CASBS Director Margaret Levi moderates a discussion on the causal factors perpetuating racial inequality in the United States with panelists Joshua Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Glenn Loury, and Alondra Nelson.
CASBS promo flyer for this discussion
"Why Does Racial Inequality Persist? Culture, Causation, and Responsibility" Glenn's paper discussed by the panel
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. Despite periods of tremendous progress, evidence continues to demonstrate the persistence of racial inequality in the United States But what exactly is responsible for the seemingly intractable problem? Today on Human Centered, we're bringing you another episode in the CASBS series Social Science for a World in Crisis. This episode of the series, which webcast originally on October 14th, 2020, is titled The Persistence of Racial Inequality, and it features panelist Joshua Cohen, academic faculty at Apple University and distinguished senior fellow in law, philosophy, and political science at UC Berkeley. Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University. Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University and a 2015-2016 CASBS Fellow. And lastly, Alondra Nelson, president of the Social Science Research Council and the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Moderating the conversation is Margaret Levi, the Sarah Miller McCune Director of CASBS. Levi engages the panel in a discussion of the causal factors that contribute to socially reproducing and perpetuating the relative position of blacks in American society. Together, the panel examine the role of both individual and group behavior on the one hand, and history, circumstance, and social structure on the other. Now, join Human Centered as we listen to an impassioned panel present differing views on both the nature of and possible ways of addressing the persistence of racial inequality.
Margaret Levi: Hello, I'm Margaret Levi, and I'm the director of CASBS, the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. And a professor of political science here at Stanford. And I want to welcome you to the 9th episode of the CASBS webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. And I'm particularly excited about today's event. I want to first acknowledge the co-sponsors for this episode, the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law here at Stanford, and the Social Science Research Council. Okay, you've read the bios of our three panelists, and the event promo provides links to their extended bios, which I suggest you look at. So I'll quickly introduce them so we can jump into this important discussion. Joshua Cohen is on the academic faculty at Apple University. He's a distinguished senior fellow in law, philosophy, and political science at UC Berkeley. And the editor, co-editor of Boston Review. Frances Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, FSI, for International Studies, Stanford, and the Mossbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, part of FSI at Stanford. Glenn Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University and a 2015-16 CASBS fellow. Alondra Nelson is president of the Social Science Research Council and the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. As you know, today's conversation is on the persistence of racial inequality, one of the thorniest problems of our time. And these world-class minds will tackle it from a very specific entry point, namely Glenn's provocative 2019 essay for the Manhattan Institute, "Why Does Racial Inequality Persist?" We pointed viewers to that piece in our event promo, so we do hope you read it, but we will summarize it a bit. Here's how we'll proceed. We're gonna start with Glenn. Then followed by Frank, Alondra, and Josh. Each will have a very brief intro, followed by interactive discussion interspersed by audience questions, which I will provide to the panelists as they come to me. A note to all of you out there in the audience, and there are a lot of you, you can submit questions using Zoom's Q&A feature. We ask that you keep your questions concise and to the point, but we also have to let you know that given the expected volume of questions, we won't be able to address them all. But be assured, we get them to the panelists after the event concludes. So let's begin. Glenn, let me start with you. You're on mute, Glenn.
Glenn Loury: Thank you, Margaret. Okay, so the essay puts forward an argument about what's got to be one of the most important problems in domestic American politics. This last few months since the killing of George Floyd illustrates that a lot is at stake for the future of our democracy. We've been at this for a while. I was born in 1948. I know it doesn't show, but it's true. And I don't know how much progress we're making. If you looked at the statistics, you would see substantial disparities across a number of different social indicators between African American and other American populations, Blacks and whites to keep it simple. That, of course, oversimplifies. But it's more than that. There is a seething anger, resentment, a sense of dissatisfaction with our position in American life amongst many in the African American community. This is not without reason. Incidents such as that which befell Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis continue to happen. They will happen again, I assure you. Uh, what is to be done about this? Perhaps we could put that as one of the questions before us, but I want to ask a prior question, which is how should we be thinking about this? And in the essay, I make an argument that perhaps departs somewhat from, uh, the conventional wisdom in that while I want to acknowledge bias, uh, that's systemic racism, that's structural racism, that's, uh anti-Black racism, that's white supremacy. I want to acknowledge the existence of anti-Black sentiment in the population. I think that it's demonstrable that that factor has diminished very substantially as a causative factor in accounting for the disparities that I'm talking about here in the period since the civil rights movement. And I want to make room for another kind of narrative. I call it the development narrative. I contrast the bias and the development narratives. We're familiar with the bias narrative. The development narrative focuses on how it is that individuals, including African Americans, come to acquire the skills and traits and habits and patterns of behavior, the disciplines and resources that allows them to be effective in the economy and, uh, in the society more broadly. Uh, I can't reproduce that argument here in these short remarks. The bottom line on the argument though is that if the response to this condition of persistent racial inequality is framed only by reference to the bias concerns, very important factors essential to dealing with the problem will be missed. Development of human beings is socially situated. It depends upon the kinds of relationships that they have with others. This is only partly a matter of what happens in markets and what happens through government policy. It is also a problem or an issue that turns on how people relate to one another. What's the character of their communities, the nature of their family life, and ultimately, what are the cultural influences on their patterns of behavior that, uh, bear on the acquisition of skills that are valued and that allow people to be productive and successful in life. To the extent that African Americans, perhaps in part because of a history, but not only that, are impaired in these processes of development, to that extent racial inequality will persist, notwithstanding mitigating and reducing the extent of bias that influences these outcomes. I want to make space for that kind of argument. It's difficult territory, And I'm not unmindful of the pitfalls and the minefields that one enters into when one takes up this kind of discourse, but I nevertheless put it forward as something that I think is a useful component of our national conversation on these issues.
