior to that, but it really became, it got his momentum going with that.
• 39:23
  And then really the following year with the death of Michael Brown and Ferguson, I mean, this became a kind of movement for racial justice that really like, I think, reached its apotheosis in 2020 and Minneapolis with the death of George Floyd.
• 39:40
  But it seems to me that October 7th was a kind of bookend to that and, you know, people started on campuses and in corporate spaces wondering why are there some of these double standards and the way we think about harm and the way we think about minorities and, you know, the way that we think specifically about Jews.
• 40:00
  And, you know, that got kind of crazy, you know, an incident in the Middle East became a kind of referendum on, you know, handful of Ivy League schools here, but that became kind of emblematic of larger disagreements.
• 40:19
  And, you know, with the, with the, with the, with the debacle around the congressional testimony with Clyde Engay and some other leaders of Ivy League institutions and MIT.
• 40:31
  And where they were basically saying that they're not going to crack down on now they're neutral designers to a pro Palestinian now they're going to be neutral speech.
• 40:40
  So if people are saying from the river to the sea, you know, Palestine will be free and if Jews get offended by that, then they're not going to intervene.
• 40:48
  But if a person wants to dress up in a funny Native American costume for Halloween, they were not known say something about, you know, their dissent with a racial justice agenda, then they will clamp down on that.
• 40:59
  Yeah, and I think that they lost a lot of not just the reactionaries like the Chris Rufo types who are activist reactionaries, no matter what happens, but I think they lost a lot of reasonable people in the middle with that kind of double standard and, you know, this kind of contorted logic that had to make it make sense that, you know, neutrality was a key concept in the way they they run their businesses.
• 41:24
  I just think that, you know, the spell was broken a bit and so I'm really thinking a bit about what happened in this moment, why it happened, why certain ideas became so compelling and why they've lost their luster now.
• 41:37
  Why did they become so so compelling?
• 41:40
  Well, because the thing is that, you know, there's there's some truth in this stuff, you know, American police are really excessively violent oftentimes and, you know, it's not just part of why, like, I don't like the term wokeness.
• 41:58
  I think it's essentially a pejorative you don't really reach people that you could reach to convince with that term you basically reach people that already already agree with you are the people that really disagree with you, they don't use the term for themselves and they find it.
• 42:15
  A kind of a signal of where you're coming from before they hear your point, but for better or worse, we're kind of stuck with this term in this conversation, you know, wokeness is compelling because it's based on actual problems that exist in society.
• 42:31
  It can distort those problems, it can use them to do things that are sometimes it can, it can recommend cures that are worse than than the disease, but there is a problem in American society with police brutality, it's not even a problem that only affects black people it disproportion disproportionately affects poor black people.
• 42:51
  But, you know, American police kill more white people in a year than I would say, you know, speaking unscientifically, but then all European society all Western European societies combined, you know, 500 or so white American unarmed civilians are killed in confrontations with police every year.
• 43:14
  I think in France, the number is like 20 or something like that, you know, so why didn't why did the movement not address itself towards policing specifically, I mean, you do have a defund the police movement as well, but that's one tiny piece of a larger mosaic that is focused relentlessly on race.
• 43:31
  Right, well, so, you know, just to that's one real problem that exists in society, a lot of the problems that the social justice movement addresses itself towards our actual problems, you know, there is gross inequality that manifests in, you know, different levels of access to, you know, to health care or, you know, people were dying during COVID, not because they're biologically black or Latino,
• 44:00
  but because black and Latino people are stuck in circumstances where they're more vulnerable, like these are real, these are real aspects of the way that our society is arranged that could be arranged otherwise and that calling attention to them can make a difference.
• 44:19
  But yes, would it have been more effective and potentially more enduring of a change if you would have said, you know, we need a movement that all Americans should be appalled by unarmed civilians being abused and sometimes killed in police custody and that's unacceptable and I'm out region of America and not on the basis of an identity group, but that this is an acceptable period.
• 44:43
  You know, Mark Lilla and many people were making this case, you know, Mark Lilla's book, The Once in Future Liberal is one of the best distillations of this idea that, you know, that is what liberalism is for is, you know, like broad universal principles that everybody can buy into equally that are not dependent on being part of a niche subgroup to advocate for.
• 45:06
  Do you cop shit for arguing these kinds of things, oh man, all the time, we follow each other on Twitter, don't.
• 45:15
  Yeah, no, all the time, and you know, sometimes, you know, that's even, you know, considered a racist thing to say because you're you're dismissing the specific.
• 45:25
  Paying that say, you know, blacks suffer as a group, but you know, at the end of the day, the society, if if black are disproportionately poor, blacks will benefit from a society that has a higher floor for everybody, if blacks are disproportionately abused by violent police forces, black people will disproportionately benefit from less violent policing.
