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Coleman Hughes is a writer and the host of Conversations with Coleman. He is the author of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Coleman Hughes explore the legacy of slavery in the United States, the war on drugs, and if systemic racism exists.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Coleman, I know you've been in Austin for the last few months teaching a college class. In this class and in some of your writing, you’ve been trying to think about the legacy of slavery, something that obviously shaped American history in a very profound way and continues to have real impacts today, though perhaps not quite in the ways that people imagine. What is your thinking on the subject, as informed by your research and teaching?
Coleman Hughes: First of all, I was very honored to get the rare opportunity to teach at the University of Austin, a new college in its first year right now. And I was teaching college freshmen. They weren't all the typical age. Some of them were older. But I wanted to create the course that I would have wanted to take at their age. When I was at Columbia, I took several classes on race-related issues and most of them had texts from the center left to the far left. I wanted to create a course where you could read everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates on the left to Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele on the right, where the perspectives were balanced between those two poles and framed by the overarching question: What is the legacy of slavery? This question gets bandied about so often that we rarely stop to think about what exactly it means.
I frame the phrase “legacy of slavery” in the course to mean whatever the long-run consequences of American slavery are. Then the question becomes, what gets included in that and what doesn't? Is mass incarceration—the fact that America has such a high per capita prison population—part of the legacy of slavery? You'll get people like Michelle Alexander who say yes, and you'll get other people who say no. The breakdown of the black family structure and—to some extent—the working-class white family structure gets included here as well. That refers to the high percentage of fatherless homes in the black community. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said yes (it is part of the legacy of slavery) in his famous report in the 60s. Herbert Gutman said no in a book in the 1970s. In my class, that was one week: reading Moynihan's perspective and then Gutman's perspective. Ultimately, the students can decide what they think for themselves. The idea of the course is not to teach them. Obviously I have my own biases and opinions that I don't hide, but it's really much more about teaching them how to think about all of these arguments and how to evaluate them critically, rather than teaching them what I think is the truth. So, I had a great time teaching that. I think it's an enduring and very important topic.
Mounk: First off, I agree with that pedagogical approach. When I teach about the identity synthesis and “wokeness”—the subjects of my last book—I do the same thing. I have a week, for example, on “cultural appropriation,” where I look at both the strongest philosophical arguments for why we should be worried about it—as some authors argue—and the best arguments that celebrate cultural mixity as a positive feature of a diverse society. I don't want the students to come out with my opinion. I want them to engage seriously with the material and, ideally, to change their mind in some way. When you haven't seriously thought about a topic before and then engage with it at a deep level, hopefully you will change your mind. That's my ambition.
Let's jump into some of those debates. I think it would be really interesting to hear what you think the strongest arguments on both sides are, and also where you come down. You've mentioned two to start off with. When you look at the high incarceration rate and the high rate of violent crime in the United States, are these a downstream impact of slavery? Or are they rooted in other aspects of American society, like individualism, the Wild West, or other factors that alternative explanations might point to?
Hughes: When it comes to crime and incarceration, I think this is one area where the legacy of slavery has very little to do with our modern social ills. Here’s how I think about it. You can map most countries using two dimensions: crime on one axis and state capacity on the other. Most of Europe falls into the low-crime, high-state-capacity category. By state capacity, I mean the government’s ability to actually put people in prison if a crime occurs. Then you have places like, until recently, El Salvador, and much of Latin America, which have high crime and low state capacity. They have a lot of crime and probably should have larger prison populations, but cartels are running wild. America is one of the few countries in the world that has both high crime and high state capacity. The best empirical research on why mass incarceration happens attributes half of it to a genuine increase in crime. Not drug crime, or low-level drug crime, but the crimes people should really be in prison for. It attributes roughly the other half to prosecutorial discretion, which means county prosecutors getting tougher over the years with decisions fully within their power, such as whether to charge someone with a crime in the first place. So, in my class, we read Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow, and we read John Pfaff's Locked In. I think Pfaff definitely wins the argument on the empirical side.
