Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S9 E4: Jessi Streib: Is it racist? Is it sexist?
14 Plays8 months ago
Jessi Streib is Associate Professor of sociology at Duke University and the co-recipient of the 2023 Early Career Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association. She is author of four books, including Is it Racist? Is it Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas, co-authored with Betsy Leondar-Wright, which comes out in 2025 and is available for pre-order. We discuss this book, and the questions it raises about how to diagnose and address injustice, and tensions between this and other societal objectives. The views expressed by Jessi on this episode are hers alone and do not necessarily reflect those of her coauthor.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Free Mind Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions.
Meet the Hosts: Matt Burgess and Jesse Strieb
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm Matt Burgess, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Faculty Fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. My guest today is Jesse Strieb. Jesse Strieb is Associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University and the co-recipient of the 2023 Early Career Award from the Inequality, Poverty and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association.
00:00:50
Speaker
She is author of four books, including Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree and How to Decide in the Gray Areas, co-authored with Betsy Leonda Wright, which comes out in 2025 and is available for pre-order. We discuss this book and the questions it raises about how to diagnose and address injustice and tensions between this and other societal objectives.
Diagnosing Racism and Sexism: Strieb's New Book
00:01:15
Speaker
The views expressed by Jesse on this episode are hers alone and do not necessarily reflect those of her co-author. Jesse Stribe, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Thanks for having me.
00:01:27
Speaker
So I have had the good fortune, thanks to you, to get an advanced copy of your forthcoming book, Is It Racist, Is It Sexist? And there's a lot of really interesting things in there where you're looking at how white people in particular disagree on what's racist or sexist, and then you and your co-author suggest your own method of analysis. So one of the big frames in your book
00:01:56
Speaker
is how people seem to disagree on to what extent and whether to focus on outcomes versus intentions when defining racist has been sexism. Can you explain that?
00:02:07
Speaker
Sure. So we divide our respondents into two broad groups. So there are people who usually acquit. We call them acquitters. So if something comes up, is this racist or sexist, they say either flat out no, or there's not enough evidence to say one way or another. And then the other group are convictors. So people who they're asked if it's racist or sexist almost always say yes, it definitely is.
00:02:29
Speaker
And so the two groups use different definitions of racism and sexism. So acquiters tend to use a narrower definition. They tend to use intent. And the convictors tend to use a broader definition. They tend to use a more outcomes-based definition, although they would also include intent as part of racism and sexism. So they're already starting with very different ideas about what racism and sexism are. And maybe to back up,
00:02:58
Speaker
Why does it matter what the definitions of racism and sexism are, as opposed to, you know, here's a problem in society and whatever, regardless of whatever we call it, we're going to try to address it? I think partly because we don't agree on what that problem is, right? And we're using the same words to describe vastly different phenomenon.
00:03:19
Speaker
And so you've got one side saying like, oh, there's no racism. It's all in the past or hardly any. And another side saying it's everywhere. And if you don't understand that we're actually talking about very different things, you would be very confused about why we can't agree. And also just if we want to solve these problems, I think we want to develop some sort of common language to be able to talk about them.
00:03:42
Speaker
Is there something about the loadedness of the term that's relevant? So for example, the criminal justice analogy, right? You know, where your terms acquiters and convictors. If you convict somebody of a crime,
00:03:55
Speaker
There's an automatic something that happens by the law, right? Depending on what you're convicted on, you have some sentence, you go to prison maybe. So does the analogy work because the terms racist and sexist are so loaded that there's this automatic negative connotation if we decide something is racist and sexist and that in a sense raises the political stakes of how you use the term?
00:04:23
Speaker
I think so. I mean, when we call something racist or sexist, it's usually a call to action, right? It's not saying, oh, it's racist or
Understanding Terms and Standards of Proof: Racism and Sexism
00:04:29
Speaker
sexist. We're not going to do anything about it. It's not a big deal. We're saying, oh, it's racist or sexist. Like, we need to do something. There's a moral wrong that is happening, that something unfair in the world is happening. And we absolutely have to do something. And so, yeah, I think that because they are loaded, it means that we have to do something. And I think it kind of helps the
00:04:51
Speaker
the analogy work, although of course nobody's going to jail because they did something racist or sexist unless it's a very extreme thing that they did.
00:04:59
Speaker
Well, continuing with this analogy, in courts of law, there's a very high standard of proof. For criminal courts, it's beyond a reasonable doubt. In some other court-like things, there's a debate, for example, with Title IX, should we use preponderance of evidence or clear and convincing evidence? And the standards of proof are, I would argue, less about
00:05:22
Speaker
what's gonna get us the right or wrong answer and more about which type of error we think is worse, right? So we have a high standard of proof in courts of law because our legal philosophy is such that we think that convicting an innocent person is worse than letting a guilty person go free. In your book,
00:05:44
Speaker
you talk about how you're not really aligned with the acquitters or the convictors, but you're maybe a little bit more aligned with the convictors. And I think it kind of has to do with this, which type of error is worse. Can you explain that and how does that relate to criminal justice or not? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So the acquitters, these people who almost always say, no, it's not racist or sexist, or there's at least not enough evidence to know, I think they're especially worried about false accusations and they're not as worried about
00:06:14
Speaker
inequalities that we end up not addressing. And so their low bar of evidence is perhaps on purpose. And the opposite is true. Convictors tend to have a very low bar of evidence to say, what's racist or sexist? Because they're more inclined to say, if we make some mistakes and call some things racist and sexist that aren't and make some false accusations,
00:06:37
Speaker
Well, that's kind of just like what happens when you have to address racism and sexism. It's not that big of a deal. And so they are using very different standards of evidence with the quitters making it very hard to convict and the convictors making very easy to convict. I think partly because they are worried about different things.
00:06:58
Speaker
Okay, great. And I want to put a pin in that and come back to it at the end because I think one of the fascinating questions that your book drew out for me is how well do we actually understand what the risks are on either side of this question? But I want to put a pin in that and go back to the app. Okay. Because we haven't talked yet in detail about how you suggest we approach this and it makes more sense to follow that.
00:07:28
Speaker
So one of the fascinating patterns that you start with, that you think is a major hook of your book, is that the way that white people are divided on questions of race don't really neatly fit
00:07:43
Speaker
any of the classic sociological theories of self-interest, for example, and I'm not an expert on these theories, but one of the patterns that you really draw out that seems counterintuitive in the context of these theories is that white people are, by some measures, more divided on race issues than people of color are, meaning that some white liberals are more extreme on their side than non-white liberals,
00:08:11
Speaker
and vice versa. I'm not an expert on this topic, but I've seen the same pattern in other contexts. So for example, on climate change, it's the exact same thing. White liberals, white liberal climate hawks tend to be much more climate hawkish than the average non-white liberal. And among conservatives, deniers of climate science are also disproportionately white.
00:08:35
Speaker
And I think there's kind of a general pattern in multiple polling studies that the political extremes on both sides are disproportionately white, affluent, and educated. So my question to you is, do you see what you're finding with race as part of a general pattern? Or in what ways is it distinct?
Race Issues in Sociological Theories
00:08:53
Speaker
And what do you think explains it?
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah, I hadn't thought that much about the general pattern. I think it depends on the issue because, for example, our white liberal, highly educated people, they weren't great about class. So they tend to kind of downplay classism, especially for white people. So if you're white and poor, well, you didn't experience racism. So you probably could have done better in your life. Maybe you are a little bit to blame. They don't say it that directly, but it's often hinted that way.
00:09:23
Speaker
And they do a lot to deny white poverty, and so they're not extreme on class issues at all. And so I would think it's really probably issue dependent. So let me try the following explanation on you, because this sort of shaped my own thinking about this, and also reading Musa Algarbi's work, a mutual friend of ours,
00:09:48
Speaker
And he has this forthcoming book called We Have Never Been Woke that takes on kind of this dynamic that you're describing with white liberals not being as concerned about material conditions and in some ways inadvertently maybe perpetuating the inequality.
