Hello everybody. I am Nick Gillespie with Reason Magazine. I'm an editor-in-large. I'm joined by senior producer Zach Weismiller also of Reason, and we are here for our weekly live stream. We're joined by David Bernstein, who is a university professor of law at George Mason University at the Antonin Scalia Law School, and you've been there since 1995, right, David? Correct. All right. You know, I thought you would be more ambitious, but you know, that's okay. I've been at Reason since 1993, and we're also joined by Kenny Zhu, who is the founder and executive director of Color Us United and the author of the book An Inconvenient Minority. Kenny, thanks for talking. Thanks for having me. Okay. So we have David Bernstein for half an hour, and then he has to adjudicate a legal matter of all things, which you know, you kind of want in a law professor. He's living the life, but David, let's start with you. Just two quick questions from a legal perspective. One, we're going to be talking about the affirmative action case that's in front of the Supreme Court that involves Harvard and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill about their admissions policies regarding Asian Americans. What is the legal rubric that governs, you know, when to what extent and how can race be used in college admissions right now? Okay. So there's two basic legal background doctrines at issue here. One is the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees that no person shall be deprived of equal protection of the law, which applies only to state universities because it's no state shall. And then there's the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans federally funded universities, which is almost all universities, from discriminating on the basis of race. And whether correctly or not correctly, the Supreme Court has held that those two provisions should be interpreted exactly the same way. So the legal standard for private and public universities is exactly the same. And the basic thrust of the case law is that universities are allowed to use race in a limited way in admissions only for diversity purposes, only to have a more diverse class, not for any remedial purpose like making up for past discrimination. Oh, really? So is that the governing principle for other forms of affirmative action, say in a business setting or a corporate setting, or in terms of minority or contracting with the federal government and things like that? In minority contracting, you're only allowed to use affirmative action preferences if you have evidence that both there was historic discrimination by the government entity at issue, and that discrimination continues to reverberate in current practice. When the Supreme Court made that rule, I think they thought they were basically eliminating preferences for minority business enterprises, for the most part, but basically every jurisdiction in the country hired consulting firms to come up with correctly, or just making up the history of discrimination in a particular jurisdiction and the current effect. So almost everywhere we still have these minority business enterprises. In the case of employment, it's not really clear that you could use race at all, but there hasn't really been a good case on it for like 40 years. So companies are just doing it anyway and hoping they don't get sued. And David, in your book, Classified, which is fascinating, and I recommend it to anyone watching, you're really making an argument that the entire kind of racial, modern racial classification system is deeply flawed and that it was almost entirely a government creation. And it needs to be beyond just thinking about affirmative action, we need to kind of rethink that entire system. Could you just encapsulate that argument for us? Sure. First, we should point out that racial classifications don't only affect things like higher education admissions. We also have extended racial classification used to buy government fiat to scientific research where it really, really, really doesn't belong in any plausible way and has a lot of negative effects and other circumstances as well. And basically, these classifications were invented by the government, obviously, with some basis in what they thought the cultural background in the United States was, but they were invented in the 1970s primarily to enforce anti-discrimination laws, to keep track of whether employers were following the laws, whether educational institutions were following them.  So the paradigm they were using was black and white. They assumed that two groups were easily definable and that no one would be trying to gain the system because it was not advantageous for a black person, for a white person to claim to be black socially at the time. And they just sort of used that as their template and they sort of threw in Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans without much thought, not really thinking about the fact or anticipating really that there be massive immigration from Latin America, from Asia, and also from Africa, such that all of these populations are both larger and much more internally diverse than anyone ever expected. So just for example, the Asian American classification includes everyone from Indians to Japanese to Filipinos who have really nothing in common with each other. Yeah, Kenny, just to get a quick reaction, and we're going to talk more, particularly in the second half about your book, An Inconvenient Minority and what Colorist United is after. But David in his book talks about the kind of incoherence of the Asian American category that the government kind of enforces and recognizes. Do you feel you are Chinese American, correct? Yeah. Yeah. And then I mean, do you feel like the category, just the broad category of Asian American, does that empower you or does that kind of erase the specific, you know, kind of sociological and historical experience of you and your family in the country? Because it includes, you know, South Asian Indians and Pakistanis as well as David was saying, you know, Filipinos and Chinese and Japanese, et cetera. Yeah. And first of all, glad to see you, David. I mean, I'm an admirer of your book and everything like that. So glad we could meet over the reason limestream. But in terms of the Asian American category, the people who invented it, who really popularized the term were a Marxist Asian American Association at UC Berkeley in 1962, where they first came up with the idea that they needed a Pan-Asian term so that they could collectively advocate for whatever Asian American rights are and whatever they were advocating for then. So it's a political term. Not only is it a government term, it's a political term. And look, there's use. I mean, as we know in America, identity politics still matters, right? And the term the Asian American identity has been used to, yes, herd Asian Americans into voting a certain way and believing certain things, even when those things are against their own interests. And this is really what the Harvard case is about politically, besides a legal matter. Politically, it's Asian Americans finally starting to break out of this category that has been imposed on them by a political activist class that has had real influence on them for so long. But Asian Americans are finally starting to think for themselves politically and be like, actually, this doesn't represent my interests. And this is what the Harvard case is about. This is why it matters. And that's because it is essentially, I mean the argument in the case, the plaintiff is that Harvard and UNC is restricting the number of Asians. So kind of an Asian identity is not helpful at this point. Right, exactly. And there was a recent New York Times article as well where the reporters basically interviewed a lot of Asian American applicants and they basically affirmed everything that the case asserts, which is that Asians are taught to in their college applications, quote unquote, be less Asian. Do less stereotypically Asian things.  So basically, all of the things that Asian Americans are excellent at that came from hours of study, that came from an enormous individual and family sacrifice, are you being used against them in this discourse? I want to dig, I'd like to dig while we have David here for the first half hour, I want to dig a little bit more into kind of the kind of the legal creation of these different categories, including Asian, but you know, broadly Asian, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, white, black. And I pulled this one excerpt from your book where you talk about this directive number 15 from the Office of Management and Budget. And it basically, you say that it is by far the most important government classification scheme. And then point out later that it specifically mentions that classification should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature. Could you just talk a little bit about the importance of kind of that specific directive and then the kind of shaky ground that a lot of this all rests upon? Sure, you know, interestingly enough, a significant reason why the government felt the need to standardize the classifications. I mean, there were a lot of, you know, there was not clear how to classify Asians or how to classify whites, there was a lot of others in there, but the really difficult category where people with Spanish-speaking ancestry, because some government agencies were just using Mexicans, some were using Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, some Mexicans Puerto Ricans and Cubans, some and others, some said Latinos, some said Spanish-speaking households, some said Spanish language heritage, there are all these different ways of describing the group. And therefore, the government was getting data from different sources that wasn't matching. They couldn't really compare data they were getting from one agency to another regarding, you know, income or educational levels because they were using different definitions. So we really need to sit down and standardize this just so we can match the classifications up with each other. And they did it in a very haphazard, informal way. They basically set up a committee and they would have subcommittees and say, okay, let's pick up, pick out a bunch of Asian people from the government, from different groups and have them sit down and figure and hammer out the Asian category. Let's take a bunch like three Hispanics, one from each of the major groups at the time, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and let them hammer out that classification. They didn't consult anthropologists, they didn't consult geneticists, they didn't consult sociologists, they didn't consult historians. So this was not any sort of formal process by which the government was saying, okay, here's exactly why we are using these classifications and here's the evidentiary basis for it. They just made these broad classifications and then just with a warning, by the way, we're really only meaning for these to be used for statistical purposes. So don't take them too seriously. But naturally when the government does something like this, it naturally infiltrates itself into the rest of society. The census starts using it, so now all of our data is based on these groups. So anyone who wants to do research, the easy way out is just to do the research with those classifications at hand. Universities want to engage in affirmative action. They could have said, well, what