 In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests have erupted around the country, calling attention to racial disparities in the way that Blacks are treated by the criminal justice system and by American society more generally. Brown University's Glenn Lowry has emerged as one of the most vocal and outspoken critics of Black Lives Matter and other groups arguing that systemic racism is at the center of the African American experience in the contemporary United States. Lowry also worries that our institutions are failing to affirm the primacy of reason over violence and calibrating our reactions to the supposed oppression as he wrote in response to his school's public position on protests. The 72-year-old professor, the first African American to be granted tenure in Harvard's economics department, talked with Reason via Zoom about how the U.S. has changed for the better over his lifetime, why understanding history is vital to social change, and whether rational discourse has any purchase left in social and political debates. Glenn Lowry, thanks for talking to Reason. Good to be with you, Nick. So you are a critic of arguments that systemic racism is the primary cause for problems facing Black Americans. You recently told City Journal of the Manhattan Institute about policing in America. You said there is a problem, but I think the scale, its scale is exaggerated. And in the same interview, you commented on the killing of George Floyd and you said that case is terrible and that there's really no kind of talking your way out of what people see there. Can you disentangle those two statements a bit? One which is that the case of George Floyd is terrible and it's on display for everybody to see. And then also that there is a problem with policing and Black communities in America, but it's been overstated. Okay, so I mean, I start with the observation that every one of these viral incidents comes to our attention because of the structure of information dissemination in the society with these mobile phones and all of this video with this networked social media mediated fever pitch attuned a hive of back and forth that goes on. So we know every single one of these incidents, you can name these names, these names are known to us, they number in the dozens or whatever. But it's a country of 330 million people, there are tens of thousands of encounters of variety of kinds that are ongoing. The determination that I will view my reality through the kind of hysterical reaction to legitimately troubling incidents, but they are relatively few in number and not characteristic of the day-to-day life of African Americans in the country. So, you know, the question here is about race. Do these incidents indicate something about the tenor of race relations? I'm still not entirely persuaded that these are racial incidents. I think the routine and habitual reporting of these incidents characterizing them in terms of the race of the people who participate presupposes a motive for action, which is in almost all of the cases never established. We just presume that a white police officer is acting in some way against a quote unquote black unarmed man because of their likeness and blackness respectively. We ought to really stop and think about that imputation, think about that presupposition. As I've tried to indicate in some of my commentary, there's a lot of quote black crime, close but I'm not talking about black on black crime, I'm just talking about black people breaking the law, there's a lot of it. Do we want to dwell on the fact that they're black? We talk about race in America, I mean, going back to the founding because blacks and whites, you know, in early on it was whites who wanted to talk about race and kind of created these responses. But we don't talk honestly about it, I mean, consider, consider. So we talk about these viral incidents like George Floyd. Now, in many of these encounters, they say he was only trying to pass a $20 bill and he got 911 calling him. Mary Garner was only selling loose cigarettes out in front of a convenience store. Michael Brown was only, it is not supposed to even be irrelevant, strong-arming appears a package of cigarettes, et cetera, et cetera. In so many of these instances, the quote victim is resisting and attacking the police officer. The police officer's use of force may be disproportionate, true enough. But can it be irrelevant that the incident is precipitated by the quote victim resisting and using violence against the police officer? Can that be irrelevant? Now, again, I want to emphasize is the race of the person who resists, arrests a relevant datum in assessing what's going on. So my bottom line on all of this is I feel like we're out of touch with reality. That we're really letting a kind of meta politics and a kind of meta racialized moralism, which I don't think really is very deeply philosophically moral at all, equity, quality, but defined in terms of race, we're letting that kind of thing drive us and it troubles me very much about the intellectual political climate of the country at this point. So you, in the same interview with City Journal, you said, I'm 72 years old and I know what things were like in the 1950s and 1960s. The United States has become a completely different country. States can lose their jobs today if they talk to blacks in the wrong tone. Institutions at all levels of government work full time against racism. Every university and major corporation has a powerful executive position that monitors and strives for diversity and inclusion. Can you sketch a little bit about how things have changed over your lifetime? Your professional lifetime, you've been a professor since 1976. Are things better or worse for blacks in terms of kind of everyday material conditions? I think you'd have to say they're better. I think if you just looked at the baseline set of social indicators, educational attainment, penetration of certain kinds of occupations, family income and so forth like that, certainly things are better and they're relatively better, although they are not anywhere near parity as compared to the mid 50s. I mean, occupational structure, I think. The modal occupation for employed black women in 1950 was domestic. I'm pretty sure that that's true. I think you had a minuscule number of people in the professions in medicine and law and in the academic and so on, and you could go down those indicators. I think, however, that if you were to look at other indicators like the stability of family life, like the degree of criminal violence, you might even find in terms of effective school performance because there was really unequal educational provision to African-American students. So whatever performance disparities might