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Hey everybody, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast, and I am here with my friend Dr. Wilfred Reilly, who I think you will probably know, from his various podcast appearances, his essays, his book reviews, his scholarly publications, his books, I'll put all the links in the show notes. He's also a professor in Kentucky. And can you give I mean, look, I know academics, you got like, you know, various affiliations here and there, I just told me like, what your top line like what you usually tell people, what do you do, Wilfred? Like who you will? People who are your people, as they would say.
I'm an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University. And other than that, I'm with the standard journals and so on. But that is my one line job description.
Okay, and like, you were not always in academia. And I think you're not like one of those like, you know, undergrad to grad school to professorship. Right. You did some other things. Can you talk about your background a little bit? Like, where are you from? Like, you know, I, I follow you on Twitter, social media X whatever you want to call it. And my understanding is you're not from the hood. Like, you just made a face. So like, just give give a general sense, because, you know, I think a lot of people don't know.
Yeah, so I've actually had a really interesting life. I mean, the hood is a relative term. I mean, I would think of the hood is an area where no one works. So in that sense, I was probably more from a series of tough working class neighborhoods. I mean, I was born on the south side of Chicago, I lived in Wicker Park on the north side, when that was pre gentrification. They didn't have all the $80 backpack stores yet. It was jokingly known as Needle Park. I moved to East Aurora, which is another large well known kind of blue collar neighborhood in that area. Chicago is second really only to New York and Metroplex size. I mean, you know, LA solved this problem just by combining all the suburbs into one city. But I mean, if you go from Chicago, out through all kind of the inner suburbs to Aurora and Naperville, I mean, all these are cities of several 100,000 people, I mean, population of Aurora, I think is 297,000 Something like that, I have to check it out. But um, the east side of the city is a well known kind of like I said, blue collar area. It was, Aurora overall was the murder capital of the Midwest region of the country during the period of time when I was in high school because of conflict between black gangs coming from Chicago after the the Jets, the projects were torn down, and the local Hispanic and Caucasian gangs who ended up winning the conflict actually, but um, the east sides, very heavily Latino, a fair number of Eastern European immigrants, fair number of African Americans. So those are the areas that I lived in coming up and I had a pretty normal sort of lower working class childhood. With white tees and a skateboard I went to East Aurora Senior, which is technically considered an inner city school, so on. But um, after that, I went through a bunch of progressions in life like I had done well in school. And I'm also black, and I'm from a lower income census District, which I assume helped when I was applying. And also my mom, by the way, I don't know if I mentioned this, the reason that I lived in all these areas is that my mom who was from the Chicago Ward family to the upper class, black family, decided to sort of do good during the 1960s. So I don't know how much she talked to the rest of the family when I was a kid, that always seemed a little bit strained. And we basically lived in the areas where she taught. That's why I was in all these places. So mom taught me to read at I mean, age one or two. I mean, there were books throughout the house and calligraphy scrolls and this kind of stuff. So I had an enormous starting advantage in addition to just benefiting from you know, my background as someone who was literate. So I ended up going to college. I went to college for quite a while. I mean, I went to Southern Illinois for undergrad school, kind of legendary party school down there in the forest preserves at the bottom of the state. In Illinois. There's a joking term BFE, Butt-fucking Egypt which refers to the region of the state. That's a well yeah, like all that like Cairo, Memphis. I mean the pronunciation is a little off but Carbondale where the mascot is the Egyptian dog the Saluki all that is in the deep southern corner of the state. So I went to college there majored in Political Science did reasonably well. Graduated went on to law school at the University of Illinois, which was a big culture shock, I was like 20, or 21. I mean, that's not quite Ivy, but it's one of the better big 10 law schools and people were furious. Theyre we’re like 30 year old prosecutors in my classes and so on. So kind of a sharp shift upward, you know, this is how you wear a suit, young man and all that, and graduated, and at this point, I expected to go into kind of a standard upper middle class life. But that emphatically didn't happen. Like I got an offer from Southern Illinois to come back and get a PhD over what was going to be based on the level of teaching the program required and so on. Minimum five years of study, from a program called DFI diversifying the faculty of Illinois, which wanted more minority and as I recall more male teachers in the state of Illinois, in elite high schools and colleges, so and so I went back to grad school, and when I've been in grad school for a couple years, my mom got very sick. So I went back to Chicago to help her out. And this started like a 10 year odyssey of all these crazy jobs, like I taught in the Chicago City Colleges, which are generally in in or close to the hood. So that's like Malcolm X College, Harry Truman, where I taught classes for a while. I was a canvas Field Manager for the Human Rights Campaign, the gay and gender rights group.
Are you are you are you part of the rainbow nation?
No, no, I'm not like so the one of the things that a lot of people don't understand, although I think you do about the activist left is that they hire mercenaries heavily. So almost all of our canvassers were like male fighters. I mean, like guys who'd been athletes in high school or college sort of Hood dudes, there were a few passionate feminist women, but they were just as a body physically. But the actual job of street canvassing in a major city is just like you, you're in Chicago, or Detroit. And you go to generally poor neighborhoods where not a lot of people are already signed up as members of the group. We also went to the Magnificent Mile, it's just as intimidating in a different way. And to sort of post up like, hey, got a minute for gay marriage. And I mean, the reactions are exactly what you'd expect from you know, physically hostile encounters to like people joyously saying yes, and giving you $50 a month, people trying to make out with you. So I was one of the leaders of this group, I managed our in city and infield, canvassers. I led small groups under our director for quite a while it was very fun job. I mean, like we went on a camping canvas, it was called the Southern Illinois, I think we took on to the actual Deep South. I didn't go on that one. But just very much. That's what Freedom Rider in my bio half jokingly refers to that I actually was a local level leader in a civil rights organization for a couple of years. And I'm pro gay rights. But I wasn't all that passionate about the topic. It was just a fun competitive job. And it's also a paid job, by the way. I mean, as I recall, we paid 15% of everything that you made over a very low baseline. So we had canvassers many of them are poor, and you know, hungry in the literal sense, if you're just starting out, but we had senior canvassers that were making probably 30-35 bucks an hour, because then you go to these these areas, and you might sign up 10 people at $30 a month, on a good day, and you're not doing that for charitable reasons. I mean, you would get 15% of the 3000 over, you know, $270. So the organized left is a much better at the ground game than the organized right. That's something I still noticed today.
So, you gotta - so you're basically what you're saying is the people are hustlers, you know, gotta run people down.
