Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “The Elite 'Social Justice’ Scam” with Musa al-Gharbi

Transcript

“The Elite 'Social Justice’ Scam” with Musa al-Gharbi · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:06
  This is the show that rejects the phony binaries of left and right, or even right and wrong,
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  and instead tries to get its hands dirty by wrestling with some of the biggest subjects
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  in culture and society, and politics caring only about whether or not people make sense.
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  Today's conversation is a fascinating one.
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  The word woke is so tired these days.
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  How many people on all kinds of platforms banging on about how bad woke is and woke this
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  and woke this, that it's lost all of its meaning, except for in the mind of today's
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  guest, who makes the point that there remains a cultural elite, which uses the language
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  of social justice to gain power and status without really doing anything that benefits
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  the lives of historically disadvantaged or marginalized people?
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  This episode is part of permission to think, which is a collaboration that we do with
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  the University of Technology, Sydney, thanks to Professor Alan Davison.
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  And Mr Algarby, today's guest, is an assistant professor of sociology, who studies how knowledge
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  workers have improved their cultural power by deploying the language of social justice
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  to essentially justify our position and our status.
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  And also to portray the losers of the knowledge economy as somehow deserving their fate because
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  they haven't been, I don't know, sufficiently woke to how to say the right things about
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  race and gender and sexuality.
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  Musa is by no means a right-wing anti-woke firebrand.
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  He is a black Muslim American academic who wrestles deeply with these ideas.
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  His latest book is called We Have Never Been Work, The Cultural Contradictions of a New
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  Elite.
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  Here, he and I wrestle with the great awokening, what it was really about, how ideas are
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  the currency in the knowledge economy that most of us live in, and how we can actually help
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  the marginalized and the disadvantaged.
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  As always, you should do yourself a favor and get all of my shows in full ad-free at Substack
• 2:13
  following the link in the show notes.
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  You can also watch this interview on YouTube.
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  I hope you find as fascinating, as scintillating as I did, the one and only, Musa Algarbi.
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  It's for I, I'm sure that you are totally sick and tired of people asking you to define
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  what workness is because like you, it's a term that I don't tend to use.
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  I think it's just become a cudgel that people on the right can use to level at anything that
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  they don't like.
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  You know, you'll hear people say that anyone who's trans is woke or that anyone who's
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  a feminist is woke, and I know you're reticent to put a crisp definition on it, but can
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  we just talk about a constellation of things that we might think of as what you're talking
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  about so that people don't end up at cross purposes?
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  Sure, yeah, so one of the things I stress in the book is that there's this kind of move
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  in the discourse where people try to get you, try to force someone to define something
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  in some kind of crisp, analytic, unobjectionable way.
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  And if it turns out people can't do that, then they go, aha, you don't even know what you're
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  talking about.
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  And so on the right right now, there's a tendency to do this with like interrogating democratic
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  law makers or progressive people to define what a woman is and if they can't come up with
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  a, then they go, aha, see you're a fool, and then on the flip side, they do the same thing
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  with, with terms like woke, if you can't define woke in a crisp, analytic, unobjectionable
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  way, then you're not talking about anything.
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  It's a weird, empty moral panic and so on and so forth.
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  But the thing about it is that's not even the way, that's just not the way that language
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  works.
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  This is the big problem with this move.
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  So in my interpersonal communications class, I have my students define Apple.
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  I say define an apple for me using the necessary and some fishing conditions that include 100%
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  of apples and don't include anything else.
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  And it turns out, we'll spend 20 minutes in class, I'll spend 20 minutes at the room
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  of 30 people trying to have them define Apple and it turns out, it's really hard.
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  Now that doesn't mean after spending a 20 minutes and showing that no one in the class
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  can define Apple, even together, they can't define Apple, that doesn't mean if I tell
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  one of them to grab me an apple, they're going to hand me a fish or a sponge or something
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  like that.
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  Right.
