Coleman Hughes || The Humanity of Race

Coleman is an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia University and a columnist for a Collette magazine. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, City Journal, and The Spectator. Coleman, is so great to have you on the Psychology Podcast. Finally, great to be on Scott. I wanted to have you on for a while, and I've known you not only for your intellectual prowess but also as a human and I thought we could

start there. Let's let's let our audience a lettle know a little bit more about Coleman. You were I don't know if you would accept the phrase polymath, but you are quite good at at multiple things. So you're one thing is you're a musician, right, Yeah, yep, musician, played trombone, piano, drums a little bit. Trombone is my best instrument, and that was my initial plan for life was to be a jazz trombonist out of high school. Really, so were you in like all state Like what were you like

in high school? I did all those things. Yeah, yeah, I did all the all state bands, and I did the national bands and all of that stuff. So why do you choose Columbia University philosophy? So it's a little bit of a it's not really so long a story, but I guess the short version is I went to Juilliard out of high school, and then, you know, let's say six months into my Juilliard education, my mother passed away and I went home to be with my family

with the intention of coming back. But while I was at home sort of grieving, I you know, discovered, not really for the first time, but intensified a love of reading and philosophical thinking that suggested to me that I should really pursue that seriously. And that was mixed with a disappointment at the feeling that I wasn't learning very

much at Juilliard. There was a distance between how I felt I learned in a classroom where a music teacher was trying to impart knowledge that is not easily in part art in a classroom, which is to say, artistic knowledge, And there's a distance between that and how I felt I had learned music up until that point, which was, you know, just through experience and solitary learning and pursuing specific mentors. And I was dissatisfied with, you know, with

my experience there. So I figured there was also just a sense that music was very much my escape as a teenager, and for it to become my my curriculum there was something upsetting about that as well. Yeah, thank you, I didn't even I didn't know that about your mother. I'm very sorry to hear that. And I'm wondering to what extent you kind of associated music with your mother as well, and maybe did you lose any motivation after she passed away. No, I think it's a bit the opposite,

not quite. But my mother was never the one pushing me to do music. She was actually quite unmusical. She had a good sense of rhythm and could dance, especially salsa, but she was nearly tone deaf. So I sort of went to Juilliard despite her, not to spite her, but despite her. Sure she wanted me. She wanted me to go to the liberal arts college. So she'd be very proud of you right now. Yeah, I think she'd be very happy with my choice to go to Columbia rather

than Juilliard. Yeah. So, yeah, even like your childhood, were you very intellectual in school? Were you in gifted education for instance? Yes? I was. I was. Yeah, I was always very good at school from the beginning. Yeah, and by that, I mean I was good at math, always was my strongest. But I was strong across the board music as well, very very weak in visual arts, and above average but not stellar at athletics. But you played basketball, now I do. Yeah, we're gonna play basketball. We're gonna

I'm gonna whoop your ass someday. Right, I don't know about that. We'll see, we'll see, that's right. Maybe we'll film it. We'll film that for bonus for the psychology podcast. Yeah. So I really appreciate you talking so vulnerably about all this. I think it's important, you know, to kind of know a little bit more about who you are as a human.

I think that you know, you kind of came out the gate here at Quillett and even like for some people, their first image of you was testifying against Congress, not against Congress, justifying for Congress against reparations. Although I felt that way, I'm sure that way that probably was a Freudian slip. And I think, you know, part of what I want to do today as well is kind of

put a human face to you as well. And what I've gotten to know about you is you're incredibly thoughtful, incredibly a compassionate human being who tried to understand all different sides of a story. You don't just want to be told what to think. You like to think freely. So yeah, I hope you're okay with me kind of paying more of a human face for you today. Oh yeah, that's awesome. That's great. So you got into college and then I feel like there was I read I think

you wrote this one of your articles. There was kind of this turning point. You had thoughts about race and society, and then you had a roommate, is that right, who kind of altered your thinking a little bit along these regards. Did you have like a transformation in some way. Yeah, like most transformations, it wasn't overnight. But I grew up in a very liberal left setting. I knew exactly one Republican that I can think of growing up my fifth grade teacher. So that's the water in which I swam.

My mother was something close to a Marxist and used to talk to me often about Marx and Graham, she and Durkheim when I was as young as five years old, and so you know, I sort of grew up with a general a liberal orientation towards race, but not at

all a race a highly race conscious orientation. What I mean by that is, if you had asked me at thirteen years old if I knew what white privilege was, or if I would have thought to you know, say, a black person's opinion on this is more valid than a white person's, that would have been an alien idea

to me. I came very much from a more Martin Luther King school of thinking, where it was, you know, deeply opposed and aware of racism, but not at all inclined to judge people on the basis of their skin.

