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Black Intellectuals Discuss Our Current Predicament
There has been a lot of talk about race in America these past several months. You can tune into CNN and listen to Don Lemon if you want a timewasting activity. But better would be to listen to some black intellectuals. Some are more conservative in their outlook than others. Some are Democrats yet they do not subscribe to the woke outlook.
Glenn Loury and John McWhorter often discuss race on “The Glenn Show” over at bloggingheads. But John Wood Jr. has talked with Glenn Loury also. Coleman Hughes has a successful podcast. As does Chloe Valdary. Kmele Foster hosts a great podcast titled “The Fifth Column.” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a book review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between The World And Me.
Well, Bret Weinstein got them all together on a great video chat. It’s a must-watch.
Published in Policing
I can vouch for Coleman Hughes and John McWhorter despite their rather juvenile NeverTrumpism.
This is informative but I dislike the term “intellectual” a lot. Substitute? No clue.
Coleman Hughes and John McWhorter got some super-serious brainpower and more importantly, they are moved by empirical rather than theoretical arguments. They are definitely high I.Q. dudes with enough sense to be listened to.
All well and good. I have nothing against the participants. I just don’t like the term.
McWhorter’s work on linguistics is very good, from what I have read of his forays into historical linguistics.
High thoughtfulness to bloviation ratio talking heads?
I like Glenn Loury too for being an exemplar of wrestling with one’s own thinking. Also responsible for this: https://www.city-journal.org/brown-university-letter-racism.
Don’t quite know how to think about Glenn Loury yet.
Stunningly wonderful.
This might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzOApVTfT48
This was an excellent discussion. Good job posting it, HW. I had watched it before your post – which probably means that we both follow Weinstein pretty closely.
I particularly like Loury, McWhorter, and Hughes, from their prior commentary. I had not seen or heard Foster before, and I liked him quite a bit.
Williams and Valdary talked principally about reparations, which I think are a very bad idea. Loury made this point very strongly, and McWhorter agreed.
Hughes did a great job cross- examining Weinstein on his vague Lefty views. Hughes is just remarkable, to be able to hold his own at such a young age (he only just finished his undergrad studies.)
A couple if the panelists mentioned shook choice as a very important issue. Weinstein seemed to agree, but attributed political failure to corruption in both parties, in line with his kooky Occupy Wall Street opinions. Loury pointed out that the problem (at least on this issue) was entirely the Democrats. Weinstein can’t seem to accept this, probably because it would force him toward the conclusion that the Right is right. I think that he has a quasi-religious commitment to Leftism, derived from his family history (specifically his grandfather). He’s able to see that Leftist ideas aren’t working, but he has to flail about looking for some vague third-way solution, because he can’t acknowledge that the Republicans are correct.
There was a strong consensus that black family breakdown was a huge problem (with one of the panelists, Foster I think, pointing out correctly that this affects whites and others, too, though at lower rates. Loury attributes it to 1960s welfare, correctly in my view.
Weinstein attributed it to mass incarceration and the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow, which is plainly wrong in my estimation. The problem was small in the 1940s, and the early increase actually correlated with early civil rights victories and the early decline in religious faith. Mass incarceration didn’t start until the late 1980s/early 90s, too late to explain the bulk of the increase in illegitimacy.
Agaim, I think that Weinstein’s ideological commitments prevents him from recognizing the real causes of this problem – driving religion out of the schools, feminism, and welfare.
I think that he is correct that now, high rates of incarceration makes the problem worse, but it wasn’t the initial cause.
I think that Loury has the best ideas, except perhaps Foster, who seemed very solid but who I had not previously heard. Loury is not quite as good a speaker as McWhorter or Hughes (though his rants can be great).
Kmele Foster is the host of a really great podcast called “The Fifth Column.”
But these were “public intellectuals”. I liked the calm and respectful disagreements along with the informed clear thought.
Everyone keeps knocking feminism. But that’s only one side of the problem, the social side. There is an economic side. With women entering the work force it didn’t take a generation for a family — for a typical middle-class family — to require two working adults in the family to maintain a lifestyle that one adult could provide previously. I don’t think it’s right to say that we are all so much more wealthy now with computers and cellphone and air conditioning; the prices for these would come down if people couldn’t pay the higher prices.
It seems almost by design that women were ushered into the work force in the seventies and eighties, looking back, it’s as if the economy itself depended on it. Then in the nineties credit was unleashed and this kept up the middle class’ appearance of wealth. Now children can’t get jobs, or depend on their parents for rent, or even remain at home (and on their parents’ health insurance).
I like Trump, a lot, but I don’t think the economy is doing as well as he says it is. And this could be causing, as Weinstein says, an unconscious but palpable crushing of the hopes of the middle class to maintain their standard of living, and the lower class to see a way out of it; leading to frustration and fear, and then envy and resentment, in those who don’t see themselves either well off, or as well off as their parents.
Quite a few of these influencers were people Bari Weiss wrote about.
Any conservatives or slightly conservatives? I think I seen Glenn Loury and John McWhorter before.
No Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter E. Williams, Larry Elder…
How about Civil Rights family Trump supporters like Alveda King and Charles Evers?
James Meredith worked for Jesse Helms and was apparently even too conservative for Senator Helms.
Condoleezza Rice has a PhD.
Bring in Never Trump Bill Kristol’s college roommate Alan Keyes who has a PhD from Harvard. He should solve the situation.
“It seems almost by design that women were ushered into the work force in the seventies and eighties, looking back, it’s as if the economy itself depended on it.“
During the early seventies, when unemployment was high, I worried that the return of Vietnam veterans to the work force at the same time as the movement for all women to work would lead to a major crisis. The economy expanded to make that moot. For a while.
I’ve actually voted for Alan Keyes for president.
What I get out of this is that we are heading for South Africa model with blacks taking over politics and running the non blacks out of the public square. To get there we need reparations as soon as possible but that will not actually discharge the debt that whites owe to blacks. Reparations may take several forms from direct money to blacks to trust funds for blacks to government programs for just blacks.
How is 12 percent of the population going to get rid of of 88 percent of the population from politics?
John McWhorter and Glenn Loury did talk to many of Thomas Sowell’s points. The guy in the center made some solid points about out of wedlock births.
Harass, threaten, cancel, kill or any other way they can. One of the people speaking said he thought we were heading to the South Africa model. I think he is correct.
That’s a pretty effective 12%. Given the relatively high rates of intermarriage this would be historically quite unusual.
I feel that these intellectuals ignore how many people will utterly deny there is any problem with the culture of the black underclass. I understand the criticism that it isn’t helpful to only talk about black and black crime and and fatherlessness but don’t they know how many on the left will never talk about the importance of culture?
but still one of the people on the video thought this was the direction they were heading. I think he is right.
I read someplace yesterday that reparations would be $151 million per person directly descended from a slave, and the total cost would be something like $6.2 quadrillion.
That is an upgrade. Most blacks I know are expecting checks for around $40000.
‘How is 12 percent of the population going to get rid of of 88 percent of the population from politics?’
That is the point. No way. The larger picture is not even imaginable. Yet.
Thanks for putting this up, Heavy Water.
Yes, that’s a lot.
One guy I worked with a few decades ago told me that he had one black ancestor. I think he said that one of his great grandmothers was black.
I bring this up because if reparations actually becomes a “thing,” you can expect lots of non-black Americans claiming, Elizabeth Warren style, to have enough black ancestry to qualify as black. And is the Department of Blackness going to try to figure out if the tens of millions of people who claim to be black actually are black based on some arbitrary standard of blackness?