The colorblind principle . Yes. So theres been a lot of confusion about what the word colorblindness mean. Many people think that colorblindness means pretend you dont. But in my book, i try to get rid of that perception because we all see race. Everyone sees race and help it. Everyone watching this notices that i am of color and and so forth. So with the knowledge that we can all see race, were all capable of racial bias. What i mean by colorblindness book is that we try our best to treat people without regard to race, both in our lives. The less controversial piece and in our Public Policy. Thats what i mean by colorblind. One of the reasons the notion colorblindness has become so contrived racial seems to be rooted in what is broadly understood as antiracism, which you also define as near racism. You discuss two of the most high profile proponents of that ideology. Robin dangelo and max kendi. What is an antiracism or near racism, and how did it become so influential . So what is today called antiracism . What i call neo racism in the book is an ideology came out of wellintentioned desire to fix and address the legacy of slavery, the legacy of jim crow, persistent Racial Disparity. The country and starting really in the sixties and seventies and then continuing on into the eighties, there was a group of scholars that came up with something called critical race theory, which has been much in the news the past few years, but which was originally a conscious effort to redirect the Civil Rights Movement, to reject the rhetoric of Martin Luther king, bayard rustin, and other traditional civil rights heroes, to say that actually they didnt go far enough and they should have put race on the front burner. What happened is that ideology percolated inside the academy for a few decades, and then just in the past decade, starting around 2013, those ideas that had been essentially dormant in certain corners of academia academia really spread throughout society and have had vocal exponents such as mexican, mexican and Robin Dangelo, who say that rather than strive for colorblind society, rather than strive for a society where someones race doesnt mean anything at all, and recognize that race only in deep, we should strive for a society where everyone reflects deeply on their racial identity. We teach kids at a young age that their race most important aspect of air we put in racial categories and every piece of Public Policy and every Public Policy, including emergence situation like covid, should be viewed through the lens of reducing racial disparities, that of breeding people that need the treatment the most on a race blind basis. And so youve seen it in the last decade that what was once a pretty fringe idea has become mainstream and has been spawned into a lot of democrat policy. Even if the majority of democrat voters dont necessarily subscribe to this ideology. Ive thought about this a lot and a lot of other writers have also tried to make sense of it. There are so many hypotheses for why so many changes in our National Discourse about race and identity started to emerge around the time frame that you also identify around 13 or the late obama era. What what do you think it is . And the past decade and change that really was so transformative. And why did these ideas that you say have been around for decades and they have been around for decades, why did they why were they able to gain such purchase all of a sudden . This moment, though. If you turn the clock back to 2012, what you find from all the polls that most americans, black and white, believe that Race Relations were good, that fact maybe shocking, given what Race Relations have felt like over the past ten years. But the first obama term was a high point for us Race Relations. A majority of of both white blacks beat. Look at the data and something happened. Around 2013 and it just began to nosedive so that by 2021, about half of the people that thought Race Relations were good in 2012 and 13 at the same in 2021. So the question is what happened . People like to republicans like to blame obama and democrats like to blame president trump. But neither of those explanations actually make sense of the data. The only explanation that makes sense is that 2012 and 13 was around the time where a Critical Mass of americans started. Instead of getting their news from the 6 00 news from newspapers and so forth, started getting their news from social media. And then the second thing that happened is that 2013 was around the time where everyone had a smartphone with with a camera on it. So you combine those two things. Everyone is now a journalist and can pick up any piece of video, any altercation that happens in the street, and then they can instantly post it to social media where it can get millions of views in a matter of hours. Those two things fundamentally changed the way that people receive information. So lets say its the year 2005 and theres a Police Citizen interaction that goes sideways as they sometimes do, and the officer happens to white, the arrestee happens to be black. How do you learn about that . Well, a journalist comes to the scene, gets a statement from each party, and maybe it ends up on the local 6 00 news at most. You fast forward to 2013. What happens is somebody pulls out their phone, takes a 32nd clip of that interaction, which may be out of context, may leave out the 5 minutes leading up to it, instantly posted to facebook where it gets millions of views. Before any journalists have had time to explain the context of the interaction and explain actually what happened, often clips can be misleading. But now its gone viral. Its been fed into a social media algorithm that preferentially its that information to the people who will be most upset by it. And you just filter all of reality through those two things. Arent phone enabled cameras and social media and what you get is a population that suddenly believes that there is a spike in racist. Even though racism has actually been on a steady decline for decades now. Theres