can you lay out what you mean by the colorblind principle?

yes. so there's been a lot of confusion about what the word colorblindness mean. many people think that colorblindness means pretend you d't. but in my book, i try to get rid of that perception because we all see race. everyone sees race and help it. everyone watching this notices that i am of color and and so forth. so with the knowledge that we can all see race, we're all capable of racial bias. what i mean by colorblindness book is that we try our best to treat people without regard to race, both in our lives. the less controversial piece and in our public policy. that's what i mean by colorblind. one of the reasons the notion colorblindness has become so contrived racial seems to be rooted in what is broadly understood as anti-racism, which you also define as near racism.

you discuss two of the most high profile proponents of that ideology. robin d'angelo and max kendi. what is an anti-racism or near racism, and how did it become so influential? so what is today called anti-racism? what i call neo racism in the book is an ideology came out of well-intentioned desire to fix and address the legacy of slavery, the legacy of jim crow, persistent racial disparity. the country and starting really in the sixties and seventies and then continuing on into the eighties, there was a group of scholars that came up with something called critical race theory, which has been much in the news the past few years, but which was originally a conscious effort to redirect the civil rights movement, to reject the

rhetoric of martin luther king, bayard rustin, and other traditional civil rights heroes, to say that actually they didn't go far enough and they should have put race on the front burner. what happened is that ideology percolated inside the academy for a few decades, and then just in the past decade, starting around 2013, those ideas that had been essentially dormant in certain corners of academia academia really spread throughout society and have had vocal exponents such as mexican, mexican and robin d'angelo, who say that rather than strive for colorblind society, rather than strive for a society where someone's race doesn't mean anything at all, and recognize that race only in deep, we should strive for a society where everyone reflects deeply on their racial identity. we teach kids at a young age that their race most important

aspect of air we put in racial categories and every piece of public policy and every public policy, including emergence situation like covid, should be viewed through the lens of reducing racial disparities, that of breeding people that need the treatment the most on a race blind basis. and so you've seen it in the last decade that what was once a pretty fringe idea has become mainstream and has been spawned into a lot of democrat policy. even if the majority of democrat voters don't necessarily subscribe to this ideology. i've thought about this a lot and a lot of other writers have also tried to make sense of it. there are so many hypotheses for why so many changes in our national discourse about race and identity started to emerge around the time frame that you

also identify around 13 or the late obama era. what what do you think it is? and the past decade and change that really was so transformative. and why did these ideas that you say have been around for decades and they have been around for decades, why did they why were they able to gain such purchase all of a sudden? this moment, though. if you turn the clock back to 2012, what you find from all the polls that most americans, black and white, believe that race relations were good, that fact maybe shocking, given what race relations have felt like over the past ten years. but the first obama term was a high point for us race relations. a majority of of both white blacks beat. look at the data and something happened. around 2013 and it just began to nosedive so that by 2021, about half of the people that thought

race relations were good in 2012 and 13 at the same in 2021. so the question is what happened? people like to republicans like to blame obama and democrats like to blame president trump. but neither of those explanations actually make sense of the data. the only explanation that makes sense is that 2012 and 13 was around the time where a critical mass of americans started. instead of getting their news from the 6:00 news from newspapers and so forth, started getting their news from social media. and then the second thing that happened is that 2013 was around the time where everyone had a smartphone with with a camera on it. so you combine those two things. everyone is now a journalist and can pick up any piece of video, any altercation that happens in the street, and then they can instantly post it to social media where it can get millions of views in a matter of hours. those two things fundamentally changed the way that people

receive information. so let's say it's the year 2005 and there's a police citizen interaction that goes sideways as they sometimes do, and the officer happens to white, the arrestee happens to be black. how do you learn about that? well, a journalist comes to the scene, gets a statement from each party, and maybe it ends up on the local 6:00 news at most. you fast forward to 2013. what happens is somebody pulls out their phone, takes a 32nd clip of that interaction, which may be out of context, may leave out the 5 minutes leading up to it, instantly posted to facebook where it gets millions of views. before any journalists have had time to explain the context of the interaction and explain actually what happened, often clips can be misleading. but now it's gone viral. it's been fed into a social

media algorithm that preferentially it's that information to the people who will be most upset by it. and you just filter all of reality through those two things. aren't phone enabled cameras and social media and what you get is a population that suddenly believes that there is a spike in racist. even though racism has actually been on a steady decline for decades now. there's one response to this people often have, which is isn't it that social media showed us all the racist racism that was actually out there? so that's a reasonable hypothesis is. but it turns out that that's not true. and the reason we know that's not true is because surveys of people show that the public is deeply misinformed and far too pessimistic about the reality of race relations. the, for example, one survey found that very liberal americans believe that.