But when it comes to the aspects of mass incarceration that do touch on racial identity and racism, I think Michelle Alexander and many others have made a true and important point. After the 60s, there were many Republicans and Republican strategists that absolutely did try to appeal to Southern voters by replacing “segregation forever” with more anodyne-sounding slogans that were meant to get at the same racist impulses. With the Southern strategy, you have several Republican strategists—at the very least Lee Atwater and one other—basically admitting that this was a conscious strategy, and that this was part of why they viewed the war on drugs as a good thing. And there’s no doubt that this appealed to some voters who saw the war on drugs as basically an excuse to lock up and control black people after the end of Jim Crow.
My pushback to that argument would be that when it comes to policies that have bipartisan and multiracial popularity, different groups have their different reasons for supporting them. To put the microscope on a certain kind of Republican reason for supporting the war on drugs doesn’t actually get you far in understanding why the war on drugs happened, why it was popular with the black community as well, and, more importantly, what the impacts were. To use an analogy, different constituents have different reasons for favoring high levels of illegal immigration. Business interests support it because of cheap labor, while people on the far left support it for various humanitarian reasons. Their motivations couldn’t be more different, yet they end up supporting the same reality for completely different aims. To me, the more interesting question is not just why different groups support a policy for their own reasons, but what the actual impact of the policy is. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, aside from all the empirical sleight of hand in that book, makes the mistake of obsessing over the mindset and intentions of a subset of Republicans, rather than examining the mindset of everyone who supported the war on drugs and the impact of the policy itself.
Mounk: Okay, let's dive into this a little more deeply. I'll start with an anecdote. I spent some time in Hanover, New Hampshire a couple of years ago, and I was sitting in a bookstore whose selection is very well curated to the left and far left, with impeccable progressive taste. They also have very nice coffee shops, so when I'm up there, I tend to sit in one and work.
Hughes: Progressives do make the best coffee.
Mounk: That is true. At one point, I overheard a conversation where someone, who must have been a Dartmouth student, came in and asked a very sweet young woman at the counter, who may also have been a Dartmouth student, about Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. That person typed into the computer and said, “No, we don't have any copy in stock. Do you want to order it?” And the student said, “Sure, yeah, if you could order it, that would be great.” Then she typed some more and said, “I'm sorry, that appears to be on our do not order list.”
I asked why this book was on the do not order list of this impeccably progressive bookstore, and I got a very sweet response: she didn’t really know and could ask the owner. I never followed up. To this day, I’ve been puzzled by what on Earth Michelle Alexander could have done to end up on the naughty list of a progressive bookstore.
But I think we've been assuming a little bit of familiarity with that book. It's a book that was published through a small publisher. It sold very few copies at first, and then was a slow-growing, huge publishing success. It sold many thousands and probably tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of copies over the course of last year. As the title suggests, the main thesis is that the real function of mass incarceration in the United States is to reestablish the Jim Crow system in some kind of way. Expand for us a little bit on what the main argument of that book is and about the empirical sleight of hand that you referenced.
Hughes: In this book, Michelle Alexander makes two big claims. One is that the reason for mass incarceration is the war on drugs. What she means by that is, in the 70s and 80s, all over the country, there was a war on drugs, which she dates either to Reagan or to Nixon. She sees that as responsible for the massive ballooning of the prison population in America between roughly the 1970s and 2005 or 2010, when the population peaked and started to decline. According to her, politicians just started locking up black men, basically creating a moral panic about low-level drugs like marijuana, and that's the reason we have mass incarceration.
Her second claim is that the war on drugs was an extension of Jim Crow by other means after Jim Crow was destroyed by the Civil Rights movement. All of that racist energy got re-channeled and re-directed into the war on drugs, and it was a way of controlling young black men, putting them in a status situation similar to where they would have been under Jim Crow. Because once you're a felon, you can't vote, similar to how you couldn't vote under Jim Crow. You were stripped of certain rights and so forth.