No, they’re classic city kids. Yeah, I mean, like with the clipboard, and like self defense stick over the back and like, sunglasses in the summer, and they give you like a shirt. So people would put like these bright golden blue, equal sign shirts on. I mean, they were they were a fun group. And they were not, you know, sexually inactive with one another, generally speaking. I mean, that was actually something that leadership kind of encouraged, like, you know, everything friendly and consensual, but people would go drink, hook up, party. So it's very much a college and kind of young person's job. We had a lot of people that seemed to almost be doing it as their alternative to more traditional community service, the military or Salvation Army or something like that. You know, for two years, I'm going to, you know, stand out here through the weather changes on the south side of Chicago and do this for gay rights. And the bill that we were backing the ENDA, the employment non discrimination act, actually I have some problems with that now as the trans movement advanced, but that and the other thing that we were backing, which is gay marriage, were pretty successful, like gay marriage Obergefell passed, while friends of mine were still doing this. And they were like, joyous. I mean, there were giant parties throughout Chicago and New York and so on. Gay Pride came the day after the decision came down in both cities actually. So I mean, like Roman level bacchanals, but I'm really I'm not the actually like the most liberal guy. I favored general gay and women's rights. But after a couple of years with people, you know, trying to square off with me for doing that I just got a I got a job. But that again was one of the classic kind of city boy jobs like I worked in a series of sales, mostly high end sales, I wasn't really a trader in the classic stock trading sense. But bullpens along LaSalle Street and Michigan Avenue, I worked for Marcus Evans, which is a legendarily aggressive British company, and our North American headquarters is in Chicago. And the goal of that business is taking our clients who are like the CEOs of little companies, and hustling until we get the meetings with the CEOs of big companies. So we were tracking down like the CEO of Walmart Americans, and trying to arrange these meetings for our clients who might be not saying whether they were or not, but like LifeLock companies at that level. Weapons makers, I mean, just like it very much one of the, again, kind of classic city jobs that went on for a couple years, paid quite well. So I actually took a break and finished my PhD at the end of that period.
And so now you Dr. Riley and your tenure now. Or are you not tenured yet?
Yeah, I'd probably say less if I wasn't tenured. I'm through the first level of academic tenure and other like five possible if you count emeritus with a - or you know salaried chair.
Yeah, but I mean, your department? You're at HBU?
HBCU. Yeah. Yeah, Historically Black College, which has turned out not to matter all that much. Like I mean, it's, I think it's cool. I mean, I'm not racist. I'm on the right now politically, but I mean, like I think they'd have an issue. If the stereotype of conservatives as bigots were accurate. And so like, every day, I was going beyond the hardest, hereditarianism. And like reading, you know VDARE in the office or something, but I mean, like, in reality, they HBCUs are like 160 of them. And they're mostly decently ranked colleges in the South. I mean, like Howard, Morehouse, Spellman, are all HBCUs Fisk is an HBCU. Meharry, the medical college. So there's almost a funny element to this without going off on a ramble, because discrimination and hiring and so on is illegal in any business. So we as an HBCU, have to deal with the question of what do you do as an all black institution? Like, should we have affirmative action for whites, given that white test scores in Appalachia are often below those for the upper middle class black kids we're bringing it and the meetings can get hilarious, just unintentionally, you know, like, what should we do for this population injured by bond servitude in the past, but on a day to day basis, it just doesn't matter that happens to be part of the institution. So we have a statue of the great black educator. I'm going to say Dubois, but I know that's wrong. I'm going to look that up. But I mean, we have we have that sort of thing as opposed to Union generals or something like that on the campus.
Mm hmm. Okay, so you're you're at Kentucky State. And, you know, as you said, you're on the right. You know, your quote, unquote, black conservative, maybe, like, Are you are you identified as that sometimes?
Yeah. Although I don't really think that that means too much. Um, so. Oh, yeah. Just the statues that we have. Are Whitney Young, we got a big we have like,
Oh Whitney Young, I know Whitney Young. Yeah.
Great guy. We've got a 12 foot brass, Whitney Young at the top of one of those majestic staircases that you see on any decent sized campus and so on. So it's just it's him instead of General Lee or General Sherman, you know, I like the HBCU background in practice, if you're teaching stats, it doesn't matter much. It's just half your students are going to be black. Um, but the black conservatism thing I think, is fairly interesting, because being a black conservative doesn't really mean that you're black, and you're a man of the right. Like when I look listen to a lot of black conservatives like I love John McWhorter. But I mean, he's a New York Times columnist. He's just a
No, John's a lib, he’s a lib now. He's moved back since his Manhattan Institute, City Journal. I mean, so, look, I've been listening to these guys. I think I told Glenn this story. I actually emailed John in the year 2000. I think when he was a Berkeley professor, he actually responded to me, he didn't remember me, but I've been watching the blogging heads show. Well, now it's on, you know, the Glenn show that's on substack since 2008, and back then, as you probably know, Glenn was the lefty Hillary stan that was defending the Palestinians. And John was the neoconservative who if not a Republican, he was on NPR in the mid 2000s defending the Iraq War, mostly just because, well, it was a Manhattan Institute, and he's kind of admitted that. Well, I mean, you feel like you had to have an opinion. He's like, Well, I mean, all the people he knew and seemed like, you know, liberal people also were pro Iraq War, right? So you know, he was there and then over the years, especially during the Obama period, they kind of like cross paths. And now Glenn is a conservative and he is definitely like you I would say he’s center right now. Definitely like soft on Trump and John is the center left, you know, more heterodox liberal again. So you know, life is long. And, you know, it's hard to define these things. I mean, I will say, I don't generally use the term black conservative because who the hell cares what your race is? Like, no one's ever called me a brown conservative by the way, if not all non white people I like if someone called me that I'd be like, What the hell? Why are you referring to me being brown? Like that's like fucking weird, you know what I'm saying? So, in general, I think I think it's well taken, like Shelby Steele objected to be called a black conservative because he’s like, I’m just a conservative, or actually back in the 1990s. He was a liberal. But he was called a black conservative because he was off the reservation on affirmative action. And then eventually, he just kind of caved was like, okay, whatever. I'm conservative, you know?
Yeah. I actually think the phrase Black conservative is useful because it explains the distinction that's being described and to be a black conservative is simply to be heterodox on American race issues. Like that's all it means. So like John McWhorter obviously famously wrote, “Losing the Race” where he described, and this to me is my one response to both racialists and hereditarians I mean, like, many variables can impact the DV but like John goes in this book through what we've later seen Brookings do in more detail, but like the study time data, how much time is black students and multiple University spent pursuing the work? These were kids on the same program as the white kids. I mean, so it you can't argue that they were in simpler classes or something. And he said, Well, obviously the biggest problem for the black community today, paraphrasing him a little bit, but it is these issues like the fact that we study a third as much as whites or Asians, or that there's this sort of tolerance of crime as rebellion where we're making these Neo blaxploitation movies in the late 90s. Like, clearly, objectively, these are bigger issues than racism in upscale colleges. And that's something that's obviously true. And I think in a bar or on a golf course, or on a basketball court, like 90% of white or black, certainly males would agree with, but that you're not supposed to say so that's what makes John like an outlaw conservative on everything else. I mean, if you asked him about health care policy, yeah, I would assume he'd be a standard liberal, we're not even center left like liberal guy. And I'm in the New York Times readership loves him, he's just a mildly, he's no more than mildly, he’s just heterodox on race. So that's what that means. Like I'm very heterodox on race, but I also like coming from the business world and so on, I'm, I'm pro gun, I would stop illegal immigration almost totally wouldn't be very difficult to do at all, build some kind of border fence even and instituting e-verify. You know, I mean, just like, I have no patience for crime whatsoever. You know, I don't think being poor is an excuse for crime, you can check the Asian data in New York City. So I actually do have a ton of conservative positions, whereas I don't think John for example, would, but we'd both fall in that heterodox on race category.
