Sam Harris's disgraceful defence of racist language.

Sam was once a source of inspiration for many people from an ethnically diverse audience that had an appetite for truth in conversation.

It saddens me to be writing this letter as I have been a long time admirer of neuroscientist, author and philosopher Sam Harris - who’s measured temperament & linguistic style, helped to improve my epistemology and language surrounding matters of great scientific and philosophical importance. which is why this - the recent podcast he did addressing the Joe Rogan controversy and along with the accumulation of other comments that Sam has made over the past 3 years especially regarding the BLM movement and race relations in the US and around the world, has painfully whilst irreversibly ended my continued support and appreciation for what Sam is doing, which is entirely characteristic of a gradual drifting towards the right and yet Sam’s incessant refusal to acknowledge the errors in his reasoning regarding modern social and racial injustice, when he’s always cautioned us to be more skeptical of our intuitions and biases, pulls him imperceptibly with the tide towards that water mark that exceeds the political threshold into the right’s territory.

A couple of examples of this is when Sam Harris went on BBC hardtalk and argued the same talking point that trump and the rest of the right made during the BLM movement, which was to say that “if you encounter a police officer drawing his gun on you, you’re more likely to be shot if you’re white as it appears at the moment” such as statement struck me as not only incredibly lousy with respect to understanding data patterns, but also horrifically ignorant with respect to understand trend causes behind the data that we see. Statista - which is a globally recognised reputable database company, released new figures regarding the fatality rate of police shootings in the United States by ethnicity per million people of the population between 2015-2022 and by far the highest rate occurred within the black community, they ranked 1st with an FRPS(Fatality Rate of Police Shootings) of 38 whilst hispanics was 28 and white was 15, now if you haven’t already noticed black people make up as an estimate ~ 13-15% of the population, yet they have the highest fatality rate of police shooting in the US, now for someone like me that understands the complex and interwoven problems of racialised crime, poverty, systemic racism compounded by generations of neatly re-packaged racist & biased policies and how they contribute to the problems we see in black communities, it isn’t hard to understand why we have issues like disproportionate police brutality with a poorly trained police force, and yet i’m not a distinguished philosopher and skeptic to see all of this, so this showed me that Sam Harris suffers from his own inability to understand the experiences and struggles faced by other communities which is what leads him to be making awful errors of judgement and evaluation here.

There’s plenty of other examples, I think whats mostly disapointing for me is that Neil deGrasse Tyson on his last appearance on Sam’s podcast, tried to explain to Sam sincerely on why demonstrations against racial and social injustice occur in the first place when injustices are ignored and Neil went on to openly talk about the historical precedent of such movements to Sam Harris, but it seems as though Sam couldn’t haven’t taken much away from such a poignant conversation with Neil, because his recent podcast episode shows the problem of the misunderstanding amongst white people mainly, on the issues regarding explicit and implicit racism and racist language.

Before we get to his recent comments, I want to address the recent Joe Rogan controversy, I recently wrote about Joe rogan regarding covid disinformation and how I believe he should change his approach to medical discussions going forward, but now i’ll briefly address what has happened and what Sam Harris severely misunderstood. Firstly I don’t believe that Joe rogan is racist, there is no argument where that claim holds, given what we know about Joe more often than not he’s well meaningful, however it is important that Joe rogan apologised and quite frankly he shouldn’t have tried to justify using racist jokes like the planet of the apes reference, it was important to apologise because it demonstrates that even amongst the well intentioned they can often not understand the problem of racism and end up making ignorant and poor racist jokes, or racist “science” comments about genetics and associating with people that also have a phrenology style race rhetoric of science. These blunders along with having people on his podcast that have such views is an important learning curve for Joe rogan precisely because it teaches him to be more attentive to the hidden forms of racism in conversations, disguised under typical tropes and stereotypes that can go undetected.

That’s why this was important but Sam Harris provided a 20 minute speech essentially arguing against an objection that hasn’t been made by anyone, but what’s worse his justifications revealed a far worse problem of misunderstanding racism. Sam categorised the use of the n-word as something we give '“magical” value to and so the idea that a white person can’t use that word in any context is unreasonable. This statement once again struck me as woefully ignorant and symptom of the all too common right wing arguments from white people of “they can say it why can’t we if its an appropriate context”. It’s quite frankly embarrassing that an educated philosopher has to be taught why words have meaning and why we must acknowledge the enduring psychological and social impact of words especially ones with a particular, incalculably traumatic history that are still used in inflammatory and derogatory situations towards people for their ethnicity today. So I found this part of Sam’s argument ignorant, incompetent and dishonest, both morally and intellectually.

The last part, before I stopped the episode, was breathtakingly indicative of Sam’s blindness to these issues when he committed the common tu quoque fallacy that many white people do which didn’t come as a surprise to me at that point after hearing his 12 minute misguided rant of a defence of the use of the n-word, this was the most embarrassing segment by far when Sam said “if someone’s friends are black I don’t care what jokes he laughs at he is not a racist” and that right there told me everything I need to know about Sam’s sheer and utter vacuous understanding of the complex issues involving race and racism. If sam cared to learn about these issues without being captured by his own biases of understanding of what makes people, words or certain behaviours racist then he would’ve been honest and acknowledged that he needs more conversations to get educated and understand the many issues that people of colour experience, before presenting his own white washed understanding. Needless to say i’m extremely disappointed by Sam’s continuous promotion of right wing views, without stopping to consider how he might be showing a disregard to his diverse audience, I appreciate Sam’s steadfast voice of reason during the pandemic in contrast to his conspiratorial colleagues like Bret Weinstein and Maajid Nawaz, however until Sam Harris acknowledges his mistakes and subsequent apology and willingness to learn and change the concerning views he has, I can no longer support what he does.

links for my data references:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123070/police-shootings-rate-ethnicity-us/

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/race-and-ethnicity-in-the-united-state-2010-and-2020-census.html