00:10:05
Speaker
So besides being disproportionately white, affluent, and educated, the other thing that's true about the political extremes on both sides is they're disproportionately politically hobbyist. It means they spend a lot of time and attention on politics, and they see politics as part of their identity. And so I kind of think of it as like, if you are
00:10:23
Speaker
a non-political hobbyist person on the margins, then politics really matters to your day-to-day life and getting politics wrong matters potentially in material ways. If crime gets out of control or inflation gets out of control or we go to war.
00:10:39
Speaker
If you're insulated from that, and also politics is part of your identity, then politics is not really so much about outcomes as it's like a shirt. And you want your shirt to be more colorful and attention getting than everyone else's shirt. And it's got to be pure, right? And so, and that's kind of the lens, I guess, through which I look at some of, you know, Moussa Algarbi and Rob Henderson's writing on these issues is like,
00:11:04
Speaker
And they focus on liberals, but I think there's a way to view this with conservatives too, that maybe white liberal race politics to some extent are a means of maintaining social status basically by using etiquette as a metaphorical shirt and obsessing with language.
00:11:27
Speaker
and other kinds of what Rob Henderson calls luxury beliefs, right? So we should get rid of the police. That's gonna be good for disadvantaged communities. What do you make of that as an explanation? I understand where you're coming from. I'm just gonna talk about our respondents in particular. So the people that we met, I think they really care about racism and sexism. I don't think it's performative. I think one of the reasons they care though is because
00:11:55
Speaker
it's become an issue that you are supposed to care about if you are a good person on the left. So I don't think there are kind of different explanations, but I wouldn't want to imply that they're only doing it to look good or they're only doing it performatively.
00:12:11
Speaker
Like meeting them, I mean, you never know for sure what other people are thinking, but it certainly felt to me like they deeply cared. They definitely read a lot that they didn't have to read for their jobs or they went out of their way to learn about these issues and were quite informed. And so you don't have to do that. So I do think they care.
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. And from my understanding, Musal Garvey would agree with you there that the degree to which it's social standing, reproducing, and has unintended consequences is unintentional. I'm not sure about the luxury of reliefs frame that Rob Henderson uses maybe is a little bit more cynical. I may be somewhere between, I don't know. But I've certainly met, I would say I've met both types.
00:13:01
Speaker
Okay, so I wanna now turn to your, you know, you talk a lot about how different groups of people in America view these issues, and then in, I think it's chapter eight, you get to, you know, and this is how we think you should view these issues.
00:13:19
Speaker
And I think this is nicely drawn out by the following quote, if I'm allowed to quote. So quote, we choose definitions directed at unequal treatment that produces unequal outcomes for people of different races and genders.
00:13:34
Speaker
Therefore, we define racism and sexism as patterns of unequal treatment based on race or gender, unequal outcomes caused by patterns of unequal treatment, and the intent to mistreat others due to their race or gender. From this definition, we exclude unequal treatment designed to rectify past discrimination by race or gender. And then you also say in a couple of different places that you're more aligned with the convictors than the acquitters because fixing real inequality is important.
00:14:03
Speaker
and the convictor's stance is more aligned with that. So I think it's a really interesting definition and I want to come, let's put a pin in the last sentence because I think the affirmative action thing has some interesting nuances. But what I think is really interesting about this is some of the debate about what's racist and what's sexist treats
00:14:24
Speaker
unequal treatment and unequal outcomes as almost juxtaposed. And I think you're kind of saying that they're not really juxtaposed. You have to look at them together. Is that right? Explain what you mean by your definition and how it reconciles or doesn't this tension between treatment and outcomes as the dominant frame?
00:14:47
Speaker
And I think there are some outcomes that are not caused by unequal treatment. So for example, that women can have babies and men can't, that's an inequality, but nobody's treating men and women differently to create that. So we wanted to kind of get rid of that type of inequality from our definition and say like that's, I mean, it's
00:15:07
Speaker
if you think having babies is great or you think having babies personally is really bad, you might have a view on, oh, man, that's so horrible that their gender can't do that. But nobody would call it sexist. It's just a biological difference that we have. And so we want to focus our definitions of racism and sexism on unequal outcomes that are caused by unequal treatment and not ones that are not.
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah, so that makes a lot of sense. I think that that jives with a lot of people's moral judgment as far as I've seen. If you treat unequal treatments versus unequal outcomes as a juxtaposition directly at odds with each other as central to the definition, my understanding is that in polls, people are much more concerned about unequal treatment than they are about unequal outcomes on average, including people of color.
00:16:02
Speaker
But I think it's also true that people are more concerned about unequal treatment on average in cases that lead to unequal outcomes or in cases that are consistent with broad level unequal outcomes than in cases that are narrower, right? So one example related to gender is the fraction of crisis centers for male victims of sexual assault, I think is a disproportionately low
00:16:31
Speaker
compared to the fraction of men that face sexual assault, and yet the fraction of sexual assault of men is still a minority, right? But it's not that low. I mean, it's much lower than women, but it's not low. Right. But my point is that society, I think, has made a mortal judgment.
00:16:52
Speaker
that sexual assault, we care more about sexual assault against women than against men. And my guess is that that has to do with a combination of the fact that it's vastly more common to be a sexual assault victim if you're a woman. And then maybe also there's some evidence that women in general receive empathy more easily than men across a bunch of different domains. But probably more the first one. In terms of the point I was trying to make earlier, I'm more thinking about the first one.
00:17:22
Speaker
Your point is that there, can you restate your point, sorry. Yeah, that basically that people, although if given the choice, I think the average person is more worried about unequal treatment than unequal outcomes, I think it's also true that we are more worried about unequal treatment in cases that map on to unequal outcomes. I think that's right. Yeah. And we would agree.
00:17:46
Speaker
Yeah, so, you know, nobody likes, and I shouldn't say nobody, but, you know, for example, most people don't like Louis Farrakhan, right? Who's a pretty virulent bigot, whether or not, you know, your definition considers him a racist. But, you know, most people I think would also consider him less of a pressing concern than the clan because of the way that his bigotry or the clan's bigotry maps onto unequal outcomes. Does that make sense? Maybe that's a cleaner example.
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think we care about unequal outcomes most when they are caused by unequal treatment and we care about unequal treatment most when they lead to unequal outcomes. Yeah. I guess the point where I'm trying to go with this is it seems like your definition of racism and sexism is trying to thread the needle and capture that social intuition that we have. Is that right?
Affirmative Action: A Debate on Rectifying Past Discrimination
00:18:37
Speaker
That's right. Yes.
00:18:39
Speaker
Okay, cool. All right, so now I want to talk about the last sentence about affirmative action. Just to repeat it, you say, from this definition, we exclude definition meaning of racism and sexism. We exclude unequal treatment designed to rectify past discrimination by race or gender.
00:18:55
Speaker
And that seems intuitive in the context of the broader definition. But I also wonder if it glosses over the debate that people have in the context of affirmative action about individual versus group-based rights.
00:19:11
Speaker
The underlying question is, what does it really mean to rectify past discrimination? There's lots of evidence that women who have children, that penalizes them in the workforce in a number of different ways. As far as I understand, the economics literature, that's by far the biggest contributor to what people call the pay gap. Occupational segregation.
00:19:35
Speaker
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is also in the sense that I'm thinking of part of the pay gap, right? You just take the kind of raw pay gap. Okay, so if you do affirmative action to rectify that,
00:19:49
Speaker
One thing, for example, that I've seen a lot, you know, there's a debate about, you know, to what extent should academic hiring factor race and gender in? And one thing that you often see is, you know, when you do gender-based hiring to rectify injustices is disproportionately you get women with trailing spouses and no kids, right? You know, or another example is like,
00:20:15
Speaker
Suppose you are doing race-based affirmative action and you're picking a Nigerian immigrant over a Swedish immigrant because white Americans treated black Americans badly. Does that make sense? How narrow do you have to define rectifying past injustice in your definition?
