The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Latest Episodes:

Carol Anderson on White Rage and Donald Trump Apr 12, 2018

Show notes

Carol Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Anderson’s book emerged from a viral op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2014, amid the backlash to the Ferguson, Missouri, protests. She writes: "The operative question seemed to be whether African Americans were justified in their rage, even if that rage manifested itself in the most destructive, nonsensical ways. Again and again, across America’s ideological spectrum, from Fox News to MSNBC, the issue was framed in terms of black rage, which, it seemed to me, entirely missed the point.” "That led to an epiphany: What was really at work here was white rage. With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling. In some ways, it is easy to see why. White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly.” Anderson, a historian, set about chronicling white rage and its core trigger: black advancement. It’s a lens that makes sense not only of our past but, given this political moment, our present, too. And as you’ll hear in this conversation, it gives Anderson perspective on a question that has been obsessing me of late: Is this moment as bad as it feels, and as many of the guests on this show have suggested? Or does our level of alarm reflect of an overly nostalgic sense of our past and the way past affronts to our political ideals have cloaked themselves in more normal garb? One note on this conversation: This was taped before Sam Harris resurrected our debate about race, IQ, and American history. So though much that Anderson says bears powerfully on my most recent podcast — as you’ll hear, Anderson brings up Charles Murray’s work unbidden — this is a separate discussion, even as it centers around many of the same themes. That makes it particularly useful if you’re still working through the questions raised in that debate. Recommended books: Evicted by Matthew Desmond Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom It's Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

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The Sam Harris Debate Apr 09, 2018

Show notes

There’s a lot of backstory to this podcast, most of which is covered in this piece. The short version is that Sam Harris, the host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over an interview Harris did with The Bell Curve author Charles Murray about a year ago. In that interview, the two argued that African-Americans are, for a combination of genetic and environmental reasons, intrinsically and immutably less intelligent than white Americans, and Murray argued that the implications of this “forbidden knowledge” should shape social policy. In response, Vox published a piece by three respected academic specialists on genes and IQ who argued Murray and Harris got both the science and its implications very wrong. Harris felt slandered by the piece we published and publicly demanded I debate him. After failing to get Harris to debate the authors of the Vox piece instead, I agreed. Over email, he then revoked his invitation to debate me. Harris’s defenders published a few pieces, our authors published a second piece, and everyone moved on. That’s where things sat for months. Then, a few weeks ago, Harris reopened the discussion with me on Twitter, I published a piece on the subject in response, and he published all the private emails we’d sent each other along the way. As you’ll hear him say, that backfired, so he decided, at last, to debate me. Whew. So here we are. For all that, I think this discussion — which is also being released on Harris’ podcast — is worth listening to. Harris’s view is that the criticism he and Murray have received is a moral panic driven by identity politics and political correctness. My view is that these IQ tests are inseparable from both the past and present of racism in America, and to conduct this conversation without voices who are expert on that subject and who hail from the affected communities is to miss the point from the outset. So that’s where we begin. Where we go, I think, is worthwhile: these hypotheses about biological racial difference are now, and have alway been, used to advance clear political agendas — in Murray’s case, an end to programs meant to redress racial inequality, and in Harris’s case, a counterstrike against identitarian concerns he sees as a threat to his own career. Yes, identity politics are at play in this conversation, but that includes white identity politics. To Harris, and you’ll hear this explicitly, identity politics is something others do. To me, it’s something we all do, and that he and many others simply refuse to admit they’re doing. This is one of the advantages of being the majority group: your concerns get coded as concerns, it’s everyone else who is playing identity politics. Even if you’re not interested in the specifics of our debate, I think this discussion goes to some important questions in American life — questions that drive our culture and politics today. I hope you enjoy it. A few links mentioned in the discussion: My piece on this whole debate, which links all the relevant articles. Harris and Murray's original podcast Vox's original response piece The Haier piece Harris wanted us to publish defending him Our authors' response to various criticisms The emails between me and Harris

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Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next Apr 02, 2018

Show notes

It’s been a tough year for Facebook. The social networking juggernaut found itself engulfed by controversies over fake news, electoral interference, privacy violations, and a broad backlash to smartphone addiction. Wall Street has noticed: the company has lost almost $100 billion in market cap in recent weeks. Behind Facebook’s hard year is a collision between the company’s values, ambitions, business model, and mindboggling scale. Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, has long held that the company’s mission is to make the world more open and connected — with the assumption being that a more open and connected world is a better world. But a more open world can make it easier for governments to undermine each other’s elections from afar; a more connected world can make it easier to spread hatred and incite violence. So has Facebook become too big to manage, and too dangerous when it fails? Should the social infrastructure of the global community be managed by a corporation headquartered in Northern California? What’s Zuckerberg’s reply to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who says the social media giant’s business model is at odds with its users’ interests? And how has all this changed Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Facebook’s future, and confidence in its mission? Zuckerberg and I talk about all of this and more in this conversation.