specific groups are we looking for, for what specific reasons? And at first it was all over the map, like some universities in California only had Mexicans, but now everyone uses these particular classifications without them ever really sitting back and justifying, well, why are white people from Spain included in affirmative action, but Hemang in Minnesota are not because, and in fact they're discriminated against because they're Asian, or why don't we include Armenians or Arabs or other groups or Italians, other groups that have face discrimination, even though they're in the white classification. So this directive, number 15, really had broad legal effects, sociological effects. No one, despite the activist groups that Kenny mentioned earlier, almost no one 50 years ago would have defined themselves as being an Asian-American or a Hispanic 50 years ago. Now most people who are Hispanic will use that at least as a secondary category, about 30, 40 percent of Asian-Americans consider themselves Asian-American. I think it's kind of interesting that still around 65 percent completely reject being called that, outside, except unless you're in an elite university where it's sort of drummed into that. So anyway, this has had extremely broad ramifications throughout society with very little attention ever paid to. I had never heard of it as a law professor having done a lot of work on race before until I started researching this, and I think 99.9 percent of Americans probably never heard of statistical directive number 15, maybe the most important government rule that people have never heard of. Do you, yeah, go ahead, Zach, sorry. Well, I was just going to say, you know, and you suggest in your book that it's time to start walking back from that, or at least, you don't argue against affirmative action wholesale, but say it needs to be much more, I guess, rationally based or much more constrained in terms of how you think about what the government does to make up for past wrongs. What would be something that makes a little more sense than this kind of political, non-scientific, non-anthropological categorization that the government came up with in the 70s? So this part isn't in the book, but I'll have it later after another interview. The first thing we should do, the constitutional classifications are extremely disfavored in the law for all the reasons that you would think so. It's anti-individual rights. It could create all sorts of societal tensions. So the first thing is, before the government starts classifying people for any purpose, they really should demonstrate what lawyers call a compelling interest. Why do we need to do this? And then once they decide that they should be doing some sort of classification, they should be narrowly tailoring another nice legal phrase, narrowly tailoring it to actually achieve that goal. So if the problem that you're having is that there are African-Americans who are in segregated inner-city schools are failing, and you want to make sure that they have some opportunity to be integrated into mainstream American society at all levels, then you should focus your resources and your attention on that, and not, for example, be taking kids who are the children of Kenyan diplomats who come to the United States for high school, and then stay here, which is actually disproportionately the sort of people who are actually benefiting from reformed revaction. If you want to use race of some, what I shouldn't say race, genetic heritage in the case of scientific research, you shouldn't be naively using these studies on a scientific basis. You should be looking at genetic studies and figuring out what genetic clusters of people which has some correlation but not that great with race should we be using. I mean, I'm Jewish, Ashkenazi, we have a lot of interesting genetic anomalies because of our intermarriage and founder effects and genetics, but no one studies us because, at least officially for the government, because we're just white, so we just get lumped in there, but other groups that, like Hispanics, which aren't unique at all, they could be any origin, they could be indigenous, European, Asian, black, they're just Hispanic, though, for government purposes, and to classify them for scientific purposes as a separate group doesn't make any sense. So we really want to separate race and state as much as possible, have a real bias against classifying, but if we do have to classify, it should be really narrowly aimed at what the goal is. But the fact of the matter is that race and state have been with us since the first census, right? Because what were the actual categories in the very first census? If I'm remembering correctly, it was basically white, black, whatever term, Negro, whatever they used, and then I think they had, like, Indians who are not citizens. Right. It was a term of art to take into effect Native Americans, but I mean, the point is that race and state seem to be, they arrive at the same time, and then the first large-scale immigration restriction that was articulated as such was the Chinese Exclusion Act. You know, this is pre-Asian American. It's very specific, although it did actually cover many more people than Chinese. So I guess, David and Kenny as well, you know, what has to happen for us to even have that discussion of saying, okay, the state is not going to articulate and enforce racial categories? You know, I think that we could exact that while certainly race was always present in government policy at the federal level, except for the census and except for immigration law, the federal government didn't really classify people until modern times. It's actually an innovation. Certainly Jim Crow South had classification states would have interracial marriage laws in California.  So it's not as radical as it seems to go back and say, well, we're not against the government keeping data for data for data's sake when we're enforcing discrimination laws or such. But it shouldn't be ubiquitous that every time you fill out a mortgage application or a college application or participate, get your COVID vaccine, participate in medical study, that you're always asked which of these arbitrary classifications you belong to. Kenny, do you agree with David that it would be an improvement if we separated race and state? Yes, depending on how you do it. Look, the question that everybody's going to ask if you separate race from state, how are you going to give benefits to those who have been historically marginalized? And the answer is not at the college level. Sorry, that's the worst place to do it because at the college level, people pretty much have their academic nature locked in. You know, if you're going to do some sort of benefit, you need to start educating people at the kindergarten level, pre-K level. And how we do that is open for debate, which is why that's the next place after the Harvard case gets resolved where this debate needs to go. What happened, David, and forgive me, what happened in Baltimore City is not necessarily segregated schools. What happened is the schools were actually quite integrated. What happened was the state of the schools got so bad that all of the middle class and upper middle class white people left. And the only people that are left in those schools are low income minorities who have literally no other choice. So that's what we have to do. We have to focus on making these schools a decent place to send your children, because that's not what's happening in our school system today. Before, I know David has to go in about five minutes, I want to get his thoughts on an argument that he made in the book. Near the end, you say that the data suggests that the possibility that Americans will develop a unique, singular, multi-ethnic, and multiracial American identity in the future. How do you expect something like that would play out? What would be required to get to that future? And what might that unique American identity look like in your mind? I think there are two models that we can look at. First is this model I was just talking to Nick before we started about his Italian ancestors. So 50 years ago, we had the Italians and the Poles and the Jews and the Greeks. And they were not assimilating as quickly as people thought. In fact, we had this sociological research in the 60s that started talking about the unmeltable ethnics. You know what? It turned out they all melted. Not that people still can't have identities and some people still do strongly feel. But for the most part, no one pays that much attention to people's ethnic backgrounds. No one, for example, was talking about how the Santas would be the first Italian American president. No one really cares. He's just a white guy. So we could see that as a model that we used to be really concerned about these things. And now we've just assimilated all the groups into one white identity. I think one could just draw that analogy to the population as a whole that we could not care. And similarly, it was a very big deal 50, 60 years ago, what religion you were, what religious tradition you came from, even if you weren't that religious. It was a very big deal that JFK was a Catholic, wasn't sure whether he could even get elected. And a lot of people didn't vote for him because he was Catholic. And contrary wise, the reason he was able to get elected was that a lot of Catholics who normally voted Republican voted for him out of identity, we now call identity politics. But now we have a Catholic president, Catholic Speaker of the House, six Catholic Supreme Court justices. And for the most part, no one cares. It's a non-issue. I'm sensing there's also a couple or there were a couple of Italian American Supreme Court justices. And it didn't work out that well for the country or for freedom. So I'm getting a lot of anti-Italian and anti-Catholic sentiment from you, David. And I appreciate it. I'm here for it. You know, when Scalia was nominated back in the 80s, it was still, it was, go back and meet your porch. It was a big deal. Still, he was the first Italian American justice. By now, no one would pay any attention to that. It's a slight flavoring on top of, you know, this great American melting pot or stew pot or whatever. But Kenny, does that, you know, that's easy. Maybe it's easier for me and Zach, Zach, who has a Hispanic heritage in his back in his family life. And David, we're all white. Is David's model of, you know, what then is this new man, this new American, which actually has roots back in letters from an American farmer by Jean-Claude Croix in the late 18th century?  