1000 unarmed black americans were shot dead by the cops every year. the year that survey was taken, the true number was 12. so people were off by a factor not of ten, but by a factor of 100. so if social media were giving us a more accurate perception of our country, you would expect people to have an accurate perception of the country. what's what's true is that social media is educating. it's making us feel that these problems are far bigger than they are. and that is what accounts for the fact that the past ten years have been a period of declining racial. what's a plausible response to that, since social media has so powerfully permeated all of our lives and is also creating this effect in many others besides what a kind of what do you do in the face of such a torrent of distortion? the very good question i would

like to say that our culture needs to adapt and develops kind of literacy to deal with the social media era. in other words, we have to learn to be less reactive very videos and we have to rewire our algorithms and not show us the most upsetting possible content. on the other hand, that's very difficult to achieve because all of the incentives of social media company to get us to click, to sell, advertise mean is is you show us the most shocking and unrepresentative slices of reality present that as if everything. so it's a very vexing problem. i think it's possible that this is just one of the huge technological transformations and it's going to have ripple effects. the television had ripple effects.

it. there's no doubt that the civil rights movement and the vietnam war would have been received differently by the public had there been no television in its probably true that the printing press in europe caused all kinds of embolization and ripple effects run. so i know what what is in store for us but we have to i have to be honest about how social media is not educating us, but messaging. there's a paradox too much anti-racism that seems a lot like what the writer rob henderson has termed luxury. luxury. he believes the policies they advocate for often end up harming the very communities on behalf whom they advocate. the movement to defund and abolish the police. for example, after the summer of 2020 comes to mind. can you expand on that paradox you do in the book? and it's quite compelling, yes.

so you give a great example. if you go back to the summer of 2020, after george floyd died and there were protests all around the world and riots, every major american city and you just went up to ask someone on the street who say reads york times, the atlantic and considers themselves to be informed that what percentage of black people do you think want less police? they would have given you some answer. that was probably the majority right? gallup did a poll at that very time found that only about 20% of black people wanted less police. 20% of black people wanted more police. and 60% of black people wanted the same police presence in their own neighborhood. and so that left about one fifth of black americans agreeing with the black lives matter perspective that the police

would be wrong and defanged, making it a minority viewpoint within the black community. now, that's not surprising because black communities are overrepresented in terms of those both perpetrate. but more importantly, this case for a crime so that the majority of black citizens who have no involvement in criminal activity are still more likely to suffer from it. and therefore the police, more than anyone. so what ended up happening is because so many places defunded, the police and the police in general were so demoralized and suffered as retirement. america had. between 2020 and 2021, the greatest single year over year increase homicide in recent american history. i think the pew research center said it was probably the greatest single year increase in homicide in a century.

that didn't happen in any of our peer countries. the reason it happened is because there was a massive anti police movement that premised its argument on the fact that black americans are demanding, which was false at the time. don't boss though it's it is strange that the movement which bills itself as anti-racist, which will quite often say things like we need to listen to people of color in in the most and most important instance of that in the past few years actually ignored the majority opinion of the black went ahead with a policy that hurt no community than the black. yeah, one of the one of the most prominent examples of that was actually in minneapolis after the death of george floyd, when homicides and shootings spiked and the black community was was begging for more policing.

yeah, there can be an odd symmetry between racism and anti-racism or neo racism, as you put it. i had the experience at a conference recently of being sorted into a so-called affinity group to facilitate discussion. the woman in charge couldn't understand how, as the son of a black man raised in the segregated south, this was such a regressive practice, in my view. but what are we to make of these? these neo segregated, these practices of neo segregation that are implemented in schools and other and other institutions as well? yeah. so when i did my orientation at columbia. in 2015, they had a similar or similar kind of practice where they would put us in a room and say, black people go in that corner, white kids go in that corner, asian kids go in this corner. hispanic is going this corner