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  Just at the risk of chasing a red herring here, why can't they just look up the Latin
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  term for the apple tree plant and say, an apple is the ripe fruit of genus, what should
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  we call it?
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  Well, so that's, I mean, you can do that, but that's kind of topological rate, that's
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  like so.
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  Oh, I see.
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  An apple is an apple.
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  Yeah.
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  Okay.
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  Okay.
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  Okay.
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  But yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the closest that we can, that we can get to that.
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  Okay.
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  Okay.
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  So workness is one of the things that you point to is that a person would not be accused
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  of being woke if they were not a feminist, so being a feminist is a necessary condition,
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  but it's not sufficient because if they were a feminist who excluded transgender women
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  from the class of women, they also wouldn't be considered woke.
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  So you might think of the position that the feminist position that includes all trans
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  women might be a position that would normally be associated with what we would call woke.
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  That would be an easy one, right?
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  Absolutely.
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  So yeah, what I do in the book, instead of providing a definition as I walk people through
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  the history of the term, and then I use a couple of examples of beliefs and dispositions
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  that people across the spectrum, whether you're on the left or you're on the right, no
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  no matter where you are, you would recognize someone who holds that belief.
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  You would say someone who holds that belief, it wouldn't be unreasonable to call them woke,
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  and if someone didn't hold that belief, it would definitely be wild.
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  Okay.
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  So trans-inclusive feminism is a great example.
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  Someone who's not a feminist is definitely not woke.
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  Someone who's not a trans-inclusive feminist is definitely not woke.
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  And that's something that even people across the spectrum could agree on.
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  So I walk through a few of these kinds of things like, for instance, the idea that all
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  of us harbor deep-seated prejudice and discrimination along the lines of race or ethnicity.
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  We can never truly purge ourselves of this, but we have to try to kind of do the work
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  to understand our buy-in to be aware of our biases and things like this.
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  We can't fully understand what it's like to belong to some group that's other than
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  our own, but we should try to understand.
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  But if we ever say we do understand, that's a sign of arrogance or something like this.
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  In fact, yeah, I mean, I would even have to say that maybe the claim that you should
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  try to understand is an unwork claim in the sense that the most woke people will regard
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  it as being condescending or arrogant for a white person to say that they understand
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  what a person of color is going through as a person of color or, you know, this is, yeah.
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  So you can't claim that you understand, but you do have to do research to try to understand.
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  So if you don't bother to exert effort about the struggles that African Americans undergo
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  or something like that, that's a problem.
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  But if you do claim to say, oh, I know it, it's like to be black, then that's a problem.
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  And you call this a, you say this is a sort of a mysticism towards identity, right?
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  The identity is this mystical thing that you have that there are these kind of paradoxes
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  in the woke worldview where you are in you have intrinsic characteristics as a consequence
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  of the identity groups to which you belong at the same time as those characteristics are
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  culturally created.
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  So race doesn't exist, but at the same time, it's immutable and you can't possibly understand
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  the lived experience of someone from another race and it's futile to try to overcome racism
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  because it's that intrinsic, even though it's culturally constructed.
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  But you have to try to overcome racism even though it's actually impossible.
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  And yeah, yeah, and race, as you said, it's a, it's a fiction, but if a black person,
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  if a non-white person tries to pass as white, that's viewed as problematic.
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  If a white person tries to pass as something other than white, that's also problematic.
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  So it's a fiction, but it's not something that you're permitted to change.
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  Yeah, and so like, but even I should emphasize that, so it is, so beliefs like that are mystical,
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  but by describing them as mystical, I described them as mystical in the book, but I don't mean that
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  as a criticism. So I, I subscribe, I'm a Muslim, I subscribe to a number of beliefs that I would
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  consider mystical in the same way, like a predestination and free will.