I think race is very meltable. It's already happening. One out of every five new relationships are interracial. Zach, I had no idea that you were Latino. I had zero idea. You look at Zach, he doesn't look Latino at all. But guess what? I can guarantee you, if Zach had any good sense, he would have put Latino in his college application. So, you know, race is, in fact, and this is David's point, race is not a signifier. It's not a real signifier anymore. It's noisy. Race is incredibly noisy now. I mean, but now, you know, the new progressive movement, this is what people have to watch out for. The new progressive movement actually is buying into this, but they're trying to defend their more pure turf by saying, well, we don't want to defend race. We want to defend descendants of slaves or we don't want to defend the Asian category. We want to defend the truly oppressed Asians, meaning that they're going to disaggregate Asians and the privileged Asians are the Chinese and Koreans and Japanese and the non-privileged are the Laotians and the Hmong and everything like that. So that's the new movement in the progressive. Watch out for that. Now, my question for regarding that, that itself is actually, if you frame it as descendants of slaves, guess who doesn't get affirmative action benefits? Barack Obama, because Barack Obama's father was Kenyan and he was not a descendant of American slaves. What is wrong with that though? Because isn't that something that would make a little more sense at least if you're like, okay, I can document that there's this lineage that had a very clear wrong committed against them by the American state, enforcing slavery kind of makes more sense than just the broad category of black or Asian or white. And you could make this the parallel case for Native Americans as well. Sure, there's two problems with that. The first problem is, one, Asians can document atrocities from American to the American state too, but they're not getting affirmative action benefits based on that. I mean, the Japanese under internment, the Chinese who were excluded. And some of that is impossible to actually document because the Chinese Exclusion Act meant that you actually couldn't attend America. You actually couldn't enter America. So we don't have data of American injustice against Chinese because the Chinese weren't allowed in America. So you can't possibly document the true scope of whatever American injustice happened, meaning that we're reliant upon cast iron narratives of history that every American knows, which is basically slavery. But then the second problem with that is that the issues, the second problem with that is that it actually rewards privileged people. That's my point because you have to have a certain level of privilege to have the data of all of your ancestors and also be able to get it.  They might not even have the data. My parents certainly don't have the data. I can only trace my family back to about 1915. David, you have to go. Do you have any parting thoughts before you leave this conversation, which is more interesting than anything that you might possibly be doing after. Yeah, the traffic I need to help my wife with is not quite as fascinating, but needs to be done. My last thought will be that I believe that race is meltable, that there's no reason that the past has to dictate the future. But that both these classifications and the ideological superstructure that I've built up around them are a threat to that future. And I love this point, so I want to leave with it, that one thing I discovered in my research is I came across this phrase called white racial consciousness. And you would think that white racial consciousness would be the kind of thing that David Duke and Nick Fuentes and those sorts of people would be promoting. But it turns out that if you actually Google that phrase and everyone watching this is free to do so, you'll mostly get left-wing anthropologists and sociologists talking about how we actually want to encourage people who we deem to be white, whatever their background, whether they be Armenian or Polish or Italian or Irish or German or anything else, or whether they consider themselves mostly Catholic or mostly a gay person or whatever other identities they have, we actually want their primary identity to be as a white person, because then they will achieve white racial consciousness and once they achieve that, they will recognize their white privilege and then they will become woke and anti-racist in the ideological sense of the phrase. And this is extremely crazy and dangerous and the idea it's against all human history and human psychology to think that if you get people to identify themselves more as being a member of a particular group and they will use that membership, their strong identity to help other groups rather than themselves. And I should add that that was my, what I thought when I first came across this and I did some research, the data not surprisingly shows that people who have a stronger identity as a white person are more likely to be racist and the fact that people who claim to be progressives are encouraging people to identify themselves by race is just tremendously dangerous and really appalling and a sad commentary of the state of our... Very, very quickly before you go, David, do you think that that is winning? I mean, clearly there are more and more calls to think about what whiteness means and for white people to kind of own their privilege, etc. But is it effective or is that actually, you know, is that the last gasp of a racialist society or is it the next stage of an increasingly racially and ethnically stratified country? It seems to be winning at the elite level of universities, big corporations, government, and at the grassroots level people are ignorant and intermarrying and having to tell people that they feel like they're multi-racial and I think there's a war between the grassroots which is actually much more liberal on race than the elite are. Thank you so much, David Bernstein of George Mason University, Anthony Scalia Law, and most recently classified a fantastic book that everybody should read because it just, as you march through the specific government, you know, history of racial classification, everybody should know this history. Thanks so much, David. Thank you, Nick. Thank you. Kenny, before we go on and we're going to go do a couple of viewer questions in a second, why don't you tell us very quickly what Colorist United is and what, you know, and what your aims are with that group? Yeah, we, Colorist United is the group that I run. I'm the president of Colorist United. ColoristUnited.org is where you can see our mission but basically we advocate for a race-blind society and I, this is why this discussion is so important to me because race, there have been no, there's no realistic proxy of race for anything. Race doesn't mean privilege, it doesn't mean oppression, it doesn't mean your cultural background. We've already discussed all of these things. It's basically a government-imposed category but it's now being used to divide Americans and corporations are doing it. American Express has a proxy where you have to hire a certain percentage of blacks and fire a certain percentage of whites.  So these are campaigns that we're fighting and we are exposing their documents to the American public and we're getting them to sign petitions. So we are a public advocacy group on your behalf if you believe in a race-blind society. Thank you.  One against Harvard, one against the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at one point they were combined and then kind of uncombined. What is the, you know, this is a subject of much of your book. What is the importance of, I guess, the Harvard case in particular? The importance of the Harvard case to America is that it's about a set of ideals that are becoming forgotten in our national discourse. It's about meritocracy. People, we've been throwing around these terms. How should we treat people? How should we evaluate people? The answer to me is, after writing this book, exceedingly obvious, though it's the average reader, may not be, treat them based on their merit. Don't look at their backgrounds. Look at what they present to you in terms of merit-based factors. Those are things like grades, test scores, your personal essay, your teacher recommendations, alumni recommendations. Have a merit-based system and don't look at somebody's name. Don't look at their race. If you want a solid solution that I've proposed that has been actually advocated by students for fair admissions, in this case against Harvard, is you can, the Harvard people are allowed to look at the application the way that it is, but they have to take the race and they have to take the name out of it. They're not allowed to use, they're not allowed to do LinkedIn background checks, at least the admissions officers. They're HR people who might be able to do it, but you have to have a blind system, a system that separates merit from background. Well, first the question about the Harvard case. Is part of, in an inconvenient minority, and there is somewhere online at Reason.com, there's a hour and a half long interview that we did when the book came out and I recommend everybody read that book as well. Part of your angry at the fact that you feel like you and a lot of other Chinese Americans or other kind of model minorities, for lack of a better term, played the game. You were told this is what counts as merit and then you do that and you succeed at it, you excel at it and then you're told like, no, sorry, we were kidding. Is that part of what is stoking the energy and the anger, as it kind of orients towards Harvard here? Yeah, look, here's my book, An Inconvenient Minority, Great Stocking Stuffer. Look, the... For all religions, it's also good for Hanukkah and Kuwanta. It has everything. Good for anybody who's interested in these issues. And yes, please check out my interview with Nick on Reason.com. But basically, so the... What are Asians? What's at the core of this for Asian Americans? Couple of things. One, yes, some Asians are... Do actually tie this into a more progressive narrative of the United States, like the U.S. is racist and Harvard is a white institution and they shouldn't be discriminating against Asian Americans. I don't believe that anybody should discriminate against anybody. But we are arriving at this point in our culture where progressives are starting to justify anti-racist discrimination in the name of solving racist discrimination. That's the frustration. Nobody wants anybody to discriminate against anybody. But what does that mean? It doesn't mean discrimination the other way. It means colorblind, meritocratic evaluation. That's what it means. That's what the Asians are fighting for. They're afraid and justifiably so that as long as the progressives continue to get their way, that the whole idea of anti-discrimination won't be about treating people on their merit anymore. It'll be about treating people on their race but the other way, which is now including them. That's why they're mad. So can I ask just real quickly, let's talk about the UNC case. David pointed out that legally there's no real distinction between a private and a public university or a state-supported university in terms of legal discrimination and whatnot, but does a public state university have a responsibility to represent the demographics of a given state or the geographics? At a school like University of North Carolina, you're from New Jersey, I think you grew up in Princeton. If I'm remembering, I went to Rutgers. I'm from New Jersey as well. Does a school like Rutgers, should it be trying to pull from every county in New Jersey? Should it be, does a state school have a different set of criteria that might come into play in putting together a freshman class each year? Not a racial set of criteria. That's illegal. To me, racial classification, just like what David said, is a category for strict scrutiny under the court, meaning that it has to be evaluated with extreme caution. And the whole idea of representing the demographics of a state is not a good enough reason to allow for the insistence of race and admissions in my view. And I'll give you another example. In North Carolina, the Solicitor General for UNC argued in front of the Supreme Court that