and. the first problem is, do i choose black or hispanics? i'm both. but once you get past, you just have the odd feeling. at least i had the odd feeling that rather than connect with these ids who i'm going to try to be friends with for the next four years on the basis of my interest at that time i was into music. i was in philosophy, i was in science, and i wanted to kid act with. other students that were into those things. now i'm afraid that everyone is going to be me and first thought that they will have is oh that's a black right and that becomes a perception that prevents them from seeing you simply as an individual. i them to see me as coleman the kid that was into music philosophy and whatever else i was into not as a kid standing in the in the black corner of the room and then know them

perceive themselves racialized as well. i don't think kids need any further encouragement. tribalist, tribal ism is unfortunately a part of human and i do not think that in in a multiracial democracy, really the world's first experiment in multiracial democracy, a country that has had the most open policy of of almost any of our nation or most of its existence, that we need to help people that their identity are deeply linked, their race. i think this a recipe for disaster. but we should be doing instead is telling kids that you are who you are as an individual. yes, there may be some racists out there, but at the end of the day you should identify with the skills and values that have as

an individual and never judge anyone else on the basis of their skin color and to cordon off people into their kind of racial corners the way that allergies are doing in the name of lessening racism is actually not a very good thing for racial harmony, right? you're actually encouraging kids themselves and others primarily the lens of race where they may not come in to the college experience with that attitude. so i think that's. go ahead. well, i was going to say that's precisely it, isn't it? there's even been research and anecdotal evidence that it actually is counterproductive and specifically white people's sense of their own whiteness and inadvertently leads to an know notions of white supremacy, because people can't fixate on their identity and forever feel it's a source of inferior. hmm. yeah. i want to make one other point here. this is a very important

difference between my philosophy and the philosophy. many people. but i would call neo racist and i don't believe that kids are born racist. i actually think the vast majority of kids, though, kids have many problems. our kids are often selfish, for example, and have to be taught to. that's a very common experience for parents. children are born haring about racial identity. that's not one of the problems that children tend to have a unless they are taught to do so by adults. so i think the the promise, the hope that that have as a country is that each new generation of kids is. that they're the potential us to raise them the right way presents itself generation. and if we have more and more kids being born in situations

where they are meeting kids of different races, being friends of kids with different race, it as i did when i grew up, i had friends of every race and i did not of them as having a race. i thought of them a lot of them by their name because we have that opportunity with each generation. what we have to do not poison. we have to preserve that racial innocence as long as possible because that really is the right attitude towards race. kids are born with the right attitude, more or less, and it's adults poison, whereas the neo racists want to say, actually white kids are born racist and they need to be educated out of it from an early age possible as possible and is why you see, for example, just this. have a and francisco chronicle reporting that a a school there

spent a quarter of $1,000,000 on a program called a woke interguard which rather than each literacy and math, these kids the majority of whom are english second language panic. they instead teach them to disrupt white supremacy. right. as the students slide back on english reading proficiency and math scores. this is not necessary. it's a totally false emphasis and actually back it gets, i guess, the problem exactly backwards. the problem not that kids are born with the wrong attitude on race and we have to hammer it out of them at eight five. the problem is that are born the right way. we as a society, as adults, are hammering the wrong ideas into them. you recount the death of tony tampa and other white victims of police brutality to make the case that a commitment to universal principles such as

police should not brutalize unarmed civilians would also make black americans safer as well. right. had tony tampa's death received more attention and outrage, there's a decent chance that george floyd would still be alive today. can you elaborate on what you mean? there at tony tampa with someone who tragically died in police and it was caught on camera? the reason i brought it up is because it was very similar to the way in which george floyd died. he had a knee impa had a knee on his back some 13 minutes and actually worse than in the case of george floyd. the officers were cracking jokes about how he was losing consciousness as was happening. anyone can go on youtube and open only tampa and watch this curious. now, that video was open for the world to see before george floyd

ever got into the altercation. altercation with officer minneapolis. had people been more upset by that? had it been a national news story at all? it's quite possible that he, out of maximal restraint technique, you put in the on the top of someone's back or neck for so might have been banned the way that it was banned any after george floyd and had it been banned. possible that george floyd would have survived that altercation and would have had his life. now, why didn't anyone care about only tempers? the story was no worse. and the video was no worse than the george floyd. the reason no one cared is, is tony temper happen to have white skin and the sight of of someone with white skin having a reaction like that with the

