jessesingal.substack.com
16 - 20 minutes
The writer and podcaster Coleman Hughes, who is a buddy of mine, kicked off a bit of a brouhaha earlier this week. Writing in The Free Press, he explained what happened after he recorded an April TED Talk, pegged to his upcoming book, arguing in favor of a color-blind approach to race and racism.
TED draws a progressive crowd, so I expected that my talk might upset a handful of people. And indeed, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a handful of scowling faces. But the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The audience applauded; some people even stood up. Throughout the meals and in hallways, people approached me to say they loved it, and those who disagreed with it offered smart and thoughtful criticisms.
But the day after my talk, I heard from Chris Anderson, the head of TED. He told me that a group called “Black@TED”—which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black”—was “upset” by my talk. Over email, Chris asked if I’d be willing to speak with them privately.
I agreed to speak with them on principle, that principle being that you should always speak with your critics because they may expose crucial blind spots in your worldview. No sooner did I agree to speak with them than Chris told me that Black@TED actually was not willing to speak to me. I never learned why. I hoped that this strange about-face was the end of the drama. But it was only the beginning.
On the final day of the conference, TED held its yearly “town hall”—at which the audience can give feedback on the conference. The event opened with two people denouncing my talk back-to-back. The first woman called my talk “racist” as well as “dangerous and irresponsible”—comments that were met with cheers from the crowd. The second commentator, Otho Kerr, a program director at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, claimed that I was “willing to have us slide back into the days of separate but equal.” (The talk is online, so you can judge for yourself whether those accusations bear any resemblance to reality.)
It goes without saying that these are abjectly ridiculous claims. You really can just watch the talk and see for yourself. Whether or not you agree with Hughes, he’s careful to explain exactly what he means, and to differentiate his own view from a more cartoonish understanding of color blindness in which we pretend to not even notice race. He’s saying we should aspire not to judge people or distribute rewards or punishments on the basis of their race (untethered from their socioeconomic standing), not that race doesn’t exist as an important social phenomenon or can safely be treated as nonexistent.
In the moment, Anderson responded the correct way. According to Hughes, he “took the mic and thanked [the critics] for their remarks. He also reminded the audience that “TED can’t shy away from controversy on issues that matter so much.” But, Hughes continues, “Two weeks later, Anderson emailed to tell me that there was ‘blowback’ on my talk and that ‘[s]ome internally are arguing we shouldn’t post it.’ In the email, he told me that the ‘most challenging’ blowback had come from a ‘well-known’ social scientist (who I later learned was Adam Grant).”
Grant is a superstar within psychology, and he claimed that Hughes’s argument was “directly contradicted by an extensive body of rigorous research,” linking to this meta-analysis. I’m hoping to do a more in-depth piece on this particular facet of the controversy soon, if I have time to do enough reading about it. But based on my own knowledge of the field of diversity trainings, I think Grant is badly overstating (1) the strength of the evidence that any one particular approach to framing these issues “works” better than others (though different people define “works” differently, which is part of the problem); and (2) the extent to which that meta-analysis could in any sense “directly contradict” Hughes’s argument.
For now, though, I want to focus on Chris Anderson’s role as the head of TED. Because of the way Anderson chose to handle this controversy, Hughes soon learned there were potential conditions attached to the release of his already-recorded talk. First, TED asked Hughes also to participate in a moderated debate to be released as part of the same video as his talk. This is extremely unusual — can you recall many TED Talk videos including both a talk itself and a debate in which the speaker had to defend their position against a skeptical interlocutor? — and Hughes said no. Then TED said okay, how about we do the moderated debate and release it as a separate video at the same time. Anderson claimed this would help amplify the reach of Hughes’s ideas, which struck Hughes as disingenuous. “Clearly, the release proposals being pressed upon me were conceived in order to placate angry staffers, not in order to amplify my message,” he wrote in The Free Press.