have existed in 1950, well, might have been accounted for by differential access to resources, whereas today you get large performance gaps by race, even when you condition on resources, even in those resources of middle class. That's where affirmative action comes from. I mean, you know, I'm sorry. Am I being responsive to you, Nick? Yeah, yeah. No, no, well, I guess things are changing. Yeah, here's the main thing that's changed over time is I mean, think about the civil rights movement. I mean, those questions were really the legitimacy of the things that King and company were working for in the late 50s and the 1960s were in question. Everybody was not on the same page in terms of affirming the legitimacy of those claims. Everybody is on the same page. Now, King is a national holiday. I mean, it's not the same country. It's ridiculous to think of it as the same country. And if I may, I'd say I think these things are not unrelated. I think the fact that it's not the same country and that the underlying structures have moved much more in the direction of civil rights for African-Americans and equal rights for African-Americans, together with the fact that there are very substantial performance differences across a range of social indicators, including crime and violence and encounters with the police, disadvantageous to African-Americans, disfavoring African-Americans, the combination of those two things, the opening of the society, basically, and the persisting underperformance and differential achievement across racial lines, that's what's creating, I think, that's what's creating this crisis. So yeah, what I wanted to ask is if things, and I agree with you in virtually any possible way that you want to measure it, things are better for blacks now than they were 50 years ago or 70 years ago. But we don't talk about things in those terms. Is there an inability of discourse about racism and inclusion and change that precludes the possibility of progress? That's one question. And then let's get to the question about how the differential outcomes for certain blacks kind of skews the conversation. But is it that we're incapable of talking about progress, about social progress? That's an interesting way of putting it. I think I might agree with that if that were the claim. The claim is we're not really able to have an effective deliberation or discourse. And I think I think that's true. I suppose there could be theories about why it's true. You know, I think there's a lot of dishonesty and a lot of kind of avoidance. But I can you can I just a lot of yeah. I just want to say virtue signaling. There's a lot of posturing. There's a lot of, you know, kind of branding, you know, that it seems to me that like, for example, this spate of corporations coming out for black lives matter, you can't tell me they have a politics. They don't have a racial politics. It's it's just like the Superbowl. You know, you want to have your your brand advanced by making a statement within a certain context. So I think there's a lot of that. Sorry. So is that is that? I mean, is that what you mean? When you say dishonesty, it's certainly virtue signaling. And but I mean, are people who are saying that, you know, the country is worse now and I'm saying it could be somebody like Al Sharpton, but there are wide numbers of of white people of white spokesmen of, you know, if that even makes sense, who will say that, you know, this country is has an irremediable race problem and that things are as bad now as they've ever been. I mean, they're just being dishonest or do they actually believe that it's come on there? Of course, they're being dishonest. Of course, they're being dishonest. I mean, I don't I don't know what they're talking about. Look around the world. I mean, history wasn't bad. Of course, there was slavery. I mean, there's no denying that there was a race and is a race phenomenon within the context of American history. But this is an open society. African Americans are the richest and most powerful people of African descent on the planet. There's nothing that's not possible for my son to dream of. People are clamoring to try to get inside of the United States. We have birthright citizenship here. I don't know what people are talking about. The fact of enslavement now more than a century and a half in the past is only loosely related. It's a social construction, the way that people have tried to make this connection. So irredeemably racist. We're in the freest, most prosperous, greatest potential for the remedy of any particular problem. Most kind of responsive to what's happening on the gay rights thing. I know that's not race, but I mean, just not a stultified, closed, inflexible, domineering society. This is a dynamic and open, morally reflective, and I think, at the end of the day, virtuous society. And I would say compared to what? I don't know what people are talking about. So you have mentioned, but there are differential outcomes among blacks and whites. In the past, you've written, and this was a critique of the bell curve and of people like James Q. Wilson, who I want to talk about Wilson a little bit later in more detail. But you were saying that it is not a sign of, I mean, you don't believe in racial essentialism, that there is something irreducible in blacks or whites. And whites is a category that changes as frequently in its definition as blacks do. What goes into explaining the different outcomes? And then how does that come back to pollute discourse about individual flourishing or not in America? Yeah, I mean, something I've been thinking about since my dissertation, which was written under the guidance of Robert Solo, the great Robert Solo at MIT. He was a growth theorist. I mean, he had made his own very substantial reputation resulting in Nobel Prize and modeling the dynamic of the accumulation of capital via the market where people are saving for the future. And then they fund underwrite investments that firms are making and the population is growing. And so how does this kind of arc of economic evolution of economic growth in its foundation? And my dissertation, sorry, but you did ask. I'll be brief. I'll be brief. My dissertation tried to apply some of the same conceptual framework for inter-temporal decision making and the structure of markets and investments and production functions and things of this kind. But to the transgenerational transfer of economic status through parents investing in their kids and through seeing the populations evolving over time, say black and white, toward more or less equality as the individuals within them became a more or less effective economic agents, et cetera. So I've been thinking about this for a very long time. I mean, I would say you've