The Ledger, every show

“90% of the slaves that came to America or came to the new world, let's say, were originally captured and enslaved by other African tribes, by stronger African tribes, by victorious African tribes, and were sold to Europeans. Not at the point of a gun, but just…”

“The most controversial, and because it was false and poorly researched, was the idea that the 13 colonies rebelled against Britain in order to preserve slavery. That, the idea they were afraid that Britain was about to take their slaves, or about to emancipate…”

“They got this historian, Leslie Harris, who is a very respected historian and happens to be a black woman as well. Hey, like, look at this before we vet it. And she raised a huge red flag. She says, oh, hold on. This is totally not true, right? And they were l…”

“Akerloff argues once those things come on board, you get this slow diffusion of a totally new market terms where, you know, people expected birth control and the pill to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, but it actually had the opposite effect because it destro…”

“American exports peaked at six percent in In the 19th century. So it was half of six percent, meaning three percent. Three percent of our economy was due to slave picked cotton.”

“And my perception is that TED has been captured kind of from the bottom up, like many institutions, just from the seeping in of staff that don't share those values and the in inability of the leadership to actually hold the line for those values.”

“What you really want to do is, if there are reasons why, say, black kids aren't getting access to violins at the same, at a young age, because schools are underfunded or band programs are horrible in inner cities, That's where you want to intervene. You don't …”

“The problems begin when you sort of bless this idea that race is a super deep feature of who you are right from the start. When you bless that idea right from the start, it sends the signal that what people bring to the table is their racial identity, is their…”

“If we're talking about the prison system, like that's a case where I genuinely don't think the legacy of slavery has much to do with it, because if you look at when mass incarceration starts, it starts in the seventies. It starts for reasons that have very lit…”

“White supremacy is ever present, even at campuses like Columbia, which are extremely progressive, and this all was very confusing to me, because I was seeing my fellow black students at Columbia say things like, I experience white supremacy every day on this c…”

“Critical race theory emerges in the 19 seventies as an explicit rejection of The civil rights movement.”

“Ultimately you would want to see a tight link between individual psychometric scores and outcomes. That would be in a way the measure of meritocracy.”

“But where do you get the first abolitionist sentiment? In other words, the first principle of slavery is wrong for all time, no matter who you are. You get that in the West. You get that in America and in Britain in the 18th century. You know, from Quakers and…”

“It's much better to have that forcing mechanism of hypocrisy because you have good principles than to have no principles that actually force attention with slavery to begin with.”

“What Dr. King was asking is, look, if America is a house, the house is fundamentally good. We're just asking you to let us inside. We're not asking you to change the house. We're not asking you to destroy it and build a new one that the other folks are saying …”

“In Nicole Hannah-Jones's flagship essay was also that black Americans essentially fought alone in order to secure our civil rights. That was, that's the exact wording. Yeah, that we fought back alone.”

“United States had had a mass emancipation in Russia had a slower mass emancipation between 18 63 and around 1900. Brazil had a mass emancipation of slaves in the 18 eighties. In every single one of those cases, the economy grew faster after slaves were freed t…”

“Children tend to be naturally colorblind unless they are actively programmed another way.”

“Every week, almost every day, you would hear a student make some offhand comment denigrating white people. In four years there, I'm not sure I ever heard a student make a denigrating comment about Jews.”

“And my view is that colorblindness actually is in the sense of trying to treat people without regard to race, that is the only proper goal, right? Like everything else, that should be the north star when we're talking about and thinking about race as a culture…”

“Most, all the slaves that were brought here were already slaves in Africa. Okay. They weren't captured like Kunta Kinte. They were slaves enslaved by other African tribes and then sold for goods to Europeans.”

“So this was caught on video, went viral throughout campus. He was actually banned from Barnard's campus as a result. Though it didn't actually happen on Barnard's campus.”

“My argument is always that you should just look directly at those proxies themselves. So if you're a college Admissions office and you want to help disadvantaged students get in. Okay, that's fine, but don't equate blackness with disadvantage. If you want to a…”

“It's actually much fairer to disadvantaged students to weight standardized testing more highly than all the other things that colleges generally weight.”

“My view is that diversity inherently is neutral in most cases. It's neither good nor bad.”

“However, I think there's an attempt there's a desire by some to use the levers of public policy to undo the effects of slavery. And this is a dangerous fantasy. I think people have the idea that you know, everything that Whatever you include under the legacy o…”

“Wherever we have policies that are meant to collect and help the most disadvantaged, we should preferentially use class as a variable rather than race.”

“All of the five talks surrounding mine, they all had between, you know, 450,000 views and 800,000 views. That was the full range. Mine had 73,000.”

“If you're a Christian and you want to hire only Christian people, if you're a Muslim, you want to hire only Muslims, I think you should frankly be allowed to do that if those are your personal values.”

“When I was at Columbia, I took many courses on the history of slavery, race relations broadly, and similar to the rest of elite higher education in America, the people you read range from basically centrists at the most to far left.”

“Arabs enslaved between, you know, 12 and twenty million Africans over the years, starting with the conquest of Islam in, in the sixth, or in the seventh century.”

“In his book, Why We Can't Wait, he says we should have class-based policy, not race-based policy.”

“In fact, in his final book, he, the whole second chapter is a critique of the black power movement, which was the BLM of its day.”

“Now we're at 66%, roughly, of single parent homes in the black community.”

“It's really hard to know because once, once that, a cultural norm like that goes away, it's super hard to reinvent in the absence of extremely strict religion.”

“It seems to me the AIs are consistently fairer, less political, and less biased than the alternative sources of information.”

“The fact that Grokipedia is a great intervention because Wikipedia is going wonky and their efforts to influence it, and that therefore influences the LLMs because they're trained on Wikipedia.”

“It just creates an endless cycle of legitimate racial grievances from different groups, right? And that's the most dangerous situation is several groups that think they are victims for different valid reasons.”

“So when I enrolled at Columbia university, I think it was, they had a student orientation and they did this exercise where they had all the kids go to different corners of the room based on their race. White kids in one corner, black kids in another corner, Hi…”

“And I think one thing we're seeing now is young men and young women are having trouble dating because young men are considerably to the right of young women.”

“If you're allowing conservative perspectives, you will be smeared as a conservative or right-wing organization, even if you're aspiring to be a big tent organization.”

“If you go back and look at the time when race relations were the best, it was the first Obama's first term, measured as measured by poll results that was a time in American history where the greatest number of people were comfortable with race relations people…”

“We don't need woke kindergarten which is some people may not, may think I'm joking. That's actually a real program that they did in San Francisco.”

“Slavery is, is, is an institution that's been practiced on every inhabited continent, for about 10,000 years.”

“Whether you want to call it wokeness, DEI, or intersectionality, it peaked in 2021 and 2022, kind of in the shadow of George Floyd and BLM protests and riots, and it has declined since then. I think there's no doubt about that.”

“Race is not correlated with who's poor and who who's rich or rather it's correlated, but it's not the best proxy. Right. It's much better to simply look at people's tax returns and income if you want to see who's rich.”

“We should all be trying to treat people without regard to race. Once we see race, we ought to disregard it as a reason to treat anyone differently. That's the real argument.”

“What does a black American have in common with an Ethiopian? Culturally, almost nothing.”