• 45:53
  Those types of things also, I think, create just longer term by and there was an enormous amount of solidarity immediately filing the death of George Floyd, but as black lives matter became more and more based specifically on identity, a lot of that solidarity was squandered.
• 46:12
  What's it like being black in France?
• 46:14
  The thing that's interesting for me there is that, you know, I'm not the first black American to notice this, I mean, James Baldwin has written so beautifully about this and so nuancedly.
• 46:31
  Your first and foremost an American in France, your skin color is a secondary characteristic, but your nationality becomes the most salient identifier and so that's actually quite a privileged position to be in, you know, you're from a powerful rich country, you're not perceived as needing, you're not an immigrant that needs something from them.
• 46:52
  You're extended a kind of cultural capital and dignity that, you know, Baldwin and others have remarked that, you know, like, especially, you know, pre-civil rights, there was a sense that like, damn, this is the first time I understand what it feels like to be an American is nice to be an American in America, I feel like a second class innocent, but like actually being an American is quite nice.
• 47:12
  This must be how white people feel like back home.
• 47:16
  I, you know, I have friends in France who are who are identified or racialized as black, who are from former colonies and they would say that it's a less hospitable kind of experience and they're not always extended that kind of, you know, cultural capital.
• 47:30
  So I think that they're Arabs when you say that, no, black, like black, black, black people, they would say they have a very different black experience in France and I can't speak to that.
• 47:38
  What about when you don't open your mouth and people don't know that you're an American? Is there a difference? Is there racism? Does the racism differ with that in the US?
• 47:46
  Something I thought about a lot, you know, Baldwin says, you know, when he came to France, he was, you know, he felt immediately liberated because he was going to go insane. He wasn't so far from where we're sitting right now.
• 47:58
  He said he was going to jump off the George Washington bridge if he stayed in Harlem, but that in France, he felt, you know, that he was outside of that kind of, you know, a black white binary that he was stuck in back home.
• 48:10
  But then he quickly realized that there is somebody else taking his place on the social totem pole and that was the Algerian and then that kind of complicated his sense of personal liberation because he was implicated in a society where somebody else was was
• 48:26
  the down trodden, the Negro or the other version of the N word that he would have said, and that, you know, that was a bitter kind of liberation.
• 48:36
  When I first moved, was that why don't you say that would?
• 48:42
  It's not because I think that, you know, the word can't be spoken, but it's probably because, you know, it's an ugly word. I don't personally like to use it. Sometimes I do use it, but I don't just use it frivolously.
• 49:00
  I don't like to trivialize the effect of the word and I don't like the, I think it's really like it's a truly ugly word. I don't like the kind of idea that you know, you can embrace it and you can, you know, you can reappropriate it or
• 49:20
  I'm not really saying like, why don't you call black friends than a word? I'm saying like in that example, just then you were talking about James Baldwin
• 49:28
  using the word. So then you're just sort of mentioning the existence of the word, which is, yeah, can just confusing to me that there isn't a recognition that there's a difference between calling someone that and
• 49:42
  mouthing the same sounds as that word. Yeah, I mean, if somebody were using the word or, you know, it's descriptive. If somebody were using the word, I certainly wouldn't say that that was an instance of racism where they need to be, you know, lose their job. But for me, it's just a personal decision for me that I don't like, you know, I think it's really
• 50:00
  it's an appalling word. Yeah, fair enough. Getting back to Baldwin and Algerians and France. Do you have a code as Algerian?
• 50:08
  Yes, I wrote about this in my first book, but it's changed with age and it's changed with self-presentation, but when I first moved to France when I was a college student, you know, I used to shave my head quite low
• 50:18
  and I feel like hair is quite, hair gives your racial identity. It's a kind of marker of racial identity as well. It can be. And when I didn't have hair, I was less perceivable as a mixed black guy.
• 50:38
  Then I am now. And so I feel like when I was younger, I was sometimes spoken to, you know, on the street in Arabic, people would assume that that was that I was coming from some place in the Maghreb.
• 50:50
  And that that was my culture. I remember being in a kebab shop and a guy, you know, asking me why I didn't speak, why didn't why didn't my parents teach me my language.
• 50:59
  My dad is like, black guy in Texas. He was like speak Arabic and I was like, I'm not Arab and he was like really confused, but that hasn't really happened to me in quite a long time.
• 51:14
  I think it's partially based on something as simple as my hair, but I think it's also partially based on, you know, I was like a single guy back then and now like I live in France like my kids.
• 51:25
  No one, if I'm walking with my kids in the street, no one would perceive me as an Arab because my kids essentially look Swedish. So, you know, it's just like who you are family with and who you are around also racializes you.
• 51:39
  And when you would be mistaken for an Arab in France, did that ever lead to people having more, I don't know, disdain for you or where there instances of racism and then when they find out that you're not an Arab. Oh, he's a black American. Oh, he's actually one of the good guys.