Margaret Levi: Thank you, Glenn. Frank, let's turn to you.
Francis Fukuyama: Okay, thank you. I, uh, appreciate being on this panel. I've been reading Glenn for 30 years. He was a very important voice in the, uh, conversation that the nation had over these racial issues back in the 1980s. And he's right that they're still very much with us. And in fact, I think we've gone backwards in certain respects in the way that we've discussed them. The most obvious way is that we got a racist president, you know, and you've got somebody at the very top of the American system that has been encouraging a kind of overt racism that I actually never expected to see in this country. After the civil rights era, but I think that in terms of our understanding of the underlying phenomenon of why there are these persistent disparities between racial groups, we've also gone backwards in a couple of senses. And I think it gets— in Glenn's article, the Manhattan Institute article, gets at that. I think that persistent disparities between racial groups are a classic phenomenon that social scientists would call multifactorial, that there's many interlocking reasons why those disparities persist. It has to do with joblessness, it has to do with, you know, family structure, it has to do with government policy. I think we did have a fairly rich discussion. It may not have come out the way people wanted, but over things like welfare reform back in the 1980s, but we've kind of lost the multi-dimensionality of this discussion, I think, and have pointed to a fairly simple, you know, phenomenon, which is embedded white racism. And there's no question that it's there, but I do think that Glen is right in pointing out that it's not the only factor and that a real solution will need to take account of many other things that— it's a low-level equilibrium. It's a poverty trap that many African Americans are caught in. And that brings me to the second respect in which I think we've gone backwards, which is that we haven't really focused seriously on reopening these big questions of social policy because, you know, apart from police reform, which is obviously something that's very urgent and needs to be done, But even a successful reform of police departments around the country is not going to get at the question of dis— disparities in income and education and job opportunities and the like. And, you know, frankly, I think that a lot of the current discussion is a sort of distraction from that kind of serious, you know, investigation as to what sorts of interventions the government could make that would get at the different, you know, factors that really do lead to these disparate outcomes. I'll just end by giving you one anecdote. I've spent a lot of time in Medellín, Colombia, about 10 years ago, which was obviously very much beset by narcotraffickers and poverty and lots of social problems, and they actually solved the violence problem over the course of about 5 to 10 years. And it took a kind of combined effort of academics, politicians, local activist groups, and the like. And I came away with that from a very sad feeling that why couldn't an American city solve its problem in a, in a similar sort of way? And I think it's partly that we've just gotten distracted by, you know, blind alleys and other issues. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you.
Margaret Levi: Thanks, Frank. Alondra.
Alondra Nelson: Thanks, Margaret. Glad to be here. Delighted that the Social Science Research Council can help to sponsor this important conversation as part of our inequality initiative. So I just wanted to offer a few brief points, and I want to thank Glenn for getting us started with his essay. Notably, and we should talk about this published in May 2019. You know, it feels like in some ways there— the article is filled with truisms, um, and also that the article was written by— written in a time that no longer exists. And so I would love to hear from Glenn how he thinks about, you know, a year hence, uh, what happened a year hence, you know, the, the insights of the article. So I want to offer a few comments, um, a few kind of statements about why racial inequality persists. Uh, one, I think because we continue to create and cultivate inaccurate, racist, dehumanizing narratives that make racism and racial inequality appear natural and reasonable. So from the perspective of my own work in the sociology of science and technology where it intersects with racial inequality, you can point here to the enduring legacy of scientific racism and how that gets used to make arguments about why children can't learn as opposed to the decimation of the tax base and the decimation of our public schools, or gets used as part of a narrative about why the poor are undeserving of support, or in the case of COVID-19, why people are supposed to be to blame for their only— their own viral illnesses. Racial inequality persists also because we tell, on the other hand, simplistic stories about a kind of inevitable teleological racial progress that we got caught up in our own mythology about the advances of the civil rights movement, and I think we're never as sort of gimlet-eyed about what actually took place or didn't take place in that moment, and were in many ways quite naive about how quickly it could all— any even modest advances could wash away. I want to suggest that racial inequality persists because it provides— inequality provides hyper-equality for those in power. Thinking here about Charles Tilly's important work on opportunity hoarding, that, you know, whiteness— and whiteness I mean both kind of literally and symbolically— provides dividends. Dividends to whom, you know, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls the honorary white. So these aren't necessarily people of European descent, right, but people who are empowered. And that, to quote Du Bois, that, you know, whiteness as a dividend is also a kind of, in his words, a public and psychological wage, right? So whiteness provides not both material dividends but also psychic dividends in a world that's growing, in which inequality is growing with white supremacy as its vehicle. Echoing Francis a bit, racial inequality persists because it's not just about racial inequality, it's a systematic, you know, kind of interlocking system that impacts myriad things. Again, we saw this with COVID-19, which was on the face of it about healthcare and health inequality, but of course became about institutions, about humanity, about access to care, about making huge decisions about who gets to live and who doesn't get to live, about the treatment of pain, about human compassion. And racial inequality persists, and this is in direct conversation with Glenn's essay, because structure is the context in which the important issues of agency that he raises today takes place. The persistence of racial inequality compoundingly constrains the theater of action for individuals, and it also dashes hopes and dreams. Langston Hughes asks in his poem "Harlem," what happens to a dream deferred? The last line of that poem, of course, is, does it explode? But we might also suggest in between, it paralyzes agency, it strangles life chances, and as I said, it dashes hopes and dreams. Can I breathe? Lastly, racial inequality persists because we allow it to, because of a lack of both political will and moral clarity, and that we, you know, that any solution here will require a real transformation in how we value each other as human beings more than it will policy, or as much as policy. Thank you.