North Carolina needed to represent the demographics of the state, which is why they needed to treat Asians with 200 points higher on the SAT, have a lower chance of admission than a black person with 200 points lower. That was their argument. And here's the problem with the argument. The problem with the argument is that UNC is not actually supposed to represent all of North Carolina. They're supposed to represent the percentage of North Carolinians who are who belong at an elite public institution, UNC Chapel Hill. And that may be racially inequitable compared to the rest of the county. But that's like saying like the state of Nevada, which is 85% white needs to have demographics that match the nation. That doesn't make any sense. UNC is created for a specific purpose to be an institution of excellence, meaning it needs to admit the most excellent people in the state. So that's my problem with it. It's not getting the category right. I'd like to introduce some of the counter arguments that were made during the Supreme Court case. I've pulled a few of the oral arguments and I'm just curious to hear your reaction to them because you're arguing here that this should be purely meritocratic based on test scores, academics, extracurriculars, athletics, things that can kind of be measured. Whereas Harvard seems to be arguing that, well, they have a compelling interest in having a diverse student body as they define diversity. And Justice Kagan in this argument kind of goes back and forth with the plaintiffs on this point. I'm going to play this back and forth, which all these clips are edited, but we'll have links to the full transcript. They're edited for brevity, but you can at least get a sense of the argumentation being made here. Everybody would rather achieve all our racial diversity goals through race-neutral means. Everybody would rather that.  I don't believe so, Justice Kagan. So that's the council for the plaintiff saying I don't think you can ever be race-conscious when you're trying to reach these diversity objectives. Do you agree to that? Do you agree with that? And is diversity a goal that is valid for a place like Harvard to pursue? Okay, so I don't want to speak at a turn because I'm obviously not a Supreme Court Justice, but I think Justice Kagan makes a logical misstep here to get us there. What is getting us there mean? Obviously she means to get to the racial goal. The point of race-neutral is that you don't have a racial goal. That's the point of race-neutral.  And if the racial goal is inequitable, so be it. Okay, you cannot say, you cannot say obviously we'd like to have race-neutral means, but if race-neutral means don't get us there, we need to use race-conscious because the point of race-neutral means is that you're not trying to get. The place you're trying to get is the most meritocratic class, the most excellent class, not a certain racial goal. So you cannot have, you logically cannot have a race-neutral admissions program while also having racial goals. It doesn't make any sense. You choose one or the other. What about in a broader social context? Not talking about Harvard, which is ultimately it's an influential institution, but in terms of sheer numbers, it's small. In a society, oftentimes people will say, okay, we're not going to have perfect demographic representation of X number of women and blacks and gays and Mexican-Americans and Italian-Americans in any given institution in any given organization. But if blacks persist at very low levels of income growth or graduation rates from high schools and from grammar schools, much less college and things like that, that that's assigned something's wrong and we need to address it. Are you saying when you talk about race-neutrality, I mean that we just never talk about outcomes that we see in broad racial or ethnic or some other group. Could be a gender group, could be a geographic group. And this is what I argue in my book, an inconvenient minority. The reality is America is truly diverse. The reality is black Americans are very successful at a number of different things in this country. And to say that everything needs to be racially equitable means that what do you know what you're actually saying? You're actually saying we want less black people in the entertainment industry. You're actually saying we want less black people in the NBA. You're saying we want less black Americans in the New York City public education system because currently it's 40% represented by black Americans. You know that that's what you're saying. But the reality is black Americans are successful in a lot of different fields. And the fact that Asian Americans are successful in academics should not be used against them. It's okay that Harvard would be 43% Asian without affirmative action, which is what would happen, by the way, if the Supreme Court is finally allowed to strike down and do race-blind meritocracy. It would be 43% Asian. And as an American, I'm asking you, sorry, as an American listening to this interview, I am asking you to actually not care, actually, though, because it is okay that Asians are racially overrepresented in certain places just like it is okay that black Americans and white Americans are overrepresented in certain fields. What happens when it's, you know, if it's something where they're overrepresented in things like, you know, prison populations, etc. I mean, clearly negative things because the average or the median experience, and I realize you're arguing like we shouldn't be talking about that. We should be talking about individual experiences. But, you know, if blacks are more likely to end up in jail, if blacks are more likely to end up in poverty, etc., as a society, don't we want to know that because that's a sign that we're not doing our job in helping all people kind of advance and get on with then I would take a look at the means at the means as to how we got to that end. Why are black Americans overrepresented in the public education system is I think the question that is fair to ask. And if you take a look at the data, is it because there is implicit bias against black Americans in the justice system, or in police altercations or anything like that. And, you know, that's very controversial. It's not something that I have authority to speak on. The only thing that I can say is the percentage of black Americans who are actually in violent police altercations is also significantly higher and racially equitable in the population. So it's not just noise. It's not just implicit bias. It does link back to something real. Before we go to Zach, I just wanted to read a couple of quick comments. Kenny nailed it says George Albert. We are all Americans. Yes, respect all people's history, but affirmative action might be hurting more than helping. I am cannabis. I am cannabis. I'm curious what Kenny thinks about the school district in Washington state that decided Asians no no longer qualify as students of color. Are you familiar with that Kenny? What do you say? Is that progress or is that backdoor discrimination? It's sort of symptomatic of a larger regressive issue. Basically, I mean, Maryland did the same thing. They said they had this graph, University of Maryland, where they had Asians, sorry, they had percentage of people admitted to things, percentage of people who are people of color, and then people of color minus Asian. They had a category. They literally put in parentheses minus Asian, because they don't believe that Asians are truly people of color or the people of color that they really want. That's the point. The point is the intention. And you can't have people governing the academic institutions of America who have mindsets that are like that, because that means that they're not going to admit the most qualified people. They're not going to admit to the people that are the best for the health and future of our country. They're going to admit people based on their own feelings and their activist agendas. This idea of putting Asians in this separate unspoken category is not limited to higher education. I pulled this article, which was referenced in David's book. It's a 2014 New York Times article. Google releases employee data illustrating text diversity challenge. There's a line in there where the author writes how Silicon Valley remains a white man's world, and then two paragraphs down talks about Google being 60% white and 34% Asian. It's interesting, and I guess from your perspective, troubling how it's just kind of, we're not even going to mention that, or that's kind of an asterisk to the side. But I did want to bring in another one of these oral arguments, because one line of argumentation that Harvard has made is that actually they aren't discriminating against Asians. There might be fewer Asians getting in than would have in this other system, but they're not systematically trying to keep Asians out. The controversial method that Harvard has been using is they have the traditional academic and extracurricular scores and so forth, and then they have this personal score, which seems to be a collection of interviews with alumni, teacher recommendations, things like that, that they all are supposed to look at, and then someone reviewing the application comes up with a one through five number, and then Asians are just ranked way lower than any other category. I mean, they're ranked lower than whites, they're ranked much lower than Hispanics, and then much, much lower than blacks on average. And there's an exchange with a Lido and Harvard's lead attorney on this topic. I just want to play and then get your reaction. It's given to Asian applicants to Harvard. Why are they given a lower score than any other group? The only model that can be created to figure out what was going into the personal rating couldn't look at almost anything that admissions officers look at in those ratings. It can't, there's no way that it could model what the guidance counselor letters said, what the teacher letters said, what the essays said, what the interviewers letters said. I still haven't heard any explanation for the disparity between the personal scores that are given to Asians. They rank below whites, they rank way below Hispanics, and really way below African-Americans. You're talking about hundreds and hundreds of applicants, maybe thousands. What is the explanation for that? I can't do better than the findings of fact in the trial court that there is, quote, no credible evidence that corroborates the improper discrimination suggested by SFFA's interpretation of the personal rating. So to try to summarize that argument, it seems as if they're saying it's a complicated, holistic thing that cannot be modeled. So we can't prove that we're trying to discriminate against Asians. And in fact, the district court found that there was no discrimination against Asians. What do you say to that? Word of advice to Harvard attorney Scott Waxman, if you ever do this again, which you won't. Word of advice, just say it. To help you, just say what you really, if you want to defend the lower personality score for Asians, just say it. Asians have lower personalities. Just say it. That's what he should have said. That would have been a better argument than whatever Dribble came out of his mouth. But he needs to just say Harvard believes that Asian Americans, despite their high test scores, are basically under qualified in the social aspect. They're less interesting, right?  