Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: Coleman Hughes Live in Melbourne

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PREMIUM: Coleman Hughes Live in Melbourne · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Hello, hello, hello, hello. Thanks for coming. What a lovely night. Welcome, Colin.
• 0:12
  Welcome, Melbourne. It's good to be here. I really say that. I'm not a Melbourneian,
• 0:14
  but I am an Australian, so I can say it. I actually should say, on behalf of the
• 0:19
  warundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, whose ancestors passed present and future
• 0:25
  I acknowledge and respect. Welcome, on their behalf. Why are you looking into my eyes?
• 0:30
  You're black, Coleman. That's why. It's not my issue. This is something that Coleman, firstly,
• 0:37
  thank you very much for being here. If you're a fan of mine, thank you. If you're not
• 0:40
  fans of mine, just fans of Coleman's, subscribe to uncomfortable conversations, because we have
• 0:45
  plenty more conversations like this. And this will be an episode of the podcast as well.
• 0:49
  I've mentioned the acknowledgement of country, not totally in jest, because one of the things
• 0:54
  that Coleman has mentioned to me in the, what, five days, six days you've been in Australia
• 0:59
  so far has been the prevalence of something that, I guess, if you're over the age of 30,
• 1:05
  35, you grow up in a country where it would have been perceived as weird for people to
• 1:11
  get up on an award ceremony and get the logo used and start talking about the warradjeri
• 1:15
  people or something, right? And now that's perfectly normalized to such an extent that
• 1:20
  I don't find it weird or necessarily forced, but it strikes you. Why?
• 1:24
  Because I'm a foreigner, mainly, and the customs of any country seem strange to foreigners
• 1:35
  until they don't. And they seem strange when they're introduced and then, you know, strange
• 1:41
  custom plus time equals tradition. And so I have two, you know, I'm split on this welcome
• 1:51
  to country thing, because on the one hand, I do respect traditions of foreign countries
• 1:59
  I go to, you know, when I'm in Japan, I bow when I'm at the Shinto shrine, right? And
• 2:07
  this tradition is just new enough that people remember when it was introduced, but it's
• 2:13
  quickly becoming a tradition and as such, I respect it. On the other hand, I can't help
• 2:19
  but notice an observation I've made in America, in Western Europe, in Australia, which is
• 2:27
  that people of liberals of European descent, right? Broadly white liberals, the world round
• 2:37
  are the only group of people that feel any notable level of guilt for the sins of their
• 2:43
  distant ancestors. I remember I was at dinner with some friends of mine from West Africa,
• 2:50
  from Ghana and Nigeria. And we were talking about the African slave trade. And of course, the
• 2:57
  dirty little secret about the African slave trade is that it was not like the documentary
• 3:06
  roots where Europeans came to Africa, kidnapped people. Tell us what the documentary roots
• 3:11
  was, because this is a huge American phenomenon that I'd never heard of. Yeah, so it was a
• 3:15
  documentary in the 1970s about a fictional story about a... Wait, it's a... Sorry, sorry.
• 3:22
  Sorry, sorry. I just call that a show. It's a historical fiction, rather. It's historical
• 3:28
  fiction. About a slave captured off the coast of Africa and brought to America and then he tries
• 3:36
  to escape and he is whipped when he is caught and he's a brave hero character that eventually
• 3:42
  gets subdued by white supremacy essentially and changes his name from his African name
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  Kuntikintay to Toby, his American name. It was the most watched thing on American television
• 3:53
  in the 1970s and more people watched it than watched the Super Bowl that year. Only
• 4:00
  reason I bring it up right now is because in that show he was kidnapped off the coast of Africa
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  by Europeans. He was a free man. In reality, the vast majority of people that became...
• 4:15
  people that were slaves in America were already slaves in Africa because slavery, the slave trade
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  was alive and well in Africa prior to European contact. And so I'm at dinner with my friends who
• 4:29
  are broadly the descendants of the Africans that sold them into slavery, that captured them and
• 4:36
  sold them. And I was curious, when you're in school in Ghana and Nigeria, how do you learn about
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  this? How do they teach this history that your ancestors captured slaves, sold them to the West?
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  And I never forget what they said. They said, it's just a neutral fact for us. What does it have
• 4:57
  to do with me? Right? And I thought to myself, that is the default attitude, most people,
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  most members of our species have towards the bad things that their great-grandparents and beyond
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  did. And so when I hear whether it's an American or an Australian say something like,
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  okay, what was done to slaves was absolutely horrible. What was done to the indigenous people was
• 5:26
  terrible? What does that have to do with me as an individual? How should my shame or guilt be
• 5:34
  triggered? Well, I have to make that allowance because it's the allowance, you know, all of
• 5:40
  most people around the world freely take. I mean, isn't the robust response to that that we live
• 5:46
  in a society that is a consequence of all of those centuries of oppression? And there are still
• 5:52
  echoes of that oppression that exists today and that you can see them in differences in income
• 5:57
  differences in wealth differences in education levels differences in life expectancy. I mean,
• 6:01
  so that's as true for the West Africans that I was talking to as it is for what Europeans.