police is not as upsetting to most americans as is when the person is black. you can understand that double standard because of american history, because people, myself included, we grow up knowing about the history of slavery and jim crow, seeing videos of black civil rights protesters, peaceful protesters being hosed down in south. and that creates a certain a template in our mind that us to respond differently. but we should really reflect on whether is the healthy template to have for the rest of. is it a healthy situation where you have a white guy killed the bike by the cops at the same way that a black guy is killed? and when the white guy is killed, it's not even a national news story. but when the black guy is killed, the entire world goes to protest. i'm not sure that this is healthy for either white americans or black america. i think that we have to

interrogate this template and ask what kind of people do we want to be going forward. do we want to be a people that enshrines and doubles down on viewing people differently as of their race? or do we want to cultivate at it that your race, no matter your race, is not who bar your race, did not influence? whether i judge the harms done as worse or better than if they had been done, anyone else, it seems to me also that there's space for a more genuine kind of solidarity to if we didn't view atrocities or abuses through the lens of identity, but looked at and looked at them in a broader way. you know, it wasn't just that george floyd was killed as a black man, was a very poor black man. and situation that he was in was a result of that kind of economic insecurity. i imagine tony temper and the

majority of the other white victims that you cite are also going to be or working white americans. and it seems that we we actually miss out on chances for solidarity by erecting these these divisions based on on physical characteristics that might even be the heart of the matter at hand. yeah, that's a great point. in my book, i argue i'm not all against policies that are meant to help people, to help people that are the unluckiest in our society but like martin luther king expounded in his book why we can't wait. i think the way those policies should be implemented are on the basis by socioeconomic poverty rather than on the basis of race to have a real conversation about the spectrum of

disadvantage as a country where there so much wealth and so much poverty. i think we have to acknowledge this point that poverty, however, like to measure it. whether that's wealth, income or some combination aren't measure that is really the crux of what distinguishes people with privilege and without it is this country. at least it does. it delineates that difference much better than race does at this point. so that's not to say that there are no differences between in terms of poverty at any policy targeted, at helping the. by definition in a overindex on helping black american is black people are more likely to poor hispanics are more likely to be poor than white americans. but at least you are therefore targeting the people who most need it. so i really have very little i

have no opposition to any evidence based policy that provably helps the poor on the basis of poverty. my opposition is to policies that use race as a replace ment or a proxy for socioeconomic because it just isn't a good one at this point. in american history. well, why that such a you know, why that's certainly the case. but why is it so much easier or more attractive for institutions, not just corporations or universities, but essentially all cultural institutions? why is it so much easier to use race a proxy for class rather than to simply address what you aptly termed, you know, the the problems and obstacles facing most unlucky among us, regardless of ethnic ancestry? well, race is visible and class is not.

so if you're if you're a company and you want to show the world that you're your company is devoted to correcting the imbalances, diety, paying attention to the class background. if your employee isn't going to send that signal, no one will be able to see that. but if you if you consider race to be equal to class, then people will be able to see you just by looking at your employees that you're a company that cares. so it works better from the point of view of optics. you use something that can in that does make a lot of sense to me. so it's a it's a cosmetic kind of fix, but it also ends up fostering a lack of genuine viewpoint, diversity in many of these institutions. at the same time. one major objection to the anti-racist or neo racist ideology that seems especially

persuasive to me is that it relies to an uncomfortable degree on the distorting lens of what we can call presentism or the reflex of seeing all past behavior, policies and practices. the biases and priorities of the contemporary era. you identified the new york times magazine's landmark 1619 project special issue as one example of this, which puts slavery at the very center of american life, both past and present. what do you object to in the way the 1619 project was handled and how it perhaps flattens such a complicated history for mainstream readership? well, besides the fact that it pushed the falsehood that 13 colonies revolted against the british in order to preserve slavery each one of its own fact checkers. in fact, that wasn't true. but over objections, they ran that anyway. the larger problem, i think, with how slavery is taught

places like the 1619 project in general is that it's not taught from a world wide perspective. this is a point that omisore made. it's a point that many others have made. when we learn about war, we don't learn only about the wars that. america participated. no one comes away from school thinking that america is the only country that has ever gone to war. but people actually do in your year, genuinely thinking that america is the only country that ever had. they don't know that. for instance, the great majority of slaves that were brought to america were not captured by. european slavers. they were captured by african and already enslaved, nearly sold europeans by other african tribes such as the dahomey tribe. that was in the recent hollywood film the woman. the me tribe was one of the most prolific enslaver of other africans.