got a number of things here. And I wouldn't necessarily lead genetics out if I weren't going to speak as a scientist, although I think if I were to speak as a practical person, I'd not want to go there. I mean, I think a lot of those are open questions. I've read Charles Murray's book, The Most Recent, One Human Diversity, where he examines foundational and biogenetic differences between human populations, whether by gender or by ancestral descent, which is his substitute for race. And class. By social class, yeah, I know it's very provocative. I know that's not what we're talking about here. But I just want to say, you can't rule all those questions out our priori. That's anti-scientific. That's anti-reason. You can't rule those questions out our priori. Certainly, it's possible, in principle, that there could be some such effects. How many, how big, and how would they work, and what consequence, and what remedy? I mean, I think the discourse about intrinsic differences, if it only turns on the existential question, or the question of whether or not such differences exist, it's a fool's errand to try to stop that question. But the question is about how much significance should be given in moreover, and perhaps more importantly, what are the interventions that could mitigate or make much less significant, whatever these things. I mean, like eyeglass, correcting vision, et cetera. So, yeah, but what's the social equivalent of eyeglasses? I'm wearing contacts, you're wearing glasses. We both would be dead a couple of centuries ago. What's the equivalent of that in contemporary American life so that people who grow up, poor, don't end up passing on a poorer life to their children who then pass it on? Yeah, I'm hard pressed to say it, since I'm not Charles Mary. I'm not going to try to disagree. Oh yeah, no, but in an American context, one of the things that is stunning is that whatever we might say about the income gaps between whites and blacks and Asian Americans, and you can break it down into more discrete ethnic groups, the wealth gap, what gets inherited is even larger. So what goes into talking about differential outcomes of groups or is that the wrong way to be looking at that? No, I don't think for the practical purpose of what we're trying to talk about here, which is this moment that we're in a crisis and agitation, that it's a waste of time to talk about groups and about group differences. And I had merely mentioned in passing about the natural differences of the genetic stuff because I'd mainly want to focus on, as I said, capital and financial and human and social capital, connectivity, what does the network look like? What does the community look like? I mean, I tried to elaborate this a little bit. I did an essay for the Manhattan Institute a year or two ago on persistent racial inequality. And I try to, I say, look, let's talk about human development because that's basically what we're talking about, whether we're talking about behavioral problems that manifest in incarceration or academic achievement or whatever, or we're talking about development. We're talking about how individuals acquire the traits that are going to be valued in the marketplace and that are going to allow them to be effective in life, to be good citizens and neighbors and parents and all of that. And the disparities that we're seeing, I want to say, and this is extremely controversial, I think are a reflection basically of disparities in the development of these respective populations categorized by race. I don't think it can possibly be irrelevant that the majority of kids born to a black woman are born to a woman without a husband. I don't know the answer to all of these social psychological questions, but the possibility that aberrant behavior among male adolescents might have some functional connection to father absence, how can you rule that out? The violence, the level of violence, you telling me that has no cultural component? I don't believe you. I don't believe you, okay? We just don't want to go there. You know, so these developmental impediments well may have their root in slavery and marginalization. This is the philosophical thing that's here, is that it's irrelevant. It's irrelevant what the historical genesis of whatever kind of behavioral maladaptations might impede the human development of a substantial proportion of a racially defined population, so as to create disparity. It doesn't matter that the historical paradigm, because this is not about assigning blame. This is about what the possibilities are going forward. And in that case, if you don't address the behavioral root, I mean, for example, school discipline. So if you just look at the statistics, it's an outsized order of magnitude like difference of the rate of the kids are disciplining because they're acting out in school by race. Now, maybe you should or shouldn't suspend kids from school. Maybe you should or shouldn't have police officers in school to deal with behaviorally problematic kids, whatever. We could discuss the policy issue, but a racial disparity of the magnitude that you can observe in the data is not plausibly the consequence of the racial racism and discrimination of the school district. It is much more plausibly a reflection of disparate behavior across racial groups of kids within the school that's disruptive. Okay, so you're saying if I just to summarize what you're saying is when, well, when people, sometimes people will say black kids, black boys especially get suspended from school or they get detention or whatever passes for discipline at far higher rates than white kids do. One story that people say is that's because the system is racist or whether it's intended or not, it ends up creating, it ends up defining black male behavior as criminal, as problematic. And then it puts those kids into a category where there are problems at school, they become problems in the workplace, they become problems in society. What you're saying is no, actually what we're talking about here is basically a difference in behavior that has its roots in cultural phenomenon and it leads to bad outcomes and that it's not about systemic racism as much as it is about the failure of kind of cultures and subcultures to produce the types of people who are gonna be successful in a given society. That's precisely what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. I mean, what I wanna just amend is to say, I don't know that for a fact, but it's an entirely plausible and defensible hypothesis. And if true, attributing the situation to something called systemic racism of A, avoids addressing the behavioral underpinnings which are problematic in and of themselves and B, denormalizes so that the ability to make a judgment