https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=k8NjtQAUIkM
After George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, a police officer in Minneapolis, and there were protests that broke out in cities around the world, and especially cities around the United States, and some of those protests turned violent. And there was riotous behavior and assaults on police officers, and there was arson and looting, and there was general disorder, and it’s a big political football, and people are on all sides of it, and there are defenders of it, and so forth and so on. But it occurred to me that I did not even know that the incident that happened with a white police officer and the black gentleman who died, who was killed, was a racial incident. I say I did not know that it was a racial incident. All I knew was that the police officer was white and that the man who was killed was black. It didn’t follow from that, that it was a racial incident. We were making it into a racial incident, we being all of us here in the United States, we were making it into a reenactment of old American dramas of lynching and the murder of black people by rogue police and so forth and so on. We took that thing and we said, yes, see, here we have proof of the knee on the neck of black America. That’s what Al Sharpton, the activist, said at the funeral of Joyfully, said America has its knee on our neck. And I thought this great country of 330 million people with 40 million black people. And here we are 150 years after slavery and a half century since Martin Luther King was killed. Really, that’s gonna be the narrative for our country’s politics for the next decade, for the next 15 years. This is what we’re gonna teach to our children. This is how we’re gonna arrange our media coverage of these events. That’s a disaster for this country. So how can you say that when you also have spoken so eloquently on topics such as the differential incarceration rate? This is not an assault on your statement, by the way. I’m very curious because obviously, you’ve spoken profoundly about the danger of that differential incarceration rate. And you can see that it’s not that easy to conceptually disentangle, especially if you’re politically motivated. But even if you’re not, an event like that from that broader narrative that something’s not right structurally and perhaps this is a reflection of it. But well, so I don’t know how to reconcile those two viewpoints. I don’t know how you reconcile them. With difficulty, I suppose I could say because they do point in slightly different, maybe even more than slightly different directions, but I’m trying to keep my perspective. Right. I do think that the advent of what they call mass incarceration, two and a quarter million people under lock and key on a given day, half of them are 45% of them being black people when we’re 12% of the population. As a way of doing business going forward without any sense of urgency of reform, without any revisiting of our drug laws or our sentencing or whatever, without any attention to what is supposed to happen when someone is in prison, rehabilitation and whatnot, without any exploration of alternatives to incarceration as ways of responding to criminal offending is bad for our country. I do believe that. And I believe the racial aspect of that echoes with our history in ways that are dangerous and that we dare not neglect. I’m the same guy. On the other hand, I think if you racialize the discussion of crime and punishment, there was the woman who was murdered at Columbia University a few years ago. And she was killed by these kids who were just trying to rob her and they ended up stabbing her to death. She was white. I’m sorry, I don’t remember her name offhand, but she was a lovely young woman and innocent is how she’s gonna appear in the photograph. And she certainly did nothing to deserve what befell her. And she was white. The kids killed her. That’s the other side of it. Yeah, right. Tessa, Tessa something is her last name. I can’t recall. The kids who killed her were black kids from around Harlem. They were in the park. They were looking for a quick score. They had a knife. The woman is lying. She bleeds out. Now they’ve convicted. One of them has been convicted. And I’m looking at the photo in the newspaper. Here’s this black kid. He looks like a black kid who’s 16, 18 years old. He’s a kid. When he’s from this impoverished neighborhood, he’s black. And the woman is white. I don’t want that incident processed in terms of black kid murderers, white woman in the park. Okay, so maybe it’s an issue. Maybe it’s an issue of careless conflation of levels of analysis, hey? Because you’re talking about a high resolution analysis of structural problems in the penal system. And to put that George Floyd event, to cram that into the same narrative sort of bespeaks of undifferentiated thought. And then you point out that the danger of that is, well, if you’re gonna racialize the white cop against the black victim of the homicide, well, then why can’t the same thing be done exactly the same way when the reverse happens? And maybe we shouldn’t do any, or we should do as little of that as we possibly can. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a look at these bigger structural issues, but we shouldn’t cram it all together in one thing because it’s not. That’s very well put, Jordan. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. You said it better than I did. Well, I listened to you, so that was a big help. By the way, if we do cram it all in the one thing, God help us because there are people, and they’re not gonna speak out. There are people who will see it, process it, just as I hope they would not do, black thug murders innocent white girl and harbor a resentment and nurse that resentment. And that’s a tinder box. That’s a powder keg waiting to be lit. And we can dismiss it if we want to, but those people are not entirely wrong in their sentiment. They need to be disabused of that instinct, that instinct to conflate those levels of analysis. Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s part of the problem I have with ideology is that ideology is so low resolution. It does that conflation. It doesn’t notice. And when you get educated, you start differentiating. It’s like, and that’s kind of what you said happened to you when you became more conservative. Once you got more educated, it’s like, oh, this is, when I take this apart and see all the moving pieces, this is way more complex than my low resolution representation guided me to believe to begin with. And that’s, I mean, I’ve experienced that many times in my life when I tried to take problems apart so they could be solved instead of just discussed, let’s say. You have to make a high resolution model before you can get anywhere. That’s true in clinical practice. And I think it’s true in public policy. And partly what we’re doing when we’re educating people if we’re doing it right is saying, hey, you know, you’ve got a map of the world, but it’s not very detailed. And when you really look at it, well, you know, here’s the complexity. And that’s what we’re actually contending with. People don’t like that because, well, it’s complex, right? You have the simple solution at hand to begin with, but the problem is it isn’t the right tool for the job. You got to make it high resolution. Now it takes a lot of work.