of course, the movie in exactly that part where rather, rather downplayed it. but you know, they don't know that. they don't know that between ten and 14 million africans were enslaved by the arab world, starting in the seventh or eighth century. they don't know that there were european captured by north african pirates. they don't know that. korea has had credibly, long and robust history of slavery. they don't know that many countries in the middle east didn't abolish slavery until. the 1960. that is correct in 1960. not the. yeah, i could go on and on. slavery was. one of the worst urges in the world. and sadly, there are still many still much slave trafficking in the world today, which also doesn't quite get enough attention. but do the fact that people leave american schools annually

believing that america or even the western hemisphere was somehow unique in this scourge is it's a it's a it's a crime, our student. and it causes them to view america as equally evil. the truth of the matter is that the whole world practically, the whole world, unfortunately, and in a very ugly, was fine with slavery and the modern times. and then countries one by one, slowly abolishing it, starting around around the 1600. so you can criticize america for not being the first in that trend, but it wasn't it was nowhere close to the last. also and the whole world really we should very grateful. we should all be very grateful to live in modern times when our morals and ethics have evolved as the barbarism of, ancient history.

but we should also be educated enough to know that america was hardly unique in its sense. yet that kind of american exceptionalism that posits america uniquely evil and looks at matters through it, presents its lens also inevitably kind of is a form of narcissism that still makes americans the primary actors of human reality. if it functions in that way, kind of like white supremacy does to even in being in positing that you're the worst or the most evil, you still give yourself, you know, the primary in the human drama. yeah, that might be it. know ruefully. i don't exactly know where it comes from, but most countries in the world and most people, most asian are basically uninterested in their ancestral. i remember one time i was at dinner, i the story in the book

i was at dinner with some friends from west africa, born and raised there and i was curious, how is it that they learned about slavery? how was it their schools growing up? and they said to me, yeah, yeah, we we learned truth. we learned that there was slavery in west africa, african tribes capturing and enslaving other african tribes and then selling them to europeans. but we didn't feel any guilt about it. you didn't feel this had anything to with know our individual selves as moral beings? how could we be held responsible for things we had nothing to do with our actions made by our grandfathers and great, great. most humans worldwide have that added or austin of their past. the only exception i know are essentially europeans and and european offshoots by like america, canada, australia,

where people have quite a bit of guilt, at least on the liberal side of the spectrum. people have quite a bit of guilt for the action that occurred 100 years ago. that's a very interesting sociological fact. now what you can't say you can say that that's the right attitude. you want to say that's the right attitude and hold the whole world to that standard. that would at least be a consistent position. right. what you can't say is that americans of exceptionally little interest in historical that doesn't make sense because america actually has much more interest in its the sins of its past than. the vast majority of nation on earth. you catalog a litany of what you call race related imbalances. the disparity fallacy, the myth

of undoing the past, the myth of no progress, the myth of inherited trauma, the myth of superior knowledge. the racial ad hominem. can you walk us through some of some of these fallacies and how they operate? yeah, well, i think one is both inherited trauma. this is the idea that because let's let's put it in the first person, in my case, my ancestors were slaves. that therefore their trauma has been passed down to almost genetically. now, some people mean this just as a metaphor for how, you know, parents in dire straits. i can pass on their stress to their children simply in the way that they parent. and in that case, you may be talking just that case, you're just talking about what is to grow up in a chaotic household

is it or is. but if you really mean it. some people do that a trauma your ancestors appearance as down to sometimes people that it is a burgeoning field in biology justified it well then my last point almost whole world is going to have an enormous amount of heritage trauma not just people of color, anyone who is descended russian serfs or from. refugees of the famine, ireland or the in china in india is going to have inherited trauma. and this is going to be something that essentially the whole human race. arendt. but, you know, some people have gone through this as the that

somehow white people would have no inherited trauma. and this and blacks and hispanics would. but again this is this is again, a symptom of the ignorance and poverty of american education, simply the fact that people will somehow believe that brahma has been. to the black experience. this this, i think leads to a very toxic thinking pattern among. americans of color and a kind of dwelling. a dwelling and perpetuation of psychological trauma than accepting that. pretty much up very recently. most of the world was a terrible place. poverty abounded, injustice abounded. and we have made we've taken

steps by bit to get better as a society. we'll never get perfect. but hopefully we keep getting a bit better. but on the way there, we should be siloing ourselves into a narrative where where our our people are permanently crippled. somehow by the past. and this is the myth of inherited trauma. take one example. really perpetuate. yeah and the disparity fallacy is also really fascinating and you've written about that for some years now and you go into quite a lot of detail with research on various groups. could you expand on that, too? yes. so many people and many people in academia believe that any time there is a disparity in who income, wealth, incarceration etc., that that disparity must be due to discriminate.