about behavior becomes undermined. As we in effect look a scans, look enough, I mean, look away from, avoid the reality of the underlying differences in behavior, not difference in how they're treated by the system. I would allow though that the fact of the difference is significant in and of itself. It does contribute to a more generic, stereotypic, denigrating social meaning of the blackness of those kids. Yeah, black boys become presumptively problematic and undoubtedly there will be instances where people were acting on that presumption erroneously to the disadvantage of some perfectly innocent person. All of that will also be a part of the situation. So what are the types of interventions then that you think are useful? Because the intervention that the anti-racists are making is, well, we need to change the way that we define problematic behavior. We need to intervene in the economy and through government welfare programs or transfer programs, a less loaded term. You're not a fan of that necessarily. What are the types of interventions that would help black kids prosper and also change the rhetoric so that we're talking more about behavior rather than group differences? I suppose I should have an answer to that question. I don't. I mean, I think the honest thing to say is I don't know. And that puts you in the position of me in the position of being a critic without a substitute. So I mean, people are gonna say a lot of things. As far as I am aware of the evidence that you can mitigate the socially disruptive through more generous social provision. I mean, I think that's... I suppose we have to talk case by case about program by program, but I think it's kind of, you're not gonna solve the security problem in American cities through midnight basketball, job training, more social workers. Is that a... Could you trace your kind of intellectual journey since getting... I applaud you for finishing your dissertation. I did too. So we know the derision which people talk about ABDs and all of that kind of stuff. How has your understanding of the role of the government in helping people to either flourish or fail? Has that, have you followed the same course over the course of your career or have you gone through various changes of that? Because what you just said and name-checking midnight basketball of course goes back to the Bill Clinton, Joe Biden crime bill of the 90s where the idea was that, but you know, and that made sense. And we were in a moment of rising crime rates. I mean, for 20, 30 years crime had been going up significantly. And the idea was that if you gave more kids in the inner city, which was both a code word and not a code word for blacks and minorities, but also poor whites, if you gave them more social opportunities like suburban kids had, things would work out better. You're saying that didn't work. Were you always in that camp? And then where are you now? No, I wasn't always in that camp. I think I was much more, when I came out of graduate school, much more a just conventional kind of liberal Democrat. I was pro-affirmative action all through the early 80s. I finished my thesis on 76. I mean, all the people that I consorted with my good friends and associates would have been, would have been more or less liberal, Jimmy Carter types. But the Reagan revolution actually upset me. I mean, guys like Jude Wynisky, you know? George Gilder, I'm not kidding. I mean, I was actually reading these books. I was watching these like the David Stockmans and the whatnot, these young congressmen that were kind of critical. And I, you know, I was at MIT and MIT would have been a, you know, social Democrat left of center, although softly left of center, you know, Samuelson would have found certainly very much, but also econometric, I mean, and scientific, right? Oh yeah, they're scientific, what an amazing, what an amazing, but they were Keyzians, okay? They were, you know, they were, and there was Chicago and Freeman and, you know, UCLA and there was this kind of more right wing kind of thing. But I always appreciated Friedrich von Hayek. I remember reading The Road to Servant when I was an undergraduate. And I was always in and more of this, the beauty of this, of these insights about markets and informational decentralization and efficiency and whatnot, and always suspicious of the fashionable kind of lefty, soft lefty kind of quasi-Marxism. I always thought it was a model. By the 90s, by the, I guess mid to late 90s, you were calling yourself a black conservative. What happened? Yeah, well, that, yeah, I got, you know. Do you regret that? And, or, you know, what happened? Was that, you know, was that a rebranding of, you know, Pepsi as the taste of a new generation or something? What made you into a black conservative? I think some of it was cultural. I was kind of traditionalist in the culture or stuff. Some of it was opportunistic. I happened at a particular moment. You know, I was writing these essays. The Neocons kind of adopted me, Peretz at the New Republic, Pat Horitz at Commentary, Crystal, Irving Crystal at the Public Interest, Richard John Newhouse, late Richard John Newhouse at First Things and before that, whatever he was doing at the religion. So I was kind of consorting with a set of people. I don't know, it was a number of different things. I mean, some of it was, I didn't think the Sandinistas were the greatest thing since sliced bread either. I thought socialism had absolutely devastated huge swaths affecting hundreds of millions of people in Africa. Behind all these, what I thought were ridiculous, centralized, easily appropriated by political factions, red-seeking, you know, preeming off the top. I mean, you know, I, yeah. So. It was strange, wasn't it, that in a post-colonial era where people were, you know, in the developing world were rejecting Western imperialism, somehow Marxism didn't count as a Western phenomenon, right? Yeah, that's a nice point, actually. It's a, you know, because none of them have actually read, they haven't read Marx, they haven't read Hegel, they, you know, they haven't read Kant, you know, I mean, they haven't read anything. So what, you know, but by the same token, you became critical of the kind of neocon establishment in the domestic version anyway. What, where do you find yourself now? And what, I mean, is it that you have been staying straight and true kind of to an ethic of inquiry or of empiricism and the cultures around you are changing? Or what, you know, how do you identify yourself politically now? And I guess in a deeper way, methodologically or ideologically, what, you know, what are your self descriptors? I feel like a man without a country politically. I am an economist, I mean, and I'm a liberal in the