Margaret Levi: Thank you, Alondra. Josh.
Josh Coehn: Yeah, thanks so much. I'm really grateful, uh, for the opportunity to participate in this conversation, which— with a group of such thoughtful people, including my good friend Glenn Loury, who's, uh, not only brilliant but also courageous as, uh, as for provoking conversations of this kind. So thank you so much for that, Glenn. So our topic is to explain the persistence of racial inequality, inequalities in wealth and incarceration, education and neighborhood quality, homeownership and health. And that question about explanation is a deep and important question. But I think the fundamental animating issue that we're facing is not really about explanation, nor can we answer the question about explanation independently from judgments in political morality about persistent racial inequality. Let me— and I want to crystallize this abstract point in an example. So there's a recent paper that was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year by Robert Manduca and Robert Sampson. And the paper has the grim title, Punishing and Toxic Neighborhood Environments Independently Predict the Intergenerational Social Mobility of Black and White children. So in this paper, Sampson and— or Manduka and Sampson propose this neighborhood harshness and toxicity index. And the index is based on neighborhood— they're sociologists— neighborhood levels of violence, lead, and incarceration. And so they look at Chicago. And they show striking differences in racial experiences of harsh and toxic neighborhoods. So of the 292 majority Black tracts in their sample, 273, 93%, had harshness toxicity levels above the citywide mean. 7 of 263, 7, 3% of 263 majority white tracts exceeded the citywide mean. Moreover, they argue that these neighborhood toxicity levels have powerful predictive effects on intergenerational mobility. This is a quote: while harsh and toxic environments are also associated strongly and directly with lower income mobility for whites, the levels of toxicity in white neighborhoods in Chicago are qualitatively different from those in Black neighborhoods. So harsh and toxic neighborhoods are bad for all children. And— not but— and there's a sharp racial disparity in the experience of such neighborhoods and the associated chances for mobility. And in the most grindingly material way, this illustrates the powerful impact of the accidents of birth on life chances. Now, we can have an important conversation about the historical roots of these disparate experiences of toxicity, but I think if we start there, we're grabbing the stick by the wrong end. Uh, think of that disparity in life chances from the point of view of a kid born in Chicago. It's unjust.
Margaret Levi: It's wrong.
Josh Coehn: I mean, there is a consequentialist case for its wrongness. Just think of all those human capacities and potential contributions that we're losing. But in a more elemental way, it's wrong because it's so unfair. There's no plausible account of fairness on which it's fair to suffer from this fundamental disadvantage, this basic inequality of life chances at birth. There's no plausible understanding of— dedicated to the proposition that we're all created equal, on which this inequality in life chances at birth is consistent with that dedication. Now, I think we should start our public discussion about persistent racial inequalities here, not by asking the deep— deeply important and really hard question about how to explain these inequalities and their disparities and their persistence. Let's begin from the acknowledgement that they are wrong, that remedying them is a matter of fundamental justice. That, I think, is common ground. I know it's common ground between Glenn and I, and I think it's common ground among all people who think that justice requires treating people as equals and that fundamental justice is an important common good. And because we're concerned here with an issue of fundamental justice. The challenge is for all of us. The situation described by Myanduka and Sampson is, as Glenn says in the article that he circulated for the discussion, he says this kind of thing is a national disgrace. Yes, it's a national disgrace that we have a shared responsibility to correct. That is the long pole of the tent here. An acknowledgement that we, all of us, have a responsibility to right this injustice. And we can, can and will, I'm sure, argue about the best way to correct it, whether race-conscious remedies or otherwise. But I think the place to start is by acknowledging that it's a disgrace that we have a shared responsibility to address, and then by asking first and foremost, are we discharging our shared collective responsibility? That's the place to begin to address the explanation of persistence, not simply as a social science question. And I don't say that disparaging social science at all, but not simply as a social science question, but as a question guided by a sense of justice and focused in the first instance on whether we have discharged our collective responsibility. So Glenn said at the beginning of his remarks that he was interested in the question of how we should be thinking about this issue. That's how I think we should be thinking about this issue. Thanks.
Margaret Levi: But let's pick up on that point, Josh, and explore a little bit what it means to have a collective responsibility and what that requires of us us as people and what that requires from us as a people, as a society. Glenn, maybe we should turn to you first because you do explore some of that at the end of your piece. And a lot of the discussion has been trying to push you back towards structure, and I know that's not where you want to totally be. So, but the idea of what our collective responsibility is the key question here. How we, how we correct.