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we don't get into it. And I think there's a reasonable debate on both sides. So I think the group based people would say just having representation of that group is really important.
00:20:48
Speaker
and helping members of that group broadly, even if they weren't the individuals who are personally hurt, can kind of spill over and do more to help people who are more affected in that group. I think the other side would say, but let's actually help the people who were disadvantaged by the thing we care about and identify them. I think it's complicated in part because of the logistics, like how much detail are you gonna ask of every applicant to know? And so the,
00:21:17
Speaker
Like, are you going to then demand we know about your class background, about if your ancestors were slaves, about if your personal work history in minute detail and exactly when you had children and who your husband is and like all of this stuff, or are you going to say like, well, on average, we think this is going to work out if we take a group based approach. And I think there's trade offs and I can personally see
00:21:42
Speaker
the benefits of both of those approaches and why people on both sides would be frustrated by the other approach. But I think in general, we just don't want to call it racist or sexist. We're using an approach to try to rectify inequalities that we know were caused by unequal treatment. Even if it are not perfect, even if we wish there was a better system, our point is just let's not call them racist or sexist. Gotcha. Would you also say,
00:22:10
Speaker
analogous leader, a convictor, a quitter, judgment. Would your position also be that we should err on the side of doing something that's imperfect as opposed to not doing something or would you not go that far? We want to be really careful about accurately identifying the sources of mistreatment. So we don't want to just say, chances are it was caused by
00:22:35
Speaker
mistreatment. So let's do something because you could end up spending a lot of money and a lot of resources and lose allies by doing the wrong thing and not fix the problem. Like that's not helpful.
00:22:45
Speaker
But we also don't want to say, let's ignore it. So what we really want is this like evidence-based approach to figuring out what's racist or sexist that can be slow, that can be time consuming to really figure it out. But then once you figure it out, then you can do something that's likely to be effective rather than rushing in and doing something even if you don't fully understand what's going on yet. Because that's, you're doing things that are unproductive to solve the problem has a lot of its own problems as well.
00:23:14
Speaker
I think the thing is kind of related to individual versus group-based rights that you touch on in the book, which I think is really interesting and underappreciated, so I'm glad that you touched on it, is the way that people sometimes conflate individual cases and broad patterns. I actually think that that conflation sometimes happens in both directions. You had some really interesting examples. Do you want to give an example of that?
00:23:43
Speaker
Sure. So we present our respondents with this case where a man is in the hospital and he's clearly sick. He's got IV bags hooked up to him and a woman walks in and he says, hello nurse. And she corrects him and says, I'm not your nurse. I'm your doctor. And we ask our respondents, was this sexist? So people who tend to quit, they tend to see this as an individual case. They say like,
00:24:11
Speaker
This man, look how sick he is. He might barely be conscious. We don't know if he can see the door and see the woman who came in the door. We don't know if he could see what she was wearing, if she was wearing a white lab coat like a doctor would be. We don't know if he knows anything about the color coding of the dress, of the uniforms. And so this is an individual case.
00:24:32
Speaker
Let's not bring broad patterns of gender inequality into it and let's just judge whether the man, if there's enough evidence in this case to see the man as being sexist. And they usually say no, there's so many other things that could be going on.
00:24:46
Speaker
Convictors, on the other hand, tend to see this as part of a broader pattern. They pay very little attention to the details of the case. So the acquiters tend to ask us lots of questions. What happened right before the scene? What's the man's history? They have so many things they want to know. To convictors, that's not relevant. There is a pattern. The individual case doesn't really matter. This case fits what they know to be the pattern, which is that
00:25:11
Speaker
women in authority positions are often seen as not having the authority that they do, that in particular women who are doctors are often mistaken as nurses. And so they see this patient as part of this pattern and they say, yes, he is sexist. So one of the main differences between people who acquit and people who convict is are they focused on the individual case or are they focused on the pattern?
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, really interesting. Where my mind went when I was reading that was, so when I talked to people about this, I always like to start with a safe hypothetical that where everybody can see the logical error and then you get into the trickier ones. So here's the safe one, right? That I think exposes how it can be permicious to, you know, generalize from the individual to the pattern in both directions.
00:26:01
Speaker
So if somebody, suppose that you were a sexual assault counselor at a university and a man comes to you and says, I was sexually assaulted, you would be an insensitive horrible person if your response was, well, statistically that's super rare. You'd be very bad at your job if you did that. On the other hand, imagine if
00:26:25
Speaker
after telling a story, the same man said, my experience shows that it's an injustice that half of the crisis centers are not for men. He would be making a logical error there too. But you can see the same kind of logical challenges in trickier areas. So for example, in the last five years,
00:26:48
Speaker
I've seen an awful lot of evidence that faculty hiring is on average skewed towards affirmative action in the last five years. Now, nonetheless, there still are jackass search committee members who say racist and sexist things, right? Yes.
00:27:10
Speaker
Uh, there still are, you know, uh, I'm sure search committees that make racist or sexist decisions, right? In kind of the, in the more, in the more traditional ways. Um, and it seems like I often find that people have a hard time holding those two ideas in their head at the same time. Yes, I think that's true. So for the, our respondents, definitely people who convict are mostly, they see one set of evidence, right? That.
00:27:40
Speaker
women and people of color are disadvantaged in hiring, and often unfairly, and they can list many, many biases, some unconscious, some on purpose, that come up in hiring. On the other hand, people usually acquit, say, oh, it's usually pretty fair. Of course, there's a few awful people out there, but on average, it's pretty fair. What we want people to do is look at the, take the patterns, say, we know that there's a lot of inequality in who gets hired,
00:28:11
Speaker
Historically, white people and men get hired more. And even now, I mean, probably you'd have to look at each department and university to see what their pattern is. But individual cases can go any direction. And so
00:28:28
Speaker
You should be aware of the pattern when you're thinking about the case, but the pattern itself is not evidence of what happens in any particular case. It should just prime you to be aware that particular things could be happening, but then you need to get evidence from the case to figure out exactly what happened in that situation. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
00:28:51
Speaker
a related entanglement that I think is challenging for people. And I want to start by reminding you and our listeners that I generally like your willingness to not be put in one box or the other on unequal treatment or unequal outcomes.
00:29:08
Speaker
So with that framing in mind, I want to ask you about cases where what I would call innocuous or not unfair causes of unequal outcomes can really get intractably entangled with unfair causes. So let me give you two examples relating to men and women in heavy industry on the one hand and in pre-K education on the other hand.
00:29:34
Speaker
So I have the rare experience of when I was in college, I was a man who worked in pre-K education, for two summers, basically as a daycare worker. And there were definitely some things about that work environment that whether or not you call them sexist, you would definitely call it gender bias. So for example, I was literally told on the first day, you are not allowed to do any kind of diaper changing because
00:30:03
Speaker
Not insignificant fraction of parents assume that men who work in daycare their pedophiles like my boss literally said that to me, right? So the the you know and then and the other things that are kind of more more innocuous like
00:30:20
Speaker
For one of the two summers, I was the only man in the workforce, and the other summer I was one of two. Sometimes the women I worked with would want to do things outside of work that I just wasn't interested in. These things didn't bother me that much. I mean, honestly, someone says, you're not allowed to change diapers. Your first reaction is like, okay.
00:30:45
Speaker
But I could see how that these things might discourage some men from choosing that career path who otherwise would. On the other hand, I'm also extremely confident that probably in large part innate average differences in preferences and interests are the dominant driver of the gender disparity and the demographics of that profession. But there's an interaction. So now let me go to heavy industry.
00:31:12
Speaker
On the other hand, I was thinking of heavy industry because there was recently an article in some periodical that I read about sexism in heavy industry, which I have no doubt exists, right? Again, you have an occupation, which I would guess
00:31:26
Speaker
the non-unfair forces, differences in interests, would lead that occupation to naturally be overwhelmingly male. And yet, and you're welcome to disagree, but for argument's sake, let's just assume that I'm right, because then if I'm wrong, then it's not an interesting question, right?