very respectable, you know, classical tradition of that. And, you know, I'm a traditionalist. I used to be religious, I mean, really religious. I was baptized at the age of 40. I was effectively a deacon in a church congregation where my wife, my late wife, Linda, and I worshiped for over a decade. What was, that was, what, what sect was that? Cause you're described. It was, it was African American, AME, African American, would be the denomination. So it was a mainline Protestant. The congregation was somewhat on the charismatic, you know, more kind of evangelical side. So did you have to go back to Jimmy Carter? Did you have a born again experience? So, you know, I had what I chose to construct as a born again experience in the context of my own particular life, coming out of drug addiction and a kind of big public fall when I was at Harvard and got into a scandal. And it was kind of, you know, rehabilitating and things were coming together for me in a different way. And my wife who stuck by me through this horrible humiliation in our son Glenn, we had two sons. She's deceased now, Linda Lowry. But we were coming through this and the church was a part of it. I mean, AA was also a part of it. Yeah, sure. You know, I mean, I was kind of in a beast still, de-emphasized ego, kind of, you know, really kind of fundamental contemplation. How did I get to this point, you know, taking these possibilities? I have to say, you know, I, in researching this interview, it's hard to get a full picture of you because these different descriptors get attached to you. And so this is fascinating. And I didn't expect to be talking about born again, born again experience, but that helped you restructure your life and come out of addiction and put your life back together, right? Did you have a, and I mean, there's a clear individual strain in that of, you know, both you're working within a system, but you have to make autonomous choices. I mean, you as a liberal makes total sense. Did you have a dead again experience or how did you, how did the religiosity leave your life? Was it, you know, did you have a Damascus road experience to get there? I did, I did. I'm one out? Or was it just? No, I'll tell you the story. I can tell it very briefly. My assistant, I started an institute at Boston University where I was a professor for about 15 years in the 90s in early odds. And I had an assistant. She was my right hand and a wonderful woman. And she died of a heart ailment at the age of like 42. And there's a long story that I'll keep short, but her life was blossoming as she was cut short. She happened to be a member of my congregation, her funeral. It was at her funeral where the God's not dead, he's still alive. I can still hear the hymn echoing as people danced around the church celebrating her everlasting life. She is now with Jesus and I didn't believe it. Again, I make the long story short. The point is, it came to me that I didn't believe it. I didn't believe in life after death. I mean, I recognized that I did not believe it. And I thought, as I again, and her mother came to tell me that we mustn't mourn. Yes, she cut down in a primal life. She was 42, a viral infection of the heart. I knew she was ill in May and August she was dead. So, could we not merely pause for a moment and accept that the abyss goes all the way down? This was my thought. I ended up with Nietzsche. I went back. It was like a dead again moment because I realized that I did not believe it. I mean, what did I not believe? Clearly, I didn't believe that Jesus lives to this day. Right? I mean, that's the point. The point of Christianity is he's living. If you don't believe that, I don't know what you're talking about. Okay, so I kind of, you know, now the music of my life that was provided by my Christian faith and community was absolutely compelling. So, I had to reckon with, whether or not I could continue to participate when I recognized that my conviction just didn't, I was serving on the board of Charles Coulson's Prison Fellowship Ministries and I stepped down and they thought that I had done it out of a kind of black anger. They thought that I thought that they were racist because, you know, there's Charles Coulson, they're conservatives. But I didn't, I didn't, I loved what they were doing. There's a global ministry, you know, $250 million budget serving people as Christians inside prisons all over the planet. There's nothing wrong with prison fellowship ministries even to this day, I'm sure. But I just could not continue to serve on that board because I didn't believe what they were, you know, it was a Christian ministry and, you know, I couldn't do it. So, can I, you know, you raise an interesting set of topics, I mean, based on your lived experience because the church, you know, a Catholic church, somebody like Clarence Thomas, there's a black tradition of Roman Catholicism, somebody like Clarence Thomas exudes that there's a black tradition of Pentecostalism or evangelical Christianity, as well as mainline Christianity and you kind of embody some of that. How do you, could you talk a little bit about the tradition of individualism both within the black community and kind of individual uplift, as well as in a larger American context? Because it seems like that is working through some of your observations and some of your analysis of this. And as a libertarian, I, you know, I'm wondering where has individualism gone in the current moment? Everybody's talking about collective identity. Could you talk a little bit about how you see individualism as an important factor in what you're doing or how you think about things? I will, I mean, I would say though, I'm not a libertarian, I am a libertarian. I understand that. I'm more a communitarian than a libertarian. But- We're working on you, Claude, you know. This is like- What I want to say in response to you is Booker T. Washington. Yeah. Up from slavery, you know, this kind of, and it's, I laugh because of course it's a, you know. He's the ultimate Tom, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. But what I want to call your attention to is this beautiful, well, I think it's a very profound essay by Herbert Storing. Herbert Storing, the essay is called The School of Slavery. It was published in 18, in 1963, Epipole of the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. And it's a tribute to Booker T. Washington. And to make a long story short, remind you, Neoconservative friends back in the 80s brought this to my attention. And I was really, I was really struck by it because there's a point there that I just think is very profound for African Americans. And the point is that the status of slavery was objectively denigrating. It was diminishing. People were not