one response to this people often have, which is isnt it that social media showed us all the racist racism that was actually out there . So thats a reasonable hypothesis is. But it turns out that thats not true. And the reason we know thats not true is because surveys of people show that the public is deeply misinformed and far too pessimistic about the reality of Race Relations. The, for example, one survey found that very liberal americans believe that. 1000 unarmed black americans were shot dead by the cops every year. The year that survey was taken, the true number was 12. So people were off by a factor not of ten, but by a factor of 100. So if social media were giving us a more accurate perception of our country, you would expect people to have an accurate perception of the country. Whats whats true is that social media is educating. Its making us feel that these problems are far bigger than they are. And that is what accounts for the fact that the past ten years have been a period of declining racial. Whats a plausible response to that, since social media has so powerfully permeated all of our lives and is also creating this effect in many others besides what a kind of what do you do in the face of such a torrent of distortion . The very good question i would like to say that our culture needs to adapt and develops kind of literacy to deal with the social media era. In other words, we have to learn to be less reactive very videos and we have to rewire our algorithms and not show us the most upsetting possible content. On the other hand, thats very difficult to achieve because all of the incentives of social Media Company to get us to click, to sell, advertise mean is is you show us the most shocking and unrepresentative slices of reality present that as if everything. So its a very vexing problem. I think its possible that this is just one of the huge technological transformations and its going to have ripple effects. The television had ripple effects. It. Theres no doubt that the Civil Rights Movement and the vietnam war would have been received differently by the public had there been no television in its probably true that the Printing Press in europe caused all kinds of embolization and ripple effects run. So i know what what is in store for us but we have to i have to be honest about how social media is not educating us, but messaging. Theres a paradox too much antiracism that seems a lot like what the writer Rob Henderson has termed luxury. Luxury. He believes the policies they advocate for often end up harming the very communities on behalf whom they advocate. The movement to defund and abolish the police. For example, after the summer of 2020 comes to mind. Can you expand on that paradox you do in the book . And its quite compelling, yes. So you give a great example. If you go back to the summer of 2020, after george floyd died and there were protests all around the world and riots, every major American City and you just went up to ask someone on the street who say reads york times, the atlantic and considers themselves to be informed that what percentage of black people do you think want less police . They would have given you some answer. That was probably the majority right . Gallup did a poll at that very time found that only about 20 of black people wanted less police. 20 of black people wanted more police. And 60 of black people wanted the same Police Presence in their own neighborhood. And so that left about one fifth of black americans agreeing with the black lives matter perspective that the police would be wrong and defanged, making it a minority viewpoint within the black community. Now, thats not surprising because black communities are overrepresented in terms of those both perpetrate. But more importantly, this case for a crime so that the majority of black citizens who have no involvement in criminal activity are still more likely to suffer from it. And therefore the police, more than anyone. So what ended up happening is because so many places defunded, the police and the police in general were so demoralized and suffered as retirement. America had. Between 2020 and 2021, the greatest single year over year increase homicide in recent american history. I think the Pew Research Center said it was probably the greatest single year increase in homicide in a century. That didnt happen in any of our peer countries. The reason it happened is because there was a massive anti Police Movement that premised its argument on the fact that black americans are demanding, which was false at the time. Dont boss though its it is strange that the movement which bills itself as antiracist, which will quite often say things like we need to listen to people of color in in the most and most important instance of that in the past few years actually ignored the majority opinion of the black went ahead with a policy that hurt no community than the black. Yeah, one of the one of the most prominent examples of that was actually in minneapolis after the death of george floyd, when homicides and shootings spiked and the black community was was begging for more policing. Yeah, there can be an odd symmetry between racism and antiracism or neo racism, as you put it. I had the experience at a conference recently of being sorted into a socalled Affinity Group to facilitate discussion. The woman in charge couldnt understand how, as the son of a black man raised in the segregated south, this was such a regressive practice, in my view. But what are we to make of these . These neo segregated, these practices of neo segregation that are implemented in schools and other and other institutions as well . Yeah. So when i did my orientation at columbia. In 2015, they had a similar or similar kind of practice where they would put us in a room and say, black people go in that corner, white kids go in that corner, asian kids go in this corner. Hispanic is going this corner and. The first problem is, do i choose black or hispanics . Im both. But once you get past, you just have the odd feeling. At