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  They don't fit easily together. And so I don't, I don't think that's a, I don't think that's bad
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  or a problem, but it, but I think that these kinds of tensions do need to be wrestled with
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  actually and, and kind of acknowledge. And so there is a sense in which a lot of belief
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  that are associated with openness do have this kind of mystical dimension to them where there's
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  this kind of deep kind of paradoxical tensions. And I should point out to the listener that you
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  weren't even born and raised in Muslim. So you chose your mysticism, you chose your mystical
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  Muslim beliefs. Another thing that you say that is a characteristic of, of workness is what you
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  call asymmetrical multiculturalism. What's that? Yeah. So this is the term that I, that I borrowed
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  from a political scientist Eric Kaufman. And so asymmetrical multiculturalism is when you
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  interpret the actions and beliefs of certain groups one way and other groups in other ways. So
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  for instance, it's good and appropriate to celebrate for people who are not white to celebrate
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  their race and ethnicity and their heritage and things like that. But one, but so you can talk
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  about the positive attributes of black people, how black people are so great, how Asian Americans
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  contributed so much to American society, how Asian American culture is so fascinating, whatever,
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  but you can't do this for white people. You can't talk about how whites are so great, how white
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  people contributed so much and so on. And in a likewise manner, certain behaviors. So for instance,
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  when non-white people choose to, if African Americans, for instance, choose to hire and promote
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  other African Americans or prefer to work with people who are other African Americans or who choose
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  to live in communities that have lots of other African Americans, these are often described in
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  positive terms. They're analyzed through the lenses of like leveraging of social solidarity and
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  leveraging social capital to help other people from your same group, you know, achieve social
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  mobility and so on. When white people engage in the exact same behaviors, if they prefer to
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  hire and promote other whites and live in communities with other whites and so on,
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  they're analyzed through a completely different set of repertoire through the lens of prejudice
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  and discrimination and the same behaviors that are celebrated with African Americans and other
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  ethnic minorities are condemned when white people do it. And so this tendency to think about and
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  analyze the behaviors of white people and non-white people in completely different ways or to praise and
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  celebrate people's ethnic heritage. So long as it's not white heritage. These are examples of
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  what Kaufman described as asymmetrical multiculturalism. So just to push back on whether or not that's
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  inconsistent, which brings us to maybe a bigger worldview of what workness might mean in a useful
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  definition if I could be audacious enough to take a stab at it and see what you think.
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  It's right to me that that would not be inconsistent if your worldview was that the salient force
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  in culture and society and the economy is not economic inequality, but a battle between groups
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  that are vying for power and that members of certain identity groups, namely straight people,
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  white people, and males have for a long time lauded themselves over everybody else and deprived
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  everybody else of their fair share of the pie. Hard to deny that as a basic claim. The correct
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  remedy to that is to think about culture and society as being a set of, and the economy as
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  being a set of warring identity groups. And the solution to what ails us is to elevate traditionally
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  marginalized groups and to impose new norms through kind of sensorious speech codes on how we
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  ought to think about the relations between those groups, the things that members of each group
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  can say to the other. So then you get into the territory of, you know, a white person telling
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  a black person that they like their hair and that becomes a microaggression because black people
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  have spent far too long having condescending white people remark on how unique their hair is when
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  actually their hair is no more unique than white people's hair. It's just that white people
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  used to it. And so in this worldview of... Although interestingly again, it is a problem if you
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  compliment black people's hair, but it's also a problem if you say anything disparaging.
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  Just don't talk about black people's hair. This is the rule, the cardinal rule. But so my,
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  you know, my sort of attempt to make a broader definition of what we're talking about would be
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  that it's this shift from thinking about things in kind of an almost Marxist era economic paradigm
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  to an identity-based paradigm where you're looking at the world through the prism of membership
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  of identity groups and trying to change the norms around the way that those identity groups
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  relate to one another such that we become hyper focused on things that could instantiate
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  the power differential and the privilege that exists between different members of those groups.