developed to their full human potential. It was dehumanizing. It was immoral. It was also objectively infantilizing and diminishing. So this is the school of slavery that Storing on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation is extolling. That Booker T. Washington understood the people had to be developed. They had to learn how to read. They had to acquire skills. They had to come to a choir land. They had to inculcate habits. They had to be virtuous. They needed respectability. They were not at some level entirely respectable. I'm sorry, worthy of respect, of course, but I mean, sorry, slavery actually was a hammer coming down on people. It held them down to suppress them. This kind of point, okay? So here's how I relate that. I mean, I think you basically, it's a philosophical thing. You basically have two large kinds of category of escalation that you can bring a bear. One of them is, I know they look a scant at me. I'm going to show them that they're wrong. And the other one is, they look a scant at me. I don't care what they think. You can either dispel the doubt, the doubt that plagues the Negro. I'll use the word in its historical context that plays the freedman in the aftermath of slavery. The doubt, the doubt that continues to shadow African-Americans. Yes, some of it is prejudice and so-called quote unquote racism. And some of it is self-doubt. I mean, it is baked into the cake. Okay, social deprivation. So what would equality consist in? How can you actually have equality between people whom history has helped different hands to? People underestimate the difficulty of this problem. You mentioned the wealth gap earlier. They talk about reparations. I'm sorry, I actually don't think that solves the problem because the problem is the different capacities to generate wealth as between the populations which is historically inherited but it's nevertheless a problem. Starting businesses, for example, entrepreneurship, saving, risk-taking, the wealth doesn't fall from the sky. So I'm sorry, I rambled just a bit. I'm trying to focus on the school of slavery. I'm trying to talk about the lesson. The lesson is the only path to equality is through dispelling the doubt by objective performance. That's the lesson. So you asked me about individualism. I mean, I'm now speaking to a matter that could be addressed in individualistic but also in communal ways. We African-Americans could see ourselves in some conscious sense as consisting of a socio-political entity of some kind of having some kind of common fate or some kind of overlapping narratives that reinforce one another in our identity quest. We might see ourselves in those terms and create institutions and foster and uplift ideals about what a virtuous life is that ends up, because after all, that's what we're doing right now that ends up shaping in a developmentally affirmative way the patterns for our people. That's what we're doing right now. All of these protests and demonstrates all of this remonstration, all of this myth-making that's going on is in effect putting forward, not only for African-Americans, for the country as a whole, but vis-a-vis the position of African-Americans, certain ideas about what constitutes virtue, those things are in play. They can be shaped by self-conscious, more or less self-conscious communal agency. So is that part of your critique of things like the 1619 project at the New York Times or Michelle Alexander's conception of what she'd called in a book a few years ago the New Jim Crow, which you've been critical of, that essentially it creates a system in which there's very little room for black autonomy or self-definition of a community that is somehow prosperous, because it seems as if they conceive of blackness only in terms of a force that is being acted upon and in negative ways. They direct their appeals, it's so ironic to me, it's almost self-contradictory in a way. They direct their appeals to the larger structure to white society which is called upon direct and we must finally have reckoning with racism. If only we would have the conversation about racism and people would come to terms with our history. Well, who are these people? These are the people that are supposed to be the racist. I mean, as I put it, no one is coming to save us. The supposition that appeals made in general to the American public to somehow reconstitute ourselves so that racism goes away is, I think it's self-contradictory. They're racist after all, they're racist. That's your supposition. Your supposition is that they're racist. Why would they be effectively manipulated into solving your problem for you? So, but I think there's a deeper problem with the 1690. I don't know about Michelle Alexander. I think Eva DuVernay that documentary film she made the 13th, which claims that the 13th amendment to the constitution in virtue of its conclusion of a clause that allows for involuntary servitude in the case of someone who's been duly convicted by a court of law was in effect a way of smuggling slavery into the back door such that late 20th and early 21st century institutions of incarceration are but the natural historical consequence of that sleight of hand during the Reconstruction Amendment. I mean, I think that's ridiculous. As again, I think people have their head in the sand. They're denying reality as if 150 years of social history could just be collapsed into a threadbare narrative of a racist determinism. I mean, you know, it's absurd, but there's another problem that I have with all of this which is that it misconstrues the country and it distorts the relationship of African-Americans to our country. What would be wrong with a certain kind of African-American nativism, dare I say it? A certain, I mean, what I mean is, American-ness, a forthright affirmation of our citizenship, a valuing of it. I mean, I think this point is just fundamental. So what does that look like? Well, it means that the Civil War becomes not, you know, an inconvenient blip in your otherwise straight-line 400-year narrative of domination. It becomes the killing field on which a half a million or so was slaughtered on behalf of a political project and that consequence of what was to effect a world historic transformation of the status of people who descended from Africans in the North American continent. I mean, it means Jefferson's fathering children with Sally Hemings is not something to be overlooked to be sure, but does not sully the world historic early post-enlightenment manifestation of political institutions of liberty. There's nothing wrong with celebrating that. It means that if I have a beef about how the cops are handling recalcitrant citizens who happen to be of color, I don't use the ritual celebration. It's