Yeah, I'm gonna say something really quickly. It's not part of my plan. But the immigration thing I've been thinking about it lately. You know, I come out of, you know, like, if you go to Wikipedia it's still listening to the Palio conservative. So I was pretty skeptical of like, the mass immigration regime, and I, myself am an immigrant, but, you know, but I liked the point system, you know, and all that stuff. I do have to say, like, just like, straight up, I gotta be honest, 2023, the system is really broken. I don't really, I don't really hold it against people for being illegal anymore. The nightmares that I've - when we came in the 1980s, it was a different system. Like today's system is just so so broken, that I can't hold it against anyone at this point. I've known people who've, like tried to go through the legal system, and it is a nightmare. It is a nightmare, man. But anyway, just my little after 20 years, like I have changed on this partly just because the system itself is just like not sustainable. I don't know what's going to happen because the left, like basically the Democrats do not. You know, they have some identity politics, issues of like people that they want to not go to the back of the line. And, you know, the Republicans don't want another 1986 asylum to happen. They would be you know, the Republicans even like Trump and a lot of the restrictionist would be okay with just being like, Okay, you have a STEM PhD, you can come, you know, you gotta be a hardcore racialist, you know, to really - and that's a very small minority. Okay, I'm not gonna say who. There are people out there who like are at mainstream publications, they just like, let's let's just be like, honestly, just don't like Asian people, you know, but anyway. But um, yeah, like, I'm going to ask you, I want to ask you, though, you know, so you're, you've been speaking about various cultural political issues. And you wrote “The Hate Crime Hoax: How the left is selling a fake race war” “Taboo. 10 Facts You can't talk about” I think you are. Did you know there were a couple of other books? “Lies, my liberal teacher told me” like, were you contributed to that?
“Lies my teacher told me” I actually wrote. The idea was that it might be a multiperson project, but no, I just finished writing that for HarperCollins.
Okay, so you're writing these books, and we live in a current, a time of, you know, like, about 10 years ago, we’d call it ‘call out’ culture or social justice culture, and I was like the woke culture, the terms keep changing. But we have had, you know, a great awokening in the second half of the teens. And you know, it seems like it kind of peak 2020 2021 And it's receding. You're in the middle of this, you're taking the heat and fire and you're in the game, you know, a lot of people are saying that it's receding, and that we're possibly entering a new age. Or, you know, I mean, these sorts of, you know, we make like arbitrary cut offs, but reality they're like ebbs and flows. Can you talk about what your perception is, as someone who's been there? In the trenches.
What you're talking about is woke culture receding? That kind of thing.
I mean is peak woke a thing? Like, are we past peak woke or not?
I don't think so. It depends what you mean. So Richard Hanania is actually is a guy I disagree with on some things, possibly, probably including some of these race issues. But who wrote a pretty good book about this, or a very good book about this recently, I mean, where he talks about the institutional roots of quote, unquote, wokeness. And he makes a point that you don't really hear that often from the mainstream commentary, which is that this isn't just a dispute about vague intellectual ideas or something like that. To some extent, it's a dispute about what to do with systems that already exist. So I mean, like, for example, the roots of wokeness are in the different expansions of the Civil Rights Act to a very significant extent. And I mean, like, again, I'm pro Civil Rights Act, when I said, like, with much or all of some of this stuff, I disagree with the hard right when it comes to like race and equality issues. But like the Civil Rights Act itself only protects a very small number of groups. I mean, you're talking about race, ethnicity, nationality, Irishman, Jews, relative to that time was probably almost as important. Religion, you know, sex, which was originally thrown in there as a joke, if you read American legal history, the idea was, they'll never pass this that to give rights to these broads. I mean, probably in the minds of some of these senators. But, um, that's about it, I guess, color is added on as an adjunct category. But since then, there have been a whole number of case, there have been a pretty large number of cases, I forget the actual name of the decision that added both gay people and anyone who ideas as trans to the Civil Rights Act couple years ago, but in practice, when when people say things like we need to get rid of affirmative action, or we need to get rid of proportional representation in business, so I've been a little clumsy about this so far, but the point is 100% accurate. When people say that, they have to understand that that's a very difficult thing to do, legally. I mean, right now, and I trained as a lawyer in a good school, like right now, sorry, there's some kind of disaster outside, there’s firetrucks screaming by. And so hopefully, everyone's okay. But anyway. So, proportional representation - the lack of proportional representation in business employment, if you have more than 50 employees is a de facto basis for a lawsuit. It's not going to win you the case, but you can bring a suit on those grounds. And that is the justificatory reason for affirmative action. In practice, if you hire only the best qualified people, as determined by an IQ test, which is, in fact, under Griggs 1971, now, probably illegal, you're not going to get a proportionate mix of people who happen to be probably in order native, than black, and Hispanic, then white, then Asian. So to do that, in any situation, if you're a fairly elite college, top 500 of them, or you’re a fortune 1000 company, you're going to have to institute some kind of program with a name like balanced workforce, and bring people in, unfairly if we're being blunt. That's what's going to be needed, given the current score gaps, given the current graduation gaps, especially for Hispanics, for you to get anything that looks like 60% 10% or 12% 15%. So saying like, well, affirmative actions done now, it's been struck down at a couple of elite colleges. I mean, first of all, that decision, as I understand doesn't automatically apply to any other sector. It doesn't apply to all business. It doesn't apply to tech business. It doesn't apply to prep schools. So all of those would be individual cases. And the center right justices actually provide a loophole right in that case, where they say you can't just use race as a factor, but you can use experiences with suffering that could be expected to affect test scores as a as a factor when it comes to judging applicants. So I mean, not My guess would be that until we see another case, five years from now, colleges are just going to focus more on, you know, the pain of racism described in the applicants essays, or something like that, well, the future will show whether I'm right or wrong. But the point here, when you talk about peak wokeness, to actually get rid of wokeness, you'd have to dismantle the structure that makes it possible. And I've just done, you know, kind of a blah, blah, blahy but in a pretty fair breakdown and analysis of the laws there. But also in every business now, I mean, you have a department of very large department of HR that focuses primarily on this kind of stuff, as well as sexual harassment is a Hannah neopoints out, you have in many cases, the Department of diversity or DEI, I couldn't think of an F 1000 without one. You've got other things like I mentioned, balanced workforce, which is the goals processes in place, a lot of companies, you know, what an ESG, SEL, to really get rid of wokeness, you'd have to get rid of all of that. So I think right now, what you've seen is public opinion, turning against these policies. But that doesn't really matter much. I mean, like public opinion, during the Iraq war turned against extraordinary rendition and torture on the part of the military. But as far as I can understand, from the cases, those things are still fully legal. The Army just doesn't talk about them. So I mean, the question is, what will actually change on the ground? Like, is Harvard getting rid of its 72 Diversity employees? No.