But that changed when I was sixteen or seventeen. This would probably be twenty twelve twenty thirteen, went to a conference called the People of Color Conference in Dallas as part of a small envoy from my school, and there were you know, hundreds, maybe over a thousand kids there from all across the country, and it was a conference where we learned about intersectionality and critical race theory. Very

hot time. It was of today, yeah yeah, but unheard of to me and my friends at that point, our first exposure, and it was markedly different than anything I had heard in my life about the subject from my family, from my teachers, who was importantly different, more muscular in ideology,

and it was appealing to me in many ways. It said to me, you know, it took little experiences I had of alienation as a result of my being black and planted them like seeds and grew this entire tree of ideology about how the country wasn't built for me, and all of my problems could be explained. Any alienation I feel as a person can be explained by the distance between the purpose for which my country was created and my place in it as a black person. You know.

So that was I suppose the beginning of my social justice phase, you know, where I became comfortable calling people out white people first, saying things I didn't agree with

or like or felt were offensive. And so that was the first transformation, really, and then the reverse transformation was a slow awareness that many of those ideas were maybe based on kernels of truth, but really misguided in fundamental ways, you know, meeting more people from around the country with different views and different life experiences, and reading, learning more about the world, and coming around to the point of view I have now, which is, you know, much more

like what I learned as a child, much more in the vein of Martin Luther King that you know, the founding ideals of this country, we're really premised on the individual over the group. And as the country evolved and dealt with the question of slavery and Jim Crow, that evolved into a concern for the individual, regardless of their race, and the idea that the way to fight racism is not to throw it in reverse, but to insist that the color of a person's skin is is truly, upon reflection,

an irrelevant characteristic of them. So that's been sort of the way that you know, and I can give more detail about how that transition came about if you want, but that something with our summary of it, thank you. There was something with a roommates. Yeah, so yeah, my friend from Arizona who I roomed with at Juilliard freshman year.

This was you know, we were moving in together right as the Michael Brown Ferguson story, the Ferguson riots were happening, and Michael Brown had been killed, and coming from my context, it seemed obvious that that his killing was unjust, that this was an example of racism, that any ulterior that that it was a simple good versus evil story. It was about as complicated as Star Wars. And that was my picture of the national reaction to the Michael Brown story.

And my roommate, who was sort of had been my best friend and was continuing to become my best friend, he didn't have the same reaction. The mere thought that he might have sympathy for the cops perspective was bizarre to me. But I think the fact of our friendship allowed me to take it seriously. And we were in I think we were in a class Humanity's class at

Juilliard and we're discussing it. And because of discussing it with him, I realized that I should actually read the transcripts of the testimonies from Darren Wilson, the police officer, and I think Dorian Something, Michael Brown's friend who had

opposing testimonies on the issue. And so I remember staying up till, you know, two or three am reading the entirety of the testimonies, coming away thinking that not only did I not know who was right, nobody opining on the issue probably knew who was right, and so the confidence of people that I had up to that point seen as being on the right side of the issue seemed unwarranted to me. And I remember that being an important I mean, that was an important moment for the country.

It was also an important moment for me. Thank you for the We got to hear Coleman's origin story a bit, so thank you for talking about that. So you know, we can dive into some of these issues. These issues strike such an emotional chord when carg you're rightly so so, and you've put a lot of thought into the various

different perspectives that are on the table. So I thought, you know, for each of these topics that I'm going to bring up, I thought we could explore your thoughts as well as maybe some trying to anticipate the critics thoughts as well. I love doing that, you know, So the idea of intersectionality, because you've read an article for quite about your sort of nuanced views on that. Can you how's your thinking evolved at all on that topic

and what are you what is a current thinking? I wrote that article very recently, so I can't say my thinking has evolved. That's what basically doesn't have that. Yeah, my argument there was intersectionality. This is born from Kimberly Crenshaw, the legal theorist law professor at Columbia as it happens right,

Columbia Law School, that's right. She came up with the idea in the late eighties, and the basic you know, it was in response to specific legal cases where neither anti racist laws nor anti sexist laws covered the kind of discrimination that black women in particular were alleged to be facing. So there are just situations where black women as a class, you know, we're being plausibly discriminated against.