The big problem with this is that I think I could say it more than borders on and really is basically intellectual malpractice. She talks only about the federal prison system. Of all the prison inmates in the country, only about 13% are in federal prison. Federal prison is where Sam Bankman-Fried is because financial crimes have no state borders. So, if you're trafficking drugs across state lines, for example, that falls under federal jurisdiction. But that's a minority of the people in prison, and federal prison overrepresents drug crimes. 87% of prisoners in America are in state prisons. The state prison system is virtually unrelated to anything Congress or the president can do. It's controlled by state legislatures and governors and so forth. Not only that, but about half of people in state prisons are there for violent crimes. Something like 20% or less are there for state crimes. So, the numbers just don't add up. There's no way you get to mass incarceration with the number of people who are in prison for drugs. It just doesn't make any sense. It only makes sense if you ignore 87% of the picture, which is almost the entire picture. That's what she does in that book. A lot of people got the false impression that the war on drugs was related to mass incarceration, which it really was not.
Mounk: One of the problems with this, which is very prominent in progressive analysis of policy—but of course there's an equivalent on what James Lindsay might call the “woke right”—is that if you have the wrong analysis, you're just not going to solve the problem on the basis of that analysis. Take the gender pay gap, for example. A lot of people are under the misimpression that the gender pay gap is mostly due to women doing exactly the same job and just getting paid less than men doing the same job—either because employers discriminate against women or because of social norms, like women being less good at negotiating, and so on. That probably explains a small part of the difference, but the primary gap is much more structurally complicated. It has to do, for example, with the fact that in professions like the law or other kinds of professions where you need to make partner normally in your 30s, often, women who choose to have children are off the partner track and they just never recover that earning potential. That's a genuine problem. It's a genuine injustice. Women should be able to have kids in their 30s or in their 20s and nevertheless go back to the partner track and be able to make that contribution to the economy. But if you have an overly simplistic analysis of what caused the problem, it is not going to solve it.
The same is true for mass incarceration. If you claim that a huge percentage of the prison population is made up of nonviolent drug offenders, and you're picturing the local guy who likes pot being jailed for decades, then you might think, well, let's fight to really cut down on the prison population. But that's just not going to work. I think we saw that in an interesting way when the Biden administration, clearly motivated to make a significant—though still symbolic, given the overall number of prisoners—move toward de-incarceration, pardoned a bunch of people. And they ended up pardoning people that caused a lot of outrage, even and especially among progressives who said, No, no, no, those are the bad guys. How can you be pardoning those people? But that's in part because it's not all that easy to find people in federal prisons who have very long sentences for obviously trivial crimes.
That’s before we even get to what I think is a further level of analysis, which is that a lot of the time, because of the genuinely unjust role that plea deals play in the United States, where defendants are under enormous pressure to accept a deal rather than risk even longer sentences at trial, what they are nominally in jail for often isn’t what the state originally believed they had on them. So, even some of the people who are in jail nominally for nonviolent crimes were persecuted because the state thought that they had committed violent crimes. That's an additional complication there. What does that mean? If you think that part of Michelle Alexander's story is wrong, what is the actual underlying story?
Hughes: The short answer is I don't know. But I do suspect it has deep cultural roots and also has to do with immigration. If you just look at the crime rate among white northerners as opposed to white southerners, there has always been a disparity where the South has been more violent. That has deep cultural roots, maybe even having to do with where immigrants came from in different parts of the British Isles. People bring cultures with them and you see certain immigrant groups have virtually no crime, while throughout American history other immigrant groups have had very high crime. So I don't actually know what the answer is in the abstract. One puzzle is that the biggest crime wave and decline in American history—starting around 1963, peaking around 1990, and then reversing, with the murder rate skyrocketing and then coming all the way back down—doesn’t have one accepted explanation. I think one of the great scandals of social science is that such a massive story still isn’t well understood. So, I can't really give any answer that's better than the few books I've read on the subject, which amounts to 10 possible different causes and a lot of question marks.
