Transcript: Wilfred Reilly

My interview with the Kentucky State political science professor

One of the goals of the Lean Out podcast is to complicate the dominant narratives. My guest on this week’s episode does this all the time in his work. He’s an independent thinker, a prolific essayist — and, as we’ll see, his conclusions are often surprising, rarely conforming to the orthodoxies on either the left or the right.

Wilfred Reilly is a political science professor at Kentucky State University. His latest book is Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: Wilfred, welcome to Lean Out.

WR: Thanks for having me on, great to be here.

TH: So nice to have you on the show. I’ve been following your work for some time. You are an incredibly prolific writer, and I find your cool headed, rational, data-driven analysis very compelling. I don’t know how you publish so much, given that you’re also a professor. I want to start today by talking about your background. Much of the commentariat these days come from highly economically privileged backgrounds. That’s not your story. It’s not mine either. Talk to me about your youth, and how this may have given you a different perspective on the big issues of our day.

WR: Yeah, I think it really did. And that’s actually an interesting point overall. I recently finished a book by, I think it’s Abraham Jack, a young African-American scholar. His book, The Privileged Poor, is just entirely apolitical. It’s not left or right. It talks about how the Ivy League, and even my own Pac 10, have have become sort of rich men and rich women’s clubs. The huge majority of students come from families that make over, I believe it was $80,000 a year. US median household income for Caucasians is about $60,000, for Blacks it’s about $45,000. So that was a striking statistic. And as you get up to Harvard, a huge chunk of students are actually from millionaire families. The point of the book is that there are ways to get around that, as a smart poor mom. You can send your kid to a charter school, you can use the Catholic system, which in Chicago costs less than $5,000 per year at a lot of institutions. So he argues that poor kids that come from these backgrounds, that go to Loyola in New Orleans and then on to an Ivy, do about as well as prep school kids. It’s an interesting book.

The basic idea that most of the elite is rich sounds relatively intuitive, when you think about it. But you’re looking at increasing growth along that trend line recently, and you’re seeing it in professions like journalism that used to be very working class dominated. And I think that’s had an enormous impact. When I think about those working class background guys that I know in journalism, they tend to be people like James O’Keefe from Project Veritas who today are considered sort of entertaining rogues. But that used to be the entire Mike Royko, Michael Wilbon focus of that field.

You would put on your gum shoes, and you’d go walking around, talking to police contacts — talking to criminal contacts, for that matter — trying to figure out what was going on in your city. And not to pick on a Twitter sparring partner, but when you look at say the Taylor Lorenz school of journalism today, there does seem to be a lot more of contacting other members of the elite and just sort of getting their written opinion on things. Versus the traditional pattern of journalistic outreach. For that matter, there’s a lot of just engaging in silly high school feuding among your social class. I mean, all these people are wired in to Twitter, often Insta, and similar sites. You see them arguing about who broke up with who, and so on down the line.

I’m doing pretty well now and I’m on social media too much, obviously. But I do try to post data or my latest article, as opposed to — I mean, several of my ex-girlfriends actually are reasonably well known — as opposed to arguing with them about our relationship, or sparring with Rod Graham about the left versus the right. We did that for about half a year. That kind of thing.

Anyway, the overall pattern of the upper class being more and more ascendant — our Gini Coefficient rising — that’s something no one really disputes.

My own background though, finally getting to the point, is a bit different. I grew up in the hood, basically. I was born in Chicago, not in the worst neighbourhood in the city or anything. But I was born on the South Side. I ended up moving to the North Side, pre-gentrification, Wicker Park. If you’re familiar with Chicago, Wicker Park is our arts district, and now it’s just unbearably pretentious. You know, stores selling $300 tote bags. A very New York feel. Kids on skateboards signed by their favourite graffiti artists, sipping lattes on the street.

But when I lived there in the 80s and 90s, it was a reasonably dangerous area. It was also known as one of the city’s big dope purchase spots. People jokingly called it Needle Park. So I lived there for a while. The Chicago public school system is very bad. So, for academic and athletic reasons, I moved to nearby East Aurora when I was 12 or 13. But that also is a working class, fairly tough area. At the time that this was happening, ‘97, ‘98, Aurora was actually the murder capital, not of the country, but of the Midwest. Because the projects in Chicago, “the jets,” had been torn down, and Black gangs from the city were coming out and clashing with the local Latino and Caucasian gangs. One year, I believe with a city that had a population about 200,000 people, we had something like 38 murders. And this went on throughout my childhood period.