But because you could not look at racism and sexism simultaneously, you actually couldn't find employers guilty of that kind of discrimination, right, because they the employer could show that we're hiring white women, therefore we're not violating sexism, and we're hiring black men, therefore we're not guilty of racism. Therefore we couldn't possibly be discriminate donating against black women, which isn't logically true

or legally true. And so it was a narrow effort to come up with a intell, actual framework that could deal with that question, which isn't super difficult intellectually, I would argue. So the basic idea was black women can face a kind of discrimination that is neither racism nor sexism, but some third thing that only applies to Black women, considered as a specific class independent of black men or

white women. And since then it's blossomed into a kind of entire thought system that encompasses LGBTQ, encompasses disabilities and disability, the idea that oppression is more than the sum of its parts. If you're gay and black, you may experience something that neither a gay person nor a black straight person experiences, but something only gay black people experience. You

suffer from an additional layer of discrimination. So more than the sum of its parts is the key concept to intersectionality. My my, my critique of what intersectionality has become, and I don't think Kimberly and Kimberly Crenshaw intended for it

to become this all encompassing thought system. One of my critiques is just that it's an armchair philosophy, which is to say, it's not a philosophy that you people went out and studied the degree to which different people were oppressed in the world, gathered the data, and then plausibly constructed a theory to fit the world. It's just something

that sounded good in people's heads. Right. It sounds good to say that black women experience an extra layer of discrimination relative to black men and are therefore worse off. They experienced three kinds of termination where black men only experience one racism. But if you actually think about it, it's not obvious that black women are worse off than black men. Yes, black women are far more vulnerable to rape, sexual violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, a few other issues

I could I could think of. On the other hand, you know over ninety percent of black people in prison are men. Black men are more likely to be murdered, much more more likely to commit suicide. So the point is not that one group is worse off than the other. The point is that it's actually a very difficult and interesting question, and intersectionality dismisses that question before it's even been meaningfully asked, and says, this group, in this very

simplistic mathematical way, suffers three layers of oppression. This other group only suffers one, and that erases most of what is actually going on in the real world. Well, as a scientist, I'm trying to think of how one would even precisely quantify such things. And also, there's kind of an assumption there about kind of a hierarchy of victimhood, that we can assign quantitatively different forms of oppression and suffering to different combinations of things, and that's hard to

scientifically capture as well. And I'm sympathetic to arguments like I understand all else being equal, if I you know, it's better off being white they all else being I can I can understand scientifically even like you control for other variables. But so I really do get that. I'm sympathetic to that. I I think that it just it becomes really tricky once you start having like a hierarchy

of victimhood. That's objective like you're claiming objective truth about Like, No, if you're this combination, you're definitely going to be suffer more than they're for this combination than if you're in this combination, then this combination I'm I guess I'm wondering to the extent to which comparing different people's combinations of sufferings is the best way forward for like universal peace.

So like here, here's the thing is that there are a lot of patterns and regularities that are true about races that have exceptions. So like, the idea that you know, being a white person in America is correlated with being privileged is true. The idea that everything else held equal, having white skin rather than black skin in the average situation more often than not, with exceptions is uh, confers

an advantage that could be true probably is true. The question is when are racial stereotypes admissible and when are they not? So, I mean, I can I could easily grant that everything else held equal more often than not, having white skin is an advantage, and I could come up with all kinds of counterexamples where having black skin is an advantage. But let's just say that there are fewer of those than there are of the rule. Those

are exceptions to the rule. It's still the case that you're coarse graining a country of three hundred and fifty million people, all of whom have different experiences. You're reducing race relations to a stereotype, namely that having white skin is an advantage. Right. And the truth is stereotypes can be true more often than not, But that doesn't suggest

that we should deal in stereotypes. Right. Imagine if we're going to observe the racial patterns in crime commission or test scores, right and come up with concepts that are true with plenty of its exceptions about every race. Right. There's a reason why we've developed a norm against racial stereotyping.

And it's not because stereotyping stereotypes are always inaccurate. It's because they always missfire in enough cases, and that misfiring can be enormously insulting to the people on the receiving end of the stereotype that we we've just developed this norm of not stereotyping people, treating people as individuals. You know, like to take an example that is like close to home. I don't know if you ever get like Clary alerts, right,

I do, yeah, Barnard right or Columbia. Yeah. Yeah, So like in the area you and I live in, we we we get an alert if there's a crime that happens. By law, we have to. I think I think I noticed one white person in the last several months. Yeah, but but that that just proves the point, right, It's like I went months without seeing a single white face.