Mounk: Yeah, it strikes me that dieting too seems to be one of those academic fields where we just don’t have any good answers. We don’t really understand how nutrition works, the consensus changes every 10 years, and it often feels like we should just throw up our hands. It’s strikingly similar in criminology, to some extent. One of the basic questions that I've been asking myself is not just why there was this very rapid decline in crime in the 90s and early 2000s across the United States. It’s also, why was it so much stronger in some places than in others? So if you look at the big cities on the East Coast in 1990, say, or 1985, New York City, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia were genuinely dangerous places with very high murder and violent crime rates. Over the next 30 years, New York City and Washington, D.C. completely transformed. Philadelphia becomes much better, but not quite to the same extent. Baltimore improves a little, but now is clearly the most dangerous out of those four cities in a way that wasn't true 30 or 40 years ago. Why is that? You'd think that we’d have a good answer for why the trajectory of Baltimore is so different from the trajectory of New York City. I've asked that question to a lot of people and I don't really feel like I have a good answer.
Hughes: It's one of the great puzzles and there's no doubt that it's enormously consequential, because this goes back to what you said earlier. So many people, especially on the left, sincerely believed that you could shrink the prison population by making marijuana legal. The truth is the prison population has shrunk. In fact, for black men in their 20s, it was cut in half between 2001 and 2017, which is amazing. But, that was largely the result of an actual decrease in crime. So, whatever actually decreased crime is the thing that prison abolition activists should care more about, and it's just not well understood.
Mounk: That's very interesting. What do you think that means for policy going forward if we want a state that ideally has high state capacity and low crime, a place where if you commit a murder, you're much more likely to go to prison than you are right now? America's murder clearance rate is way lower than Germany's or Japan's, for example. We want those murderers to be in prison. But ideally, we also want fewer murders in the first place so that there's not a ton of people sitting in federal jail for violent crime. I know that that is a huge policy prescription, but even if we're not able to completely change that equilibrium, what are your thoughts?
Hughes: There are two things. One is, I think I agree with the instinct—I'm taking this from Alex Tabarrok, the economist—that there should be more police and less incarceration. Meaning, every time we've tried de-policing a city, it's been a disaster and there were enough experiments after 2020, I think, to prove this for all time. If you cut the police force, you're just going to get more crime and you're going to get 911 ringing off the hook and people waiting two hours for a police car to arrive long after the scene is cold. Criminals are not idiots. They understand the incentives. They understand that at some level, it is cops versus robbers. If there's half as many cops, they have a much better chance of getting away with crime. That said, to take a high-profile example, when I hear that Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to over 20 years in prison, it strikes me as harsh. It strikes me as unnecessarily long. The research has definitely shown that there are diminishing returns to longer sentences in terms of whether it actually deters crime, because people don't really consider seriously the possibility of going to prison for decades as opposed to just years. It's arguably inhumane to put people in prison for that long except for repeat violent offenders. That would be one reason for my instinct towards more police and less prison.
Then the second thing would be, John Pfaff, probably more than anyone, made the argument that prosecutorial discretion is really the heart of the issue. There’s no oversight, it’s incredibly difficult to study, incredibly difficult to reform, and prosecutors have an enormous amount of power. Nobody really knows what goes on in prosecutors’ offices except the people who work there. And to the extent that their incentives have changed a lot over the past 50 years and pushed them to be tougher and tougher, we don’t really understand why that is or how to change it, even if we wanted to. So, understanding what’s going on with prosecutors seems to be important.
Mounk: By the way, that implies that part of the problem may be too much democracy. One obvious difference between prosecutors, and in some places judges, in the United States versus other countries is that they are often elected here, whereas they aren’t elsewhere. So, rather than mass incarceration being some kind of foreign imposition, either by the political system or by an ethnic majority, what's often happening is that communities are voting for those prosecutors. Now, sometimes that may be communities that are 60% white and 40% black, and maybe there's some kind of racial dynamic there. I'm sure that's true in parts of the American South. But in many places, as you were saying, ethnic minority communities strongly supported harsher sentences.
Certainly, the incentive for those judges and those prosecutors is always to say, Do I want to take a risk on someone who has committed a violent crime, but who I believe is unlikely to reoffend, who seems to be learning the lesson, and who might be able to reintegrate into society if given a relatively lenient sentence? But then they think, maybe it’ll cost me reelection. Better to put them in jail for a safe amount of time. I don’t want my career to be ruined over this.