Glenn Loury: Yeah, I appreciate Alondra and Frank and Josh, all of you here. In response, very briefly, I guess I want to say a couple of things. Absolutely, matters of justice are primary. They are not, I would however want to argue, mainly racial. That very same argument about toxicity and the impairment of people at birth and what are their life chances could have been offered. And while there may have been, as an empirical matter, racial disparity in the extent to which people are impaired by those factors, the logic of morality, it seems to me, would advance to the same effect without reference to without reference to race. I think the historical genesis of these conditions, well, might draw on racial history, but I think the imperative of the moral position is really transracial. That's one thing that I wanted to say. The other thing I want to say though is that, um, I said there are pitfalls in even entertaining the idea that there could be behavioral problems within African American communities that contribute to the circumstance that we find ourselves in. Alondra points out that such behavioral problems— I put words in her mouth here, but I hope she'll correct me if I say something that's wrong— such behavioral problems as you might find must be understood within the context of the structure that will have given rise to them. And I agree with that. I don't think as a social scientist one could fail to acknowledge the inter— action between structure and culture, if I can use that word. But I don't think that's enough because agency, I want to argue, and I put this forward here for people's reaction, isn't something that you're going to just pin down by the logic of social causality. There, there is something I would argue called free will, and I would even extend that argument to apply to collectivities of the population. We African Americans to some degree, can make our future here in the United States. We have, to some degree, autonomy over the way in which we live and conduct our— live our lives and conduct ourselves and organize our communities. And I think the proof of that is in protest and resistance, which is not the direct logical consequence of structure. It's nested within structure, but it is also a venue within which the creative and world-making potential of African American agency manifests itself. We don't have to rise up and protest against our oppression. We will ourselves to do so. Likewise, we can will ourselves, I would argue— I know it sounds somewhat romantic— to stronger and more robust family and community structures that give our children a better chance of surviving the toxicity that Josh Cohen gave voice to.
Margaret Levi: I'm going to turn to Alondra in a second because I'd like to hear her response to this, but I'm going to interject a question from one of our, um, one of the people in the audience, which is right on this point, and it's challenging you, Glenn. The developmental theory focuses on the importance of behavior and culture. How does that theory factor in the very, very real limitations of free choice regarding what behaviors and cultural practices to engage in? I.e., not everyone has the ability to choose to engage in certain behaviors because of various resource access limitations. Alondra, let me turn to you partially to answer that question. We'll get back to Glenn and to others in a moment.
Alondra Nelson: Yeah, I mean, that's what— that was the point that I was trying to make. And moreover, I think when we, we often think about the structure and agency problem or the issue of free will, we, we make an assumption of a kind of even starting point, you know, as opposed to understanding how the inability to have autonomy and forms of oppression, how they constrain and paralyze people's agency and autonomy itself gets constrained over time in a compounded way. So I'm actually even trying to push that— our colleague who just made the comment that you read, Margaret's point, a little bit farther to say that it is a kind of corrosive process in which, you know, you're never starting at an even starting gate of free will, and that moreover it is increasingly constrained and constrained, and what one sees as the horizons for free will are also constrained over time. So I find it that the world of autonomy that Glenn imagines to be shrinking quite radically over time, and that means that that can't be, you know, that the kind of structure in age agency sort of toggle is very much, you know, the pendulum swing— swung, I think, to structure. That's not to say, you know, like Glenn, I wouldn't like there to be more autonomy, more freedom, you know, free Black people, free brown people, you know, with fists in the air. Like, I want that. But I think we also have to be very honest about the severe and growing kind of constraints on the autonomy that we imagine, which is— I wouldn't say is romantic, Glenn, but I think it's idealistic or it's an ideal form.
Margaret Levi: Frank, Josh, one of you want to get in on this?
Josh Coehn: Yeah, let me, uh, say two things, and I think I, I may be just reiterating what Alondra said using different words, but we'll see. So Glenn, you made two points. Glenn, the first is that the issues that I was describing, these fundamental issues of justice, are not exclusively racial. That was the first one. And the second point was a point about free will. Let me take those in turn. On the issue about there not being merely racial, there are three things to say. First of all, absolutely, I agree with you that the moral imperative that I was appealing to, which is basically an imperative of fair opportunity is universal as a basic requirement of justice. There's no disagreement with us about that. The second point, and in fact I mentioned that the kinds of toxic neighborhood effects that Sampson and Manduca described, they say that it's, you know, surprise, surprise, it's not great for white kids either to be born in these toxic neighborhoods. Absolutely. But 93% versus 3%, that's a big difference. In the burdens of these toxic experiences. And I think while the fundamental requirement of justice is universal, there is a fundamental disparity of experience here. And that brings you to the third point, which is really the relevant one, which is I wouldn't want to prejudge whether the right remedies— the right remedies are universal or race-conscious. I mean, I think that's an open question once you acknowledge that there's a fundamental requirement that's being violated and I'm not sure why you'd want to insist as a matter of basic principle. I favor, as I know you do, as a general rule, universal remedies, except when you got 93 versus 3. I'm a little skeptical that that's the right way to go. Okay, on the free will issue, I'm a philosopher. I like metaphysics as much as, or more even, than you do. But I don't think the free will issue here is fundamentally a metaphysical issue. Physical issue. The free will issue that I think the right way to think about it is as a normative issue.
Alondra Nelson: What—
Josh Coehn: there's collective responsibility and then there's individual and group responsibility. And the question is, what is it reasonable to expect of someone? Not what's possible for them, but what's it reasonable to expect of somebody living, growing up in one of these toxic neighborhoods, it's reasonable to expect by way of their conduct in a world— and this goes to the collective responsibility issue— in which there's a fundamental failure of reciprocity. That is, there's a failure of collective responsibility. And then you say, hey, we're not doing our job. If you're honest, we're not doing our job, but we're going to make you know, very great demands on you despite the structural concern. We make great demands on you to step up and do the right thing. And I say about that, free will, shme will. That's a moral issue, and I think it's the wrong moral position.