The city has since calmed down through the useful expedient of throwing all the criminals in jail, which works. But, I mean, that was the background. I was born in Chicago. I lived in Chicago and [was] a kind of nerdy, would-be jock. I mean, just a normal kid. But I had a typical urban 80s and 90s experience, which if you’ve ever watched Kids or New Jack City, was fairly gritty, very interesting, a lot of first experiences early on. Then I moved to another kind of working class city and had the same experience. I still own property; actually not Chicago, in East Aurora. I go back reasonably often. But that was my background.

One thing that did help me was that my mom actually is a member of probably the ruling class, would be an accurate description. She’s a Chicago Ward, a well-known Black family. She herself has a Master’s degree — had, RIP — but a Master’s degree from Roosevelt University. I think a lot of people were very caught up in the 1960s and 70s movement. My mom was a feminist and wrote on the topic. My father is Caucasian, a Celtic background, not a millionaire by any means. But both of them were part of this sort of activist, “we’re going to change the world” generation. So, she ended up, for most of my teen and young adult life, as an inner-city school teacher. She actually taught in East Aurora High School. There was a weird contrast between me playing basketball in the hood — we had Lebanon Park, which was one of the better known athletic locations in the Chicago inner suburbs across the street from my house. I’d come home having done that with junkies sitting by the court. You don’t want to exaggerate, there was a lot of families as well. Then my mom would be reading. I think Bitch and Bust had come out by this point, and she’d be circling articles and asking me if I’d done my Plato homework to get ready for an AP exam.

I do think that the idea of having a working class background — that that toughens you — that can be exaggerated. Particularly in my political faction, the business center-right. You’re now seeing this idiotic idea that kids shouldn’t go to college because college leans left. You know, “go be a plumber.” I have great respect for people that are doing well in the plumbing profession. But no, if you get into Yale and your other option is being an HVAC guy, you should go to Yale.

But at any rate, that duality was something that was there for much of my early life. And I ended up basically just going to college, partly because of that influence. I went to the Illinois schools, basically. I went to Southern Illinois for undergrad. I went to Illinois for law school. I ended up getting in to law school. I probably would have gone on to graduate school at the University of Illinois, but Southern Illinois actually offered me a full fellowship to get my PhD. And I prefer free money, so I went down there. At that point, things became pretty conventional. I was definitely a working class kid, but I did, after my first year of college — there was an adjustment period — I did fairly well. The ideas was, “I’m never going to forget the old block, but I would definitely like to go on and get a traditional job.” I had an interesting life, but the concentration of working class experience — having a number of friends that were killed, that sort of thing — that was primarily early on.

The last brief comment here, and Thomas Sowell has said this as well — someone obviously who ended up as an intellectual with fairly similar views, absolutely intolerant of racism and so on, but on at least the center-right politically, very quantitative — one of the things I saw was the absolute dichotomy between what people were talking about when I got to the academy and the actual problems in working poor areas, across ethnic lines. So, I mean, growing up, the biggest problem in the Black and Hispanic community was violence, specifically gang violence. And there was just no way to excuse that. There would be 40 or 50 people a year essentially. I mentioned 38 in one year, in a mid-sized community, the size of Dayton, Ohio, getting shot to death.

There were other problems around this. When I think of my Caucasian friends at the time, many people were using fairly hard drugs. Suicide was certainly [happening]. This was the Nirvana era. That was becoming, one would never say trendy, but the rates were increasing. People would simply kill themselves, and the availability of guns and drugs and so on facilitated that. Sexuality, at this point, began for a lot of people at 13 or 14, which I notice has dramatically changed, which is a bit bizarre. Obviously with other people of that age. I didn’t have any fascinating stories about 36 year-old seducers, or something like that. So, those were the actual issues. Teen pregnancy was very common at this time.

When I got to the academy, and people were discussing the “systemic racism” of the gaps and this sort of thing, it struck me that a lot of this just wasn’t true. That it was rich people trying to put these complex, highly politicized spins on things that were fairly easy to understand.

TH: I did want to touch on woke politics, something that I cover quite often. Something that I think is quite difficult for a lot of people to unpack. We just had this moment, again, of everybody trying to define it. Bethany Mandel choked in this [viral] interview with the former Bernie Sanders press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray. Many on the left, including Toure, who you quoted, were restating the claim that this word is a racist dogwhistle. You wrote about the controversy for National Review. You said you had defined “woke” even two years ago. So, how do you define woke?