Not right now? Well, I mean, so you're talking about, you know, Dick Hanania’s book. And, you know, his argument is interesting, because conservatives since, I guess, I mean, it was before Breitbart, but before the original, you know, before Breitbart, he said, you know, politics is downstream of culture. And what Hanania is actually saying is no, no, the culture has been shaped by the politics. And he's actually, you know, wrote a book that came out at about the same time, a similar time. So “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics” and like Dick was on this podcast, I know Dick pretty well. I'm trying to make Dick happen. But in any case. So he wrote that book, and then like, Rufo, wrote a book about kind of a similar topic, but he focused on the culture and kinda like the bottom up ideology, and how that shaped politics. I'm not going to like say, which is more important, but it seems that they are working in synergy. So a Rufo’s was “ America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything” does seem like there is there is a synergy there, though, right? Because the legal framework was there to operate upon. And the NGOs, the, you know, the academy, you know, the legal profession, they started pushing these radical views in the context of this law, which provided them the opportunity. And so they're - they're interpreting the law, they interpret the law by their lights, you know, by what they think is reasonable, what they think is reasonable, is shaped by the culture coming out of academia. So I think, in some ways, why not both? They're both right. Obviously, if there was no law, if there was no civil rights law, it would be I don't actually know how they would intimidate corporations into doing what they're what they're doing. Because I think you're right, the law provides a really straightforward framework for corporations like okay, like, you know, you interview X number of people, you have this number of people in this sort of, you know, position, etc, etc. Like, you know, it's actionable. On the other hand, there, there are laws out there that people kind of, like, enforced and ignored, right. So you need the will to enforce that law. You know, for example, there are plagiarism rules at Harvard, that apparently have not been enforced, you know, but the rules are there. Why aren't they enforced? Well, you know, I mean, look, I mean, what was the last time at Harvard? I mean, aside from Ted Kennedy, when was the last time you heard about a plagiarism scandal at Harvard? Look, they got into Harvard. That's 99% of the game. You got into Harvard now give them a degree and let them go to McKinsey. You know, so I mean, there's like, there's like multiple games here that I think they're gone. But you know, your point is taking like, we still have the legal framework, we still have the legal framework. And even if the culture as a whole opposes something, that doesn't really matter. You know, I'm in Texas right now. It's pro life. It legislation is pro life. But if there was a if there was a single issue, referendum, I’m 99% sure that abortion would be legal again.
Yeah, so I mean, just like one quick comment there like abortion. Most Successful people make decisions in an almost entirely amoral fashion. I mean, this is one of the most replicable conclusions in psychology, there's actually a really interesting conversation about whether morality is real at all. Like, we all agree that humans have an empathic sense. But I mean, that varies from person to person. And the question of whether there's any objective observer of this process, who cares? I mean, I frankly, tend to say no, is the deepest question of human philosophy. But I mean, even aside from what should be or what might be just like in practice, most people's decision making calculus, when you get beyond very unsuccessful, overly empathic people and beyond, like priests and saints, is basically just based on the simple analysis of does this benefit me more than it harms me? Like there are a whole bunch of things like pornography is the other obvious example, that are easy to attack on some kind of ethical grounds, like 2% of these people could be trafficked. And I mean, the general person's response as well. 98% of them aren't. My watching, this isn't going to really impact whether any one of the videos from 10 years ago is or is not. And I've sometimes like watching this with my girl after dates or before them, I mean, or, you know, just by myself if that fails, you know, I mean, so the about 80% majority of men, I think 56% majority of women use pornography quote, unquote. So every time you actually see votes on should porn be banned? Should there be radical restrictions on erotica? You see radical feminist and evangelicals making like a huge amount of noise up front. And then you see the ordinary person who has a couple of copies a hustler and some downloads on their computer, just saying hell no, in the privacy of the voting booth, and abortion is -
Wait bro- . Let's keep it real. No ordinary person has a couple of copies of Hustler today
I was a bit of a dated line, but like look, okay, cool.
I got I got Zoomers listening who have no idea what you just said. But anyway, I think they get the jist of it.
You know, there’s a website that grew out of the magazine as one of the biggest contributors to Pornhub. And people know what porn is. But the basic point, though, is that the percentage of people that watch porn on the internet, and actually, that's not really true, by the way. I mean, like, there's still all you I think most of this is targeted at women. Honestly, when you look at like this whole genre of bodice rippers with names like he took me number seven with pictures. But I mean, like, if you look at Aella’s survey of like human kinks, almost as many people use, like written and visual erotica is used internet pornography. And the percentage of people that use one or the other was again, almost 100, it was over 80% for men. But my point there wasn't like what delivery mechanism dudes prefer it was if you actually give people a chance to go to a voting booth and vote to ban all porn, and kick all 2 million current thots off only fans and just never see this stuff. Again, no one is going to vote yes. So there's a difference between virtue signaling behavior in public and actual behavior in private. And I think that was just to lead into I think abortion is the ultimate example of this. Because almost everyone, almost no one actually believes that, like week two blastocysts are people. Again, there we both read and perhaps helped design some of the studies on this. I mean, it's nobody does it, almost every woman can conceive of the situation, rape, or a one nightstand that went badly wrong, which results in a pregnancy, two months in you decide what you're going to do about that. So again, the arguments like well, isn't there an ethical risk to ever taking human life are morally interesting, but almost no one is swayed by them. And like, I don't wanna go on a long speech again, like we see this with a situation in Texas, right? Where there's the the woman is pregnant, the baby has some debilitating medical condition, so it's probably going to die in her body, like it's probably in pain right now. And the question is, can she get a DNC to remove the baby? Or does she have to give birth to the baby as part of some horrible procedure about seven months in where it's going to be born, and then they're going to kill it? Like they're going to give it painkillers that stop the poor little creature from breathing? And the answer of the Right in Texas is, well, no, because the baby is technically alive. Now, you should never be able to take a life. And the ordinary person is looking at that and saying, This sounds completely insane to me. So yes, I have no doubt bit of a sideline there. But I have no doubt that if you were to actually put that to a vote, like three fourths or more of women would vote either just for legal abortion or for major exceptions to any rule that held most abortion to be illegal.
All right, I'm gonna have a weird question here. You're at an HBCU. What do your colleagues think about Ibram Kendi? Like, what do they say behind closed doors?