• 51:52
  Yes, that was only in the capacity of never really happened to me with police, but, you know, especially like when I first was there, that was like 2003. That was like peak war on terror.
• 52:05
  And I couldn't just, I don't think I flew one time through Charle de Gaulle airport without being pulled to that special room. They have fram big US Lee brown people.
• 52:16
  And I really became quite sympathetic to people who are just going about their business and they cannot, they're just, you know, identifiably Muslim and they cannot go through the airport without being pulled into this room.
• 52:29
  And I would get pulled into this room and immediately be released as soon as they realized I was an American and that I was, you know, not a Muslim.
• 52:40
  Yeah. And these people would just be stranded in there. I saw people miss flights. These people would just, they weren't getting in and out in that way. And most of them, I mean, just mathematically, most of them couldn't have actually been terror.
• 52:52
  They were having, they were having their days, you know, completely upended by this.
• 52:58
  Yeah, that that used to happen to me. It doesn't happen anymore.
• 53:01
  The social justice left in America would have us believe that my experience of walking through this city is a different universe from a black person's experience.
• 53:12
  And then walking into a shop, you know, the black person is going to get tailed, the black person is going to get it.
• 53:18
  It's not that there isn't truth in that. I have personally seen it like I was in a, I was in a pharmacy in Sydney just the other day.
• 53:25
  And there was a guard at the door, like searching some people's bags and other people's bags.
• 53:30
  And there was a young African Australian woman and he searched her shopping bag and then he just wait me through.
• 53:36
  So, you know, is race one of the various metrics that he was using to try to judge my non-riskiness as a shoplifter?
• 53:45
  Probably, maybe. But what's your experience?
• 53:49
  So it gets to what we were talking about off camera a few minutes ago, which is that I think that race is one factor is you said, but class markers are always another factor.
• 54:05
  And, you know, my own racial experience changed when my class changed. That's something that like I've experienced in my own personal.
• 54:13
  You mean when your economic situation changed?
• 54:16
  When my educational and economic situation became more, I guess, perceivable or when I, you know, I lived...
• 54:25
  You stopped dressing like you were from the hood?
• 54:27
  Well, that actually, like when I stopped dressing like a teenager, that was an immediate kind of...
• 54:34
  That had an immediate impact on the way that, you know, my identity was negotiated with my professors in college.
• 54:40
  But look, you're wearing a colorful scarf. No one's going to throw a scarf at you.
• 54:44
  You could say that something as strategic as just wearing an a feet scarf will protect you from many indignities.
• 54:53
  But it might invite other indignities. But no, but in a real way, you know, I think that, you know, experience is conditioned by that.
• 55:01
  And one of the things that I think was also a blown moment in, you know, in 2020 when there was so much solidarity was that George Floyd was killed in one sense as a black man.
• 55:12
  But he was first and foremost killed as a poor black man. His death was a death that poor people experience.
• 55:20
  And to only see it through the lens of races to miss one of the most important elements of how that came about in the first place, he didn't have enough money to use a legitimate banknote.
• 55:33
  You know, he used a counterfeit banknote, which is already not an experience that, you know, the overwhelming majority of black people can relate to.
• 55:42
  To take class out of these situations and to reduce it to race, I think eliminates a lot of complexity and human interactions.
• 55:50
  Also, to put things in a black way binary eliminates a lot of the complexity of 21st century American life, which is that in a place like New York,
• 56:01
  you're often not dealing with white people in the capacity of who's profiling you, who's making racial calculations is a lot of people that are not either black or white.
• 56:11
  There's something in the middle there, there, there are an enormous amount of identities that have to be taken into account. And then we have to have a more nuanced and kind of complicated understanding of what actually is going on, who people are.
• 56:23
  The racial situation really is America is no longer a black white binary. Most of the police you encounter in New York City, or that I do, they don't tend to be white police officers anymore, a lot of them are Latino and enormous number Asian, Pakistani, all types of things.
• 56:42
  Do they have racialists or racist ideas in their heads? I'm sure a lot of them do, but it becomes a slightly different kind of.
• 56:50
  Well, if they're Asian or South Asian, at the risk of being offensive, they probably have more racist ideas than white and black Americans do.
• 56:57
  I would say if they're Latino, they might too.
• 56:59
  A lot of my friends from those communities are quite open about the fact that the way that they regard other Asian countries and other Asian cultures.
• 57:06
  Yeah, with a clear hierarchy of who's better on whose worst.
• 57:09
  And then we have to update our understanding of what actually is going on. And you know, I think that, you know, one of the things that's insidious about race in America is that blackness is often coded as a state of poverty.