whether systemic or individual. the problem with that theory is when you actually study the whole landscape of disparity, not just between different in america, but also within race find, it's just not possible that the vast majority of the parity could be due to race. there are too many disparities large ones between groups of. the same race. you'll have two groups of the same race. one will be at the very top of the income spectrum. one will be at the very bottom. yet outsiders actually couldn't tell them apart. therefore, ruminate between them. so in my i make the point that disparity are a lot like human. it's a very scary word, but majority of them are benign, which is to say not caused by racism discrimination. so if one thing that people could learn, it's that in a

multicultural society where you have different groups of different cultural backgrounds, you going to see a lot of disparity. but most of those disparities are, rather than malignant. what is also the purpose? can you steal amanda rationale for fixating on disparities? as opposed to simply doing the hard work of, i guess, bringing individuals and perhaps communities up to speed. but why fixating on the injustice of perceived disparity? yeah. so i look, i do think should care to ameliorate disparities make disparities smaller because at the end of the day whatever disparities are caused by they're an ongoing source of friction in know immunities is community with much more regardless of what is caused, it's going to cause at least potentially always a potential

source of friction. intense pain and resentment between groups. but we absolutely do want to address disparity. the disparities that are caused by by lack of education and poverty so forth. but frankly, if we can, we could wave a magic wand and get rid of all disparity. i would be for that. but in in in the real world where the means by which we get somewhere matter just as much and else, we have to keep a few things in mind. one is that we're never going to get rid of all disparity. so expect stations that do realize there are some we shouldn't violate in order in our effort to close racial gaps. we should not discriminate against individuals on the basis their race. we should instead focus on addressing poverty on on targeted pre-k and k through 12

improvements for poor americans, which will disproportionately benefit american and we should stop focusing so much on all of these policies that kick in after eight years old, like affirmative action. and i. neither of these though they occupy a lot of the national media conversation. these are all things that apply to an individual, essentially college. and after whereas we know the time, you can have the biggest impact on on the life of a of a child that comes from disadvantage between zero and in. so we need to focus on evidence backed ways to improve schooling and environments for kids for poor kids between the ages of zero and 18. and if we do that i do think many of these disparities will begin to break. and if we do it that way, and we'll have done it without

racially discriminating against anyone, and we'll have done it in a way that is more consistent with a long run ruling of race relations. so it's not that i don't care about disparity because i want to set expectations, say that all societies will have some disparities and most them are benign. and to say that in addressing racial disparity between blacks and whites, whites panics, so forth. there are certain rules that we shouldn't violate as a cure will be worse than the disease. one of the most self-defeating myths is certainly in my is the myth of no progress. many anti-racists and, progressive americans believe or profess to believe that white supremacy is in fact increasing. in a 2020 interview with goop, robin d'angelo even claimed, quote, in many ways we're in the sixties in terms of permission that's been given to explicit we

express racism, but you argue that white supremacy is a declining. yeah. robin d'angelo's about that. i mean, there are many ways that you can see white supremacy has as decline and precipitously one is just you know all of the poll results. if you go back to 1960, almost all white americans that time would have said, i don't want my id marrying a black person. now those numbers are below 10%, often below 5%. if look at if you look at the fact that, for example, in the early 20th century, a percentage there's research this a huge percentage of black people that could get away with it because they were light skinned enough would simply choose to pass as at some point because living as a black person at that time

still constrained their opportunities. now, in age, i've never heard of a light skinned black person that tried to pass it by as living as a black person was difficult. that that alone is a massive indicator of how far the country not to mention the fact that we did a two term black president which most people even in 2007 didn't think was possible because the country was too racist. and yet it happened, which apparently proved some level of progress that couldn't have happened in 1980. and so i think i think we've clearly come a huge way. there's really no level of office at this point that a black person hasn't held. there are black ceos of fortune 500 companies and people don't even experience that as as