Let's just switch to the other topic you mentioned, which I think is really interesting: the disintegration of—originally “the black family”—but then a lot of working-class families across the United States. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous (or infamous) report about the black family, he was accused of harboring some kind of racist motivation or of speaking about the topic in ways that were very racially charged. But one of the very interesting things is that all of the observations he made about the black family then very quickly were emulated among lower-class white families. So, the average white family, particularly ones where the parents don't have college degrees, particularly ones that have origins in Appalachia or Scots-Irish, have much higher rates of family disintegration than black families did at the time. That was what Moynihan wrote in his report. Tell us about that phenomenon, and the ways in which it might or might not be tied to the legacy of slavery.
Hughes: In 1965, I believe, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous (or infamous) report on “The Negro family,” as it was called at that time. It's important to understand the context of the conversation he was entering. He was entering right on the heels of the high point of the Civil Rights movement, two years after Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech, just after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, right around the time the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed, and before most of the worst riots of the later 60s that really dampened optimism for race relations. So, he's coming in at a high point of optimism about the moral progress America can make on the race issue and basically taking a huge crap all over that optimism by saying, essentially, that black people are never going to experience actual economic and social equality with all of this happy legislation unless we figure out what is going on with the family structure. He basically sounds the alarm about a crisis of fatherlessness, saying that no amount of legislation or happy talk is going to actually translate into economic equality if we don't solve this issue.
This was unwelcome for many reasons for different parties. Obviously, it's unwelcome to people who want to claim victory in the Civil Rights movement, because he's essentially saying that what they accomplished matters a lot less than they think it does. Secondly, he is pointing to a reality that a lot of people are uncomfortable looking at. If you go up to a typical person on the street and say that a man abandoned his family, most people wouldn't even be tempted to think one step beyond, Well, he's just an asshole. He abandoned his kids. What more is there to talk about? Obviously, that becomes very touchy because then black people feel their community's being blamed. White people feel they're being accused of racism for pointing it out. Moynihan comes in the middle and tries to make this argument where he’s pointing to the phenomenon, calling it a crisis, and saying it undermines the possibility of equality. But he’s also saying that the reason for it is the legacy of slavery. He’s not claiming it’s due to some character defect or innate flaw in black people. He’s very clear about that. He has a whole chapter in his report on it. In fact, it’s the second or third chapter.
Mounk: Spell out that argument for us. What exactly is it about slavery that he says causes this cultural phenomenon in the 1960s?
Hughes: It's very much under-theorized. But it's something like, basically, black families were routinely separated during slavery. This is a fact. People often grew up several plantations, or many miles, away from their own parents. De facto, husbands and wives were separated. It was one of the most tragic aspects of slavery. You can read about this in Frederick Douglass’s memoir. He met his mother only once or twice in his young life, during visits to a plantation fairly far away. This was common. The idea is that this stamped a kind of cultural pattern of broken families that we trace down to the modern day. Then he has a whole section where he talks about the fact that because Brazilian slavery was Catholic, it was a lot nicer and that didn't happen there. And because American slavery was Protestant, it was a lot crueler and that's the reason it did happen here.
Mounk: I imagine some historians of Brazilian slavery would have something to say about that.
Hughes: Yes, yes, definitely. He really bases this on a few block quotes from one book that is really dubious. I also can't help but notice that he himself is Catholic. So, he may have a bias towards seeing Catholicism as more humane than Protestantism. But in any event, he says that slavery happens, and then Jim Crow happens, which humiliated the black male in particular—not the black female. This is his Freudian, gendered analysis of what Jim Crow did to black men. Because at some level, he wants to explain: why is it that black men, in significant numbers, abandoned their families, while black women didn’t? What’s going on here? There must be a gendered aspect. He says something like, it’s in the nature of the male to strut, to be prideful, to stick out one’s chest. And Jim Crow, by insisting on a subservient, second-class, don’t-make-eye-contact attitude, humiliated the black male in a way that it did not humiliate the black female. This is his argument. Combined, all of that leads to black men having a higher rate of abandoning their families. He doesn't blame them. He blames slavery. None of that actually helps him in the court of public opinion where he is called a racist nevertheless.