Margaret Levi: I want to let Frank in here, and then we have a question from another philosopher, Ruth Cheng, that I want to introduce.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, so look, I think that Black people have free will and, and should take responsibility, but the problems are really structural and they go so deep that no agency on the part of that community by itself is going to be sufficient. You actually need to put the power of the state behind, you know, getting at some of those issues like, you know, like joblessness, like poor access to healthcare. And by the way, Josh, in response to you, I mean, this is why I actually do think you need to go through a little bit of the causal story behind this, because you cannot formulate adequate public policies if you don't understand the causality of why you're in this situation in the first place. And I actually think that— I don't think that many people would disagree with you about the moral unacceptability of the outcome. So just to give you a very clear example, disparate outcomes of the COVID crisis on minority communities— what is the appropriate response to that? I think it is universal healthcare. You know, the only major social policy that this country has undertaken was the Affordable Care Act, and then we spent the, you know, the, the 10 years since then with the Republicans trying to destroy it. And so I think if you want to get at these structural issues, uh, you need to, um, protect that act and extend it so that everybody has access to, uh, you know, basic health services in a time of a global epidemic. I, I just think that that's, you know, it's not rocket science to figure out that, you know, Black people are not going to solve this problem on their own. You really do need the government, uh, behind you to do that. And that's why, again, I just think that we've been sort of brain dead on these on these policy issues. And that's really where our energy and attention ought to go.
Alondra Nelson: So to Frances' brain-dead part, I mean, I think part of what faces us as scholars right now and as researchers is like, you know, the paper that Josh raises is a really important paper. But I think that, you know, that we also know a lot of the mechanisms. We know a lot of the reasons why, and that we really need to be engaged in work that is helping to find solutions, you know, And so I think that there needs to be a kind of profound shift in how we think about what the— you know, one of the questions is sort of what are the responsibilities of any of us? I think for scholars and for researchers, the responsibility is to orient our work towards solutions. I mean, you know, I understand why for so many of us we are obsessed with causal inference and, you know, let's find those small mechanisms and those causations. Let's find solutions that allow people to thrive and live. And I think also responding to Frances in particular, yes to universal healthcare for everyone, but let's also understand that that needs to happen along with disparate care for those who need it. So what we saw and what we've seen in COVID-19 is, you know, people with healthcare, you know, afro— middle-class African Americans, middle-class Latinx members of, members of the Latinx community going to the hospital, not even being believed that they had COVID, not being able to get a test, being denied testing, being placed in these kind of triage decisions in which their life is being chosen or not chosen based on, you know, the decision of an individual. And so even in the case of a universal healthcare system, there's still going to be all of these inequalities that we need to be really honest about and be thinking about as a way to forestall them, even, and not just, I think, romanticize, hopefully, if we achieve universal healthcare, that that in and of itself is going to be the solution. Even people with very good healthcare who are members of marginalized communities do not get good care.
Margaret Levi: Josh, you wanted to jump in. I could feel you.
Josh Coehn: I did. Yes, thank you. No, I did. I just wanted to say something in response to Frank, uh, because I, I think I may have said something that, um, maybe not clearly enough, because I agree with very, very much with, uh, what things he's been saying. So I didn't mean to be saying at all that the issues about causation, about explanation, are irrelevant to developing remedies. Of course they're relevant to developing remedies. I was just emphasizing that the fundamental thing— we should keep focus on what's fundamental here. And I think the fundamental issue is this issue of justice, or what Glenn in his piece calls a national disgrace. That's the first point. It's about the priority, not about whether you could do without addressing the questions of explanation. Now, Frank, you also said, and I think it's a very— important point I want to say a word about, which is you said, well, everybody agrees about the injustice here. Let's focus on the solutions. And I think there was an implicit challenge, like, why emphasize, why make such a big deal out of something that everybody agrees on? Is this just to present yourself as very morally high-minded? And no, I am agree with you that lots of people— and I know it's true of everybody in this conversation— agrees about those points about justice. But I think the idea— so the idea of surfacing that is to make sure that people understand that the disagreement about how to address the problem is framed by a fundamental agreement on the normative, the issue of political morality. That is the issue of injustice. And we can fight about what the best way to deal with this issue— to go back to the thing that I think Glenn and I may disagree about some here, like race-conscious or universal remedies as a way of addressing the issue. We could disagree about that, but it's really important, I think, to be clear that there's a common ground of normative principle that guides those efforts, and that's the reason for surfacing it.
Margaret Levi: Thanks, thanks, Josh. Glenn, why don't you come in, and then I'm going to go to Ruth's question.
Glenn Loury: Okay, I'll be very brief. I mean, I— okay, you guys, uh, I got it. Uh, there's some social structural issues here, and we have to be a just society, and we're not there yet by a long shot, and a lot of people of color suffer the short end of that. But that can't be the only thing that we're talking about here. I mean, what about the level of violence and the consequences of that for the lives of people in these communities? While I am calling society to account for its failure to meet the minimal requirements of a decent and just provision, can I also condemn the absolutely barbaric behavior of people who are taking the lives of children on the streets of Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago? All right, I'll stop because you can see the sermon that would issue from that. Now a lot of sermons are being given about justice. Can one of them touch on the responsibility of the criminals violating violently their neighbors so as to condemn that behavior without equivocation? Can we not do two things at the same time, maintain a macro conversation about social justice and not lose sight of elemental moral judgments about what civil behavior should consist of in our society? And to the extent that there's a racial disparity in the violation of our norms of civility, let us not shrink from nevertheless asserting those norms, notwithstanding the incidence of the consequences of us having done so by race. Thank you.