• 6:08
  Nevertheless, the idea that I inherit the guilt for the things I didn't do is so it's so
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  fundamental, I think, but does it have to be guilt? I mean, guilt might be spinning it a little,
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  or maybe the white person who doesn't like saying the welcome to country codes it as guilt,
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  but when in fact the intent is recognition, ownership, like standing up on your own two feet,
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  understanding what your history was, and oh yeah, phones off as well.
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  And you should feel guilty for that exactly. And you know, it could be interpreted as
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  evidence of a certain level of enlightenment. I mean, maybe we're more enlightened
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  than the people in Ghana for owning the things that our ancestors did 200 years ago that still
• 6:53
  benefit us today. An enlightened ownership and understanding of the sins of the past would be
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  having one day a year or maybe a week where you commemorate the suffering that was brought upon
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  native people. It means having accurate history in the textbooks. It means having museums
• 7:21
  dedicated to the memory of those who suffered. It doesn't mean that every single flight that lands
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  in Melbourne should begin with a re-agknowledgement dozens of times a day of what all of us already know.
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  That borders on what looks from the outside like a pathological obsession with self-flagulation.
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  What do you think is motivating that psychologically then? Because there's clearly something,
• 7:54
  there's clearly a strain in modern social justice, progressive culture that almost seeks to outdo
• 8:01
  ourselves on this stuff. You know, it's almost like he who can make the ought, sorry, he she,
• 8:08
  they, them who can make the longest and most elaborate acknowledgement of country in the most
• 8:15
  inappropriately timid scenario. You know, if you'll have, I'm sure many people here have had the
• 8:22
  experience of, you know, you're on a Zoom call with like four colleagues who are all middle-aged,
• 8:27
  middle-management, you know, white females and one of them start saying like just before we begin,
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  I want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and everyone goes, oh,
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  damn it, she got it till before I did, she wins. Now I have to sit through it and pretend,
• 8:42
  wow, what's going to do that? I would have done it definitely. What's going on there like sociologically?
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  It's a tricky question. So I wouldn't be the first person to point out the similarity between
• 8:57
  that dynamic and original sin, Christianity, the notion that we are born guilty,
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  we're born sinners and need to go to church once a week to sort of get cleansed and
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  address the sin that can nevertheless never be cured. There is a kind of, there's a way in which
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  that rhymes with the white guilt phenomenon and I think it's also no coincidence that the places
• 9:28
  in society where I think this flourishes the most are the places that have become more secular,
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  the places that have lost Christianity, you know, it's possible that there is some,
• 9:41
  you know, people talk about the God-shaped hole in the soul. I mean, it's possible that there's
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  even a more specific kind of hole in our souls to do with guilt, with wanting to be made to feel guilty.
• 9:59
  Now I can't, or maybe we all, not sorry to plan on, yes I can't, but maybe we all do feel guilty
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  about things and know that we did naughty things as children that we have never been caught for
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  or punished for and there's some kind of emotional emphasis in having a context or a framework
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  for channeling that guilt and being absolved of those sins through some kind of catacism
• 10:24
  like either a prayer or a welcome to country. Yeah, I mean that, I think there's no doubt to
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  me that it's a solution in search of a problem. In other words, the first thing is that people
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  want to feel guilty about something and then, you know, depending on your context, Australia,
• 10:47
  America, Canada, Western Europe, you reach for the thing that is a plausible thing to feel guilty
• 10:54
  about, given your history, right? And obviously in Australia, it's the indigenous issue in America,
• 11:00
  it's more so slavery. So what are the Ghanaians failing guilty about? Well, they don't have the same
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  culturally, they don't have the same searching, right? They're not searching for something to
• 11:13
  feel guilty about. That's what's interesting to me about if you want to, you know, if I may,
• 11:19
  white liberals, essentially, that it's the only group of people that are searching for that thing.
• 11:26
  If you talk to anyone from Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, Russia, South America,
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  you could find equally terrible things in the story of their ancestors, that their ancestors
• 11:39
  committed, but they're not eager to find something to feel ritualistic guilt about. Now, even as I
• 11:48
  say it, I don't fully understand it, but it seems to me the only way of looking at kind of the
• 11:56
  landscape of human history and making sense of it. And you don't see it as an extension of, I mean,
• 12:05
  I hesitate to use the word enlightenment again, but, you know, I think the way that a progressive
• 12:09
  who is super social justice focus would articulate this is like, yes, of course, we're the only ones
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  looking for things to find guilty about because this is the latest stage in an arc of moral development
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  that has good to span centuries or millennia. And, yeah, it's, you know, just because other people
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  have civilizations that haven't quite caught up, got the memo about how you're supposed to
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  interrogate your past. We have, and we're here, and therefore, at some point, other civilizations
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  will also have the kind of reckoning that we're having. But, yeah, we got here first. We got to
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  the Enlightenment first, too. We got to, you know, the Industrial Revolution first as well.