And so so here's the point. The few times in my life that I've been stereotyped for being black, I can I can understand how that stereotype may have been born of some you know, pattern recognition, or maybe it was Hollywood tropes or whatever. But let's say it just is, for the sake of argument, born of like that pattern recognition. People are always seeing black faces in the Clary crime reports. It just so happens that the demographics of crime in

this area are very racially disproportionate. That doesn't actually make it hurt less when I get stereotyped. It doesn't, because there's something about what's so hurtful about stereotypes is like we operate with this presumption of innocence sort of, and you're presuming me guilty of something that turns out not to be true, and maybe six times out of ten it would have been true or whatever, But still that

doesn't make it less hurtful. So if I put myself in the shoes of a white person who really has not seen white privilege work out in their lives, Let's say they were passed over for a job and the boss told them, I, actually you were more qualified, but we have to get more diversity. Right, that's a person who is not feeling white privilege. And let's say that person is the exception to the rule. Still, most people

are feeling it. When they hear the term white privilege, they're going to be extremely mad, and their right to be mad, because it's a stereotype. And what group around the world, what racial group has ever reacted well to being stereotyped. But if you're in what is perceived as the dominant group or the position of power, you're not allowed to call out instances that you perceive as racism against you. So some people would would make that argument

in the social justice movement. Have you crime across that argument? Yeah? Sure, yeah, yeah, see do you see a problem with that argument? Yeah? Well, so, one, there's a problem of moral logic to it. If you were to ask the question wise racism bad and come up with a philosophically rigorous answer, that answer has to appeal to some principle about race being an arbitrary fact, about someone being not sufficient reason to treat them differently.

And it's hard to not see how that doesn't how that shouldn't also apply to the quote unquote dominant group. The second thing I would say is the word group and the language of group. Really it is an abstraction. You know, there is no such thing as the white community or the black community. All of us, know, I mean, the most popular among us, know, like have like a few hundred friends. Maybe most people have fewer friends than that. So the group is just an idea in our heads.

It's not it's not really a reality on the ground. And it's useful to think and talk in terms of groups often, but it's often not. And so when I you know, when I call my friend who's you know, parents committed suicide, who grew up you know with like methadics as parents part of the quote dominant group? What what am I actually saying there that's meaningful? In what sense? Is he part of the dominant group. And in what sense is Malia Obama or myself part of the oppressed class.

So that that's another consideration, is just that the concept of groups is inappropriate and insufficient to the task of it. It's a it's a bad it's a bad constraint on the concept of racism because groups are so diverse. Within groups, it's probably more diversity than even between groups. Yeah, yeah, And then I mean, and then the final thing I would say about that is it really just is a rejection of what the civil rights movement stood for. People

resist this point. They quote Martin Luther King in half his moods and ignore most of the other things he said. If you look back, people who have used the term reverse racism without the quotation marks, which is to say, have actually worried about racism against white people in that group is not only cranky white male conservatives or whatever the stereotype is. It's also a Philip Randolph, who originated the March on Washington movement and forced FDR to integrate

defense industries and the military. He used that phrase seriously.

It's you know, Bayered Rustin, the organizer of the nineteen sixty three March on Washington, it's Nelson Mandela in the in the mid nineties, it's many other people who's who hardly had a naive idea of what it meant to suffer racism, and so it's a it's I think it's unwise to throw away the principles that such people stood for because they knew that their fight against racism depended depended upon preserving the principle that all racism is evil,

all discrimination is ultimately evil because race is ultimately arbitrary. Absolutely. You know, the thing that we share in common, and I don't think about race issues to the extent that you do this, but something that we both share is this drive for having more of a transcendent, transcendent values in society kind of values. Maybe you haven't kind of phrased, you haven't phrased in this way, but this is what I see as a commonality between us. You know, I'm

a humanistic psychologist. I'm really interested in how can we promote more of appreciation of kind of the uniqueness of each individual that we see, regardless of maybe superficial characteristics of that individual, kind of transcend kind of have universal moral principles that apply equally to everyone you know in

a society. So I think that we kind of share this, you know, humanity, humanistic perspective on things, and it's really interesting for me and quite fascinating for me to watch you kind of apply a lot of this within this domain that is so important and relevant to the lives of so many people, you know, within the race domain. But you can you can start building up these principles and applying it to anything in life. You can apply

it to gender discrimination in the workplace. I wrote an article recently arguing why no one cares that there's under representation of men in female dominated fields, you know, it seems to be so one sided, and then arguing trying to make the case for why it helps society to

increase representation. So I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like there is this common drive for a very humanitarian perspective, where like, what will rise the tide for humanity, not just what will rise the tide for one in group? Is that a fair thing to say? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I think as a matter of moral philosophy, it's very difficult to justify any point of view that does not rate individuals equally in terms of our desire