Margaret Levi: That sort of leads into Ruth's question, which is at a more abstract level, but we'll— let me throw it out. And there's another question as well here that I'll come back to in a minute. Um, so what she asks is, who has to burden the brunt of the responsibility, of our collective responsibility, to do something to right the wrong? Glenn Loury wants to say that the fundamental problem is transracial. Josh Cohn suggests, though he doesn't actually say this— this was some time ago— uh, that it is one that is equally shared. Others might think that the disparate impact of fundamental injustice is most saliently racial. And so should be the responsibility— so should the responsibility most squarely be put on the shoulders of those who have enjoyed the benefits of this injustice? The answer to this question will affect the shape of how we tackle the answer. Anybody want to jump in there?
Josh Coehn: Fools rush in where angels dare to tread. So let me just plunge right in. Thanks, Ruth. For the question. Sorry, we're— it's good to have you here. I'm sorry we're not in the same physically co-located to say hello. I think that addressing an issue, just take the one that I mentioned, this issue of toxic neighborhoods for a lot of people, including white people. I mean, until fentanyl came along around 2015, deaths of despair was a white working-class phenomenon. And a lot of people have died from that. It's another national disgrace. And it was also racially disparate. It was deaths of despair, Case-Deaton, deaths of despair was a white work— racially disparate white working class, particularly burdened, as I say, until fentanyl came along and spread the pain. So I think, and here I think I am probably maybe closest to Frank, I think once we've identified a problem as a fundamental problem of justice, I'd like to know before asking exactly whose responsibility is it, and should the burdens go to the people who are arguably the beneficiaries. I don't know who exactly the beneficiaries are of harsh and toxic neighborhoods for Black kids in Chicago, but whoever they are, I don't— I don't want to go through them. I would like to know what the effective ways of addressing that problem are.
Margaret Levi: So let me put this question a somewhat different way, and I'm drawing on several of the questions from the chat box as well as my own interest. So, Glenn, you've developed a notion— you're really the originator of the notion of social capital. We had Bob Putnam here on our webcast who popularized it, but you You really are the one who created that concept. And Frank, you've written a very important book recently, one of your important books recently, on identity. And both of those concepts begin to get at something that is deeply embedded in our conversation. Josh raised it. David Owen is asking a question about the way in which Josh raised it. You raise it in your Manhattan piece about what— who the we is here. How do we even think about these sets of relationships, these identities? We talk about the collective we having a responsibility. Who is that we? And what are those responsibilities? But the we is crucial here. How are we defining that? Glenn, let me start with you, because you end your article there, and that'll give people a chance to think and respond.
Glenn Loury: Okay. So I'm basically drawing a distinction between the political and the communal. If you will, and between what we do as a political collectivity through the state, through public policy, through taxation and the promulgation of policy, and what we do in our social lives as a community. And the we's are not going to be the same we, although it's in flux. I mean, the we's are to some degree The social we is to some degree a product of how it is we decide about questions of identity and affiliation and whatnot. If I call upon the Black community to take up responsibility for enhancing the quality of the social life of our youngsters so that they have a better chance to seize what opportunity exists in the society, that is a communal we that I'm calling upon. If I say that the nature of family life amongst African Americans is not ideal, too many children in single-parent families, not enough parental responsibility and whatnot, very controversial, very controversial, but if I say that, I'm calling on the communal we. If I say people who need healthcare should be provided it, if I say the state can't be indifferent to failure of educational services to be delivered adequately to youngsters, If I say there's not employment, gainful employment for people who are looking for it and so forth, and the government needs to do something about that, I'm talking about the political we. And what I want to say about the political we is it should be nonracial. It should be based on citizenship. It should be based on our common membership in the political community. And much of the contemporary discourse, I think, loses sight of that fact. I say that both for pragmatic and for principal reasons. My theory— I'm not a philosopher, but I'll try— about the social good puts equal weight on every person independent of their biography. We're all human beings equal here before the state in terms of the well-being of the people. And that's the principal reason. And the practical reason is it's a democracy. You don't get anything without 50% plus 1 of the vote. You have to persuade your fellow citizens of the virtue of what it is that you would have them undertake. And to frame your claims in racial terms, to point to winners and losers, the whites who are on top enjoying their privilege and the Blacks who suffer under the long, long, long historical shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, and to have that be the foundation of your politics is, in my view, a deep strategic error in a democracy. You have to find a better way of framing your claims than that if you want to succeed. So That's my response.
Margaret Levi: Frank, let me turn to you as a theorist of identity and the various ways in which we think about identity. And then Alondra, you— we'll get you in.
Francis Fukuyama: So I think that the single biggest problem that the United States faces right now is the fact that we have realigned our politics away from an axis that was really defined by economic policy to one that is defined by identity, in which race is in fact one of the more important characteristics that defines that polarization. And it's weakened the country in innumerable ways. We can't pass budgets, you know, we can't address social policy issues seriously because of this, I think, kind of deadly polarization. And I don't think that you can actually make real progress on substantive remedies for these big problems unless you get agreement. And in this sense, I really agree with Glenn that, you know, you do live in a democracy. And if, you know, you're not going to get any assent from half of the society to do things that are costly, that require, you know, prolonged sustained attention, it's just not going to work. And so you do need to get beyond, you know, the focus of the current, you know, identity division in our country, and you got to figure out ways of, you know, overcoming that polarization, I think, before you're going to make political progress on any of this.
Margaret Levi: Alondra.