But what's interesting to me is if you look at the numbers he was worried about, they were absolutely nothing compared to what the numbers would be 20, 30 years later. He was really seeing a crisis at its very beginning and sounding an alarm. He was made to look totally prescient by the trend line that eventually happened. To close the loop on this, about 10 years later, in the 1970s, this guy Herbert Gutman spent 10 years doing research on this question, because he was provoked by the Moynihan Report. He gathers every scrap of evidence on the black family structure and actually finds that this trend didn't really start until maybe the 1920s or 30s. Before that, all the available data suggests a pretty similar rate of fatherlessness between black and white communities. He finds—which I think is a solid finding—that because slavery broke apart black families, the moment that slavery ended black people were incredibly eager to reconstitute their families. They were like Django Unchained, trying to find their husbands, wives, and children.
In other words, slavery is just as likely or more likely to create a backlash after it’s over than to stamp in a lasting pattern of not forming families—similar to how, because slaves weren’t allowed to read, the moment they were freed in 1865 they became obsessed with learning to read, precisely because it had been denied to them during slavery. Gutman writes his 400-page book basically laying into Moynihan, though he doesn’t really offer a strong explanation for why this disturbing trend began. Sadly, this is another example like the crime decline, where I don’t think social scientists have a clear understanding of why we began to see such a high rate of fatherless homes.
Mounk: This is certainly one of the areas where I’m initially very sympathetic to the idea that the legacy of slavery may have made that difference. The ways in which black families were torn apart during slavery is incredibly cruel. It's plausible to think that that might have had an impact on cultural norms in some kind of way. But as you're pointing out, there are these two pieces of evidence that seem to speak against that. The first is that it's hard to fully understand why slavery would start to produce that effect in the 1920s and 30s and then accelerate it over the course of the 20th century. If until around 1920, let's say, the rates of black family cohesion are very similar to the rates of white family cohesion, you'd have to find a quite subtle argument to try and explain that. Perhaps somebody has done so, but it's not obvious what that might be.
The second point is one I mentioned earlier. When you look at the mid-1960s and say fatherlessness is more prevalent in the black community than it is in the white community, and you seem to have this very stable white family and you start to see a kind of degradation of the black family, then factors that uniquely explain the black family might seem to be very pertinent. But if you look over the following decades, you see parallel developments—particularly among the white working class. Today, when you look at Scottish-Irish families without a college degree, the rates of fatherlessness are likely much higher than they were in the 1960s, when Moynihan was expressing concern about the same trend in black families. I don’t know the exact statistics, but that would be my understanding. Well, that truly is not because of slavery. So, at least to some extent, there has to be a common cause that explains those phenomena. The one obvious explanation one might want to use is that it's something to do with the advent and then the decline of the industrial society. There's something about both rapid industrialization and then, of course, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs that changes the environment in such a way that it's easier to abscond from your family without social judgment.
Later on, perhaps it becomes very hard to hold down jobs that give structure and meaning, particularly to men without college degrees and that can tempt them more easily into alcoholism and drug abuse and other such things. Some conservatives might make arguments about the welfare state, but it just becomes easier for women to subsist without the father present and that, therefore, one of the adverse consequences of a genuinely humane institution of a welfare state might actually be to encourage that kind of absenteeism. But you're saying that you think it remains for the most part, an unsolved puzzle.
Hughes: Yeah, I do. But I think I definitely tend towards the explanations that look at urbanization, industrialization, and deindustrialization. The welfare state arguments could totally be true as well. It's just that when you get welfare reform in the ‘90s, you don't really see a reversal of the trend. So it's complicated. I don’t think it’s well understood, but I can see how, if working-class men have access to valuable jobs for a few decades—jobs that allow them to support families—and then that gets taken away too quickly for them to adapt, it can have serious consequences. Men often need structure and responsibility, and when they lose that, and can’t retrain or find new ways to support their families, many do end up turning to alcohol. We’ve seen that happen in so many communities across America, both black and white. It’s a pattern, and I don’t think it’s as well understood as it should be.