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  Is that close? Yeah, I mean, so I think, so I think this focus on identity and
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  identitarianism is deeply bound up with with wokeness. And this has been the case for roughly
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  a century now. So a lot of people think that a lot of these ideas are new, maybe they started in
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  the 60s according to some, but for instance, so Kaufman's research shows, for instance,
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  this tendency towards asymmetrical multiculturalism. It goes back to the 1920s. People have been doing
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  this for symbolic capitalists, the knowledge economy professionals. They've been doing this for like
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  a century now. They've had this worldview. And as I show in the book, the previous, well actually,
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  even in Orwells, so George Orwell wrote a book called The Road to Vegan Pier at the tail end of
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  the first grade of wokening in the 1820s and early days. And in that book, he shows that like,
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  one of the things the book explores is that the left at that time and today talks about
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  how they are committed to helping the marginalized and the disadvantaged and the working class
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  and so on. But they don't really have any kind of meaningful connection to genuinely marginalized
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  and disadvantaged people or working class people. They don't know what those people want or think
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  about anything. And when they're confronted with the views of those people, they often recoil
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  and horror and try to micromanage them. And more than that, he argued. Even socialists,
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  even ostensibly class-based organizations, he said, often end up devolving into these kind of niche
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  identitarians things. So he has this great quote in The Road to Vegan Pier, which was again written
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  a century ago almost where he says, it seems like the word socialism and communism almost as if
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  with magnetic force, draw to them every feminist, every sex deviant, every vegetarian and
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  nature cure a quack. All of them in sandal-wearing person, all of them in English. He sounds like
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  time to call some. And so one of the things that he criticizes in Vegan Pier is that a lot of people
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  who claim to be socialists or communists or so on, they don't actually spend much of their efforts
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  on class-based organizing or working class anything. They spend almost all of their focus on
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  kind of niche identitarian and other kind of stuff that's popular among highly educated,
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  relatively affluent people, but that alienates everyone else. So this has been true for a century now.
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  Okay. You and Mr. you mentioned in passing symbolic capitalists, which is a fundamental part
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  of your worldview and it wasn't a term that I was familiar with. What is symbolic capitalism?
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  What are symbolic capitalists? Yeah. So symbolic capital is a term that I
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  cribbed from a different sociologist, Pierre Bordeaux, and what symbolic capital is in his account
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  is they're the kind of cultural resources that elites draw upon to make any qualities seem
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  normal or appropriate. So he came up with kind of, so for instance, if you are, if you say,
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  hey, the reason you should listen to me is because I have a PhD in blah or I'm a professor at
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  X University or I write for the New York Times, these are examples of leveraging a type of symbolic
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  capital that he calls academic capital. Or if you say, you should listen to what I say because
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  I'm the manager. And if you don't, I'll rate you up. Or if you say, you should listen to or if
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  people are trying to defer to you and to follow your plan and to do the things that you want them to
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  do because they think you're interested and cool and sophisticated and they want to impress you
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  and ingratiate themselves with you. These are examples as well of different types of symbolic capital.
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  So symbolic capital are the kind of cultural resources that elites draw on to get other people
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  to do the things that they want them to do without coercing them. Got it. So we're basically
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  talking about knowledge economy workers in the modern context, right? I mean, symbolic capitalists.
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  So I call these knowledge economy workers. I call them symbolic capitalists because the way we
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  make a living basically is by what we know, who we know and how we're known. So by producing and
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  and leveraging symbolic capital. Okay. So universities, journalists, media people,
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  business titans, people who work with ideas instead of producing physical things. I mean,
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  you, I've heard you make a fascinating analogy in the medical profession between the distinction
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  between physicians on the one side and surgeons and dentists and people who actually work with
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  their hands on the other. Can you tease that out? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so that the fundamental
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  divide is between people who provide physical goods and surfaces to people and people who don't.
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  So physicians, when you look at what a physician does, they probably, and this is what we call a GP
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  or a general practitioner outside of the United States, your family doctor. Absolutely. Well,
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  the main thing they do is they diagnose and they prescribe. So that's the main thing they do.
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  They don't perform physical interventions on your body. They don't even do things like collecting
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  samples. Typically, they have people for that to send in someone else to collect your samples.
