So I think looking back two years ago, there was a lot of content around woke taboos that people could not talk about or were afraid to talk about. And I think that we, coincidentally, through timing but also through platforming certain guests, we gave the left-wing critique of those things where, you know, previously people couldn't really differentiate whether it was like center-right, classical liberal, or whatever, or maybe it was even like you're a Maoist and so DEI wasn't going far enough for you.
I think what is most clear to me is that we've been able to make the social democratic argument for why woke was bad. "Woke 1 was crazy. We're on to woke 2. We're doing a different thing now. We've learned from the past." I don't think we've learned anything. I think we've learned nothing from the past, and I think that we even got to that point demonstrates that we didn't know what the fuck we were doing to begin with.
You know, how could you have possibly arrived there if you had a kind of firm grounding for your political education? So I'm paraphrasing. I'm not going to recall all these numbers perfectly off the top of my head, but Adolph Reed, who is a scholar that I admire very, very much. I read his work for many, many years.
His line on this, and I believe his analysis is correct, is that DEI and anti-racist measures do not benefit people of color, do not benefit black people. They are part of a neoliberal policy platform. So there's a few statistics that come to mind.
I believe this is from the book that he wrote with Kenneth Warren. In 1968, if you were to take all of the black people in the country and take the median income, meaning you line up everybody and you pick the guy in the middle, you're picking the median because the asymmetry of wealth is enormous. The top 10% of black people own 50% of the wealth.
The top 20% own 75% of the wealth. So in order for us to get a kind of average that is meaningfully representative of that racialized population, we have to pick the median. If you pick the median black income in 1968 and compare that to the median white income, black workers are earning 55% of the median white income.
Now, that sounds profoundly unfair. People are basically, black people are earning a little more than half of their white counterparts. In similar jobs and similar industries, it's profoundly unfair.
Right after the civil rights movement, you still have the legacy of Jim Crow and all of these things that are holding people's upward mobility back. Fast forward some odd 40 years, the next index is at 2016. And you take all the black population and you pick the median income of a black worker in the United States.
In 2016, the median income for a black worker is earning 48% of their white counterpart. So just to underline exactly what is at stake here, that means all of the affirmative action stuff, all of the DEI, all of this kind of talk and, you know, allowing people to kind of get into roles that they would have been excluded from in the past, right? Like going to professional careers and building, quote, building the black middle class and whatever. People were earning, in 1968, black people were earning a little more than half of their white counterpart.
And now they're earning a little less than half. So how did they fall seven points within the 40 years of uninterrupted black upward mobility? That's because the underlying neoliberal policies are polarizing wealth to such an extreme degree that it hurts everyone in the society. So Adolph Reed's line on this is that the anti-racist policy actually damages black people and it is itself a class program.
So that critique has kind of been hinted at. I think Michael Brooks said this explicitly many times. But if you look at the ecosystem of left-wing content creators, they all kind of like tiptoed around the identity politics stuff.
And sometimes they would counter-signal it. They would be like, okay, well, like we went too extreme on this and now we'll walk it back because we're alienating the normies. But they basically haven't reformed any of their policy understanding or theoretical grounding for what they want to do.
And those things were wrong. They were never the Marxist position. They were never actually even the left-wing position.
I think what has basically been absorbed as the political common sense is that in 2016, universal policies like Medicare for all, full employment, free public education, this kind of stuff. And I think the way that these things have been kind of portrayed through the media and absorbed as political common sense on the left is that, well, we can't have those big universal programs, but we can compromise on a little bit of social justice, a little bit of redistribution and diversity, equity, inclusion, and whatever. So that this thing was understood, the kind of racialized redistribution as a compromise between universal social democratic programs and the neoliberal center.
And it was not a compromise. It was actually their program to begin with to rhetorically distract from the overwhelmingly beneficial universal policies that were being proposed in 2016. And they won.
And they won to such an incredible degree that people on the left internalized all of those ideas and built an ultimate untouchable taboo around these subjects where you had to have people or people had to like, you know, defend the admissions policy of fucking Harvard or whatever. It's like, you're not going there. It doesn't matter if the New York Times is a more diverse board or the, you know, the C-suite for some company is more diverse.
Like, that's what such a small fraction of the population, we don't benefit from that. Yeah. So, sorry, this is all to say that this program, I think one of the many functions that it serves now is intellectual discipline for the left where we can present better arguments because I have a deep faith, we have a deep faith in the ability of normal people to make up their own mind and to achieve change democratically through a mass politics.
And that means actually being more coherent on these issues rather than kind of zig-zagging and having like, I think you see everybody on the left when you bring up these topics, you know, they're very robust to talking about the need for redistribution and taxation or whatever. And then you bring up like, well, should we have subsidies for black owned business? And they're all of a sudden like, oh, oh boy. Oh, you know.
So, yeah, I think we didn't flinch on those topics. And that has been a big part of our contribution.