Mounk: So far we've sort of double clicked on two very interesting subtopics of a larger question of the legacy of slavery. What takeaways do you think we should draw about the question more broadly? I'm torn on this because I see in many aspects of American life that slavery obviously does have a massive influence until today. And given how shaping a role it played in the history of a country, that is perhaps unsurprising. One topic, for example, that may seem trivial and may seem a little bit abstruse, but where I really feel that is in the difference of the attitude of American women and particularly perhaps American white women about hair. In Europe, curly hair is often seen as something positive, perhaps a little bit “exotic”—something that many women take pride in. And I'm just struck by the extent to which a lot of Americans think of curly hair as somehow unprofessional, as somehow something negative. It strikes me that the likely explanation for that has to do with racialized attitudes, the history of race relations more broadly, and slavery specifically in America, and that can wind itself into all kinds of elements of American life in ways that might not be obvious.
Now, on the other hand, I think that there are real problems with the invocation of terms like systemic racism or structural racism to explain all kinds of things in a hand-wavy way that anybody who's interested in a firm understanding of the social world should be very skeptical about, precisely because it is plausible that slavery may have had influence on so many different aspects of American life, it becomes tempting to just look at anything that's happening in society and say, that must be because of structural racism. But as we learned when we were thinking about Michelle Alexander's explanation for mass incarceration, if you just wave your hand and say structural racism, A, it's very hard to know what to do about that, and B, it may be the wrong explanation, in which case you're not going to fix whatever underlying problem or injustice you're addressing. So what advice would you give to listeners or to readers about how to think about this question more broadly and the extent to which we should be alive to the possibility of things like structural racism, the extent to which we should be careful about using those terms because it may occlude rather than help our understanding of specific social problems?
Hughes: In my view, structural and systemic racism are fuzzy, cloudy concepts where 99 out of 100 times I hear them used, I'm not sure what the speaker actually means. And it's not because I'm stupid, it's because they don't quite know what they mean.
Mounk: As a side note, this has become a general intellectual assumption of mine, and it's generally different from when I was 18 or 20 years old. Back then I assumed that if somebody says something I don't fully understand, it must be because I'm an idiot. Now I understand that there's many domains in which that's the case. If somebody talks about the algorithms behind AI in a highly technical lecture or podcast, it's likely because I haven't done the work to fully understand the mathematics of artificial intelligence and it's not because they're being deliberately unclear. But when we're talking about many social questions, or many philosophical questions, where both I have more background and where I think it's possible to express yourself in such a way that non-experts can understand what you're saying, if I genuinely just don't get what somebody is saying, I have come firmly and strongly to assume that it's because they’re deliberately or inadvertently being confusing—or perhaps confusing themselves—not because I somehow am not smart enough to understand what they're saying.
Hughes: Yeah, same. So just to put some meat on that, if I ask someone, what's your evidence of systemic racism?, the most common response I will get is statistics about how black people are 14% of the population but 30 some odd percent of the incarcerated population, or are 14% of the population but hold single digit percent of wealth, for instance. And those disparities are interesting and worth discussing, but they are not necessarily caused by systemic racism. And obviously Thomas Sowell has written ten different versions of the same book just showing that it is the most common thing in the world for ethnic groups and races to have different statistical outcomes in circumstances where discrimination can't be the cause. And so that's actually to be expected. It's a further question whether that's the result of discrimination or not.
Secondly, if I ask you, what do you mean by systemic racism?, someone might give me a study about how people have implicit biases, or white people on average have these biases that have been shown in laboratory settings and so forth. I think a lot of that evidence is suspect, but some of it is very much real. But then I don't quite know what you mean by the systemic part of systemic racism. I understand what it is for someone to have a racial bias. If you enter a shop and buy some chips and then a black kid enters a shop and buys some chips and they think he's stealing but they don't think you're stealing, bam, that's just racism. That may not be ideological racism, but it's a racist behavior. It's a biased behavior. If what you mean by systemic racism is just that multiplied throughout society, then we're not actually talking about systemic. We're not talking about a system. We're talking about people and their feelings and beliefs, I think. The purveyors of the systemic racism concept tend to be very unclear about what it is that they are talking about. And there's something about it that is hand waving in a way because this is one of those situations where, because academia is so left wing, there are “experts” that can go for decades just saying the term structural racism and never having a student or professor ask hard clarification questions about what they mean. So you can just go a long time without realizing that you have no idea what you're talking about, or that you actually can't define the concept.