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  They'll send in someone else to run your tests. They just diagnose and prescribe. They don't do
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  anything to you. And this is in contrast with people like surgeons who are defined by the activity
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  of cutting you open and messing with your internal organs or dentists or and so on. And it turns out
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  that this divide within the medical profession between people who diagnose and prescribe and the
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  people who perform physical interventions on people's bodies. So in the contemporary era, physicians
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  are overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party. Surgeons are overwhelmingly aligned with
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  the Republican Party. And that's interesting because they have similar levels of education,
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  similar levels of income. They work in the same kinds of places. They live in the same kinds of
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  communities, but they have completely different political and ideological leanings typically.
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  And it turns out this goes way, way, way, way back from the beginning of the medical profession.
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  People who diagnose and prescribe have looked down on people who actually do physical interventions
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  on people's bodies. They kind of condescended to them and so on and so forth. And the people who do
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  physical interventions on people's bodies have long resented and hated and struggled against
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  the people who just diagnose and prescribe and don't actually do anything. There's been this
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  longstanding enmity between these blocks within the medical profession that goes back as far
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  as the professions go. I mean, like literally centuries. But what's interesting is in the contemporary
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  era, this tension that's long been simmering in the medical professions has become one of the core
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  tensions defining politics writ large in the United States. So the kind of people who do work where
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  they're providing physical goods and services to people have been consistently over the last
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  50 years or so trending towards the Republican Party. Whereas the people who work in the symbolic
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  professions, so people who are lawyers, administrators, and people in consulting finance, so on and so
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  forth, they've all been aligning ever more robustly with the Democratic Party. And so this tension
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  that's longstanding within the medical profession has now become this kind of broad
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  schism in society and not just in the United States. But actually, if you look at
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  in the UK, for instance, as well, you see a similar alignment, Thomas Piketty,
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  an economist, Thomas Piketty, looked at France and the United States and the United Kingdom and found
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  that in all three of these contexts, you see this reorientation where working class people and
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  people who provide physical goods and services and so on have been aligning with the right
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  aligned parties and people who work in the symbolic professions across all three of these contexts
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  have been increasingly aligned with the left. I mean, that is a huge description, but isn't there
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  an alternative hypothesis, which is the more reductionist economic one, which would say that
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  doctors don't earn as much as surgeons and orthodontists and prostodontists. And if you looked,
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  for example, at dental hygienists who also work with their hands, but are more lowly paid,
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  they might be more likely to be left wing. And if you looked at financiers, the very top
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  financiers, I'm sure are right wing, but the lower ones are left wing and the titans of media
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  might be right wing, but the lowly paid journalists who are doing the grunt work might be left wing.
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  Couldn't you still cleave it along more Marxist lines? Well, what's interesting is that's not what you
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  that's not what you actually see for the most part actually. So like the even the even the
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  kind of super elites, so increasingly the millionaires and the billionaires who are aligned with
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  the symbolic professions, not only are they typically aligned with the left and democratic party,
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  but they actually tend to be even further to the left than activists within the democratic party.
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  They're one of the main people that are pulling the democratic party left, especially on cultural
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  issues. But who are we talking about in the US context? If not, Elon Musk and Peta Tael and
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  J.I.O. But Elon Musk is actually up on the right. But Elon Musk is a prime example of an elite
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  who would be on the right. Most of his companies are involved with producing physical goods and
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  services. Tesla is an auto manufacturer. He has the boring company has SpaceX, which is a
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  transport fundamentally a shipping and logistics company. He works in the world of ideas and
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  high as other people to do the physical work. Well, but the industries that he's created and
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  affiliated with are involved with physical extraction and producing physical goods and services.