00:31:47
Speaker
So the evidence as far as I've read, and you probably know this evidence better than I do, suggest that it's something like if the gender ratio is more lopsided than between about a quarter and a third,
00:32:03
Speaker
then there, there, there can be isolation and alienation. And I haven't seen this explicitly in the research, but I would guess that that, that effect is slightly stronger on women when they're in the minority than on men. So for example, one of my aunts was in a big criminal law firm, you know, in the early nineties, right? When a few women, and you know, when, when I would tell her about, you know, the women I worked with in the daycare doing something that I wasn't interested in.
00:32:29
Speaker
she would talk about the men that she worked with in the 90s inviting her to the strip club. There's a difference there. One, I'm not interested, but it doesn't offend me in the way that it might. I can imagine the same thing being true in heavy industry, that there could be a culture that is not just isolating, but also potentially toxic. Certainly, that's what this article was talking about.
00:32:53
Speaker
So here you have a case where, like suppose it was true that in heavy industry, the fair distribution, if nobody cared about being the minority, and so we just, the demographics are a space and interest. Let's just for argument's sake say that the natural equilibrium would be, you know, five to 10% of the workforce is women, right? And yet we know that if you have five or 10% of the workforce women in reality,
00:33:18
Speaker
those women are going to likely face the hostile climate and feel isolated. So now it seems like you have a trade-off where it's like if you don't kind of push things farther than probably
00:33:29
Speaker
the fair forces would push them, you're gonna have unfair forces, right? If you allow the fair forces to kind of work the way that they will, then you're gonna have this unfair force.
Gender Biases in Professions and Education
00:33:42
Speaker
So what do you think about that trade-off and kind of how does that, assuming that exists, and feel free to throw evidence at me that it doesn't, but assuming that exists, how should we think about that trade-off in the context of the way you and your co-author think about racism and sexism?
00:33:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I think it depends on how narrowly or broadly you define fair here.
00:34:04
Speaker
boys are encouraged to play with heavy machinery objects when they're, you know, toys, when they're little, right? And parents are more likely to point them out to them when they go past them. And so there is some level of socialization. I'm not a geneticist or a biologist to know how much is it need, but I think we can say pretty confidently that there's at least also some socialization that goes into that.
00:34:28
Speaker
So if we think heavy machinery jobs are awesome jobs that we want everybody to have, then that would be unfair, but maybe at the point of childhood socialization rather than later. Also with your preschool daycare experience,
00:34:47
Speaker
It would be best if people didn't assume you were a pedophile. I agree. Thank you. We don't want unfair stereotypes to continue. The fair thing would be to not assume that of you, to do a criminal history check, to see if there's any evidence of it. Which they do, obviously, to be clear. Right. But not to assume that just because you're a man, you must be a pedophile.
00:35:15
Speaker
Those things seem fine to me to think about in terms of unfair treatment. But let's... But that's the easy one, right? And I agree with you, right? So I think what you're saying is, don't negatively stereotype men who work in daycares. Don't be a jerk and sexually harass women in heavy industry, right? Yeah. Great.
00:35:42
Speaker
But if you believe the research, that probably doesn't totally solve the problem, right? Because so for example, it probably still is the case that because of within gender homophily, that the average man in the daycare is more socially isolated and the average woman in heavy industry is more socially isolated for reasons that you can't point to and say you're being a bad person, you know, because you want to
00:36:11
Speaker
play golf on the weekends or whatever it is. So how do we deal with that?
00:36:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so I think part of it is recognizing that the effects of being a token are different by gender. So when women experience it, they often are harassed more. They're not promoted as often. They experience a lot of negative effects. The research on men who are teachers does not take care specifically, but teachers more generally, is that being a token makes
00:36:43
Speaker
Often the women there treat them very well, right? Oh, don't you want to be a principal? You'd be such a great principal. And so they get promoted up partly due to their isolation. Oh, it'd be so great to have a male leader. This is such a female-dominated space. And so the consequences are very, very different. So I don't think they're actually as parallel as we might think.
00:37:08
Speaker
Okay, so let's put the parallel aside because the tension that I'm really trying to ask you about is within each one of those cases. So the proximate solution that people often reach for, and this article was talking about how in some heavy industries companies are reaching for this, is we affirmatively hire more women. We use sex as a deciding factor in some hires to bring in more women.
00:37:35
Speaker
My claim is that there's a tension between, on the one hand, doing that reduces the unfairness of being a token, but it also creates unfairness within the decisions.
00:37:51
Speaker
Assuming that the women are less qualified that we create unfairness. Sure. But if you imagine a case where you say, pick the best candidate subject to it has to be a woman, in some cases that constraint isn't binding. You want to pick a woman anyway. In some cases it is binding. On average, it will be binding more often than zero. So in the cases where the constraint is pivotal, how do we think about that trade-off?
00:38:22
Speaker
I think we acknowledge that it's a gray area and that sometimes when we try to fix one inequality, we create another and we have to think carefully about which kinds we are most wanting to do and what the kind of overall benefits of doing so are. So if you never can keep any women in this construction industry because they're so tokenized, but you think if we have, if we get to
00:38:48
Speaker
30% are women. We won't have this problem. And then we could stop preferentially hiring because women will recreate other women who are very good. They'll help us get excellent women to hire. Then maybe the problem would go away and you could say, this is a short term solution. And we're going to favor one type of inequality for now.
00:39:10
Speaker
But I don't think there are easy answers. And part of what our book is about is just how many gray areas there are and how it's often not as clear cut as we'd like to think. And being circumsect, being okay with ambiguity, being okay with not knowing the right answer is sometimes okay. And just knowing that there's not easy answers all the time.
00:39:39
Speaker
Okay, I want to talk about two other gray areas quickly and then move on. So one is, you talked about earlier about how which jobs we think are desirable affects which professions we focus on this question on. And interestingly, heavy industries actually, and actually pre-K and heavy industry are both industries we do not tend to focus on for precisely that reason.
00:40:08
Speaker
But so the research that you've seen suggests we focus on industries that we think are higher status. We focus more on industries where women are underrepresented than where men are underrepresented. And some of that has to do with thinking about the kind of cosmic inequality as opposed to the local inequality.
00:40:32
Speaker
But one area where I think this gets into an interesting gray area today is in higher ed education. So there are a lot of departments of engineering, which is a high status, high paying profession, that are very worried about the fraction of undergraduates that are female at a time when
00:40:52
Speaker
the fraction of undergraduates overall that are female is something like 60%. If we have a situation where we focus on women's underrepresentation in fields where they're underrepresented and not the opposite, logic would dictate that the overall disparity in higher ed attendance is going to get larger. On the other hand, it is true that engineering
00:41:18
Speaker
We focus on fields like engineering and computer science, not just because they're male dominated, but because they're also high status, high pay. How should we think about that tension?
00:41:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I do agree with you on which industries we tend to focus most on, and we definitely tend to focus mostly on male-dominated industries inside women should be going into those. I think, I mean, your conclusion is that men might not go into college as much. We could also encourage men to go into education or to other female-dominated fields. Right, but my question is that, or my premise is that currently we are not focusing on that as much.
00:42:00
Speaker
I mean, I wonder if part of it is what we think is possible. So it's possible to get women to go into high status fields where it's harder to get men to go into lower status fields.
00:42:15
Speaker
I mean, everybody wants more status and more pay. Oh, I see what you're saying. It's easier to upset the Apple cart when there's the lure of status. Yeah, I got you. Right. But I also think because historically men have had so much more status and money that
00:42:37
Speaker
Totally lost my train of thought. That's okay. Basically it was saying, you know, how do we like, or here's another way to think about it. Within higher ed, being an engineer and computer scientist is higher status than being a historian or a sociologist. Within society, being a college graduate is higher status than not being a college graduate. Currently there are opposite gender disparities in those two areas. And so I guess what I'm asking is like,
00:43:03
Speaker
Can we walk and chew gum and say we want more men in college and we want more women in engineering computer science or are those two problems in tension in some way that kind of solving one makes the other one bigger?