to uplift them and help them flourish. I mean, it's impossible to It would be impossible to write a really coherent and persuasive argument, and I would argue this has been true for a few hundred years now, that the flourishing of some human beings is at bottom more important than others period. You know, that's just very very difficult

intuition to pump, a very difficult proposition to defend. And we can forget that because like in the day to day, you know, in the political sphere, it's very easy to lose principles, to lose sight of important principles. M Well, I agree. I agree with that. So wokeness, let's talk about wokeness right now. What is wokeness? And do you have any criticisms whatsoever about sort of people who call

themselves woke, the kind of their ideologies. You know, I don't know exactly what wokeness is, but it's I guess my at first approximation, it's less a set of particular beliefs than a style of politics, like a sensibility or

an instinct around how to view politics. It very much goes back to what I said earlier about viewing politics as a simple good versus evil as having all the complexity of a Star Wars movie, although Star Wars can get a little bit complex because you know, Anakin becomes starth Vader and at the end when he dies, you kind of feel bad for him. So like something even much more simplistic. I think it's true sometimes is that simple,

But the vast majority of cases it's not. And the woke mindset encourages you to view things through such a simple lens. There is just the right side of history and the wrong side of history, and it's as simple as shaming the bad people into agreeing with me. The answer is obvious. That's a key part of wokeness. The moral answer is obvious. It doesn't require deep thought, and what it requires is an active pursuit of power. The people we're talking to, the people on the other side,

cannot be persuaded. That's also, I think a key feature of wokeness, and I you know, one should know. All of these features can be found on the political right as well. So wokeness is the politically left version of that Manichean mindset that doesn't roll off the tongue, as well as wokeness. We need a label for the right version of it that's not menic. You know, I hear your your argument now is there? Let's let's try to be fair. Second to people who say they're woke. What

what what points good points are they making about? You know, about people who are unwoke? You know, like, isn't it possible they are making some good points in the sense that, like, you know, a lot of us can be really ignorant of the suffering of those who have a different skin color from us, who have fundamentally different experiences because of their skin color or their disadvantage in some way that we're just not privy to. So that for you know,

aren't there unwoke people? What does that even mean? I'm really trying to think. I want to think this through and is there any anything to be salvaged from this concept at all? Do you see anything? Let me make a distinction here. People who are woke, like everyone else, are complex people. So in the moments where they're being woke, as I've like defined it in the past few minutes,

there is very little redeeming about that style of approaching politics. However, those same people often have important insights when they are trying to persuade rather than bully, they can make as important and crucial points as anyone can. And they are very, very people who have nothing at all of value to say. And so the point that there are forms of suffering that you're not likely to see if you're a white

person compared to if you're a black person. Say you're a black man living in Brooklyn at the height of stop and frisk. Let's say you're a white person who's never felt the burden of being racially profiled. You understand what the word means in the abstract, but it's never hit you, and so you assume, maybe it's a bit of a nuisance. But what are these people complaining so

much about. You don't understand the deep insult that it is to be to feel presumed guilty when you know you're innocent by someone who has the backing of the state. That's a perfectly valid point, and it's a point that the woke have been much quicker to recognize than the rest of society. It's also a point that does not need to be bullied into people. It's a point. It's a point that, like any other, can can be made

through persuasion. And it's a point that is not you know, it's not aided by viewing politics in terms of just good and evil, right, I mean, I think there are many points like this. So like, if you were to talk to a police officer and do the rather unpopular thing nowadays of looking at things from their point of view, you might find that there are similar insights to be had.

I don't know what it's like to be in charge of keeping order, to be the type of to be the person that all of society relegates the duty of, you know, dealing with the worst people in society. There are some psychopaths out there, there's some. I mean, listen, I live in New York, you know, living in New York, taking this subway every day, it does it impresses upon one the reality that human nature is not just a list of good qualities. There are just some crazy people

out there. And what the police do is there we just relegate the job to them of dealing with it so we don't have to. That's not an easy job. What does that do to a person? I don't know, that's an interesting conversation to be had. What does it do to know that, you know, roughly every day a

cop gets shot somewhere in the country. That certainly does something to the consciousness of other cops who know that even though that's probably rather unlikely to happen to them, it's still affects you in the same way that a black man seeing an unarmed black person gets shot by the cops. It can very much affect you, even if you know statistically it's very unlikely to happen to you.