You do more studying. You don't go out in high school. You don't party with the cool kids. So we're just going to say it. And that would have helped his argument a lot better than whatever he said. It is if I may say, years ago, I taught college expository writing, freshman writing. And one of the things that you could always find when people didn't care or they didn't know something, they kind of, you're just clearing your throat and having it hung. And bad thinking shows up as bad writing. And when Zach, when you first pulled that, I was like, God, this is freshman comp 101.  And to be clear, none of us feel that way. And also, it doesn't appear that the Harvard alumni feel that way. I pulled this chart from your book, Kenny, showing the interviewer overall ratings by various groups. And it's not like the in-person interviewers are rating Asians lower than the other groups. So I think that there's strong evidence that there's something else going on here. But I guess the broader question is, what does it take, do you think, to prove that something is actual discrimination versus it's just an unequal outcome, just like fewer people of sort of group get into Harvard? First, you have to define the word discrimination. What does discrimination mean, at least in a sense where it's morally objectionable, because we all discriminate, all of us discriminate every day, who we talk to, who we choose to write to, everything like that, who we're attracted to, whatever. What does discrimination mean in a morally objectionable sense? It means that with regards to objective merit-based factors, you are veering significantly off that course. That's what it means. So before we define discrimination, we have to define what we should evaluate people on. And I think the vast majority of Americans want people admitted and accepted and employed based on their qualifications for the job, based on their scores, based on their grades, everything like that. The things that everybody has been raised to believe should happen. And so to prove discrimination, first, you have to find a standard. And I think that standard is grades, test scores, a score on an essay written with an objective panel of people, come on, this isn't that hard. What do you think about other things that go, because Harvard, it's also like, if you're a legacy, you have a much better chance of getting in. And I argue, there are different reasons. Should that be an acceptable level of discrimination? Of course, it's $10 million for Harvard. You're put on a dean's list. So this is actually what happens, by the way. You're put on a dean's list, and then your chance of admission on the dean's list jumps from about 5% to about 40%. But you have to donate at least $10 million. And Asian Americans, on average, are less likely to be legacies, less likely to have donor parents giving to Harvard. So you're kind of like working uphill against that. But what about adjusting for that stuff? What about getting rid of legacy? This question of merit, I guess, Kenny, I think it's really interesting. And I totally get the idea that we asked you figuratively, as a society, we asked you 50 years ago, what counts as being Harvard material? What counts as getting into the Ivy League? Or research one, flagship public research universities? And then you change the game. But part of that is who cares if you play to high school sport? Who cares if you play a musical instrument? You're going to college. You're not going to become a professional musician, et cetera. Where do you go with these things? I think there's a lot of people who, if I just to finish, maybe somebody who's a third generation Harvard person is actually going to be a better student because they know the system, et cetera. What's the nub of merit ultimately? It's what aligns with the purpose of your institution. Last time I checked, Harvard doesn't define itself as a country club for old privileged Americans. Harvard defines itself as a leading institution of educational excellence that claims to produce the best graduates in America has to offer and ultimately foster citizen leaders of society. They call it citizen leaders. So what are the characteristics of those people? Well, they have to be excellent, undoubtedly. They have to be academically excellent. They have to get the right. They have to be socially excellent. By the way, we didn't touch on this, but Asian Americans have the highest scores at all the races on teacher recommendations and alumni recommendations and the second highest set of guidance counts recommendations. So I can stand on that all day. But you have to be an excellent person. That's what's Harvard material. So stick to that. Nobody's asking you to change your mission. We're just asking you to stick to it. The plaintiffs in this case have presented Harvard with what they call an alternative simulation of you could do this to kind of increase the diversity, not necessarily pure racial diversity, but other kinds of diversity on campus. You could do things like ending legacy admissions or reducing their importance and waiting for kind of the wealth or income of the applicant's families or there's even more controversial things like geography, which I know you actually have come out against in your book. But is that legitimate if Harvard wants to wait for other things and in the end does have the effect of causing fewer Asian people to get into Harvard? Is that okay? Yeah. Does it have the no, it's the geographic, I want to touch on the geographic because I think this illustrates your point. After the case is over, after the case is resolved, Harvard is going to do something like, okay, fine, we're not going to discriminate. I mean, assuming it goes our way, Harvard's going to say we're not going to use race explicitly, but we're going to use geographic diversity. That's right. And conveniently, very conveniently, Asians tend to be congregated in the geographic locations that Harvard doesn't select enough from. This has already been modeled. I'm not like spitting hypothesis here. I'm not hypothesizing. This has already happened in the New York City specialized school system where their elite magnet schools were proposed to use a geographic diversity admission system that just happened to exclude the Chinatown districts in New York City. This is what's going to happen. So no, you're not allowed to use this kind of stuff. This is what I'm saying. Judge on a blind admissions process, you get the application, you can't consider background. You're actually unable to consider background. That's what I want. And obviously, it was also modeled. The Ivy League introduced geographic quotas back in the teens and 20s when Jews started attending in large numbers because then they were like, you know what, maybe it's not good to have everybody coming from New York City where 20 or 25% of the population was Jewish. So we're going to, we really need to get more people from Idaho and Montana. So it's an interesting question about the ways in which Harvard and other schools might work to get around any kind of finding of issues. But can we, let's deconstruct the Asian concept too, because you were talking about like, you don't want to be an Asian American, right? You want to be, I assume, first and foremost, New Jersey because it's the greatest state in the country. And even Sam Alito is from New Jersey, who was mentioned before. But I mean, is it, is the way through this a more of an assertion of smaller level kind of ethnic and racial identity, not to kind of push supremacy, but just to kind of say, well, this is who I am and this is where I'm from. And would it be good for Asian Americans to start saying, you know, instead of saying I'm Asian American say, no, I'm Chinese and I might be, I am historically American, you know, like my family goes back here 150 years where I'm an immigrant, et cetera. I mean, do you think, what is the role, I guess, of ethnic identity or people of an ethnic identity that is either favored now or disfavored to start kind of deconstructing these, you know, large categories that David Bernstein talks about and classify? Yeah, I think however people want to introduce themselves at a party, they should do that.  I think for the vast majority of people, it's not, hi, I'm Kenny, I'm Asian, or hi, I'm, you know, Sarah, I'm black, you know, it's what you do, it's who your community is, it's your interests, you know. Those are the things that stick out that appeal to Americans far, far more than race. So I do believe that just allowing people to identify the way that they do will foster the true diversity that America is known for. Your organization is concerned not only with higher education but these issues as it pertains to the corporate world as I understand it. I mean, in some sense, so in terms of governing the workplace, there's like, you know, there's the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and this is their take on discrimination versus affirmative action. They say that discrimination against any individual on the basis of race, color, religion, so forth, violates Title VII. However, the commission recognizes race, sex, and national origin. Conscious decisions may be required in order to eliminate the effects of past discrimination. So that's both in talking about in terms of federal contractors, but also kind of what's allowed in the private sphere. There's clearly some tension there between saying you can't discriminate but like it's okay to be race conscious. How do you think about resolving that tension? And then I have another question about the private sphere. Resolve the tension by basic, resolve the tension by making this discrimination law very clear in what you're saying. Judge people based on their talent and contribution. That's the only thing that they should put. The reason why this discrimination discourse has gotten so muddled. Ask any discrimination lawyer who has a job, they'll say this, is because nobody really, there's no standard by which you're appealing to. Sometimes it's racial equity, sometimes it's meritocracy, sometimes it's neither. Define it. If you're a government worker listening to this, do your best to try to define what discrimination actually is and what standard you're discriminating from. I mean in some sense wouldn't take a kind of clean solution be we just ban any sort of racial discrimination or consideration in either government-run institutions or even institutions like Harvard that rely heavily on federal funding, including affirmative action, and then just turn affirmative action entirely into a social movement. Something to play out in the private sphere in the marketplace and let private actors figure out, you know, if they want to pursue diversity as an objective and that requires some level of race consciousness, you might not agree with it. I probably won't agree with it in many cases, but it's kind of just a social phenomenon that needs to be worked out. Would you agree to that kind of broad societal compromise? Yes, I would. I would. I had to think about that for a second because in some sense businesses should be allowed to do whatever they want to do regarding hiring, but in another sense businesses should, you know, they should be held to anti-discrimination laws as well, truly anti-discrimination laws. But yeah, I mean, I think if you're in the government sphere That sounds like you're not actually agreeing to it because, you know, the way you're interpreting it is anti-discrimination law consistently