Privilege, Power, and the Intergenerational Fairness Paradox
00:43:19
Speaker
I don't see them as intention. I mean, it depends on what you think is realistic, but certainly we could encourage more men to go to college and to become nurses, to become teachers, to go into the humanities.
00:43:32
Speaker
I think that would be possible as well. I think it is a harder sell than getting a woman to go into more traditionally male-dominated fields. Okay, last question on this topic. Some people who I would characterize as critics of modern feminism, however you define that, right? There's many different ways.
00:44:01
Speaker
argue that disparities in privilege today and power and status are as much or more about variance as they are about mean. So if you look at CEOs, you see a lot of men. If you look at homeless people and prisoners, you also see a lot of men. And no one's calling for prison quotas.
00:44:26
Speaker
Uh, nor should they to be clear. Yes. Uh, you know, so to, to what extent, you know, I mean, first of all, do you even buy that argument? And if so, to what extent does it complicate the idea of, you know, we have an average problem that we're trying to fix that sort of goes in one direction? I think we have a lot of local problems. So I think it is true that men are more often CEOs and that men are often going to prisons at,
00:44:56
Speaker
Like, far, far higher rates than women are and men are more likely to be homeless. Some of that is policy of how we think about giving welfare to low income men and low income women and especially.
00:45:09
Speaker
because it's often tied to having children and women are more likely to have the children. So some of it is a policy decision that we could make differently or think about differently. But I think we can think about overall trends of who's more advantaged men or women, but it potentially is more productive to think about many different outcomes and think about who's disadvantaged on them.
00:45:32
Speaker
I think there is then a debate about, do we call the things that men are disadvantaged about compared to women, do we call that sexism, especially if women didn't cause them? So it's not women that are causing men to go to jail more than men are. There's no woman in charge who are running Congress and making rules that would make it more likely that men than women would go to prison.
00:45:55
Speaker
So is that sexist or is that an inequality that we might still care about but not sexism? And there's, as you know, a huge debate about that. I'm not sure it matters. I think we might just care if we have the right number of people in prison and if we are over penalizing men or not penalizing women who are dangerous in ways that we should.
00:46:21
Speaker
Yeah, the closest I've seen to anybody reconcile these frameworks is Tanya Reynolds, who's a psychologist at, I want to say, New Mexico, University of New Mexico or New Mexico State. And she basically says, you know, gender biases.
00:46:36
Speaker
Gender bodies that go against men and go against women have the unifying characteristic of assigning men more agency. So if men are disadvantaged, it's their fault. And when we want to help them less, and if men are doing well, then we reward them more and we give them more credit for their accomplishments.
00:46:57
Speaker
So the last tension, what your thoughts on is where there's a tension between fixing a local inequality and some other objective.
00:47:13
Speaker
that's kind of one type of inequality versus another type of inequality would be, you know, this idea, this representation matters idea, right? So, you know, for example, I'm aware of pretty good evidence that there's a, you know, small but not insignificant effect of having teachers of the same gender and race, especially for strongest for African-American boys. Now that might come into tension with
00:47:42
Speaker
you know, again, if you're like, suppose that it's true that the natural fair interest driven distribution of education is overwhelmingly female, there's going to be attention there, right? And, you know, and you have to basically kind of cross generationally balance the
00:48:02
Speaker
the unfairness of having non-diverse teachers for the kids versus maybe the unfairness of having to affirmatively hire and therefore exclude some people who want to be teachers at the teacher level.
00:48:18
Speaker
Did, do you see, is that basically the same tension we were talking about earlier, kind of framed differently? I think so, although I think I'm less convinced than you are that this one's natural. So like, if you think about clergy, who you could think of as teachers, they're mostly men, and they're interacting, they're doing a lot of what teachers do. You give a lecture, you interact with other people, you help teach them something. And so I, and I think historically, a lot of teachers have been men,
00:48:45
Speaker
So I guess I'm not convinced that this one is a natural one, although again, I'm not a biologist, so I can't say for sure.
00:48:52
Speaker
Let me give you another example that's related that I think is less controversial. I'm writing a paper right now on what I call the intergenerational fairness paradox. I started thinking about this because I saw polls and the one hand say, almost everybody in America supports equal opportunity and two-thirds oppose inheritance taxes. That doesn't make any sense.
00:49:21
Speaker
And I think where it comes from is so you can show mathematically that basically the paradox is as follows. If you define fairness as proportionality, right? What you get out of life is proportional to what you put in or kind of in mathematical terms is a monotonic one increasing one-to-one mapping between inputs and outcomes is kind of how I define it in the paper.
00:49:47
Speaker
If one of the things you care about and invest in is your children's well-being, it is mathematically provably impossible to strictly satisfy proportionality in two consecutive generations. And the reason is, if I invest more in my children's well-being and education than my neighbor does, then our proportionality requires my kids to have an advantage over his kids. But our kids' proportionality requires that they don't.
00:50:15
Speaker
And there's just no way to reconcile that. It's like, mathematically, you can deviate a little bit from personality over here and a little bit from personality over here to kind of strike the balance. And I think that's roughly probably what people intuitively are trying to do. But you can't solve the problem, strictly speaking, unless you assume people don't care about their kids, which as a parent, I can tell you we do.
00:50:42
Speaker
And so what I wonder aloud in this paper is, are people basically giving these conflicting answers because when they're asked about one thing, they're thinking through the lens of the parents and this paradox and the other thing, they're thinking through the lens of the kids. And you can imagine how this type of thing would map on to inequality in a bunch of different ways.
00:51:04
Speaker
So there's the tension of what you want for your parents and what you want for your kids, just like there's a tension of if you try to fix one inequality, you might create another. Kind of. Maybe to more tightly put it back into your framework. And obviously we're talking about cross-generation, this makes way more sense in terms of race and class than gender, right? Right. So in terms of race and class,
00:51:31
Speaker
You probably have situations where, let's talk about class because that's less loaded and easier to think about logically. If you've got two kids that are growing up in different class backgrounds,
00:51:48
Speaker
There probably are many cases where the kid who's disadvantaged, some of that disadvantage owes to structural problems that anybody would call unfair, and some of it owes to different choices that their parents made that in a way, if you frame it through the eyes of the parents, some people might be more willing to accept.
00:52:17
Speaker
And yet, regardless of to what extent you'd accept that with the parents, it's not fair from the perspective of the kids, right? The kids didn't make those choices. Right. So, yeah, how should we solve those kinds of problems as a society? Or is the answer, you know, we don't know, we kind of have to muddle through. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm with you that it's...
00:52:42
Speaker
Parents have a lot of power over their kids and structural issues have a lot of power over their kids to solve them. We want to give parents some freedom to decide how to best raise their children, even if that creates some amount of inequality. So I think we want to have the options be available to all parents equally and then they could choose to some extent what they want for their children.
Causes, Solutions, and Analogies in Social Issues
00:53:04
Speaker
But yet their children are still stuck with their parents' choices. We can try to make those less costly so there is more room to overcome differences. So for example, if college was cheaper to low-income kids across the board, then maybe your parents' decisions don't matter as much. You can still find a way to go to college, even if they made it hard for you.
00:53:30
Speaker
So I think it's trying to lower the consequences of parents' choices and of structural differences. Predistribution, kind of, is what economists like to call it. Great, yeah. That's the best answer I'm coming with, too. So good. All right, so now I want to shift gears a little bit, and I want to end by drawing out
00:53:59
Speaker
on the one hand, getting back to this question of kind of what are really the consequences if we over-diagnose or under-diagnose. And now also to think about the sometimes interesting differences between like causes and solutions. So here's an analogy to help set up this second concept. It's extremely well established.