just a little ceremony. They're playing the anthem and the flag is waving. I don't make that the site. I don't talk about going to the United Nations to have America investigated for the fact that it hasn't resolved certain disputes about the Voting Rights Act. I don't refuse to concede a duly processed democratic election that I lose because of a theory about what the motives of somebody who changed the location of a voting place might be. I don't do that. Do you think that your conception of this and you've referenced a bunch of recent controversies, including the gubernatorial election of Georgia and NFL protests about police brutality and things like that, do you think your conception of those as kind of side issues, are you more representative of the black community than the 1619 project? Or how does one gauge that? Yeah, well, no, I think my objective answer, my assessment is I'm not more representative. I think I would lose that when if that were gonna be put to a popularity contest amongst African-Americans. Because I think that the culture is in the grips of, the people who run the root.com, I just throw one thing out. Oprah Winfrey, I just throw one thing out. LeBron James, I just throw one thing out. No disrespect intended to these people. I'm sorry if it seems as if I am. I'm not, I'm not. But I can predict exactly what they're gonna say. And I think, I mean, here, let's just make a sharp point of this. The border, the border, okay? Now, here's my point. I'm not talking about putting children in cages. I'm talking about appropriating the historical narrative of African-American petitioning politically for equal citizenship, racism, race exclusion, allowing the appropriation of that narrative on behalf of a completely different project, which is letting people from Salvador walk across the border. They may or may not be appropriately allowed to walk across the border. You can have a view about that. But the idea that that debate exemplifies or somehow reflects what Martin Luther King was about or what African-Americans have striven for, for 150 years, is a move that at least deserves to be debated before it's allowed to set in stone. I'm not now talking about labor-American competition. We could talk about that. I'm not talking about who controls the school district in a certain place based upon the interests of why I'm not talking about what language is used in the workplace if I'm in Southern California or whatever. I'm talking about black Americans seeing our quest within the context of the American national project. Do you think the African-American experience of kind of, you know, to use a Booker T. Washington phrase coming up from slavery, did that provide, or does that provide a model for white Americans or immigrants who came in, you know, between the late 19th and early 20th century? I've always been amazed that, you know, I don't know where the immigrant narrative of the 20th century necessarily came from. Is it, you know, I mean, is the black experience something that was used by immigrant Americans? Do you think, who then also parcel it back in different ways? I've always been kind of impressed with the way in which Italian-American culture and black culture often are riffing off of one another. And the way that Godfather, the novel in the movie took, you know, charges of criminality against Italian-Americans and turned it into a source of cultural power. You eventually, you end up with a Snoop Dogg album called The Dogfather and African-American rappers, gangster rappers playing up in Mafioso, which then gives rise to a rise of Italian-Americans who act like blacks being gangsters. Is the, I guess, a very roundabout. That's a nice essay, Nick. Nick can really have written it. No, you know, I keep giving it away. Nobody will take it. Yeah, that sounds like some kind of Norman Mailer stuff. Yeah, well, you know, I'm not far from where he lives, so, but I, you know, I guess one of the questions is, is the black experience in America, is it one, is it the foundational American experience? And are you arguing that that's, we need to be talking about it in those terms? Because that would make it American and hence it would change the way that we talk about America. I like it, I like it, you know, you said it, I didn't, but I concur. I hadn't quite followed, perhaps, I hadn't quite followed the arrow going in both directions. I was assimilating African-Americans striving to the larger American narrative, but perhaps the larger American narrative is in some way, you know, grounded in or significantly influenced. Of course, that kind of thing is the inspiration for the 1619 project, isn't it? So, and I wanna just interject that this talk about immigrants, I mean, somebody's gonna say, what about whiteness? I mean, I can hear them saying it right now. They're gonna say the difference between the blacks and the immigrants was stigma and that the, this is a Khalil Muhammad's book, The Condemnation of Blackness, for example, where he examines the intellectual life in the United States in the period from 1890 to 1930 or so, progressive era. But the question of the African-Americans, blacks, the blacks assimilating to the full inclusion in society was very much up in the air. And the populations were moving, you know, blacks were coming into the industrial areas in the Midwest and Northeast and there was crime and there was social disruption, but the immigrants were also coming and there was also crime and there was social disruption and drunkenness and all this kind of stuff. And the argument of Muhammad and others nicely executed this argument in his book, The Condemnation of Blackness, is that basically the stigma of racial racism kept the powers that be, the people who edited the magazines and who gave the lectures and wrote the books from seeing that in a way these were two sides of the same coin that was going on with these populations and it's because there was doubt about whether the Negro was assimilable in a way that there was not doubt about whether or not the Irish quote unquote could become white, kind of thing like that. So, you know, I'm not necessarily standing on that argument, although I think it deserves to be considered. Well, it's also interesting in that context to think about historical events and I'm thinking of my father's family was Irish, my mother's was Italian World War II played a role for white ethnics, recent immigrants that I don't think it played for blacks or it played, it had a different role, which is that the Italians and the Irish could become white after returning from Europe and Japan and putting their lives on the line. Blacks came home to a different reality and it catalyzed the horrible behavior towards black veterans, helped