Alondra Nelson: A few things. I mean, you know, I have been meeting Glenn for a long time, talking to Glenn for less longer time. But, you know, it was really— I was quite moved by the kind of anguish that I heard in your voice, you know, talking about the communal we and about crime in Black communities and, you know, death and devastation. I mean, it is a tragedy. And so, you know, so I'm hearing really for the first time in our knowing each other, the real anguish that it causes you and where that— where the work comes from. And, you know, we know from the work of Randall Kennedy and others that, you that Black communities for a long time have been trying to work with law enforcement as a vehicle for improving the conditions of their lives. I mean, that's been a quite failed strategy, and we're living with the implications of that. You think about the Rockefeller drug laws in New York City. There are other instances of that. We can also think about how people are being effectively taxed into poverty with fines and tickets and these sorts of things as the the tax base is diminished. So, so, you know, I really do take that point. But, you know, the we has been the thing that we've always struggled over in this country and in a global community. And we've never all been equal before the state or equal before the law, from the kind of founding document in which Black people are 3/5, where— in which, you know, Indigenous people are not mentioned at all, and to the contemporary moment where that that legacy really plays out and how people know that they will be differently treated in encounters with the police authorities when they go into any social institution, school, a hospital. And so I think that I agree with you with the ideal, but I think that the objective reality of it is just not equal status before the state or before the law. For citizens and noncitizens alike. And that there are many reasons why that is the case, but racism and white supremacy is one of the reasons why that is the case. And I want to just put back on the table to Frank's point about identity, back to Du Bois's quote about the sort of public and psychic dividend of whiteness, you know, not— and again, as I said, including honorary whites, not only European Americans, that Whiteness is an identity here that is at work. And we're seeing— we're having to really reckon with that in the Trump era. And, you know, and see that the sort of, you know, it's really raising its head as an explicit identity that had been implicit or unspoken for quite a long time in our political culture. You know, that is also a communal we, for good and for not, that people are struggling over and that we've got to be honest about.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, but that's a bad identity. I mean, it did seem to me that—
Alondra Nelson: That's a normative claim, Professor Fukuyama.
Francis Fukuyama: No, yeah, that some people are making, but it's a terrible one in a democracy. And I think that if you organize your politics, you know, around racial identities, it's, you know, it is a bad formula for being able to deliberate or, you know, make collective decisions. And so that's part of what I was complaining about. Complaining about is this shift towards the polarization being increasingly centered on these racial issues. And I think we need to get away from that.
Alondra Nelson: I would just modestly offer that the politics have always been organized around racial identity. I would make that as a foundational claim.
Glenn Loury: Sorry, Alondra, I just want to challenge you a bit about this honorary white stuff, because I assume that means you're not of European descent, but you're also not of African descent. Uh, that's a question. What do you mean by honorary whites, and why would you use a phrase like that?
Alondra Nelson: That is, um, that's from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and other social scientists. Others use it in their work as well. It's just to suggest that racialization, um, uh, sort of differently impacts people's life chances. And so you see it— so one way to think about it would be one could take a sort of pan-ethnic approach to thinking about Asian Americans, or one could understand that, you know, that sort of Chinese Americans from, you know, a longer migration in the United States have a different experience from recent Hmong people or Cambodians, and that those experiences, even as we talk about them all as Asian American or Asian American Pacific Islander, are not the same, and that some of those experiences may track more similarly to the life chances of Black people, others, or to the life chances of white people. Longer conversation, but that in short is what that concept tries to—
Glenn Loury: And in doing so, it assimilates what might be distinctive about some relatively successful non-European, non-African American population, assimilates, for example, the cultural traits that might underlie the outside success of Asian American students at Ivy League institutions and so forth, to a kind of whiteness-Blackness binary that I think leaves out the real substance of what's going on with those people. It's not their race at all that the people who are represented amongst the relatively successful subpopulation of Asian Americans, it's not their race that's the issue. It's their work habits, it's their values, it's the structure of the communities that they're embedded in, it's the norms that they affirm, it's their filial piety, or whatever. One could give a substantive account of their success that doesn't make any reference to their race whatsoever. It feels gratuitous to me with respect.
Josh Coehn: Just— can I just say one thing about— I'm puzzled by something that Glenn said. I'm sort of puzzled by something that Frank said that's similar, but I'll focus on Glenn. So you and I agree at a very fundamental level about the idea of people being treated as equals. That's a basic requirement of justice. You expressed it, I expressed it. That's the spirit. Spirit has to be made flesh, Glenn, It's got to come down to earth. And on earth, in Chicago, 93% versus 3%. The idea that you can exclude out of hand, a priori, that the right way to remedy that terrible situation, which we agree is fundamentally wrong on universalist Grant. The idea that, you know, you can say a priori that the right way to remedy that has to proceed, you know, without race consciousness in the design of the politics and the programs, I just— that seems— I, I don't get it. I don't get it. The re— the norms are what here, reality is here, and they gotta meet And it's not obvious that the way they meet is just by thinking in those—
Glenn Loury: Josh, I just want to get the lead out the water, man. I just want there to be a program for the kids after dark. I just want to upgrade the amount of money that's going to the schools. And I don't care what color the people are who are in the communities. I'm responding to the objective conditions of those people as Americans. That's all I'm saying. And I don't mean to rule something out a priori. I want to counsel, as a matter of political pragmatism, that you're more likely to get to the goal that you want to achieve if you frame your program in—
Margaret Levi: Okay, so I— we're reaching sort of the end of our time, and I have a couple of very concrete questions from the audience that want to get to the remedy piece. So I'm just going to frame it quickly. One is from Claybourne Carson— sorry, asking about educational disparities and, you know, whether we got off to the wrong start with Brown v. Board of Education and thinking only about desegregation and not educational equity. And that leads into a question that Peter Gorovitch raises and is challenging each of you, and I'll just read it: What action is required from whom by each theory, thus each speaker. What do you want each person, each citizen, Black, white, other, to do? And let me get a response from each of you, and we'll end there. Um, should I go in the reverse order that we started with? So Josh, turning to you first.