00:54:27
Speaker
that smoking increases risk for lung cancer. It's also, I would say, extremely well established that once you have lung cancer, stopping smoking isn't going to cure your lung cancer. You can imagine scenarios, and I'll frame them hypothetically because they're acknowledging the fact that they're active debates about to what extent these scenarios are real and when do they apply and when they don't.
00:54:53
Speaker
A common, for example, conservative view of structural inequality, and I apologize to my conservative audience if I'm over paraphrasing, but I'm going to put it out there. It's basically that, yes, historical discrimination, historical on axis of race and axis of class is absolutely relevant to the patterns that we see today in terms of race and class inequality.
00:55:24
Speaker
However, the argument goes, in terms of what is actually going to today solve the problem, it's less going to be white people going to seminars and feeling bad about themselves and more about things that are going to fix the family breakdown and things that are going to break cycles of crime and things that are going to, in some communities, break cycles of addiction.
00:55:53
Speaker
you know, lower class communities of all colors that have been hit hard by the opioid crisis, right? And so let's just for argument's sake, suppose that some cases fit that description, right? And recognizing that there are many, many active debates about which to and which don't, right? In cases where that's the relevant description, to what extent is it still helpful
00:56:17
Speaker
to use racism or classism as the frame of analysis. I think it's still helpful. So it gives you a sense of what to look for and to think about if the outcomes are the same for each group. So for example, growing up in a single parent home, the outcomes are quite different for black and white families. Among boys.
00:56:45
Speaker
Yes. Particularly. More so than girls, I believe. It depends on which outcome you're looking at, too. True. Yeah, economic ones I'm thinking of. But yes. Yes. But in general, black families do better in the same family structure than white families, partly because the family structure that we're measuring doesn't include extended kin that are often helping black families in the way that they're not helping white families. And so just knowing that you might look for different things, you might think about different solutions, you might not care about
00:57:15
Speaker
the same issue in exactly the same way for each group. So I think it's never bad to think about the patterns of how racism has affected people, how classism has affected people, but ideally then you would think about the individual ways that people locally are experiencing something and try to give them a direct solution. So taking this into the gender world,
00:57:42
Speaker
So we know that girls get lower test scores on math tests than boys do. So if you just applied that across the board, you'd be like, oh my gosh, like girls really, we need to give them more math homework to help them catch up. We need to do like all these things. But if you don't think about it specifically, you'll miss the problem. So girls actually get higher grades in math than boys do. So the problem wouldn't be like, oh, let's like give them extra homework so they can, or the solution wouldn't be let's give them extra homework so they can catch up. Like they're,
00:58:12
Speaker
doing really well in school and math. And then some schools have a big test score gap by gender for math. And other schools don't have one at all. Other schools, girls are actually doing better than boys on math. There's a huge class interaction, I think.
00:58:27
Speaker
Yeah, also a class interaction. And so you actually, one of the things we argue is like, you really want to think about the local issue. And so you can use these big patterns to think, does this exist locally? But you want to not assume that the national pattern always applies to the very local case. And so using those patterns to investigate, but not to conclude and not to make a solution. So we do still think they're useful, just not
00:58:55
Speaker
in kind of blanketed, that's the only thing you look at sort of way.
Costs of Diagnosing Racism and Sexism
00:59:02
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, the last really substantive line of questioning, and that is going back to this idea of what are the costs of the errors in one direction or another.
00:59:16
Speaker
And actually, by the way, before I wanted that, one thought I had was, you know, the way you frame this, the way you responded to this tension that I was just describing, really, it seems like maybe there's an opportunity for bipartisanship on addressing these issues if we see that some of this tension is false, right? Nobody would say that we should stop warning people about the dangers of smoking because we still need chemotherapy, right? And nobody would say we should stop doing chemotherapy research because smoking is the problem, right?
00:59:45
Speaker
So maybe that same kind of thinking can bring people together and say, look, yes, there are these structural historical factors that contribute in a big way to causing this problem. Also, we need to think about solutions that work, that help people in the conditions they are today, rather than kind of romanticizing how things could have been had we not made the mistakes that we've made already.
01:00:08
Speaker
I think that's right. And the approach that we recommend for figuring out what's racist or sexist really combines our conservative and our liberal respondents' points of view. So liberals tend to, we use it, we call it an algorithmic approach. There is a pattern. I know there's this case, so therefore the case is racist because the pattern is racist or sexist. And then conservatives have this much more case-based approach where they
01:00:30
Speaker
know the pattern or ignore the pattern and then say well like what's happening in this case and we're arguing like actually let's bring those together let's use the pattern to say is there a problem here and be really alert to it but then not jump to conclusions and say well therefore it must be racist or sexist because this case matches the pattern the case probably matches many patterns some of which are not about race or sex
01:00:53
Speaker
And so let's investigate the case, just like the conservatives do. And so we do think there is this way to bring liberals and current conservatives together so that both groups can more accurately identify what's racist or sexist. And then we could actually solve real problems and not talk past each other all the time. That's great. I really like that. Yeah. Okay. So now getting to my last question.
01:01:17
Speaker
So one of the things that I think is interesting as a setup, on the one hand, you talk about in your book how you're focusing on white people because white people still are the racial majority and disproportionately represented in positions of power. All undoubtedly statistically true facts, right?
01:01:37
Speaker
On the other hand, it's also true that the people whose ideas, the people who generate the ideas that then become used in this discussion, my experience is they are often people of color. So for example, the critical race theory founders were almost all people of color. And then on the right, people like Thomas Sowell, John McWhirter, Glenn Lowry, Coleman Hughes, Tyler Arson-Harbor, Moose Algarvey, although the last two would not consider themselves conservatives, to be clear.
01:02:06
Speaker
You know, uh, uh, every single one of the people I just mentioned is, is either, is, is African-American either, you know, in whole or in part, right? Uh, and, and, and one of the things that I, from reading some of the, the conservatives in that tradition would maybe push you on a little bit is that while I think you've correctly characterized the cost of
01:02:32
Speaker
underdiagnosing, that we're going to miss problems and then miss opportunities to solve problems. I think most people would agree with that. I wonder if you've correctly characterized the costs or the main costs of overdiagnosing. The costs that you talk about are basically what happens to the wrongly convicted person. Repudational damage, lost job opportunities.
01:02:55
Speaker
and people getting fired, things like that. And I don't want to minimize, those are definitely costs.
Fairness Policies vs. Economic Impact
01:02:59
Speaker
I don't want to minimize the experience of people who have been canceled or people who have been passed over or whatever. But I wonder, if you ask,
01:03:11
Speaker
Glenn Lowry say, what were the main negative consequences of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement? And I did ask him this once at a conference, so I feel somewhat confident in paraphrasing what I recall is his answer.
01:03:26
Speaker
He wouldn't say that too many white people lost their jobs. What he would say is that this anti-police stuff and anti-prosecution stuff led to devastating increases in crime and consequently decreases in investment.
01:03:43
Speaker
and some of the education stuff led to decreasing emphasis in the most disadvantaged schools on reading and phonics and math in favor of this kind of ideologically loaded anti-racism stuff in ways that were absolutely materially devastating to the very people that we were supposed to be trying to help.
01:04:01
Speaker
What are your thoughts on that? Are there major costs to over-diagnosing to the people that we're trying to help? Because sometimes over-diagnosis leads to naive solutions that make the problems worse. I think there's a difference between over-diagnosing and misdiagnosing or properly diagnosing the problem but thinking about the solution incorrectly.
01:04:31
Speaker
I mean, I think, you know, Black Lives Matter is correct that a lot of Black men get shot by police compared to white men. It's disproportionate, which isn't to say that no white men are shot by police. There's a debate actually in the literature about shooting versus non-lethal force, the kind of rolling fire stuff. But sure, the broad point, policing has bias. Absolutely it does, yes. Okay, we'll say assaults are definitely unequal.