least i had the odd feeling that rather than connect with these ids who im going to try to be friends with for the next four years on the basis of my interest at that time i was into music. I was in philosophy, i was in science, and i wanted to kid act with. Other students that were into those things. Now im afraid that everyone is going to be me and first thought that they will have is oh thats a black right and that becomes a perception that prevents them from seeing you simply as an individual. I them to see me as coleman the kid that was into music philosophy and whatever else i was into not as a kid standing in the in the black corner of the room and then know them perceive themselves racialized as well. I dont think kids need any further encouragement. Tribalist, tribal ism is unfortunately a part of human and i do not think that in in a multiracial democracy, really the worlds first experiment in multiracial democracy, a country that has had the most open policy of of almost any of our nation or most of its existence, that we need to help people that their identity are deeply linked, their race. I think this a recipe for disaster. But we should be doing instead is telling kids that you are who you are as an individual. Yes, there may be some racists out there, but at the end of the day you should identify with the skills and values that have as an individual and never judge anyone else on the basis of their skin color and to cordon off people into their kind of racial corners the way that allergies are doing in the name of lessening racism is actually not a very good thing for racial harmony, right . Youre actually encouraging kids themselves and others primarily the lens of race where they may not come in to the College Experience with that attitude. So i think thats. Go ahead. Well, i was going to say thats precisely it, isnt it . Theres even been research and anecdotal evidence that it actually is counterproductive and specifically white peoples sense of their own whiteness and inadvertently leads to an know notions of White Supremacy, because people cant fixate on their identity and forever feel its a source of inferior. Hmm. Yeah. I want to make one other point here. This is a very important difference between my philosophy and the philosophy. Many people. But i would call neo racist and i dont believe that kids are born racist. I actually think the vast majority of kids, though, kids have many problems. Our kids are often selfish, for example, and have to be taught to. Thats a very common experience for parents. Children are born haring about racial identity. Thats not one of the problems that children tend to have a unless they are taught to do so by adults. So i think the the promise, the hope that that have as a country is that each new generation of kids is. That theyre the potential us to raise them the right way presents itself generation. And if we have more and more kids being born in situations where they are meeting kids of different races, being friends of kids with different race, it as i did when i grew up, i had friends of every race and i did not of them as having a race. I thought of them a lot of them by their name because we have that opportunity with each generation. What we have to do not poison. We have to preserve that racial innocence as long as possible because that really is the right attitude towards race. Kids are born with the right attitude, more or less, and its adults poison, whereas the neo racists want to say, actually white kids are born racist and they need to be educated out of it from an early age possible as possible and is why you see, for example, just this. Have a and Francisco Chronicle reporting that a a school there spent a quarter of 1,000,000 on a program called a woke interguard which rather than each literacy and math, these kids the majority of whom are english second language panic. They instead teach them to disrupt White Supremacy. Right. As the students slide back on english reading proficiency and math scores. This is not necessary. Its a totally false emphasis and actually back it gets, i guess, the problem exactly backwards. The problem not that kids are born with the wrong attitude on race and we have to hammer it out of them at eight five. The problem is that are born the right way. We as a society, as adults, are hammering the wrong ideas into them. You recount the death of tony tampa and other white victims of Police Brutality to make the case that a commitment to universal principles such as police should not brutalize unarmed civilians would also make black americans safer as well. Right. Had tony tampas death received more attention and outrage, theres a decent chance that george floyd would still be alive today. Can you elaborate on what you mean . There at tony tampa with someone who tragically died in police and it was caught on camera . The reason i brought it up is because it was very similar to the way in which george floyd died. He had a knee impa had a knee on his back some 13 minutes and actually worse than in the case of george floyd. The officers were cracking jokes about how he was losing consciousness as was happening. Anyone can go on youtube and open only tampa and watch this curious. Now, that video was open for the world to see before george floyd ever got into the altercation. Altercation with officer minneapolis. Had people been more upset by that . Had it been a National News story at all . Its quite possible that he, out of maximal restraint technique, you put in the on the top of someones back or neck for so might have been banned the way that it was banned any after george floyd and had it been banned. Possible that george floyd would have survived that altercation and would have had his life. Now, why didnt anyone care about only tempers . The story was no worse. And the video was no worse than the george floyd. The reason no one cared is, is tony temper happen to have white skin and the sight of of someone with white skin having a reaction like that with the police is not as upsett