So there are all of these kinds of insights that can be learned about people in a different social setting than you, and they ought to be learned through persuasion and storytelling and journalism and documentaries and conversation. But you can't get very far if you think of politics in terms of good and evil. And that is what I see wokeness as I mean the very term applies that it's religious in the sense that it's like I've seen the truth. It's not all that complicated. It's all right

here in this book. And all I have to do is get you to believe the truth has a religious quality to it. Yeah, that's not a helpful stance to take to politics. It assumes that you have nothing to learn yourself from the person that you're educating, right, which how could that be true? I don't know anyone who knows everything, so I don't, in general do exactly. I mean, most of the interesting things I've learned in life are things that I didn't believe prior to reading or talking

to someone. Yeah. Right, that's how you expand your horizon. Thank you for engaging me so nuanced about woke culture. Hi, everyone, just wanted to take a quick break and talk about my new book that's coming out April seventh. It's called Transcend The New Science of Self Actualization. Really excited to present this book to you all. It represents the culmination

of many, many years of hard work and synthesis. What I've been what I've done in this book is I've taken Maslow's classic Hierarchy of Needs and I've revised it for the twenty first century, trying to bring back humanistic psychology. I think that the field of humanistic psychology in the fifties and sixties really got a lot right about humanity and the creative possibilities of humans, as well as the

humanitarian and spiritual possibilities. Really hoping this book can present a vision of humanity that transcends us all and helps us connect deeper with each other, but also help us reach our greatest potential individually and collectively. So if you want to check out this book, you can actually pre order it right now in Amazon as well as other there's independent bookstores I think you can pre order it from and then on April seventh. Starting April seventh, that

should be in bookstores. A lot of people in wondering throughout the years how they can support me and the Psychology podcast, and here's the time. You know, you're always welcome to contribute money to the podcast, help support it. If you're a longtime listener or even short time listener, you want to not only support the podcast, but dive deeper into a lot of the concepts and ideas we talk about constantly on this show. This is a great way to do that by buying this book. So please

check the book out and let me know what you think. So, I want to talk about a topic that I know something about, to science of intelligence and gift education and discuss we and discuss real debated, hotly debated and poorly misunderstood still from a scientific perspective, in terms of the causal factors why African Americans on average are so strikingly underrepresented in gifted education programs it is, and are so

overrepresented in special education programs. This is a real important topic in my field, and we've been trying to look at it from all different kinds of perspectives, and I just wanted to get sort of your perspective on it and link it to the term you coined racial gapology, which suggests maybe we shouldn't be so focused on these gaps. So would you mind giving me some of your thoughts on this as all these other topics today, I'm just here to kind of sit back and listen to your perspective.

I'm genuinely curious to hear some of your thoughts about this well, if you don't mind me turning it back to you. I'm curious, since you pay attention to this issue closely and empirically, I want to know what you think about out the racial gap and gifted education and special at as well. So first I want to you know acknowledge I do think it's a problem. You know this, this particular disparity I do see as a problem. This difference disparity is so striking and it is something that

is such an important leverage to further education. You know, having gift education resources does give you acceleration, gives you enhancement, it gives you a leg up and getting into good colleges. It's important. And so to have like you know, we're talking like overwhelming you know, differences in this disparity. There's clearly a lot more that we should be doing. So the interesting question is what in the world, what are

these factors that are going on. So there's low hanging fruit and then there's much more complicated fruit, so to speak. The low hanging fruit is it is true that on average, African Americans don't get access to as good early childhood education programs. So from a developmental perspective on the development of intelligence, it is true and is the case that there are disparities that start very young. And as Keith Statavich has noted, the rich do get rich or the

poor do get poor. These things do accumulate. IQ is not something that just you pop out, you know, with the IQ kind of branded on your forehead, and that it doesn't change throughout your entire life. Like there is a from a within person perspective, IQ can be developed. So I think there's will hanging fruit in terms of giving everyone access to the same quality early childhood education, healthcare.

There are there are certainly economic and environmental disparities that play some role in this, but I think people have a prior that kind of need to be working with a different prior here. So it is true that if you just look at the average differences in IQ between African Americans and Caucasians on average, it's still is sizable, and if you look at the tails of the distribution, you could you could expect there to be a huge disparity in gifted education based on IQ differences alone, and

even if you don't look at any other factors. So I think that is true to a certain degree. And that's but then that that moves the buck and that you have to explain, well, what is the difference? Uh, what is explaining the i Q disparity? And that is a very interesting important question, but I think that's what needs explaining. I think that's what we really need to zoom in on, as opposed to the prior of, well, there's a disparity in gift talent education, it's because of racism.