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  So he's actually exactly the kind of an elite who would typically be who would be aligned with
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  the Republican Party, even though his own literally what he's doing day to day isn't manufacturing
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  cars, but the kind of industries that he's a part of are distinctly aligned with the Republican
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  Party. Let's take that on face value. So your claim is what? That we in the knowledge economy,
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  symbolic capitalists sort of leverage social justice discourse to blame the losers from
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  the knowledge economy for the problems that we benefit from. Is that? Yeah, I mean, that's one of
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  the things that yeah, absolutely. So I'll give an example. So within a lot of knowledge economy
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  spaces, there's this narrative that people have to acknowledge their privilege and that people
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  who possess white privilege are unworthy of what they have. Okay, so there's kind of there's
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  a couple of problems with the white privilege narrative. One of them being that it's just not
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  the case that all white people share the same benefit the same from their race. And so in the book,
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  I teased this out by looking at height. So there's a lot of unearned benefits you get from being tall,
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  but how much mileage you get out of being tall depends a lot on the circumstances that you
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  find yourself in. If you're in a community where lots of other people are tall, then you don't
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  see those same advantages on the dating market, on the job market, and so on. You're just average
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  relative to your circumstances. It sucks to be a tall dain. Absolutely. The way you get a lot of
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  benefit out of your height would be to be in a circumstances or a community where you're surrounded
• 25:57
  by lots of other people who are shorter than you. And so the same kind of thing is true for
• 26:02
  most other unearned advantages. And so the way that we like to talk about white privilege in this
• 26:07
  universalistic way is very convenient for knowledge economy professionals. It allows a white
• 26:14
  professional who lives in Manhattan, for instance, to pretend as if they benefit from their same race,
• 26:20
  from their race in the same way as someone who lives in a small town in North Dakota and works out
• 26:25
  of 7-11. They do not benefit from their race in the same way. The professional who lives in a
• 26:30
  city like Manhattan with lots of desperate and poor minorities to lure their white privilege over
• 26:35
  benefits much more from their race, but setting that aside. The reality is when you look at poverty
• 26:42
  in America, the lion's share of poor people, a plurality of poor people in the United States,
• 26:48
  and so if you subscribe to a world view that lets you look at those people and say, hey,
• 26:59
  guess what, all of these poor and suffering people, we don't owe them anything, we don't have to
• 27:04
  reallocate anything to them. In fact, they deserve their suffering, they deserve their poverty.
• 27:08
  That's a very convenient view for elites to hold, and I'll say there's even empirical literature
• 27:14
  that shows when you train people about white privilege, it doesn't change anything at all
• 27:20
  about how people who undergo their training, it doesn't change anything at all about how they
• 27:24
  think about non-white people or how they engage in non-white people. The main thing it changes
• 27:30
  is it causes them to look at poor whites and to think those people must really deserve their
• 27:35
  poverty. They were born with all this privilege and they're poor, well then they must really,
• 27:40
  and so. This is JD Vance's sort of ethos, which is weird because we're describing this as a
• 27:46
  work perspective, but it's, you know, read hillbilly allergy, and it's basically saying like these
• 27:51
  white people deserve to be where they are. Well, this is why JD Vance was actually a New York
• 27:55
  Times bestseller and why he was picked up and beloved so much, I think. We were all reading him in
• 28:01
  2017, it was like, you know, all the white elites were trying to figure out what the hell happened
• 28:04
  with the election of Donald Trump and JD was our beacon of sanity. Yeah, well, because he was
• 28:10
  telling, he was affirming a lot of the beliefs that white people, that people like us already have
• 28:15
  about those people, that's actually the reason they're poor is because they're, they're slovenly,
• 28:20
  they sit around waiting for handouts, they're entitled, and unlike JD Vance who pulled
• 28:27
  himself up by his bootstraps and went to the military and so on and so forth. So yeah, hillbilly
• 28:31
  allergy is a great book for people like us. We read hillbilly allergy, and it allows us to think,
• 28:35
  oh, wow, yeah, those people deserve it. They have it coming. If they're poor, they deserve their
• 28:39
  poverty. And the same as long as they want, huh? As long as they're white. If they're black and
• 28:45
  poor, then we deprive them of the agency to be deserving of the poverty. Yes, absolutely. And so
• 28:50
  this is the, and so this is a way in which this white privilege discourse on its fees.