Well actually, he's never really come up, which I think is in itself telling. I mean, so most of my colleagues that I could think of, I mean, Fred Williams, a former Major with the Kentucky State Police, Reginald Thomas, who teaches criminal justice. He's a state senator, Dr. Hamid de Fay, one of my colleagues, one of the better Africanists in the game. I mean, they're all just sort of State U professors like I mean, they're busy with their methods models. I've never once heard one of them refer to Ibram Kendi, other than maybe a chuckle over an op ed or something like that. And I think that in and of itself is telling, I mean, the Ibram Kendi audience isn't black statisticians. It's guilty white people. I mean, that was one of the big things about the whole BLM Movement, right. Like 70% of the rioters that were arrested, even in downtown Minneapolis, even in the South were white. I mean, they were kids who'd come there basically, to fight to overturn a system they thought was unjust. And they were doing that by breaking shit in middle class black neighborhoods very, very often, like when they burnt down the Lake Street, Black and Asian business district in Minneapolis. So I mean, I've always thought that Kendi’s audience was kind of white people who wanted to support hip sympathetic looking brother that was explaining that the only problem in society was their racism. And I mean, I think that when you look at like the black scholars on point - Now there’s just as many annoying woke black people, I mean, per capita, I mean, you know, not denying that. But when you look at like serious black scholars like Roland Fryer, William Julius Wilson, I mean, they're not really citing Kendi that much they're looking at empirically, is there actually a difference between black and white rates of police shooting and you know, 90% of the time, there's not. So I hear very little about Ibram Kendi, the only thing I've ever heard about Robin DiAngelo, you know, his homie, Batman and Robin, I'm not going to name the colleague who said this, but he was talking about some of the scenes in her book, like, there's one where she goes on a date with a black guy seems like a perfectly nice guy. And all she could think of she said, was black jokes. And she was like, she was sitting there, just like mildly attracted to him, it was a nice dinner, and she had the salmon but like, she couldn't think about how to talk with this black guy. And I may be paraphrasing this a little, maybe getting some of this wrong. But she says all she could think of were jokes and like ethnic debates in her family and so on. And then she said something like all white people think this way. And my colleague was like, this broad seems nuts, basically, you know, and that was it. The take was like these very guilty white people trying to comment on black issues seem to be projecting a lot of their pathologies outward. And I mean, I think that's, if I had to do a one sentence pop psych analysis here. They would kind of be like Robin DiAngelo probably came from given the name and area background, sort of a working class, possibly at least somewhat bigoted white family, has some suppress thoughts herself and thinks that everyone does. But in fact, the average like white jock from the suburbs doesn't. And that's why the reaction to her book has often the conversations that follow it becomes so silly, where someone will say, Well, I'm not a racist in the sense you're describing. And the diversity trainer type will then have to say, well, one of the first signs of being a racist is denying your racist. I mean, so you don't hear a lot about that. That sort of thing in serious black academia in my experience,
Yeah. I just say, there was a SNL parody, an SNL commercial about after Trump won, It was about Brooklyn. And it's basically Oh, it's Brooklyn is in the bubble. What if Trump didn't win and all the cars are hybrid, and all this stuff? The coffee shops are all like fresh ground coffee. And then it shows a woman reading “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Everyone just starts crack cracking up. And, you know, people were like, I think Ta-Nehisi actually specifically said that he was like, what does that even mean? Like, why are white people reading my book? And, you know, and was it Colin Powell was like, Oh, wait, wait, like after the system? Who is this Ta-Nehisi Coates? Is he like, the new black guy that white people are into that capture something really, really deep there? Right. In terms of like, I'm sure Ta-Nehisi is sincere, but, you know, he's, you know, his his. His intergenerational wealth is driven by AWLF’s you know, affluent, white liberal females purchasing his book. So it's a really strange situation.
Yeah, no, I think that's correct. I mean, one of the findings and we talked about Aella Girl’s sex survey was that the people that were most into like hyper male dominant, extreme sex weren't men, they were all women. They tended to lien kind of upper middle class. And I guess the idea was a desire for discipline or a strong father figures or someone who was going to correct them or something. The analysis is actually pretty interesting. But there's something kind of similar here and I'm saying that because it borders on the masochistic. Like, there's a real demand among upper middle class whites like I've always liked the term AWFL for like rich white ladies. affluent white, female liberal as you just went through , but I mean, there's a huge demand for like black guys to say that your racism is the problem with society. It's all your father's fault. And I think the motivation there is that then the idea is that you can go out and fix it. Like if you modify the racism in your group of Chardonnay, sipping housewives, that's going to have a real practical impact on like the average black dude in Watts. So I mean, I think that there's an element of I'm, again, not a psychologist, I'm a political scientist, but there's an obvious element of like centering yourself, and what you can do to this. So like, they're all these books actually, like Nice Racism. I think that's another DiAngelo topic. You have Ciara Rao and Regina Jackson that will literally go to dinner and like lower upper class white neighborhoods, and scream at these white women about racism as they are served food and before they are paid $10,000. I mean, and the the appeal of that is not necessarily a real desire to go to the ghetto and help. It's a desire to feel that you're part of the ruling class, you're responsible for this problem. And you you know, Barnard educated young woman can solve it. If you accept the real problem, the black community is black dude shooting each other. I mean, that you don't have a role to play. And it's also tougher to process probably you've been told you can't think that. Is there a problem with them? Can't be.
So you know, you grew up in Chicago. And you're talking about black community and stuff like that. You mentioned your your mom is from an upper class background. So just like the talented 10th, Jack and Jill like that sort of set. Is that still around?
Oh yeah. Yeah, my mom, I think my mom, I know, looking back, my mom tried to probably introduce me to some of that at an early age. I mean, certainly there was reading and even I mentioned incredibly exotic thing like with watercolor paints and calligraphy brushes around, she encouraged me to do things with them. Um, she wanted me to meet the family early on, I mildly regret not doing that more. And yeah, she wanted me to do some of those kinds of activities. Like I recall, she wanted me to go to IMSA, which is the Illinois Math and Science Academy, just outside of Chicago, it's actually in suburban Aurora. And the idea was that go to this prep school. And I would also do, there were some black programs she wanted me to do while I was there that were in that surrounding area, like in a suburban minority community. And I actually just didn't want to do that. I wanted to go to the local public high school East Aurora and be an athlete there and study a lot less, which is what ended up happening. And it turns out, that's probably an advantage when it came to me applying to college because we didn't have that many applicants to like Illinois or Brown or whatever, from you know, EA, but she definitely pushed that stuff. I didn't really do it. But is it still there? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's um, who is it? Lauren's Otis Graham wrote -
“Our kind of people” from 1999.
Decades ago,
I read that book. That's a good book,
It’s a good book. A new edition, as I recall, just came out. And he talks about all this stuff. And almost every one of those organizations that he talks about, like, you know, the alphas, the deltas, and aka is very prominent on our campus. I can't think of an HBCU where that's not true. They do good work in the community. The Boulé, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, I'm not a member, at least at present. Couldn't say if I was, but I mean, like they are. I mean, that's known as one of the four or five men's business groups. There have been a few whites now in most cities. Yeah, all that stuff still around, Jack and Jill almost certainly is when you create an organization and it has a pretty good mission, especially if it's kind of racialist that's like, you know, the Hibernian American society, and you know there’s going to be Irishmen and 100 years, you know, it generally doesn't go anywhere. So yeah, the the black upper middle class is still very much there, and kind of trying to figure out what to do, right? Because I mean, you're starting to see black billionaires almost proportionately now. Like, we still haven't caught up on the tests. But I mean, we benefit a bit from affirmative action and control the music game. So you're seeing people like Jay Z, multiple, eight, 9 billion. So there's a question on one hand of can we still blame racism for everything? When we see this massive, successful clade over here. We know exactly how they got successful. That's a big debate in the black upper middle class where you know, where fall in some of my friends, but the group itself yeah, it’s growing. There more now than there were 1970.
Yeah, for sure. For sure. So I guess I have two questions. I'm kind of curious about like, heterogeneity. Because, I mean, I know this is not true intellectually, but, you know, I don't like know, the community. You know, I mean, I live in Austin, not many. Anyway, I don't wanna get into it. But mostly, like, I hang out with white and Asian people. Okay, a couple of Latin X people, whatever. You know, but I don't know. I don't know firsthand. I know intellectually. So what is the attitude and the position to the fact that like, so, for example, at Harvard, they're not going to do an ethnographic survey of the black students quite clearly because they don't want to. They don't want people to know that there's so many African immigrant children and Caribbean and whatnot. Like is that spoken of in the ADOS, You know, American descendants of slaves, I mean, I know it is, like on social media and stuff, but does it show up at HBCUs? I mean, in terms of discussions, like what's going on here? And then the other question that I want to ask is, you know, America we have a tradition of hypo descent. One drop of black blood unless you're Latino, apparently. How far is that gonna go? Because we're starting to get into the period where it's like, you know, I know people that are a fourth and an eighth black and yeah, that I guess, like, you know, they have a grandparent who's black, but like, I mean, this is just starting to get ridiculous.