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Is Mitch Landrieu the "White, Southern Anti-Trump"? Mar 26, 2018

Show notes

Mitch Landrieu is the white mayor of New Orleans, and he wants America to talk about race. Landrieu is the author of the new book, In The Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. The statues he refers to are Confederate war memorials, four of which he controversially took down in May of 2017. "These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for,” Landrieu said, in a speech that went viral nationally. "After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.” Since then, Landrieu's profile has skyrocketed. He is often talked about as a Democratic candidate for 2020. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg called him "the white, Southern anti-Trump." In this conversation, Landrieu and I discuss how he came to believe it necessary to remove the statues, and what happened in the aftermath. We also talk about his experience serving in the Louisiana legislature with David Duke ("a dress rehearsal for the rise of Donald Trump,” he says), the power of dog whistle politics, why you can’t run a government like a business, whether Democrats can still talk to the whole country, what makes a “ radical centrist," why leaders need to get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations, and whether confronting America’s divisions opens a path towards healing or just deepens our divides. Recommended books: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, by Martin Luther King Jr. Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

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Melinda Gates (live!) on stopping climate change, ending malaria, and the problems money can’t solve Mar 19, 2018

Show notes

Melinda Gates is the co-founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the United States. With more than $40 billion in assets, the Gates Foundation works on a dizzying array of issues, from eradicating polio to feeding the world to treating HIV to stopping climate change to reforming the US education system. Gates has also been working, in recent years, on increasing diversity in the technology industry. “If you [only] have products created by white guys in their 20s, you’re gonna miss the mark,” she says. I sat down with Gates at South by Southwest for an interview that covered a lot of ground. We talked, among other things, about bioterrorism, comic sans, climate change, the culture of Silicon Valley, the Damore memo about gender and technology, the future of food, the problems money can and can’t solve, what makes America culturally distinct, and more. Books: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

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A better conversation on guns Mar 12, 2018

Show notes

Want to know why we can’t make any progress on the guns debate? Because this isn’t a debate over policy. It’s a debate over identity. After last month’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I remembered a book Evan Osnos recommended on this show, called Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by Jennifer Carlson. Carlson, a sociologist, realized that her discipline had missed a major social transformation: that Americans weren’t just buying guns for hunting or home protection. Guns had become part of their everyday lives, structuring how they saw the world, their country, and their role in it. And so she dove deep into the experiences of gun carriers in Michigan, becoming a gun carrier and even certified instructor herself, examining how the NRA’s training programs construct new models of citizenship, and digging into how gun ownership interacts with race, gender, and class. I don’t believe that empathy alone offers a way forward in the guns debate. But I do believe that understanding the identities at play here — both among those who own guns and those who want to see gun ownership restricted — is the only way to have a debate that makes sense. This conversation helped me, at least, see those identities much more clearly. Books Columbine by Dave Cullen Chokehold by Paul Butler The Limits of Whiteness by Neda Maghbouleh

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This isn’t Joe Kennedy’s grandfather’s Democratic Party, and he knows it Mar 05, 2018

Show notes

When you’re sitting in front of Rep. Joe Kennedy, it’s clear that you’re sitting in front of a Kennedy. The face, the jawline — it’s all uncannily familiar. But Kennedy, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, is rising in a changed Democratic Party. In the 1950s, the nonwhite share of the Democratic vote was about 7 percent. In 2012, it was about 44 percent — and that number is ticking upward. Kennedy is navigating it smoothly. Tapped to give the Democratic response to the State of the Union — and you’ll want to listen to him tell the story of how that came about — he delivered a powerful performance in a speaking slot that usually buries ambitious young politicians. And he did it by reminding Democrats that their rhetoric can be bigger than their divisions, that a party built on difference can still see its way to a national identity. In this conversation, Kennedy and I talk about the vision and the policies that lie behind that speech. Where should Democrats go on health care, on economics, on drugs? Is the divide over identity politics and economic populism really a “false choice,” as Kennedy argues? And how do Democrats talk about unity when Trump keeps driving the national conversation into divisive issues? Further Reading: Matt Yglesias' piece on Rep. Kennedy's SOTU response The Ezra Klein Show episode with the authors of How Democracies Die Books: Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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Amy Chua on how tribalism is tearing America apart Feb 26, 2018