• 57:23
  But, you know, race is classed and class is raised, but they're not exactly the same thing. So, you know, I don't think that necessarily if you were an eye or to walk around, we would have such a different experience.
• 57:34
  What about in Paris?
• 57:37
  I don't think so either. I really don't think so either.
• 57:42
  So what's the whole social justice movement about and what should it do from here? Should it go away completely? Should it transmorph into an economic justice movement?
• 57:52
  Do we not need it? Like what's the future of the left, Thomas?
• 57:57
  I mean, you have to ask yourself why the most dangerous candidate was Bernie Sanders. I mean, I think that, you know, a left that took seriously a kind of universalism would be appealing to a lot of people.
• 58:11
  You know, that's not even necessarily. I'm a liberal. So, you know, I'm not necessarily, you know, Bernie Sanders' follower, but I found his message quite, quite interesting, quite healthy to have in the political discourse.
• 58:27
  I would like to see a universalist left that wasn't divisive, that like looked for ground upon which, you know, coalitions could be built, as opposed to kind of catering to, you know, I mean, one of the things Mark Lilla pointed out in his book is like,
• 58:44
  when Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump is like, if you looked at the Republican parties like website, they had a platform that was the GOP platform.
• 58:52
  And if you looked at the DNC's website, they had 17 different platforms that were based on whether you're a woman, whether you're a Latina, whether you're a Native American, whether you're a Black, whether you're, you know, LGBTQ.
• 59:04
  I mean, you add a different platform for every single conceivable identity group, and I would like to see, you know, a politics that, you know, allows for universal buy-in.
• 59:15
  And no, I don't think that the social justice movement needs to completely go away. I mean, the idea, if we take the words in their explicit sense, social justice is something that, you know, I'm for.
• 59:27
  If we take it in the esoteric meaning, then, you know, where, you know, there's a kind of culture of sensoriousness and that there's a kind of punitive culture that will police itself and will police other people to get in line with a kind of rigid ideology that cannot be questioned, then I think that's really problematic.
• 59:47
  But, you know, I'm all for a society that recognizes that, you know, recognition is an essential need, and that there are ways in which, you know, people who enjoy high levels of recognition are unaware that other people aren't extended dignity.
• 1:00:02
  You know, all of that can be discussed. I think it can be discussed in ways in which good faith people can disagree on what the productive way forward would be.
• 1:00:13
  But we're not there right now, you know, and social justice orthodoxy has become something that I think has really grown counterproductive.
• 1:00:23
  And last question, how do you think about the future? You're generally optimistic or pessimistic like we both have young kids when our kids are middle aged, where we have succeeded in turning the volume down or where we've turned the volume further up on difference, like we'll be more fractious or less less.
• 1:00:44
  Well, James Baldwin said something that I like, which is, you know, I'm a black man in America, as long as I'm alive, I have to be an optimist, you know, I think he was kind of a pest optimist, you know, there's a kind of pessimism to him, but he always tempered that with a real optimism and the idea that, you know, that love among groups is possible love among individuals and groups are collections of individuals and that they can be.
• 1:01:11
  You can reach other people, I believe, you know, I'm an optimist, I believe that society is better than it was, even when I was a child and it can continue to get better, I think we have new challenges that really, you know, are quite dangerous.
• 1:01:27
  And I think we didn't talk about the technological aspect of all of this, but I think that really is one of the things that's making it very difficult to have a common culture, you know, we're all really not just like disagreeing on ideas and events, but we are living with completely different systems of reality.
• 1:01:47
  And we're going to have to find ways to bridge that and we might have to really look back on this air and say that we participated in a mass experiment of all being on these, you know, social media platforms that was really as poisonous as anything that's ever happened and reassess how we actually get our information and how we communicate with each other.
• 1:02:09
  But, you know, social justice is essentially a kind of redistribution of recognition the way that, you know, Marxism is a redistribution of wealth.
• 1:02:19
  And, you know, we live in a, you know, all of these Western societies, they're not pure capitalist societies, they're, to the extent they're more or less social democracies where wealth is redistributed and we need to find better ways to, you know, to raise the floor of poverty.
• 1:02:36
  So that, you know, those with the least don't sink so low and we need to raise the floor of basic dignity and, you know, an access to opportunity and then I would say that people can really disagree about how much everybody has to have equal outcomes because the fact is that reality is unequal.
• 1:02:55
  There's no, there's no tree in this park that's equal to another tree and the idea that human beings can be made 100% equal you've got kids I've got kids anybody who has a family knows that there's no such thing as equality no one is the same.
• 1:03:09
  But everybody should have an opportunity to flourish and I think that we're going to keep getting towards that until the climate apocalypse takes us out or something.
• 1:03:18
  Glad you had to throw that last piece of pessimism in it. Thomas, great to talk to you.
• 1:03:23
  You too. Thanks for having me.