Yeah, well, it was a frankly, alt-right writer, John Derbyshire. Um, I was actually reading him while critiquing like, the hard right, but this line is actually pretty funny where he was like, when you think about it in business, there has to be an ideal percentage of black quote unquote blood, like something like a fourth would be perfect because you just look to, you know, to women and employers like a handsome like Lebanese gentlemen, but you'd benefit from all the affirmative action benefits and at a forth no one would question you. And I was kind of like, you know, okay, honorable.
Stop talking about Thomas Chatterton Williams, I'm talking about Tomas Chatterton Williams.
It was just like, Okay, I'm gonna disagree with most of what this guy says in his essay, but that's laugh out loud, funny. And he like explains like, you know, some programs have a cut off of an eighth. So you wouldn't want to be that, but you wouldn't necessarily want to be half. It's a solid line. But you actually see that a fair amount in the black community, like you see guys where you understand like, if this guy and his girlfriend, the blonde cheerleader, have a kid, there's a point at which those kids are in practice just going to be white, they're just going to be Southern European. That's neither good nor bad, but just genetically, that's kind of what's going on. So I mean, obviously, there's a discussion of that. So what you said about the, the distribution of black students at Ivy League institutions, not just Harvard? That's a point that actually I think it was W.J. Dub, William Julius Wilson made decades ago. It's more true now. But he said, I mean, the the question with affirmative action isn't just, you know, theoretically, would this be a boost for descendants of slaves? But does it actually benefit any such people? And I mean, by his estimate, at that time, I think it was three quarters of the black students at Harvard were either biracial, African, not even specifically Caribbean, or from just very wealthy families, like people who quite likely had been free in the 1700s. And children of Benjamin Banneker, and that kind of thing. And so the question is, what are you doing in terms of giving these people an advantage over, you know, their white buddies from Martha's Vineyard at an institution like this? You know, even if we just applied the test scores correctly, those kids with their 1350s would just go to, you know, Purdue Honors College or something like there would be no massive negative impacts. Why don't we do that? I guess what I'm saying is, yes, the patterns are recognized, No, they haven't changed. And No, nothing's been done about them. Another kind of point in the whole culturalist hereditarian debate on IQ would be, we're not talking about stable groups, right. So I mean, like, how would you boost black IQ scores, I mean, there are a bunch of ways that a lot of Americans might feel are too eugenic, you know, Link welfare payments, where you obviously can't support yourself to use of birth control while you're on the program is something that's been suggested in major developing world powers, you know, you can have your own moral opinion on that. But it would obviously work, subsidize high performing families, you can do the same with athletic whites, to have children. Nothing particularly complex about that. But another thing would just be when you said, letting anyone from the Black and Brown powers who has a master's or above in STEM, why not? 500,000 Nigerians a year, they're only what 38 million black people. I mean, you'd see massive changes beginning quite rapidly. So again, we're not supposed to talk about this kind of human stock breeding because it's evil or whatever. But I mean, yes, like people in the black community, obviously, notice, it's just there's not really much to be done. There's some hostility between ADOS blacks and newly arriving blacks, in part because black Americans often are not viewed very highly by people from like the Nigerian ruling class. And it's obviously not a genetic thing. It's just like, obviously, most of your problems here are your fault, and there's almost nothing more poisonous to tell a modern black American.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I hear ya. I don't want to get into - I yeah, I do have some acquaintances that are from Nigeria, and they have Jamaican spicy things to say, let's just put it that way. Which I will not repeat because I don't want to get canceled.
I’ve heard friends say crazy stuff. And I don't think we're gonna get canceled. I'm not saying this. But I mean, like people have said things like, you lost the war. We sold you over here. And since then, you have learned very little. I mean, it's just sort of it's that take in other societies like China and Nigeria, India, of course. I mean, there's an idiotic Western condescension toward India, I mean, much of India was based around highly stable kingdoms and city states while people were painting themselves blue and hunting wild pigs in most of Europe, but there's an attitude toward these other societies. That's largely unjustified. And in practice, people from those societies are often much more capable of non softened analysis than Westerners in my experience. So yeah, I mean, the East Asians or West Africans will say about Americans in general, like they think the whites are insane. If you're cut off - I mean, like, it's all of that is perhaps a value to our national conversation. It's a counter to this excessive empathy problem we have.
Well, I mean, you know, there is that joke that's going on, as we're recording right now that Vivek Ramaswamy is the one bringing replacement theory to America? You know, it's a brown man. Yeah, it takes a brown man to do the white nationalist job now.
Well, that’s also, I mean, like, one of the jokes on Twitter, and 4chan is just sort of like, well, when you accuse a group of people of being racist, and you actually pull up like PFPs. And so when you see it's like, you know, three whites, two West African blacks, three Indians, two Chinese guys, I mean, so like, who? How diverse are the people screaming, you are bigots as versus the people being attacked? So like white nationalism, in the sense that Kendi or DiAngelo would mean is one of the has to be one of the most diverse, we would both be accused of it quite likely, you know, in the US.
Yeah. It's called multiracial whiteness.
Yeah, like the the school district that literally listed, it was Japanese and Nigerian kids as white. And like, to some extent, you have to look at this and just laugh like, those are the other options. Like when you look at the great human civilization, there's like East Asia, India, you could throw in Ethiopia and West Africa, Peru, I mean, the the people that you are now labeling white, oh, the Arabs, of course, were literally the other people who built tall buildings throughout history, it just doesn't make sense. There are characteristics of civilization would be a simple way to put this, that bring success in every society. And the the fact is that a great many Chinese and Nigerians and Indians have them. And a fair number of Western white and black Americans don't. And you're going to see those characteristics tell out when you look at the performance of those five different groups. So uh, you know, you don't need to come up with some idiotic rationale, like, I had a jet black chief’s son from Africa, white guy, you know, you don't need to do that you can just you could just explain what's going on.
So, you know, you're a political scientist. And, you know, you do you know, methods and whatnot. There's, like, arguments arguments in this country about whether America's, you know, going to collapse or whether, you know, our greatest times are ahead of us. And, you know, I guess like, here like, as I'm, as I'm recording right now, I'm probably feeling not actually optimistic about America, but very bearish about the rest of the world. And so I actually think we're going to do okay, positionally, but I think there's going to be some problems, you know, the number of young people is going to decrease when you have a decreased number of young people that just causes downstream effects. And I do think, you know, my friend, Antonio Garcia Martinez or… , I don't know these like double named Latinx people. But anyway, yeah, you know, like, you know, clubhouse and like, TikTok all these age of orality. And I basically said, like, Okay, this is moronic. These kids are - they have no attention span, they're dumb. So I think there's a lot of negative things happening. But you know, they're happening all over the world. And, you know, we still have Silicon Valley, you know, we were the the AI. Basically, the AI revolution is happening in the Mission District of San Francisco. That is how concentrated, some of these revolutionary changes are in this world. Most of them are in the United States, there's very few unicorns in Europe, like maybe Spotify, a few others, right. So that's how I'm feeling. But you’re a political scientist, you know, we're gonna have an election, fall 2024. Right now, Trump is leading the polls, etc, etc. We still have moderate inflation. You know, where, where are we right now? And where are we going? Wilfred? Like, what do you think?