Show notes

Human beings are tribal creatures, particularly when they feel threatened. And the reality of living in America in 2018, at a time of massive demographic change and social upheaval, is that we all feel threatened, and so we are all becoming more tribal. In her new book, Political Tribes, Amy Chua argues that America’s foreign policy has long been undermined by our underestimation of tribalism abroad, and that our domestic stability is now being hollowed out by our inability to see it clearly at home. Donald Trump, she argues, is a product of tribal threat — of a country where “race has split America’s poor and class has split America’s whites.” And progressives, she argues, are a big part of the problem — they have become judgmental, exclusionary, and smug. The question that animates much of my conversation with Chua is: What can be done to calm American tribalism? Is it a product of overheated rhetoric and political choices? Or is it the inevitable result of a country teetering on demographic instability, a moment when no group can truly consolidate power so all groups are left fighting for it? Mentioned: The book about sports rivalry that Ezra mentions as an example of the power of divisive sports identities Amy Chua mentioned Better Angels, a group working to depolarize America She also mentioned Sarah Silverman's new show, I Love You, America, which aims to bridge our political divide with comedy Anne Jones' "whitelash" idea is articulated here Ezra mentioned that the Soviet Union exploited American racial tensions. Here’s an explanation of that history. Books: The Possessed by Elif Batuman Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover Ethnic Groups in Conflict by Donald L. Horowitz Amy Chua also did a By the Book with the New York Times recently, so here's a full breakdown of her reading recommendations.

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How technology brings out the worst in us, with Tristan Harris Feb 19, 2018

Show notes

In 2011, Tristan Harris’s company, Apture, was acquired by Google. Inside Google, he became unnerved by how the company worked. There was all this energy going into making the products better, more addicting, more delightful. But what if all that made the users’ lives worse, more busy, more distracted? Harris wrote up his worries in a slide deck manifesto. “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention” went viral within the company and led to Harris being named Google’s “design ethicist.” But he soon realized that he couldn’t change enough from the inside. The business model wasn’t built to give users back their time. It was built to take ever more of it. Harris, who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, has become the most influential critic of how Silicon Valley designs products to addict us. His terms, like the need to focus on “Time Well Spent,” have been adopted (or perhaps coopted) by, among others, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I interviewed Harris recently for my podcast. We talked about how the 2016 election threw Silicon Valley into crisis, why negative emotions dominate online, where Silicon Valley’s model of human decisionmaking went wrong, whether he buys Zuckerberg's change of heart, what happened when meditation master Thich Nhat Hahn came to Google, what it means to control your own time, and what can be done about it. Further Reading: A Verge interview with Jaron Lanier where he talks about the idea that to maximize engagement, you need to maximize emotional engagement, and the emotions that are most engaging are the negative ones. Tristan mentions Kahneman’s System 1 & System 2 thinking. Here’s an explanation of that. The Onion article Ezra mentioned about the ways meditation is applied in Silicon Valley The New York Times piece with a headline Tristan says is somewhat different from the truth A description of the Facebook earnings call that Tristan mentioned The Stanford Persuasive Technology lab Tristan mentioned to explain the psychology behind the Snapchat Streak Ezra mentioned Ralph Nader’s Consumer Movement. Here’s a description of that. The New York Times article on greyscaling a phone that Tristan and Ezra discuss Recommended books Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves Reprint Edition by Adam Hochschild Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

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Steven Pinker: enlightenment values made this the best moment in human history Feb 12, 2018

Show notes

Does the daily news feel depressing? Does the world feel grim? It’s not, says Harvard professor Steven Pinker. This is, in fact, the best moment in human history — there’s less war, less violence, less famine, less poverty, than there ever has been. There’s more opportunities for human flourishing, more personal freedom, more democracy, more education, more equality, more technological wonder, than the world has ever seen. In Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, he mounts both his case that the world that this moment is astonishingly great from a historical perspective, and argues that there’s a reason for that: enlightenment values of science, reason, humanism, and faith in progress. Values that he says are under attack from a right that is retreating into zero-sum nationalism, a left that has lost faith in progress, and a public that doesn't always appreciate just how much progress has been made. In this conversation, we talk about Pinker’s new book, as well as his views on political correctness on campus, how politics drives us to irrationality, and what future generations will look back on us with horror for doing. There are things Pinker says in here that I’m skeptical of, as you’ll hear, but I agree with his big point: if all you’re following is the daily news cycle, with our deep bias towards what’s going wrong right now, it’s easy to miss how much has gone right to get us to this moment. Books and articles mentioned in this episode: Pinker's piece for the New Repulibic, Science Is Not Your Enemy Leon Wieseltier's reponse to that piece Yuval Noah Harari's, Sapiens Paul Shapiro's Clean Meat Philip Tetlock's Superforecasting Peter Singer's The Expanding Circle Richard Herrnstein's controversial Atlantic piece on IQ E.O. Wilson's book, Sociobiology German Lopez's reporting on "The Ferguson Effect" Books Recommended: Factfulness by Hans Rosling The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brandt Atrocities by Matthew White Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

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