01:04:54
Speaker
So that diagnosis by Black Lives Matter is 100% correct, at least by the assaults that we can debate with the shootings. And policing in general, I think, is fair. Yes. But then I think the question is, does getting rid of police or funding them less solve the problem? And that's, I think, that's a whole different issue. But I think they were correct to say,
01:05:18
Speaker
we could call this racist, that there is this pattern it has been going on for decades and decades of police mistreating Black people more than other people. That's just kind of factually true, and to us to call it racism seems fine, that draws attention to the issue. But I do think the solutions they suggested are, it's difficult to know the effect they've had. I mean, partly the policing issue happened during the pandemic too, which makes it really hard to
01:05:47
Speaker
figure out exactly what the real cause was of the increased crime rate. But even if we knew for sure, I mean one of the reasons we do argue against liberals and
01:06:01
Speaker
we suggest that liberals sometimes over say like, let's not look at intent at all, is because well-meaning actors who are really trying to address inequalities that are well established can suggest the wrong solution that can make things worse for the groups they're trying to help. And so to call everything racist, regardless of the intent, sometimes is a problem. So we do advocate for thinking about intent in certain cases.
01:06:30
Speaker
And to go to the justice system analogy, when you're talking about punishing individual people, our justice system absolutely cares about intent. Attempted murder is still a crime, even if you don't succeed. And involuntary manslaughter is a very different level of crime than intentional murder, even if the outcome is the same.
01:06:48
Speaker
And to put a finer point on it in the context of what we're describing, if impact really doesn't matter more than intent, then the people who've been pushing long-term lockdowns in schools and defunding the police should get the strongest punishment for racism, right? If you buy my argument.
01:07:14
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure about the data, but this is exactly why we argue that you need to look at patterns and not one-time things, because people often suggest solutions that nobody could have predicted the outcome. And so to say we should never think about intent, even if you one time made a mistake,
01:07:32
Speaker
So for example, Ban the Box was the program that is trying to say, we want to help black men get jobs, black men are discriminated against more than white men with criminal records. And so we're going to just say, you can't ask about people's criminal records. They did that on purpose to try to help black men get more jobs.
01:07:51
Speaker
And the opposite effect, yeah. The opposite happened, right? Because then in players thought, well, maybe, like, I don't know if this black man has a criminal record or that black man has a criminal record. So I'm just going to assume that a lot of black men have criminal records more than is actually true. And so it hurt black men's prospects. But to call the people who are advocating for ban the box racist, because they produce this
01:08:12
Speaker
the unequal outcome that disadvantaged Black men, or to call it sexist even, that's kind of crazy. And so we do think thinking about intent for things that are one-time issues and not patterns does make a lot of sense. Yeah. So kind of related,
01:08:34
Speaker
The frame, you know, very logically in the book is on racism and inequality. And what, you know, what approach is going to lead us to best remedy racism, right? And sexism, yeah. And sexism, sorry. You'll see you in the example I'm thinking of why racism is living larger than sexism. And my question relates to
01:08:57
Speaker
How we should think of this when the goal of alleviating racism or sexism, but in the context I'm going to go to in a second racism, conflicts with another goal that has nothing to do with racism, but has large material consequences for people who are racially disadvantaged. So for example, there's lots of evidence in economics that neutral laws and rule of law are super important for driving investment.
01:09:25
Speaker
and investment is super important for economic prosperity and development. Neutral laws, this obviously has a race and sex element, but it also has an element of a country where you have to be somebody's brother to get a contract. It's not a country people are going to want to invest in as much as a country where laws are written down, they're enforced, they apply to everybody, we know what they are.
01:09:51
Speaker
Okay, those two legal principles, neutral laws and rule of law, meaning basically rules that are written down and don't change and give people certainty, conflict with affirmative action and reparations policies. Even in cases where there's a really strong moral case for them. So for example, land redistribution policies in Zimbabwe and affirmative action policies, both
01:10:15
Speaker
actual and planned by some parties have had significant effects on investment and some people argue have done serious damage to the economies and livelihoods of those countries, which obviously trickles down to the most marginalized. What do we make of those tensions and how important are those tensions in thinking about the context of we want to solve racism and sexism? How big of a lens do we need to have?
01:10:43
Speaker
I think they're hugely important. I think that's a lot of what the fight is about with our acquiters, people who often say that there's not a lot of racism and respect them saying, look, there's neutral laws, like they apply to everybody equally. And then convictors saying, well, they say they apply to everyone equally, but
01:11:02
Speaker
if you start off with an unequal playing field, then the outcomes end up being different. But even moving aside, just to be clear, I'm 100% a convictor on Zimbabwe and South Africa for being racist, 100%. And yet still, the policies which I would argue have a strong moral justification, absolutely the distribution of wealth and land in Zimbabwe, when colonialism ended,
01:11:29
Speaker
was unequal and driven in large part by racism and yet still the reappropriation of land to address that caused capital flight which really harmed people in Zimbabwe.
01:11:42
Speaker
That's what, how do we deal with that? I'm not talking about equivalent convictions, we're convicting. I'm talking about what we do about it.
The DEI Industry: Rise, Backlash, and Criticism
01:11:51
Speaker
If you want equality by race, you have to do things to address it directly. It's not going to just magically disappear. I mean, in occasional circumstances with exactly the right economic shocks that were totally unforeseen, like maybe it could, but like that's very rare.
01:12:08
Speaker
that's not something we can count on happening. And so I think you do have to take a direct approach to trying to address it. Also recognizing if most of your country like South Africa or Zimbabwe is Black and you want to invest in your people, you will be disproportionately investing in Black people who were harmed by all of these injustices. And so it also makes economic sense to invest in them.
01:12:33
Speaker
In some ways or not others, history suggests. In not others, yes. I mean, it'd be nice if we could convince the investors to keep investing in the country. I'm not sure you can or not. Yeah, I mean, I think the morally right thing to do is to still
01:12:51
Speaker
help them assuming the consequences and have this race-conscious policy. But yes, I understand what you were saying, that that had some negative consequences even for the people you were trying to help.
01:13:06
Speaker
And arguably, especially for those people, right? What many of the rich white landowners in Zimbabwe left with their money, right? They weren't the ones stuck, you know, holding the bag when the economy, you know, went south. Yeah, no, it's totally true. I mean, I think it goes to how complicated this is and how much we want to do to prevent future inequalities from happening.
01:13:32
Speaker
so that we don't end up in these situations more than we have to. But I don't have a great answer. I mean, I take your point that there are, like as much as I'd like to say, let's have conscious policies to help people who are very, very discriminated against, be due to their race, like it doesn't always unfold the way I would hope it would. So I don't have an easy answer to that.
01:14:02
Speaker
Okay. No worries. I don't either. That's why I asked. Let me end with one last question that maybe doesn't have an easy answer either. That is, it's hard to talk about racism and sexism in the last five years without noticing and talking about the rise and subsequent fall of the DEI industry since 2020.
01:14:28
Speaker
I mean obviously it started before that and hasn't completely fallen back to where it was in 2015. What do you make of that? There's a story where we were going forwards and now we're going backwards. There's a story where we were going backwards and now we're going forwards and I would say there's a story where we
01:14:45
Speaker
We're trying to do something important, and we made some hasty mistakes, and now we're kind of pruning those mistakes, but largely keeping the better parts. What's your take? I think it's a mixed bag. I mean, I think the backlash was more, the backlash to the DAI efforts was more extreme than I would have predicted. I predicted a backlash, but not this sustained or this widespread.