I mean, I think your analysis is basically correct. So I am a professional skeptic of doomsday predictions. I mean, this is actually something that should be one of my next pretty serious articles, like journal or long form, but I mean, so like, when people talk about the most extreme climate change prediction, there are specific mistakes that are being made, like relying on worst case scenarios from unreliable models that we've seen a dozen times before, like The Population Bomb. Still, like the second best selling book in the social sciences, the world's gonna end by 1980 was just entirely wrong. And the guy who wrote that book is still appearing on CNN and MSNBC, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, but that's just one of many I mean, like peak oil, you know, 123456 and seven, you know, the green tech boom that was supposed to happen 20 years ago, Y2k Although there at least we just had to change the codes but killer bees and the great northerly migration, the Club of Rome, every resource was going to become unobtainable. Have all of these in the post 1960s 1970s modern era. And I think we're going through this again, oh, global cooling, never the big deal as the right says, but like page two of Newsweek does on and on and on the western heterosexual AIDS epidemic. So when people look at models showing increases in trackable racial tension or something they say, you know, America is falling my least favorite Twitter line. No, I don't think that's correct. I think the worst case scenario for the USA would be pretty much what we saw for Britain, where there is growth, but there's growth at a slow pace relative to rising powers. There are political and ethnic tensions and so on down the line. So you kind of see a stagnation and quality of life throughout much of the UK, you know, high level ODs and suicides, which we're already seeing here so on but I mean, Britain is still the eighth rank power in the world, something like that. So I think that's the worst case scenario like China, India, may be one of the BRICS type black African states or Brazil surges up to our level are a little past but we're still right there. I mean, I'm from downtown Chicago our miles by our buildings aren't going anywhere in New York's even bigger you mentioned SF there contender when it comes to tech you know, throughout the country. You know, there's there's some dead cities Detroit and Baltimore might be falling in that category. But no, I mean, the the large majority of the USA which is continental power, were allied with Canada, which is almost a continental power Mexico, we think it was a little brother neighbor, that's almost 200 million people like know that the North American block is not going anywhere. We're not going to collapse into ethnic war. We also have nuclear weapons and this sort of thing. I mean, that either the USA would be invaded or that or race war here would be allowed to get out of hand before you know the army Hellfire missiles started hitting the two armies and breaking them apart. I mean that this is unrealistic nonsense. So no, the USA will continue on for quite a while. Will we see increased federalism increased drug issues, that kind of thing. That's quite possible but we're not going to see dissolution of the country or any anything similar. That’s my take.
Alright, so I want to close out. I want to ask you about Kentucky. So I've been to Kentucky, just people know I have been to Kentucky. I've been to Paducah. So been through Louisville, been in central Kentucky have some rest stops. You're in Kentucky people don't know too much about Kentucky. It actually has like, I mean, Louisville is great. From what I have a friend from Louisville, so I'm not gonna say it's a bad - I mean, it's a great city. You know, it's kind of a different city than the rest of Kentucky in some ways. Kentucky's, you know, got some originality, so Paducah is definitely like the south I would say. But like, you know, there's Appalachia in eastern Kentucky. Some of the, you know, poorest, most deprived areas of the country are actually in eastern Kentucky. And then obviously, Louisville is like, you know, right across from Ohio. So there's that stuff going on. But it feels very flyovery to me. I know people in Indiana, looked down on Kentucky. And Kentucky is kind of a byword for being kind of backward in large parts of the country. I don't know why specifically Kentucky, but that is just a thing. People were talking about West Virginia as much because I don't know it's just like West Virginia doesn't like roll off. So for example, I went to University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and its sister city, a city right across the river is Springfield, Springfield, Oregon. And actually, the writers for The Simpsons, spent some time in Portland. And Shelbyville is Eugene. And Springfield is probably Springfield, Oregon. But in any case, so Springfield, people in Eugene sometimes called Springtucky. You know, and why Springtucky? Well, you know, it's a poorer, It used to be a mill town, because the unwinding of the forestry industry, well basically productivity gains got high, so you don't need as many people right. So it's a little bit poorer. A little bit more rundown, so they call it, you know, Springtucky but um, you know, you live in you live in what like Frankfurt? Is that where you live?
Yeah. So I mean, like, I think there's a lot there. Like, first of all, one of the things that I've always found weird as a Chicagoin is kind of the coastal idea that in the Midwest of the country, there's not much to be found, like, I mean, Chicago. I'm not gonna get into one was endless, like New York, Chicago, LA DC conversations, but like Chicago is about 10 times the size of Boston, like metro but no, I mean, that's not quite fair, like five, like metroplex, if you're counting an honest Metroplex would be about 10 million to 2 million maybe. I mean, New York, of course is bigger, but I mean, like the the Bos-NY-Wash corridor, if we were seriously like talking cities would have to go up against the Great Lakes metroplex, like the curve of the inland seas with like Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, all the Ohio cities. So I mean, like I've the area where I'm from, like in Center City of Chicago is actually the most urban area I've lived. Manhattan is a little more urbanized, but like places like Ciudad de México, or like downtown Detroit or San Francisco seemed a little bit The more rustic frankly. So I've never gotten that. And I think that that attitude that you get toward like Chicago or Montreal or certainly like Cleveland extends even more dramatically if you go like five miles inland from the Great Lakes. So I mean, in reality where I live in Kentucky is actually like surprisingly mundane. So the population of Kentucky is all concentrated in like a one triangular area, which is like Louisville over here. Frankfort, which is the capital city in the middle, maybe the 100,000 people during the day, it's the smallest by far Lexington, which is like 400,000 Over here, Cincinnati, which is like 3 million up here. And I guess Louisville, like 1,000,00 2 million. But I mean, so most of the area between those four cities, all of which are like 40 minutes apart is again, just well maintained farms and tall buildings. So there's really nothing all that interesting, which is actually something that I mean, it's a great I mean, it's a great social area, the derby is in Louisville, but I mean like when people have come down, they're like, What are all these nightclubs? I thought there’d be like guys sitting on porches playing gut fiddles and banjos and so on. So no, not really the the association with Kentucky and I think produces that is what the Appalachian Highlands to the east. So yeah, like five of the 10 poorest counties in the USA are in Appalachian Kentucky. And this again, like one of the things that I focus on, is
That's the legacy of white supremacy. That's what Dr. Ibram Kendi will tell you.
Well, the interesting thing about that is that like a lot of these guys, there's a term I once heard from a boss who had been a Marine, and the term was thintelligent, which was his word for people that are like kind of smart, seeming like they know how to wear a tie. But they've really only read through like nine historical facts and don't know anything else. So that's how slavery strikes me with a lot of the black left, like you've got to understand we were once enslaved. And the idea is that that's the Ender of conversations about reparations, and so on. And if you bring up well, the Native Americans were defeated in a series of wars that lasted 400 years, they're like, well, all the poor whites also came here as well, if you prefer, they came here as Bond servants. But you know, bond servitude wasn't illegal until a couple years after the Civil War. Where do you make these points that just sort of like, Well, why didn't I know that? Eastern Kentucky actually is the legacy of that, like what's talking about in “White Cargo” Where Britain for a long time just dumped its poor people, and it's criminals and so on, in like, the less populated colonies and territories. So yeah, I mean, you can trace like the descendants of the freed indentured servants and so on in Kentucky, Ohio, and so on up to this day, but for whatever reason, yeah, Eastern Kentucky, I think if you start with Harlan and go down has five of the 10 poorest counties in the country. And again, in terms of like real history, I don't think any of the poorest counties in the country are majority black, actually, East St. Louis might get in like 10, or 11. They're all poor white areas, or Native Indian reservations, murders a little bit lower, but like suicide, opiates, all that stuff is through the roof. It's just nobody really gives a shit because nobody, there are no news networks there. You know, like news comes out of Harlan, like there was a giant biker brawl, or they busted an opiate ring or something like that, when it goes to the Kentucky papers in Louisville and Lexington. And then what four days later circulates the AP wire. So there's not the constant barrage that you get with, you know, black crime in the cities or something like that, or the mob back in the day, but it's very much there.