applied would preclude kind of race-conscious affirmative action in the workplace? Yeah, I mean, I disagree with the policy. I disagree with the policy, but if businesses want to do it, do they have the right to do it, right? You would say yes. I would say yeah, they have the right to do it. If they don't take, here's the problem, and I think the whole Elon Musk Twitter thing made this even more clear, is that there's so much interweaving between the so-called marketplace and the so-called government now that it's hard to separate. Anthony Priestess writes question for Kenny, will there be a legal challenge to Gavin Newsom's reparations bill about a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago? The governor of California talked about introducing a reparations bill for African Americans. How do you feel about that? You touched earlier on Japanese Americans who were, you know, during World War II, in California in particular, on the West Coast, not on the East Coast, but they were dispossessed of their property. They were put into concentration camps. There was in the 80s, Ronald Reagan signed off on a reparations bill for them. What do you think about reparations for African Americans? My feeling on that is that we've already done some form of that, not direct to African Americans, but for example, welfare is 47% African American. Public education, which is disproportionate to African Americans, we spent three times as much spending. We've done so many programs that have been justified on racial equity and not just over the past 10 years. Bush, when he created No Child Left Behind, justified his massive federal expenditure in the school system on the basis of helping African American children, and also the whole debt-loaning idea was supposed to help new immigrants and African Americans get homes. So we've done a lot. I don't think we're ever going to get to a consensus where we're going to have direct cash reparations for African Americans, but even if we did, would people be happy? I don't know. I don't think so. Do you think when you look back, I mean, this happened, I think before you were born, but the reparations to Japanese Americans who had their property confiscated and, you know, the old art director of reason's father was lived in Southern California during the war and was put into a camp in Colorado and then moved to Chicago and never went back to Southern California. They received something like $40,000. I mean, it was a token. But do you think that was an important gesture on the part of the federal government to say, you know what, we did something unspeakably wrong and we are owning that? Reparations to Japanese Americans during Ronald Reagan was probably a uniquely decent policy. It was a result of a unique confluence of events that unfortunately we passed the deadline to do for other communities, which is very sad. But basically, the American sentiment towards Japanese Americans turned so quickly after World War II that we were able to do this in the span of one generation when people, when you could actually see the direct harms of the US government and their descendants and you had people who were still living and everything like that. So it was a very clean easy connection to make for direct cash reparations. Such a case today would be nearly impossible for Black Americans or even Chinese Americans. It's hard to make it along purely racial lines just because as we talked about earlier, the idea of race itself is murky and the boundaries get confusing. There are examples of individual cases. There was a beach in Southern California that was taken by the local government from a Black family and then the descendants of that family could clearly prove the claim and then just a couple of years ago got reparations for that taking and that seems pretty uncontroversial. It's not totally uncontroversial, but from my standpoint that's a clear case for reparations. In a related way, the state of Virginia about 15 or 20 years ago made an apology and I think some form of reparations to people in the counties where during the period of massive resistance, this was after the Brown versus Board of Education decision mandated integration of schools, a couple of counties in Virginia actually stopped providing public education at the high school level as a way of getting around that and they actually found people who were directly affected by that and apologized and I think made some kind of financial settlement, but that's very specific and I agree, Zach and I think Kenny as well would agree that when it is tied to specific individuals within recent memory, it's not controversial in the way that when you're trying to write a massive societal wide historic wrong, it becomes much more difficult. Again, as I said before, we've already written massive societal wide reparations. We've not phrased it as reparations, but what it is reparations. Maybe that is part of the problem. I mean, because this is, I wonder if part of the issues that we have now and there are obviously, there's a small fringe of kind of racists who will never want to move on from a racially conscious society and there's a bunch of progressives who will never be happy, but the vast majority of people. I wonder if we talked more openly and honestly about, you know, historical wrongs and also what we've done to address those just in more plain language. If that would have an effect because, you know, people to go back to the way the Harvard lawyer was kind of hammering and hawing about stuff, like if we say, well, you know, we're giving you this welfare, we're helping you with certain types of, you know, public school assistance or whatever, instead just own it and say, this is what we've done and we are committing to a race blind, a color blind, you know, an actual society of equals and individuals, maybe we would get a little bit further. Kenny, can I ask you with Colorist United, who are the people who belong? Like, can you describe, is it a membership organization? It's a 501c3 nonprofit, right? Like, what are your activities and who are your members? What's a typical person look like? We're actively looking for, we've already taken on the Salvation Army and want in the sense that we force them to rescind their racism packet that accused their supporters and members of being racist. We've taken on American Express and we're filing class action lawsuits.  That's what it is, info at ColoristUnited.org. Could you briefly recap the Salvation Army story for people who might not be familiar with it? It's truly incredible as to how, where this culture has turned to, where it's become fashionable to accuse your own members of being racist. This worldwide charity, 80% supported by Americans, by the way. So 80% of their money comes from Americans to support Black and Brown people across the entire world. Took the extraordinary step of writing a packet that accused their members, their supporters. They said, we need to lament, repent, and apologize for racism. The Salvation Army is the counter example to the idea that America is a racist country because it shows that Americans are willing to give to charities not knowing the race of the people they're going to.  So we launched a campaign facilitated by 18,000 Salvation Army donors to compel the National Commissioner, Kenneth Hodder, to rescind this statement. And we had a meeting with him. I had a meeting with him at his Arlington office, beautiful office. He wouldn't do it. He wouldn't denounce critical race theory. He wouldn't say that Americans aren't racist. He wouldn't praise the generous work of Americans in supporting the Salvation Army. And finally, we got so tired of it. We launched a social media campaign to force him to do it. And in December of last year, their donations dropped significantly. And we did force him to rescind that document. But the campaign is still ongoing because he still has not praised the generosity of Americans and he still has not denounced critical race theory. So we are pushing him to do that right now. And you can join in by signing up at ColorUsUnited.org. I wanted to bring in this comment that was pertinent to our discussion a second ago from Mike V. What about the U.S. military discriminating against Black soldiers for veterans assistance? That's a justifiable case for reparations to African Americans. And I would agree with that. It's another example of a very specific wrong that you could pursue reparations for. And we talked earlier about the idea of, well, what if you limited the Harvard's affirmative action to groups that have been wronged very clearly by the federal government like descendants of slaves? And I wish David Bernstein was here because he writes, but he actually endorses in his book kind of constraining affirmative action to people who can document their heritage connected to slavery and also people who live on or near an Indian reservation that have American Indian DNA. I can't endorse that, but I keep an open mind to it and I'm mindful of Kenny's objection that when you're asking people to come forth with documentation, that might favor certain privileged groups. But it also always seems like it has to come with some sort of resolution, some sort of, okay, we have now addressed this and we can move on to the next step. And that was the last clip that I hope to play here and have Kenny respond to was an exchange with Gorsuch who is talking with the council for Harvard about, well, 28 years ago, there was a landmark case about affirmative action and Sandra Day O'Connor said, we're gonna allow race to be one factor among many to consider, but in about 25 years, this won't be necessary anymore, we predict. And so Gorsuch is putting that question to Harvard's council. Harvard anticipate this will end. Grutter spoke of it being a 25-year window as you're well aware. Harvard could tomorrow do without federal funds and continue to discriminate on the basis of race. However, please, I'm sure that would be a hardship. But what is Harvard's view on how long this will take? What Justice O'Connor said was it's been 25 years since Grutter. There's evidence that our society is changing. It is, we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary. So Harvard agrees with that? Does Harvard agree with that? I don't, I, Harvard does not currently, based on its data, expect that in 2028 it will have been able to use a only race-neutral alternative. So what this, but what I do agree with, if I may, I'm just, I'm just, just, it's a real simple question. If Harvard doesn't have an answer, that's fine. But does Harvard have some view about when? Harvard, yes, Harvard's view about when doesn't have a date on it. And I misspoke there. I said that case was 28 years ago, 22 years ago is what it would be. So three more years. But Kenny, what's your reaction to Harvard's kind of unwillingness to commit to any kind of end in sight? Yeah, Mark, Stalin's view about when the, the, the dictatorship of the proletariat needed to end and a true socialist utopia could be forms didn't have a date on it either. You know, you don't have a date, you don't have a time, you don't even have, and you don't even say, well, I, I, I agree that this is a bad tradition. The evidence points to if Harvard's allowed to do this, continue to do this, they're just going to keep on doing it. And it's going to take a change and it's going to take a form. But it's going to be a hard, it could, it could be 10 years from now, they get rid of