01:15:12
Speaker
I think part of the issue is that I think the DI industry does a really good job of identifying inequalities that are unfair. I don't think our solutions are often great. And I think we have these big structural inequalities, and then we say, just think about nice thoughts. Yeah, why don't people go to seminars and meditate? Yeah. And you're just like, that's not going to solve anything. And the blame gets passed from the structural issue to
01:15:41
Speaker
potentially a white person who didn't have that much to do with it. And, you know, also was just born into the system that is unequal in all of these ways. And so I think
01:15:52
Speaker
The solutions that DEI has offered have been, I mean, not to say that there aren't any good ones, but I've certainly been to plenty of bad DEI trainings where they just say, think about your implicit biases. And I thought, if I need to have them, I would just not have them. I can see why the backlash exists.
01:16:18
Speaker
I should say my co-author would dramatically disagree with me here. She runs a lot of DEI trainings and sees them as being very effective. Yeah, on which side would she disagree with you?
01:16:28
Speaker
She thinks that they're good at evaluating the problems and having solutions. I haven't seen the solution part myself, but I also have not gone to the trainings that she runs. So I am happy to defer to her that sometimes they're good. But I just think there's overall usually a big mismatch if we have structural problems and then we're asking people to solve them by
01:16:51
Speaker
like basically being nice and being... Right, smoking and lung cancer. Yeah. And so I think the left maybe hasn't made a great stand against them because there's to some extent realized that they weren't doing a lot of these DI programs. And there's sociological research that suggests that they often produce backlashes or do nothing. And so if that's true, why defend them?
01:17:20
Speaker
But we do want something to happen. The inequalities are still real and still happening, and it's still perpetuating inequality in a lot of unfair ways. And so we do need something to happen. I'm just not sure that the seminars that are mandated are the solution. And maybe one last question on this thread, and then we'll wrap up, is I would say some conservatives would certainly take it farther
01:17:51
Speaker
For example, Christopher Rufo would take it farther than just, you know, these are people with good intentions that are proposing naive solutions, right? He would say, if you trace the intellectual roots of a lot of these things, you know, including critical race theory, it traces to people and critical pedagogy, you know, critical praxis. It traces to people who quite literally were vocal supporters of
01:18:15
Speaker
Lenin and Stalin and Mao and literally some of the worst dictators in history and were explicit promoters of political violence like Angela Davis.
01:18:30
Speaker
naive people. In some cases, there are people with really backwards and destructive ideologies that are capturing the public attention on these real problems and using them to further pretty pernicious agendas. What would be your response to that claim?
01:18:49
Speaker
I mean, I don't know the specific, like I don't know which specific of people we're talking about or their specific intellectual histories, but I guess I would just say like, there's still a lot of racism and a fair amount of sexism. So the wealth gap is still, or let's just call it inequality. There's a huge racial wealth gap. There's a huge racial and incarceration gap. Like there's real problems out there that I think we really need to fix. And so I like that people are trying.
01:19:18
Speaker
And I understand that it's hard to come up with solutions that are going to be politically viable to most Americans. And so it's not surprising to me that we come up with some that are not effective or not politically viable. And so I think it's just a really hard problem. And I guess I give people the benefit of the doubt a lot that they
01:19:43
Speaker
just legitimately care about this problem and are doing their best to solve it, even if sometimes that's ineffective. I also would say it's not their fault that they're producing ineffective solutions sometimes. Sociology is a discipline. We are awesome at identifying inequalities, and we're very bad at suggesting solutions. If they turn to us, you would just see problem, problem, problem, and very little about what to do about it.
01:20:11
Speaker
I think as a field, we leave them with little guidance about what to do. I mean, that's kind of an indictment though of sociology, isn't it? Not to say that it, of course, it's good that sociology is good at identifying problems, but
01:20:29
Speaker
Isn't it a problem that we're not paying enough attention in sociology to solutions? I don't know. Do you tell me? I would agree. I think there's a lot of reason for it. But yeah, I think it is a problem. I think we should be doing more of it. Okay, so let me close with an optimistic take and hear your reaction on it.
01:20:50
Speaker
So I'm just starting a book project called How Polarization Will Destroy Itself. And basically my argument is that the basic institutions of Western civilization are strong enough to resist extremism and polarization because
01:21:07
Speaker
The energy that can empower extremes temporarily is the energy of real problems people care about, like racism and sexism, but also like patriotism and American greatness and American accessionalism. And the weakness of extremism is that it's bad at offering solutions, but people, I think, are going to eventually gravitate towards pragmatism and to solutions that work. For example, there was a backlash to Me Too, but nobody wants Harvey Weinstein to get out of prison, right, besides his lawyers.
01:21:39
Speaker
And I see the same thing with racism. I've met people with an extremely broad range of opinions on the Black Lives Matter movement and an even broader range of opinion on the Black Lives Matter organization.
01:21:54
Speaker
Even on the right, in my experience, a majority of those people don't think it's a good thing that George Floyd was killed and don't think it's a good thing that young black men are disproportionately roughed up by police. My optimistic take is that as long as we maintain our institutions of a free society, markets, rule of law, free and fair elections, free speech, that eventually we'll figure it out, at least in so far as we'll continue to slowly make progress on these problems.
01:22:24
Speaker
Am I a naive Pollyanna or am I onto something? I mean, I don't know that the future is hard to predict. I think I'm less optimistic than you are, which might be my sociology training here, although there are sociologists who are much more optimistic than I am. But like, if I think about me too, it feels like where to go. Like, and what changed? Like there was this moment, but have we had less sexual harassment in the workplace? Have we had less sexual assault? Do we have
01:22:52
Speaker
Have we gotten rid of those arbitration clauses maybe on that one? I'm not sure. But it doesn't feel to me like, oh, wow, we suddenly made all of this progress. It feels like we had a blip. And maybe if you're a very high profile man, it might affect you more. But for everyday people, it feels to me like I'm not sure that that legacy is going to be that long lasting.
01:23:18
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see the data, which I haven't seen. So I 100% admit that this is anecdotal, you know, experiential take. But my anecdotal experiential take is that there are still bad actors, you know, the 5% or whatever it is of men who are jackasses, you know, still exist. And some of them are still employed. But some of the more innocuous, but still, you know,
01:23:45
Speaker
cumulatively pernicious stuff in terms of day-to-day behavior norms I think have perceptively changed in ways that even people who think, you know, me too, cancel culture went too far, you know, don't want to undo. But again, I admit that I haven't seen national data and I could be a totally naive Pollyanna.
01:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't either. So I'm not sure.
Hope for Overcoming Polarization
01:24:03
Speaker
But I think also we just disagree about the extent of problems so much. So our, what we call our motivated acquitters, the people who are who say there's like no sex, basically any time, they would deny that men sexually assault women that often. And they would say women put themselves in these situations so that they can have sex with these men. And then they can
01:24:26
Speaker
claim assault and then they can get a book deal or somehow make money off of this incident. And so they don't even believe it's a problem to the same. And then on the opposite end, liberals sometimes overstate the problem, the numbers of the problem at least. So I just think we're so far apart on recognizing what's real and how it comes about that I feel like the polarization might continue for quite some time.
01:24:55
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it's going to go away overnight, but I do think it will and already has decreased somewhat from its apex in 2021. Anyway, we could do a whole other podcast on that. We're out of time. Thanks so much, Jesse Strive, for coming on the Free Mind podcast. Super interesting. When will your book come out so our listeners can look for that? It'll be out in the end of January, and it's on Amazon for pre-order already. Oh, great. Just to recap, the title is, is it racist? Is it sexist?
01:25:25
Speaker
Yes, and with my co-author Betsy Leander, right? Yeah, and so everybody should go check that out. And you know, Dr. Strieb is, although similar career stage as me, has written a whole bunch of other books, which is really interesting and impressive. So I encourage you to check those out too. A lot of different books of would it be fair to say that kind of inequality in different ways is kind of a theme.
01:25:48
Speaker
Yeah, all the other ones are about class inequality. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, thanks again so much and we'll see you soon and go check out this book on Amazon. Great, thank you. Thanks. The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash Benson.
01:26:17
Speaker
You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center. Our Instagram is at TheBensonCenter. And the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.