exceptional or strange at this point point. and you turn on tv, you see black people for a now occupying every position of authority, respect, possibly imagine. and again, it doesn't even strike me as weird anymore, which is the ultimate indicator of normalization and progress. and so i think there are people that really want to cling to of the past and admit that certain victories have actually been achieved. and that's an unfortunate thing. but for the rest of us, we ought to acknowledge and give credit where credit is due to the great civil rights activists the past for having transformed this country and and claimed ground. that has been one not only are there no instances can think of of passing their high profile of

cases whites who are actually passing as black and people of color is there not some type of some type of power the victim posture or refusing to relinquish the wound that is a kind of reversal going on as. well. absolutely. i think, as you said, the only high profile case passing in my lifetime has been rachel, which was not a black person trying to live as a white person. it a white person trying to live as a black person person. now, and not only that, i frankly, in my lifetime that just well, a lot of biracial people prefer to lean into the black aspect of their identity. it's no longer a detriment and it could even be a plus in many. so how do we understand all this know it's it's it's like for

people of a certain generation must feel like whiplash to have been born in a country that was deeply racist against black people. and over the course 50, 60 years actually really transformed to a degree where a critical mass of people really want to celebrate black success and foster it and even want to want to standards give black people a leg up in a certain case, it must feel like whiplash to have grown in one in the same country and yet transform to this degree. that's not to say that racism doesn't exist. i think racism is always going to exist as frankly because, you know, humans are a fallen creatures. and some amongst us will always want to indulge in the kind of bile like bigotry which says that black people are lesser beings and there's no way to eradicate all of that. but we have really cleared we

have cleared out of mainstream our the the the white supremacy of old. and instead good institutions. we do have what i call neo racism, which is almost the opposite impulse. it's an impulse which says that white people are inherently racist and they're on the way out. and it's only a matter of time before, you know, white america simply gets, you know, white americans. time is over essentially and kind of celebrates that with a little bit of a nasty gear behind. this is what i'm sorry. yeah, this isn't this is not a healthy way. address your fellow countrymen. even if you have those feeling how does affirmative action and

recent supreme court rulings enter into that picture of of relinquishing the past and and finding way that we can move forward for for every american? yeah. so the recent supreme court ruling which ruled affirmative and constitutional. again, i think this is this is a decision that struck people as some people as a huge step back. but i don't think so. i think this is this is a step forward. it's an uncomfortable thing for many people that does, but affirmative action based upon race was not meant to last forever. it was it was meant as a kind of training to eventually be ditched on the path to a more colorblind. now, does this mean we can't use

policy to address disadvantage? no but it does mean we should do so on the basis of socioeconomic class, not on the basis race. it's not sustained for a country like america that invites its stores. the whole world, and then says, once you get here, you may be discriminated against. if you apply to harvard, you may be rejected because you're asian in a country that prides itself on judging people as individual. this is the contradiction that had to be reconciled at that at some point. and i think it was frankly overdue. if anything. so it's uncomfortable for people. i think in particular people who who at least superficially benefit from affirmative action, people that are black, people that are hispanic, who do

envision what applying to college or applying to jobs, would like without affirmative action as it advanced it, it acts to our advantage. but if we are being completely honest, is it not better that such policies operate on the basis of socioeconomic class rather than race? i would say say, jane, can you give some closing thoughts on what we could do to reclaim the term anti-racism. yeah, well, i think we have to return the definition of racism that was used of by civil rights leader martin luther king said that racism is doctrine, congenital inferiority of a people. that's the kind racism that civil rights movement thought. and i think that's fully destroyed at least the bulk of it.

so if we return to that racism that of racism, which can be applied and is applied to every group of people, in different measure. we have to stand against that kind of racism. whoever is for it, you have to stand against it when it comes of the mouth of those some some idiot calling black the n-word. and we have to stand it when it comes out of the mouth of some ivy league professor talking about how white people are all evil. you have to stand equally against all of this stuff as. a signal to our. our fellow americans that we will we will just not tolerate anybody denigrating whole people, rather than judging people as individuals. this is something that we have to continually annually brine. it was the ethos of, the civil rights. and i think we each time that we

restore it as our north star when we're talking thinking about the issue, race, racism, racial inequality. coleman it's always a to talk to you. thank you so much.