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  So I see a few problems with that. One is that there are societies just as advanced as any
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  Western society, but with none of the guilt, Japan, for instance. Second, they could do with a little
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  more guilt. They could get rid of some here and give it to them a little. Secondly,
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  I'm not sure it's actually, it's only a marker of advancement if it contributes to the Enlightenment
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  project in some way. It could just be a pathological feature of advanced societies. It could be a
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  bad side effect of societies that have taken the road down Enlightenment moral progress because
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  the Enlightenment is premised philosophically on the idea that every person is equal to every
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  other person. That human flourishing can be understood using reason and science and that we can
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  make progress incrementally by understanding the world. That philosophy, nothing in that philosophy
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  suggests that ritualistic guilt over things that happened hundreds of years ago is productive or
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  beneficial. There's no version of the utilitarian or consequentialist project, which at least that
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  I could see could justify ritualistic feeling of guilt over things that happened in the past,
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  especially when guilt is such a deranging emotion. It's very easy to get someone to stop thinking
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  logically if you can just get them to start feeling guilty. Part of the reason that
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  the American context is the one I know more about, but part of the reason you see
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  in liberals cave into policies that make very little sense even just in terms of helping black
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  Americans is because the mind short circuits when feeling guilt. What kind of policy is he
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  talking about? I have a whole chapter in my book that goes into all of them, but I'm talking about
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  defunding the police, for instance, I'm talking about handing out COVID era restaurant aid on the
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  basis of race rather than need. I'm talking about changing teachers' contracts to favor
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  black teachers during layoffs instead of race neutral metrics. All of these things that
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  to most liberals of yesterday would seem like crazy policies can be made to work if you crank
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  the guilt up to 11. And then you get to say, as a insert membership of historically disadvantaged
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  minority group here, I get to sort of trump you. When I'm allowed to have a rational conversation
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  about something because my lived experience trumps your guilt, your sense of guilt. That's right.
• 16:06
  One of the fascinating things in your book is also the examination of what's happened to not
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  just public policy, but also culture and the media and Hollywood and entertainment and the way we
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  think about diversity in those areas. Can you give us a snapshot illustrator of what you would
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  regard the kind of prevailing consensus in American elite institutions and media is about race?
• 16:27
  Yeah, so in my book I call it neo-racism. It really comes down to exactly what we've been talking
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  about, which is this sort of cartoon version of history and humanity where whiteness is evil,
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  anything other than whiteness is morally superior, basically. It's really just white supremacy
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  flipped on its head in a way, but without intelligence being the marker of hierarchy, it's really
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  moral goodness. White people are thought to be inherently morally worse than people of color
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  broadly. If it's not an explicit philosophy, it's a feeling. It's an instinct among a certain
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  section of progressives that are overrepresented in Hollywood, overrepresented in corporate America,
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  in certain parts of corporate America, and certainly academia. You mentioned Hollywood,
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  the classic case of this from a year or two ago is the movie Woman King. Woman King was about a famous
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  African tribe called the Dahomi, which actually had a cadre of female warriors, which is an insanely
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  cool historical tidbit that they had serious trained female warriors hundreds of years ago,
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  and so Hollywood makes a movie about it. Slight problem that the Dahomi were one of the most
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  notorious slave trading and slave trading tribes in Africa. They've put up numbers. If you put
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  that through in any rational world, you would still be able to tell that story in all its complexity,
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  and it could be a damn good movie. But the problem is that as far as Hollywood is concerned,
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  black people in history have to be perfect, and white people have to be the bad guys. So they
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  completely bastardized the history to make it seem like the Dahomi tribe was forced into slave
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  trading or had serious moral qualms about slave trading, and it was really the guys from Portugal
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  and Spain and Britain that were pushing it on. It was completely my opposite. It's even more
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  insulting to make it seem like they didn't have agency over their own crimes. Like it's even more
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  insulting to be like, oh, Dory, they were just hoodwinked by nefarious, misstashed, whirling,
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  white people. Exactly. So that's a classic example. It's just a sentiment that exists
• 19:09
  that is of a piece with the kind of guilt we were just talking about. And you also mentioned
• 19:15
  that Hidden Figures wasn't right? I didn't know that, baby. But I didn't know Hidden Figures.