In Ibram X. Kendi's book How to Be an Anti-Racist he deliberately avoided using the terms structural racism or systemic racism in the whole book because he found that he couldn't explain them to normal people. I thought that was very telling, because it's actually not rocket science—it's not the finer points of artificial intelligence. If you can't explain to a normal person what systemic racism is, then it's possible that it's just a bad concept, so it doesn't really mark out anything that isn't already marked out by other simpler words.
Mounk: How do you think people who might experience discrimination should think about particular situations they experience, in which that may or may not be what's going on? I've asked myself that question sometimes growing up in Germany as a Jew, where there's good reason to think both that there are some prevalent antisemitic attitudes and that there's a very strong social taboo to expressing them. Of course, one difference is that if I walked into a shop or bakery for the most part people had no idea that I was Jewish, But I was thinking of it also the other day in the context of racial minorities, perhaps particularly African-Americans in the United States, for a very stupid reason which is that I accompanied a friend to a USPS at a small town post office in Jackson, Wyoming, which is a very white place—and both I and my friend are white. The person in the post office just treated us incredibly rudely. It just really felt like she was going out of her way to be unhelpful and unpleasant to us. And of course, given that she was white and we were white, our assumption was this is just a really unpleasant lady or she's having a really bad day or whatever it is. But it's nothing to do with our race. I thought, if I was black and I had that experience, I would probably jump to the conclusion that she must be a racist. And it would be very reasonable in that situation to jump to the conclusion that she was being racist because her behavior was just sort of so needlessly antagonistic.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that people, whether it's Jews in Germany, or from the United States, or other racial minorities in other contexts, should jump to the conclusion that nothing could ever be discrimination because that would also be naive. In this particular case, this woman just was a particularly unpleasant employee. But in other cases, that really might be what's going on. In your own life, what advice would you give to other people? What do you think about this kind of structure, beyond the obvious recognition that that's actually one of the injustices of living in a society where some amount of racial prejudice persists? That one of the injustices is that I can go into that interaction and come out of it and think, well, that lady sucks, and sort of move on with my life. And somebody else hopefully would also move on with her life, but would have to ask themselves that question. Have they been targeted in this kind of specific way that somehow does feel more meaningful than just having to interact with somebody who's bad at the job and an unpleasant person?
Hughes: That's a tough question. My view is that, in order to be successful in life, you have to have a glass half-full attitude. It helps to have a glass half-full attitude. It's not going to help, when you're treated shitty in life, to assume that the person is also a racist in addition to being just a dick. Because then you create a model of society that is about rejecting people like you, which makes it—I guess you could react to that multiple ways. You could say, well, I'm going to try even harder, even though they don't like people of my skin color, but the more human and typical reaction is to reject the thing that you think is rejecting you. What bothers me is that, in private, black people and other minorities, I think, rarely challenge each other about those interactions. There's a lot of affirmation of, like, yeah, this racist USPS lady treated me like shit. No one ever says, well, how do you know she was being racist? How do you know she wasn't just a disgruntled, sad, pissed off USPS employee, like many of them are?
There was an interesting Hidden Brain episode about this where they came to the conclusion that it actually benefits you to take the glass half-full attitude towards these interactions because then you have a higher sense of agency, a higher sense of the idea that I am able to succeed in the world if I keep trying to do things and putting myself out there, putting myself in situations. That is extremely healthy if you want to become wealthier, if you want to get a better job, you have to have that sense that I can keep doing at-bats at this game of life and it's going to lead somewhere. And the more you think people hate you because of your race, the less likely you are to want to do that. The more likely you are to become bitter and pessimistic. So my view would be, yeah, whenever someone is mean to me, unless there’s just like a clear comparison case, like he treated the guy in front of me really nice who was white and then treated me shittily—unless there's a comparison case like that, I assume people are just in a bad mood and I move on with my life.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Coleman discuss race-related polarization, the Trump administration’s war on DEI, and how the Democrats should respond. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