catalyze the civil rights movement. No, there's, and there are lots of good books on this, Ira Katznelson, when Affirmative Action was white, he calls it in, it's basically a history, social policy 1930 to 1950, which emphasizes the outsized role of the recovery from the depression and the engagement in the global conflict. And in terms of fostering social mobility, you know, GI Bill and all the new deal and all these institutional transformation that's going on that played out in ways that were not as advantageous to African Americans because of racial discrimination and segregation and so on. So I, you know, when I say a kind of nativist thing, I mean, I say it with trepidation because I know people will trot this out. I know that Nicole Hannah-Jones will already has done and this essay tried out African Americans wanting to serve the country, serving, fighting and dying from the Revolutionary War but never right being accorded fully the benefits of having done so in terms of citizenship and inclusion. But you are doing essentially that they are now. Yeah, because I think that that's in fact the case, yes. So let me shift to a slightly different topic but two things I want to ask, at Brown University where you're a professor, wrote a statement of the president and the, you know, the grandpa was there denouncing racism and, you know, calls for police reform and you wrote a rebuttal to that and you were talking about the national debate at this critical moment that what the letter failed to do was in quoting you to a firm, it failed to affirm the primacy of reason over violence and calibrating our reactions to the supposed oppression. Could you, you know, I worked for a magazine called Reason, I believe in reason, I also believe in emotion but could you talk a little bit about the longer or the bigger picture of how does reason, you know, as a kind of philosophical or an analytical category, how does that work for you and do you feel like we're in a particular moment where reason is just being kind of thrown overboard in favor of emotion, not just on race but on other kind of analytical categories and policy decisions going on? Yes, I do feel that we are in this moment where reason is being overthrown and we're being swept along by, often by hysteria. And this, I mean, this would include somebody like Donald Trump on the one hand as well as a number of people. Yeah. It couldn't, in fact, the advent of Trump, I think is one of the things that is, you know, they call it derangement syndrome. I won't because I'm not just talking about it undermining the thinking processes of his opponents who become obsessed with him. I think it creates a background condition. For example, I might not say something because Trump said it, you know? And I actually believe it, but quite apart from how I feel about Trump, I know that- I hope you're not about to talk about Mexicans right now. No, I'm not. You asked me about reason and weather and how and at this moment, you know, with the racial upheaval. And there's just a number of things that, one of them is about violence and about looting and rioting and, you know, being clear about that. I mean, I've heard things said, like, if you try to defend your property, that's violence. You know, so I mean, come on, the foundation of our civilization, which we take for granted. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. We realize upon maintaining certain kinds of distinctions and the distinction between defending my property and violently looting and burning somebody is very elemental. It's an elemental distinction. What do you think? You go into a state of nature. If you lose track with that, you're going to a state of nature. Yeah. What do you think gives rise to, you know, kind of the subjugation of reason to emotion? And in a lot of ways, I think, you know, without going into partisan politics, Trump, it's, you know, Trump didn't cause this. He's kind of the effect of the end of rational discourse in many ways. Well, you know, what happened to rationality? It seemed like it was kind of popular there for some time in my lifetime. It seems less popular now. I don't know. That's a big one. That's above my pay grade, man. Okay. All right. I didn't doubt a professor. That's a different lash or somebody, you know? Yeah, yeah. Lash is a good guide to the current moment. I kind of forgot. As a final topic, I mean, you are a university professor and one of the things that I was thinking as I was... Nick, Nick, Nick, I know you want to conclude. I just want to say about my university and about the letter, what it was that I really objected to, which was the kind of group thing. Here was a letter declaring a reaction about this moment and you would have to read it to appreciate what I'm saying, but it was very political. It was kind of the Black Lives Matter friendly take on the cops and on what was happening. It trafficked in all of the tropes and it was signed by the president and the provost and the vice president for finance and the vice president for administration and the honorary down to the dean of the faculty. And I thought they can't all have exactly the same reasoned reaction to these events. These events are controversial and contentious. They're political. So to have them in lockstep sign off on this letter felt like I was being told, these are brown values. This is what brown stands for. We're a university. Really, we're going to tell our students that there's nothing to argue about here. I mean, for example, was the killing of Floyd a racial event motivated by race? Can I even ask? So this moment of political agitation, of mobilization, of conflict is a front in a culture war that's ongoing in which Donald Trump is a particular participant. It's regional, it's class, it's ethnic religious. It's got a lot of different dimensions to it. All kinds of changes are going on in the world. So, I mean, a university having a party line or something like that, that is really unacceptable in my mind. I mean, it really debases the currency. We're seeing in. Are you, are you- That was my point. Okay, thank you. Well, Pete, are you optimistic about public discourse and or where we go from here? Because this, you're old enough to remember 1968. It's kind of fashionable to talk about the current summer that we're starting like 1968, or when things got really hairy in a lot of ways. Are you optimistic about the near future of the country? No, as a matter of fact, although I'm no sage, I don't have any foresight. No, I'm terribly frightened to be honest with you. As you ask, I'm very, very concerned about it. I think we're going to leave it there. Not a lot to say after that too. So, I want to thank Glenn Lowry for talking to reason. Glenn, thanks so much.