• 19:19
  Do you remember Hidden Figures? Maybe you just explained what it was. Yeah, Hidden Figures was a
• 19:23
  movie that centered on a few black employees of NASA that were in the 50s and early 60s,
• 19:32
  a few black women that were involved in getting us to the moon. And to good film, it's like the
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  unseen crack squad of black jakes who helped us get to the moon. Yeah, great concept,
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  good execution in a lot of ways, except for that one of the main black women in the story
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  inconveniently said that actually she didn't experience any segregation at NASA. So this was
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  obviously a centerpiece of the movie was that part of the people working to get us to the moon
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  were at the time experiencing segregation at NASA, which is an ironic comment on you know,
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  it's like you said they're good enough to help us get to the moon, but you're also they're so bad
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  that they can't you know they have to be separated from white people. That's the underlying irony.
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  Only problem is one of them came out in an interview before the movie was made and said she didn't
• 20:29
  feel any segregation when she was at NASA. But of course they had to make it so that she did. Because
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  again, whiteness, bad, evil, you know, and so this is a kind of reflexive, it's a reflex in an
• 20:45
  instinct that exists on the left. And so you don't I mean what do you say to people who say
• 20:52
  this is just sort of justice going too far. I mean every you know at every stage there are young
• 20:58
  people who take civil rights and social justice ideas a little bit too far and then they sort of
• 21:03
  swing back but you know, woken us or cancel culture or whatever you want to call us or getting
• 21:07
  obsessed with social justice is just the necessary pendulum swing and they're just a little bit too
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  enthusiastic about good things. Yeah, so I would I would argue that justice gone too far isn't
• 21:18
  justice almost by definition. And you know the pendulum swing phenomenon. Yes and no I mean
• 21:29
  pendulum's do swing I think for instance all the problems I'm talking about right now were much
• 21:34
  worse three years ago than they are now after George Floyd and the kind of hysteria that
• 21:42
  gripped people in response to that not just in America but globally. But there's also such a thing
• 21:49
  as just new norms being created right like it's actually not the case that people just I just had
• 21:58
  the political scientists Eric Kaufman on my podcast. Month or two ago and we went pretty deep into
• 22:05
  the data on whether people you know snap back to you know, centrist or moderate politics as they
• 22:13
  get older. It's actually not necessarily true. I mean it's often not true a lot of times people
• 22:19
  really retain throughout their life a lot of the political instincts and beliefs that
• 22:27
  that they that they hold when they're being forged in their youth. So I don't expect this stuff to
• 22:34
  snap back to a moderate place necessarily even if it's declined from its peak. That's interesting.
• 22:42
  And I suppose even if it declines in intensity it may not decline in kind in the sense that it's
• 22:48
  possible for social movements to just go off the rails and start caring about things that they
• 22:54
  shouldn't be caring about and not caring about things that should be caring about. So if what you
• 22:57
  care about is what Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi and Mandela and Barack Obama cared about
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  egalitarianism, equality, forgiveness, justice. Then if you have abandoned those virtues in your
• 23:11
  pursuit of a neo-racist policy that sets people of color against white people again, then merely
• 23:17
  turning the volume down on the latter does not re-instantiate. That's right. That's right. What you're
• 23:23
  getting at is that they're actually different projects. The project I think is the healthy and
• 23:30
  wise one is raising our children to believe at their core that race is a meaningless feature
• 23:41
  that you don't know you should not prejudge anyone based on their race in any direction for any
• 23:47
  reason. And to not wield their own race as if it means anything more than how much some block
• 23:59
  you need to apply. That's the project that Martin Luther King was interested in. That's the project.
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  The Civil Rights Movement was premised on. That was seen as the end goal of all the marching and
• 24:11
  all the legislation is to inch toward that society, which is the only workable one for multi-racial
• 24:20
  multi-ethnic societies. The world could go Japan's route and just have one ethnic group for one
• 24:29
  one island. That's not how Australia is going. It's not how America is going. That's not how the
• 24:38
  UK is going. And if we're going to do the multi-racial diverse society, there has to be a compact
• 24:45
  and a philosophy wherein I don't discriminate against you and I ask you not to discriminate against
• 24:50
  me. That's the logic of what I call colorblindness. It's the logic that the Civil Rights Movement was
• 24:55
  based on. Instead, there's a new movement that, you know, what whether you want to call it
• 25:01
  wokeness or social justice, wants to essentially reverse the logic of the old system,
• 25:08
  at least to some degree, correct. This fantasy of correcting for all of the ills of the past
• 25:17
  via present-day discrimination, which just in turn creates new disgruntled victims of discrimination
• 25:24
  today. It's a totally separate project. You know, you can read everything Martin Luther King
• 25:30
  wrote and you're not going to find modern-day wokeness in there because it wasn't there. It's
• 25:36
  just a different project. What about compensating people who obviously have disadvantages or
• 25:42
  whose parents had obvious disadvantages that you can connect back to past racist government
• 25:47
  policies? So I think that I'm in favor of compensating. To hear the rest of this conversation,
• 25:54
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