So this on which part of it. What are what are the causes of such a disparity in i qah, so the factors that we use to accept people into gifted programs. It is a fact that African Americans on average don't do as well in those metrics, so they're not getting into the programs. I don't think that racism is one hundred percent the explanation of the disparity. The prior is really understanding, well, what are all the development

I mentioned someonell hanging fruit. You know that the early child access to early childhood education does affect development of intelligence, like pre k right, yeah, pre k, yeah, I agree, And I think you know, I don't pay super close attention, but we seem to be learning more and more about the ill effects of air pollution even at low levels, and environmental environmental factors on cognitive development and virtually anyway you slice this, the typical that you know, the media

and black kid is getting a different dose of environmental particulates in the air, and a worse dose than the media and white kid. And by the way, lead in particular, that's one example. Lead is les shown to Alan Kaufman has shown that to have a pretty sizeable effect. I mean, it doesn't explain all of it obviously. Yeah. Yeah, I think people vastly underrate the effect of rising blood lead levels on the crime wave in the seventies eighties and

on the crime decline in the nineties. There's a great book called The Lucifer Curves by the economist Rick Nevin that was really persuasive on that point. But once one has dealt with all of those things, I think realistically the disparities are going to persist. And that doesn't mean

we shouldn't deal with those things. I mean, the way I want to approach this is by de emphasizing the racial disparity and emphasizing the moral imperative of making of enhancing cognitive development for the people at the bottom of society.

I mean, so like, if we were to just focus on quote unquote white people and divide them by ancestry, so that we're talking about white Americans of Irish descent versus Polish descent, versus Italian descent versus Norwegian descent, we would no doubt find disparities in high school graduation rates, SAT scores, college admissions rates GPAs you know, all the research I've seen, whether it's income, wealth, you know, incarceration rates from one hundred years ago, back when they used

to you know, gather such fine grained data showed often massive disparities, including an IQ. You know, we could make much of those, but it's not clear that we would be doing a good thing, right, why not just you know, you know, if universal pre K is a good idea, for example, why not just do it? And you know, disparity be damned. If it's a good idea, if it's helping the people at the bottom, then we don't need to focus on the distance between them and some other

arbitrarily defined group. You know, given you know, we're slicing in the in the grand scheme of history, the way we're slicing up humans in America black versus white. These categories are I mean, they are social constructs that could be constructed differently. Could we could just compare Jamaicans to black Americans to Nigerians and there would be something equally valid about that. And when we do that for income, we find big disparities that nobody cares about. The point

is the categories mislead us. We treat them as like pre pre philosophical givens that just like essences that exist out there in the world, and we anchor our concerns about education to those categories, you know, failing to realize how arbitrary they are, and how very recently they were different and no doubt in the future they'll be different.

When we could just be focusing on those kids, whatever they look like, who are not getting adequate pre K education, who are exposed to, you know, negative environmental factors, and just institute the policies that help them, and then not focus on the gaps. That would be my it, you know, and then you don't necessarily have to deal with the very thorny questions of race and IQ and you know,

genes versus culture. I mean, that seems like that seems like a pretty sound answer in my view, but it would require getting rid of the obsession with racial gaps and outcome, which is too much for many people, too much for many people. What do you think of that? Well, I had Flynn of the Flynn effect theme, I remember that on my podcast, and he is really adamant that a lot of it has to do with black culture and black culture. So it seems like which is an

environmental variable. But I've heard you kind of talking about this in other places that maybe that my payroll. Now, what I'm trying to understand is, I mean, are you being hypocritical all yourself? Like you do talk about this topic on like every podcast I listened, and you are interested in the effect of maybe some race relevant variables on gaps. So it is your ideal world a one where then you wouldn't be talking about this topic anymore. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, yea, yeah, I do.

I do. I mean I haven't talked about that actually in a pretty long while. I haven't wrote about it in a while either, And yeah, I do think my views have evolved in the sense that I'm happy to talk about the source of the sources of disparities in general. So, like you know the fact that you know, basically every survey that asks black kids, white kids, Asian kids, how many nights, how many hours per night do you study?