affirmative action. It could be 50 years. It could be discrimination against Asians is a tradition as old as John Harvard's foot himself on Harvard yard. And we, and unless we strike down this policy right now at this opportunity, Harvard will get away with this logic forever. So we have to do it and we have to do it tomorrow. What happens, what happens if, you know, Harvard and UNC win their case? What does Colorist United do? And what do you as a Chinese American, you know, interested in this conversation? What happens next? What happens? And this is my fear for the, what, what, what happens is that if Harvard is allowed to continue doing this, then they're going to continue to create the narrative environment that allows them to do this. In the sense, I fear that Harvard may start to actually play along with this anti Chinese sentiment. Certainly the whole use of stereotypes against Asians. Harvard is going to and the progressive left in general is going to continue to drum up the narrative to support this policy. And so if, if we lose, then Colorist United, I think our mission becomes a lot more urgent in terms of needing to advance this counterpublic narrative right now. Actually, your race, your background is just one thing about who you are. And it's, it's really not, it's really noisy and it's really irrelevant in a lot of cases. I want to ask my last question. I'll leave it to Nick to wrap up with his final thoughts. But, you know, it was interesting. You mentioned Stalin and a previous answer. And it made me think of a part of your book where you're talking about kind of the influence that many Chinese immigrants that having the cultural revolution and going living through or having their parents or grandparents live through Mao's China might have on their perspective towards some of these issues, towards things like meritocracy, towards, you know, the way higher universities can warp higher education can narratives can be warped. Could you just tell me a little bit more about that aspect of this debate and also why you think, you know, merit, abandoning meritocracy, which is kind of the center of your book is really kind of a dangerous future for America. And I'm not afraid to talk about my heritage because it matters in this discourse because the first thing that Mao did, not the first thing, one of the first things that he did when he really took power is he changed the universities and he changed the university admissions process. China has this ages old tradition of standardized civil service, where they basically say if you can pass this test will give you this administration. If you get the high score in this test will give you this administration. That's in one sense how it has been able to keep a unified yet diverse culture for thousands of years. And what Mao did was he took these universities and he said you had to pledge fealty to the red revolution basically and he divided the people into the red and black classes and it wasn't about intellect anymore. And it drove out a lot of talented Chinese people who immigrated to places like the United States, everything, you know, Europe, South Africa, those kinds of places. And Mao did this and it caused a lasting seer on his culture forever. And by the way, when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping, the I would call him, look, they're all part of the Communist Party but he was more of a liberal. The first thing Deng Xiaoping did was he restored the standardized exam for entrance exams for those people because he recognized that's the symbol that we need to show that we are moving in the right direction again. That is a fantastic kind of history to recover, you know, as we wind down. Zach, I wanted to point people also to when you were talking about potential reparations or payments to African American GIs, particularly from World War II in Korea who did not participate in the VA and the GI bill after those conflicts because they knew they were not going to get housing loans or education loans in the same way. Richard Rothstein's book, which came out a couple of years ago called The Color of Law, is fascinating in documenting the way in which federal housing policy and ultimately treatment of veterans actually kind of the way David Bernstein talks about how the federal government created and enforces these really awful racial categories. Federal policy did a lot of that. He has distinctly non-libertarian policy solutions at the end, but they actually speak exactly to what you were talking about. And there's a podcast with Rothstein about The Color of Law as well as a SOHO forum debate that is fascinating to watch because this is real history, which is all within recent memory, the people who experience it are still alive in many, if not most cases.  You invoke, I think in many ways, our highest aspirations. How do you feel about the future? I mean, you've got this case, you know, these two cases, which are going to have a major effect on, you know, on not just on education policy, but on kind of self-conception of America. You talked about how, you know, one in five marriages is considered interracial or whatever, which is kind of amazing. And it's worth remembering that in, you know, around 1960 or thereabouts, when Barack Obama, I think, was born in 1961, 62 is, you know, like almost single digits of Americans believed that interracial marriages were moral. It took until the 80s to get over 50%, but now nobody questions that. Are you optimistic about America becoming a race-neutral place where, and it doesn't mean that people aren't proud of their heritage and that it doesn't infuse who they are and it doesn't make them distinct and diverse. But, you know, are you optimistic that we're moving towards that goal? And besides the case that we're talking about, the cases that we're talking about now, you know, what are the main things that would kind of speed that along in your estimation? Well, I mean, this sort of informs my motivation as a person, because I grew up in suburban Richmond, Virginia. Oh, I'm sorry. I, for some reason, but you do have Jersey roots, right? You're right. I moved to New Jersey when I was 14. So I'm still from New Jersey. I have a very complicated background. Don't worry about it. I just want to claim you for New Jersey. The super fun toxic dump site of states, the Garza state, the greatest state in all of America. I certainly have the brashness and the boldness of the views. That's for sure. I love New Jersey. But I was around Southern people. I played, my best friends were, well, there was an Indian guy, and then there was a Southern white guy. And then when I went to middle school, I became friends with like a Southern black person at my IB program, basically, in Moody. International baccalaureate program. It's an international baccalaureate program. Which is an incredible ball busting program. Anybody who goes through that has got a lot going on. Well, thank you. They really trained us hard. But basically, when you look at me, you see Kenny's agent. But there's a side of me that you don't understand, that you will not know about me unless you actually asked me. You know, you won't know that I grew up in the Baptist church. And I'm actually very familiar with Baptist preaching.  You won't know those things about me. I think Americans are desperate to try to understand people better. I think there is good intentions behind people who want to get to know people of diverse backgrounds. If you want to get to know people of diverse backgrounds and get to know people of diverse backgrounds, actually get to know them. Don't listen to the narratives about this is what these people believe, this is what these people are. Actually go and talk to somebody because you're not going to know. And I didn't know until I talked to other people. So I still believe, I still believe diversity is important. But I believe in something greater than surface level diversity. That's the higher ideal. The higher ideal, ironically, is the lower ideal. It's the actually doing the dirty work of getting to know somebody. All right. Well, thank you very much, Kenny Xu of Color Us United. What's the best place to, what's the URL for Color Us United? If you believe in a colorblind society and you want everybody to be treated as individuals and you want to stand up to people who try to divide and to privilege and oppress, go to colorusunited.org, colorusunited.org, sign up and we'll keep you updated. All right. Thank you, Kenny. Zach and I are going to wrap up in a minute here. So you are free to go about the rest of your day. All right. Thanks so much guys. Thank you. Zach, are there any final questions or comments that we should run through? Our audience is quite determined. And I guess while I'll vamp a little bit. There was this question or this, this is just a compliment from Kotor Leotards. Thanks everyone for your thoughts and information. Thank you for the service, for your service, Kevin Kerr, who is someone they've been talking to in the comments. Thank you, Reason TV, for exercising our thoughts with solid information so we can ponder more on the topic. Well, thank you. And thank you to everyone who left interesting comments to keep the conversation going. That's part of, you know, the fun of live stream. So whenever you all throw in interesting comments, it improves the conversation. Can I go back to an interesting point that came up when we were preparing for this, but you have a grandmother who was of Latino heritage. She's Puerto Rican or Panamanian. But you've never identified as Hispanic or Latino. Can you talk a little bit about why or why not? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's funny, Kenny mentioned the college experience. That was the first time where there was any conversation around that. But yeah, you know, I technically could claim to be Hispanic because I have, you know, I'm a quarter Panamanian, but that's not been a core part of my identity. I do know others who are in the same situation have like one Hispanic grandparents don't speak Spanish, but they identify as Hispanic. So I think that it's that the point is that it's very Hispanic and Bernstein writes about this is probably the most broad amorphous of the modern racial categories. And it's it's so subjective. And it I guess it has to do with your connection to the culture as much as it has to do with any sort of lineage. And yeah, that's that's been my personal experience. But I mean, my the other thing is, I guess, probably because of that, I tend when the government tries to ask me questions about race or ethnicity, if at all possible, I just leave that stuff blank or check other non applicable. And I think I guess that I think of that is like that can be part of a sort of bottom up movement to kind of resist the overclassification that the government engages in. I, you know, I'm curious, you're married with three kids. Does your wife Lindsey have any, you know, curious ethnicity or anything?  