Josh Coehn: You know, sometimes, as Peter knows, sometimes the right answer is to criticize the question. I, I just, I don't As Mark said, I don't get— really, I don't get the question because there are so many things. I mean, take what Glenn said, and I agree. You want to get the schools working. You want to get the lead out of the water. In order to do that, you pick something that you think is animated by this high-level principle. You figure out what you're capable of doing in the circumstances that you're in. And you try to make headway on addressing that issue. And then you have hope. What you hope is that by making diligent and deliberate and well-motivated efforts to do that, that the world will cooperate with you. It's not going to make things worse. But there isn't— the answer to the question— there isn't a single thing that everybody should be doing. It depends on what the nature of the problem is in different circumstances. But I do think the key thing is to recognize— and this is the point of my opening remark— the key thing is to recognize that there's a fundamental wrong in the world that we live in. And if everybody agrees on that, as Frank said, not everybody of course agrees on that, but in your— yeah, anything. But if lots of people agree on that, great. And if they recognize one another as members of a political community because they agree on that, even better. Then you figure out in the circumstances that you're in, in the location, given what you're what the best thing to do, the best expenditure of your energy is.
Margaret Levi: Alondra.
Alondra Nelson: Hard questions. I mean, I would only have a comment to, to Professor Carson's, um, uh, question, which would be to remind us all that, you know, the late, great Derrick Bell wrote about Brown v. Board, um, in part saying, uh, that, you know, maybe it was a failure in that it, um, sort of fractured Black communities, right? It sort of took, you know, where you had prior African American communities that had everyone from the poorest to the elites, and that Brown v. Board sort of takes people out of community. So, you know, I think also an interesting— Derrick Bell offers an interesting, I think, sort of rejoinder, or is interesting in conversation with Glenn's point about sort of the communal we. Then I would say, you know, what's the theory? I mean, I think You know, let's do something crazy and try universal healthcare, social welfare net that's not threadbare, universal quality education, no lead in the water, like a real infrastructure. And then have a conversation about people's behaviors. I would like to try in a world of RCTs, you know, a randomized control trial that gives people all the things that they need to thrive in this world. And then sort of makes a judgment about their behavior with a full and flourishing structure around them.
Margaret Levi: Terrific. Frank.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, as I've gotten older, I've become much more of a social democrat. And so it seems to me the approach that you need to take to this is a pretty typical one. You need to tax rich people at a higher rate and transfer that money to poor people. And the bulk of the rich people are going to be white people. A lot of the poor people are going to be Black people. Is a racial transfer, but I don't think that it ought to be based explicitly on racial criteria. I think it ought to be based on economic status. And again, you know, just to cite Obamacare, that's what it did. It didn't say Black people would get health insurance. It said that people that meet, you know, certain criteria will get health insurance regardless of what race they are. And I think that's the way, you know, all of these policies ought to be— ought to be structured.
Margaret Levi: Perfect. Glenn, last word is yours.
Glenn Loury: Okay, so for the political we, for the collective we, here's how I want to think about equal educational opportunity. Not the per capita expenditure in school districts being equalized by states, you know, redistributing resources between districts based on differences in their economic well-being. Equal effective educational opportunity where more money would be spent to offset the deficits that kids might be laboring under who come from disadvantaged backgrounds in the districts where they are concentrated. So, I mean, that's— I say that it's a very specific and concrete thing, but the right conception of equal educational opportunity should be denominated in terms of the effectiveness of the service as opposed to the nominal dollars spent. For the communal we, I just think we have to do a better job, and I'm talking about we African Americans raising our kids. Maybe that's a conversation for my church basement and not for this forum. I know a lot of people would feel that way, but if I were in my church basement, I can assure you that there would be a great many heads nodding, amen, amen, uh, in hearing me say that. So I'll leave it at that.
Margaret Levi: So I want to give a really big thanks to all of you. This was an incredibly lively, illuminating, stimulating conversation, and I'm— we are all very grateful who have been able to listen to it. And again, I want to thank the— this event's co-sponsors, the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford and the Social Science Research Council, a great partner in many things CASBS does. And a heads up, details about the next episode in CASBS's series, Social Science for a World in Crisis, and how to learn more about the series is coming on your screen in just a few seconds. So panelists, all of you, thank you again. And thanks to everyone for joining today.
Glenn Loury: Thank you all.
Alondra Nelson: Thank you, Margaret. Thanks everyone. Good to see you.
Glenn Loury: Good to see you too. Goodbye.
Narrator: That was Joshua Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Glenn Loury, Alondra Nelson, and Margaret Levi discussing the persistence of racial inequality. You can learn more about this event and others in the Social Science for a World in Crisis series by visiting the CASBS website at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter we're @CASBSStanford. We've got more CASBS Live events coming to the Human Centered feed, and of course, more original interviews exploring the work of fellows here at the center. So be sure you're subscribed in your podcast app of choice. You won't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.