What it finds is that black kids study fewer hours than white kids on average, who study fewer hours than Asian kids, which comports perfectly with my own experience having grown up in a very diverse community observing differences in home life. So that's a very strong reality it's also something that is not likely to be changed by me

talking about it podcasting. That's something so that the problem with culture is that it's only really changed I think by local, face to face kind of circumstances, Like if you're a church, you have a much better chance of changing attitudes towards homework in your town than I do

by talking about it on a podcast. I think in that sense, people tend to underrate the importance of local policies, not even policies, local voluntary network organizations, and overrate the like like what the federal or state government can do

to quote solve a problem. A lot of problems are actually, imprinciple, not in principle, but in practice, only solvable at the community level because they require that they're the kinds of problems that can only be influenced on a face to face level by people who know the particular circumstances of

a particular community. And I think culture doesn't completely but often falls into that category, which is why when I when I think, when I'm thinking about policy, I do think the focus should not be on looking at racial disparities, if that makes sense. Well, I think that there's great value in looking at policies that will rise the tide for everyone. And you said particularly those of the Yeah, and I guess the define what is the bottom? How do you define that? You know, are we talking about

just sees? Are we talking about in terms? You know? What does that mean? But so I think there's great value in that. What I'm trying too logically think through here is like, well, what if there are certain variables that are race specific though, that do create certain inequalities for particular groups. You know, are you saying we should we should ignore that? So I mean, if we're talking about if we're talking about culture, culture, Yeah, culture is

not the same as race. It's often correlated with raceh So, for example, the culture, the average household culture of the typical Nigerian immigrant to America is vastly different than the average household culture of the typical black American descended from American slavery. They are of the same race, but very different cultures in basically every way you could think of,

including attitudes towards toward education. Well, and that's primary, But I just want to clarify that's primary what I'm talking about when I talk about like I even used phrases like black culture, and people could argue, what the heck does that even mean? But I'm arguing about attitudes towards education and the kind of stigmatization that people within a certain culture might experience for expressing aspirations, particular aspirations. I

just wanted to be quote I was referring to. So, yeah, that's what I'm zooming in on, right, So you know that need not necessarily be talked about as a racial phenomenon, because it's not, strictly speaking, right, it's a phenomenon that is very disproportionate in that far more. But you know, I've never met a single Asian American kid who got teased for being a sort of traitor to his race, for liking school, or for walking around with a book, or for trying hard in class. I'm not saying it's

never happened. I'm saying it's very atypical, right, because part of that's right, whereas many black kids would get the sense or be teased for acting white if they go to a particular kind of school and if they try

very hard in school. Right, I'm trying to think what are the effects of that, like, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean the effects of that are are only bad, right, So you know, how does one So I mean that that is the kind of problem though that I think is more liable to local intervention, you know, And it's certainly a good thing to be able to talk about it on a podcast, but probably what is more responsive to you know, you know, anywhere that I'm that I'm

writing or talking, the audience is like implicitly the nation and even like parts of Europe, like the implicitly like the English speaking world. That would be different if I, you know, like if I give a talk at the local charter school, I'm much more comfortable talking about that kind of thing because it actually, like it has more of a chance of landing as as a an important causal very for positive change, because of the nature of

how like culture operates. So when the audience is like implicitly the nation, it's not that I don't want to talk about those things. It's just that I think there's a more important message, which is that racial dispair. Focusing on racial disparities as if racial disparities are a proxy for human well being is a mistake, a very important intellectual error. I'd love to see you like develop that argument even further as the years go on. I am

so curious to see where your career goes. And it's it's been a delight for me to even to see in in the what have I known you just a year maybe a little more than that, a little more than that, how your own thinking has evolved, and even your thinking on reparations has has evolved, and or at least you know has has has shifted in various ways. And can can you kind of leave right now kind of a vision you have for the good society? What I mean, what does your Martin Luther's speech look like

right now? On? You know, we were the clash to say, the Coleman Hugh speech February eighth, twenty twenty. Where's it looking right now? Well? So, we're human beings with a human nature that is part good and part bad. That's complex. Part of that complexity is an inherent urge to form tribes, to delineate my group of people, separate it from yours,

to feel more empathy for mine less for yours. That will never go away, whether that is defined by race, by interests, by religion, by politics, but that that's an instinctual and first order urge that humans have. Their Humans also have the capacity to reflect on their first order urges and emotions, and you know, rationally developed principles that make sense upon reflection, that make moral sense upon reflection.

And one of those principles is the color blind ideal. Right, And at a first order level, everyone sees race and can't help but see it, and it matters. But upon reflection, most people can come to realize, or be made to realize, or be persuaded, that race actually does not matter. It

really is, upon reflection, just your skin color. And so my vision is for more and more people to reflect, to go past the first order urge that says this is my group, that's yours, that first order urge that will always be there, and to reach the second order level, where the idea of color blindness as a moral principle guides our policymaking, guides how we seek to treat other people and demand to be treated ourselves, and guides our sense of how much we can expand the circle of

concern and empathy as one human family. Well, brother, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you felt as though your views were fairly represented and had a chance for airing because I really just wanted to kind of just sit back and kind of listen to you today. Awesome, Scott, thank you so much. I wish you well you too, thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion

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