So I guess like, you know, some academics complain that they have to live in the middle of nowhere, but you don't sound like you got that problem. You like it there? Frankfurt you love that area? You like it there?
Yeah, I like it well enough. I mean, like, in fact, I like Frankfurt a lot. But again, the, the idea, everything is relative and contextual. So if I drive 40 minutes east, I'm in downtown Louisville, I mean, so I actually don't feel and I might have a bit of quote unquote, privilege here. Like there are people that teach it like Utah State that I would assume are really in the Bundu to some extent, like you're in a ski town, you're several hours from Salt Lake City, and there are no other cities nearby. And I can understand that attitude in that case. But the large majority of academics unless they come from downtown New York City or Chicago, and unless they're in that situation, I think we're just kind of griping. You know, I mean, I don't think too many people actually have a problem living you know, where the University of Illinois is, or Penn State is University of Michigan is or on down the line
No I think you make a good point that you're like, not that far of a drive away. So like, it'd be why do you you know, it's just like, even living in the suburbs, right?
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, like, that is exactly correct, actually. So yeah, I mean, they're all They're all pretty connected. I mean, I guess technically, Frankfort and Louisville have like little suburbs but in practice most people feel the ability to go to any of the other cities whenever they want to so yeah, I'm I'm content I enjoy K State. I don't really see myself as well. I don't know I mean, like I've gotten other academic offers and so far, I've always said no to a move on. I mean, if there was an offer in downtown DC or something like that, I mean is the think tank spot opens up who knows but right now Yeah, I’m very content
Well, okay, so last question. Last question, as they say, Chinese food where you live like what's it like? Is it any good? You know, this is this is the measure of civilization and in Razib Khan world. So
This is actually this is one of the few downsides of like the central Midwest actually in Louisville and Lexington there are like, just below Zagat, like well known Chinese restaurants in Frankfort. Not really, because the there are very few Asian people. I mean, this is something like when you talked about the different racial demographics of different cities, like in Austin, there aren't that many blacks. So I mean, I would imagine that has impact on everything from the musical and art scene to local athletics. Like, it's the same thing in Kentucky. I mean, we're about an 85% White, the 12% Black 3% native, I mean, there's not that much room left for people from Thailand or Vietnam, China as well. So I mean, like, again, in the major cities in the area, certainly like Cincinnati, or if you drive up north toward Chicago, you'll find you know, excellent Chinese food, but there's there's very little in Frankfort. I think we have two Chinese restaurants.
Well, I gotta say something because like, I know people are gonna be like looking me up and stuff like that. I'm gonna give the statistics so that people know what where I'm coming from, and that I am not like a white nationalist or something. Okay. Austin Is 48% non Hispanic white, 33%, Latin x 8%, Asian, 8% Black or African American and 9% mixed, okay. And just my socio demographic circle tends to be mostly you know, with a lot of the Latino people here, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be honest, like, they're part Latinos. I don't know. Until like, it's like, oh, they're like, Okay. I mean, I told the story. I think on another podcast. One of my, one of my closer friends here is he has a Latino, I'm gonna use Gomez, because it's common. He's Latino. He has a Spanish last name. He's a fourth Mexican. He is. I mean, he's like, not as built as the guy who played the two twins and the social, you know, Armie Hammer, he's not as built as them, but he looks kind of like Armie Hammer. So this is these are the kinds of Latinos that I encounter here. But um, yeah, just like, you know, the demographics here, like, a little different. I definitely noticed when I go to like, Northern, like Midwest cities or Northeastern cities, it feels like black and white America much more, especially the ones that have not developed too much. Like, let's say, Syracuse. I'm thinking Syracuse, you know, it's a whole different America in a way, an older American in a way. An America that like, kind of, you know, it's like you know, Reagan's or maybe Carter's America. Whereas, like, when I live in, you know, Austin, California, to some extent, California, Florida, you go to Miami, bro, it's just like, you know, you better be speaking Spanish. Because they're like, what's wrong with you? If you don't like that's my experience. You get there? Just like, no service, you know?
Do you speak Spanish?
I don't. So I'm like, really screwed in Miami. Like literally, like, I've been to Miami multiple times. And it's, it's an inconvenience.
Yeah, I speak it up fairly well, I mean, but yeah, so I there definitely are different demographic patterns in the USA. I actually think that's pretty wholesome. And I also think I mean, we need to regulate mass migration across the border. But I also don't think that's all that unusual in big countries. And if you look at Brazil, India, you know, the EU Taken as a whole the Roman Empire, the idea that diversity is something novel that just got introduced to the west is actually really stupid. I mean, that's one of the kind of like dissonant right arguments that just doesn't make any sense at all. Like, I mean, what 25% of the population of the current United States used to be unsettled Native American tribes that were a war with the settlers. I mean, you know, the reason that the population of Mexico we conquered the northern third of Mexico at that time was, quote, unquote, the sector with all the paved roads. The reason those people didn't count as Hispanic in our population censuses is that they were some of the 20 million people here. We didn't count Hispanic as a category until 1973. And since that point, we've never had less than 5% Hispanics and of course that began is unmixed Hispanic. So I mean, just like the idea that different parts of the country look different, I kind of like, like, I like going to Miami and seeing Cuban women from Florida International partying and, you know, go into the desert-
I’m sure you do. I'm sure you do. Dr. Riley,
That's the most appealing um, but I mean, like, but you know, going to the Detroit suburbs and seeing rich black guys mowing their lawn and going to North Dakota and seeing like Caucasian cowboys, that's part of being a gigantic nation. So yeah, I mean, in Kentucky, we don't we don't have a lot of Asian people. It's it all depends on you get regionally there's a large number. There's a surprisingly large arriving Mexican American population actually in the larger cities, which I started seeing just a couple years ago, like guys doing construction or like taco trucks on the streets and so, so that will probably within a decade or two be 5, 10 15% of the population. But no Chinese food is one of the one of the area's weaknesses. Because,
Well you know - Well, I mean, you know, Wilfred it was great talking to you, all your stuff. I'll put the links in the show notes. Obviously, you are a, I think like the word raconteur. I think that applies to you, you know, to pull up the Thesaurus a little bit. There's a there's always something to talk about. Let’s do this some other time. You know, I've guested on your podcast before, you know, happy to do it again. But I hope people enjoyed the conversation and hey, everyone out there. We're both brownish people. Please don't cancel us. White women.
Wilfred: Fair enough.
Thanks, man.
Wilfred: Good talking to you.
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