So that means you are like the Velveeta of Americans. I'm just advocating for Floridian to become its own ethnicity. But yeah, we, we, yeah, my wife is half Puerto Rican, half Lebanese Armenian. So it's a whole stew in there. I guess we would technically be in the one in five, I think was the stat interracial marriages. Although again, we don't really think about things in those terms. And it's it's not, which is kind of amazing, right? Because I'm assuming that her parents might have, you know, had to deal with that more first generation immigrants. So that was definitely something that they had to deal with. But my parents were both born in the 20s. And my father was the son of Irish immigrants. My mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants. And that was considered at least by my the way my father told it by his sisters and his mother, that was considered a mixed marriage. And the fact that they were all Catholic, you know, or both Catholic made it okay, but it was dicey for a while. And I think you can overstate the divisions among kind of European immigrants, including Jews in the early 20th century, but they were kind of real. And I think a lot about this because I have two sons who are now in their 20s. And they their mother is American from Ohio, and is Welsh and German and Dutch. And, you know, a whole mixture of things that what was interesting to me is when we met, she did not identify in any way, shape or form as immigrant, like the immigrant experience did not matter in a way that for me, and I say this partly to talk about the construction of social identity, which is what we're talking about here. The I grew up, everybody had grandparents who, you know, at least one, sometimes four who didn't speak English. And that was just taken for granted. But it be being immigrant of some level, or being second or third generation American, depending on how you talk about it. What became increasingly important to me as I got older, weirdly, as I got further away from that. And yeah, it's, you know, I, you know, part of it is again, you know, because we're both from certain groups, we have the privilege on some level of playing with our identity more than, you know, if you were black, if you looked black in the South in a particular time, you know, a lot was defined for you, you didn't get a chance to kind of pick and choose. But I think part of a sign of social progress now is that more people are able to define themselves and to create a narrative and it can have very positive, you know, like the whole, I mean, I think for me, a basic libertarian virtue is living in a society where you're able to kind of define who you are from the various constituent parts. And I think we have more freedom to do that, even as, you know, what I think both David Bernstein and Kenny Hsu would argue is, you know, there are forces that want to fix these, you know, have certain people define everything for everybody. But I feel like, you know, we've made a tremendous amount of progress simply in my lifetime, much less yours as well. Yeah. And I mean, one realm where that really plays out, you know, my wife works in entertainment and in terms of casting different actors in ethnic roles that becomes, it's become an increasingly dicier prospect.  Now, this is Anthony Quinn, the Irish Mexican who played every ethnicity, except for Irish and Mexican kind of late in his life. But he could play the he could play an Arab, he could play a Jew, he could play a Greek, he could play this. Yeah. There's this controversy about James Franco getting cast as Castro. And that got some push back from the Latino community. Although interestingly, like, Franco's heritage is like from the Iberian Peninsula, which also is Castro's heritage. So it gets complicated. But like an interesting line in Bernstein's book was about whiteness, the idea of being white should be way more controversial than it is. And it kind of reminded me of like you hear on the progressive left sometimes about this idea of abolish whiteness. And there's like the handshake between Bernstein and like the progressive left on abolish whiteness. Although his agenda is like, eventually we want to kind of, I don't know if abolish or at least downplay all of it. And right, that's not the same. But for me, yeah, I never like I've tried, you know, people would look at me and describe me as white, but it's not like something I ever try to like, think about or put out there about myself or and it's why it partly why I'm like uncomfortable even checking that on a box. But isn't that part of that's part of the critique, though, it's like, of course, we don't think about whiteness because we don't have to. Right.  And I go back and forth on that because it is and I do know, you know, my parents have been dead for a long time. And again, I mentioned they were born in the twenties, their whiteness. And it was not just a racial or ethnic thing. It was also a class thing, as well as a an American thing because they they were on shaker ground. Like they did not feel quite white, particularly my mother, they did not feel quite middle class.  Like, you know, I think you kind of earn citizenship, you don't have to be Robert Heinlein and Starship Troopers to say, yeah, you know what, like if you fought in World War Two or Korea or Vietnam, you know, you're you're American. But you know, that tenuousness of of identity is kind of fascinating. And I guess what I'm getting at with this is, you know, these categories and David Bernstein's book is just phenomenal in this. It really documents it, you know, it shows how recent many of these categories that we take for granted as if they are founded nature, like the Grand Canyon, as opposed to constructed, you know, like the Statue of Liberty or something. These are really recent and totally arbitrary categories that didn't make sense when they became law or custom. And they don't really, they make even less sense now. It's, I think we do well to kind of, you know, constantly be rehearsing that these are, you know, like inherently fake categories that are used for short term political goals that oftentimes end up with long lasting effects that we're not really being thoughtful about. Exactly. And Couture Leotard is back and says after DNA tests became popular, I think a lot of Americans found some eye opening features. And I think that's a really good point that also further complicates all this is people suddenly discover because of technology, you know, heritage that they didn't know about. And it, you know, might make them rethink parts of their identity that they thought were fixed in a certain way. And I think that's all good. And it's also reveals, you know, Bernstein brought up the point like you have to, when we're talking from a scientific perspective, you know, genetics is extremely complicated in terms of what manifests to the visible eye with the phenotypical features are, doesn't necessarily explain like what's going on inside physiologically. Like one of the really shocking parts of that book to me was he talks about the vaccine trials and how they're basically Moderna was mandated to kind of extend its trials to slow down bringing stuff to market. Yeah, because of the people are dying. Because yeah, they need to increase diversity. Even though Francis Collins himself was doing radio interviews saying, well, there's not actually a scientific reason that we would expect that there would be variation between these racial categories. You know, there might be genetic markers that respond differently to different interventions, but it can't be boiled down to race. So that's an example of like where this can be really take a like dark and like fatal turn if you take the categories too seriously. And it is, you know, it's worth pointing out. I mean, I think if we're trying to be, you know, intellectually serious as well as kind of culturally sensitive and whatnot, like, you know, the history of America and the history of a scientific racism, you know, is bound up together. I don't think it, you know, I don't think it means that the American experiment is, you know, has an original sin that could never be expunged or anything, but you know, the concept of scientific racism doesn't really get under, you know, underway until there's science and the enlightenment, you know, and, you know, it's kind of coterminous with the United States as a concept, you know, as a political project and certain attempts to kind of really not just talk broadly or figuratively in terms of different races and species, but, you know, science in the worst elements of kind of enlightenment, hubris and whatnot. So it is kind of fascinating. I'm curious what 23 and me, have you done it? And did you find anything fascinating or interesting? Because I can tell you I did it as soon as I could. And I was like, oh, there's, there was some interesting North African stuff that couldn't be accounted for at a couple of other things. And then as the database got bigger, it's like I am 49% like Irish and 51% Italian. And that's because my family, my grandparents descend or, you know, ancestors did not move from, you know, like their hometowns probably for 1000 years before they showed up in America. So it's a, yeah, I don't have, I, my gene pool is incredibly, you know, it's a kiddie pool. It's a shallow pool. I did, I did take it and nothing particularly surprising revealed itself at the moment. But then years later, when the controversy was going on with Elizabeth Warren and her alleged Native American heritage, and she went and took a DNA test and claimed some very small percentage, I then decided to look at mine and realized I actually had like slightly higher percentage than Elizabeth Warren of like, you know, indigenous blood or whatever DNA. Even though I've never thought about that, but it's kind of like that's just a ridiculous thing that played out with her. Yeah. Yeah. But I do want to just echo, I guess, as I kind of concluding thought that I think Kenny's like parting piece of advice is just fundamental to like, if you value like valuing diversity and like learning from different people in different cultures is something that is I think inherent to just like the American character and that you don't need the government to make that happen in your own life. Like it just takes, you know, a little bit of effort and getting to know people and stepping outside of kind of the usual bubble that you interact with. I'm fortunate that like that's part of my job is to like go and just talk to different types of people. But you know, it's very rewarding to just to get to know people and try to shed as many of those preconceptions. And that is really how I think we get to that kind of like multi ethnic like American character or future ethnicity that Bernstein was was laying out at the beginning. Yeah, I agree with you completely. And also, you know, that I think about this, you know, we don't talk about individualism much anymore. When I was growing up, it was, you know, individualism was a thing. It was a category of conversation.  But people are so much more fascinating. And again, we're in an age in an era where we're free to be, you know, I hit say you and me, which was a shitty record that had a Marlowe Thomas, you know, pushed, but it is just we're in a golden age of kind of understanding that we are all individual at the cellular level. And hence, you know, unique and interesting, et cetera. And it's, you know, it we mass personalization isn't just for, you know, online shopping, it's actually for who we are in the communities that we form in the bonds. Zach, I want to thank you so much for participating in this and structuring this conversation. We will be back next week, Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time. And please bring your friends next time. Thanks for watching. And thanks for, you know, behalf of Zach Weisner, myself and reason.


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