• 28:57
  It's about social justice, it's egalitarian and justice oriented and whatever. But in practice,
• 29:02
  the way it actually functions in the world, it often allows people who are elites to look at people
• 29:07
  who are the losers in the knowledge economy, and to think that those people actually deserve
• 29:11
  their suffering. We don't have to allocate anything to them. In fact, they, they would just
• 29:14
  misuse it the way that they abused their white privilege. And, and in fact, those people already
• 29:19
  probably actually have more than they deserve already. They were, they were born white with all this
• 29:24
  privilege. They, they probably already have more than they deserve based on their merits and so on
• 29:29
  and so forth. But just to push back on this in, in two ways, firstly, you say that the lion's
• 29:34
  share of poor people are white. Yes, but not, not proportionate to the population, right? I mean,
• 29:41
  people of color are disproportionately poor in America. So there are pure numerical analysis
• 29:47
  seems deficient. And secondly, it's isn't that the case that the left is more concerned with
• 29:53
  trying to help white poor people than the right that that is at the moment. I mean, if it were the
• 29:59
  case that wokeness is what is depriving the elites of the compassion to give benefits to white
• 30:06
  poor people, then why is it the left that is in favor of food stamps? Why is it the left that
• 30:11
  implements Obamacare? Why is it the left that tries to expand, you know, programs that uplift
• 30:18
  the poor and not the right? Well, the, the left. So, so they support things like Obamacare and
• 30:26
  food stamps and things like this. But often explicitly framing them and describing them as
• 30:32
  racial justice, as, as initiatives to help poor minorities and stuff. If these policies were
• 30:37
  framed as a way of helping poor whites actually Democrats would hate them. And that's why they're
• 30:42
  not they're not framed that way. And they're not discussed that way. And in fact, this is
• 30:47
  the way they are discussed in race neutral ways. I think I don't remember Obamacare. Maybe this
• 30:51
  maybe this predates the great awakening too much. But I don't remember Obamacare being framed as
• 30:56
  a way to help poor black people. Well, they do. Yeah, actually, they even even like the discussion
• 31:02
  about snap benefits and food stamps in the United States has always been, for instance, as an
• 31:06
  example, has always been heavily racialized in a way that is unfortunate. Again, because actually
• 31:13
  the plurality of the people who use food stamps are white. But when people think about food stamps,
• 31:17
  they, on all sides of the aisle, they associate it with say black people or, or, or Hispanics.
• 31:24
  But isn't that because of the first objection that I made, which is that they're disproportionately
• 31:27
  overrepresented in that group, people of color? Well, sure. But, but this is the point is like,
• 31:32
  if they're disproportionately, I think it's important to keep both of these thoughts in the
• 31:36
  head at once, right? So if they're disproportionately overrepresented, if they're overrepresented,
• 31:42
  but they're not, but most people who receive food stamps are not that. In fact, if you were going
• 31:48
  to pick a random person out of a hat who receives food stamps, they would be more likely to be white
• 31:53
  than anything no matter how many times she did the poll. So that's, it's important to keep that
• 31:58
  in the head while also recognizing that among that black people do have higher poverty rates
• 32:06
  than whites and are more likely to be on say to rely on these services than whites. So both of
• 32:12
  these things are true at the same time. And I think one of the problems in some of the discourse
• 32:19
  about this stuff is that we focus, we being progressives, especially, like to focus a lot on
• 32:27
  things like proportionality. There's a political scientist, Adele Fried Jr., who talks about this a lot
• 32:32
  about the focus on disparities and whose disproportionate this, whose disproportionate that,
• 32:38
  to the point where we lose sight in many cases of the base rates. But in any case,
• 32:45
  the point I was making about white privilege is just that. Again, in practice, what this white
• 32:52
  privilege discourse does, and we can see this in empirical studies, even it doesn't lead people to
• 32:57
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