Eventually they struck a compromise: “TED would release and promote my talk as they would any other, and I would participate in a debate that would be released as a separate video no fewer than two weeks after my talk.” But Hughes claims TED has not held up its part of the bargain by giving his video the same (considerable) PR push it does to its other videos, and that as a result his talk has languished and not gotten much attention relative to the normal size of this platform.
This was already a ridiculous story, and the available facts suggest Chris Anderson botched it every single step of the way. As anyone who has read about the polished, whirring machine that produces TED Talks knows, the organization does not leave anything to chance in terms of quality and content. TED Talk participants run a bit of a gauntlet, and that includes, obviously, TED knowing exactly what’s going to be said during the talk long before the speaker actually steps onstage. This is far from a poetry slam open mic night.
So right off the bat, if the TED organization first has a speaker run that gauntlet, and then tells them, “Huh, it turns out your speech maybe wasn’t science-y enough,” that’s a sign that something has gone very wrong, especially in a case like this where Hughes’s argument was much more philosophical than scientific, and didn’t really rely on all that many empirical claims about the world (it was fact-checked by TED beforehand anyway, according to Hughes). To then also try to force the speaker into a debate, after they have done all the work of preparing the talk, agreeing to various edits and tweaks and format contrivances. . . it’s just an extremely unprofessional way to treat your talent, to be honest. (I’d also be remiss if I didn’t point out that TED routinely platforms trendy but half-baked ideas, some of which are later debunked, so intensive scientific fact-checking does not seem to be par for the course. Amy Cuddy seriously exaggerated the evidence for her “power posing” thesis during her mega-viral TED Talk, in fact. While it’s good that TED updated that page with information about subsequent failed replications and so on, let’s just say that there are some other TED Talks that haven’t yet been updated along those lines, but which should be.)
I can’t say for sure, but based on what we know and the approximately zillion other instances of this sort of dysfunction seizing liberal institutions in the last few years, I would bet that Chris Anderson is far more concerned about an internal revolt, about “Black@TED,” than whether Coleman Hughes’s talk was perfectly in line with a nerdy meta-analysis. And, supporting this theory, his botching continued Wednesday, in a follow-up piece in which The Free Press allowed him and Adam Grant to respond.
Anderson explained that Coleman’s talk “was received with huge enthusiasm by many in the audience. But many others heard it as a dangerous undermining of the fight for progress in race relations. So yes, there was controversy. When people on your own team feel like their identity is being attacked, it’s right to take pause.”
In recent years radical types within liberal organizations have realized that if they utter certain magic phrases, they can extract sympathy and sometimes other concessions from management regardless of the merit of their claim. It has the effect of turning off management’s brain and getting the organization’s leadership instead to react from a fearful, gut-oriented place. A common tactic is to claim that the presence of some person or idea in their workplace constitutes “harm” or makes them less “safe.” In many cases, these claims are on their face ridiculous, but I think the choice of words evolved because some phrases contain implicit threats that whatever the employees are freaking out about could cause legal problems for management. An unsafe workplace summons HR, and once HR is involved, who the hell knows where things could end up?
In a newsroom context, for example, if you say to your managing editor “I disagree with this article we ran,” he or she will shrug, say “Sorry to hear that, but we publish a lot of stuff and you’re not going to agree with all of it,” and usher you out of their office because they have much more important stuff to attend to. If instead you suppress any sense of shame or pride you have and somehow manage to keep a straight face while telling that same managing editor, “This article we ran makes me less safe at work,” that is likely to incite a very different and less dismissive response. The managing editor might be flipping you the bird on the inside, but they’ll likely understand that due to your invocation of some magic words, this is more fraught territory and they can’t simply kick you out of their office and demand you seek some perspective.
A version of that is going on here. Anderson is paraphrasing his employees’ complaints, so we don’t know exactly how they were expressed. But if these TED staffers aren’t just being strategic in their language — if they genuinely, viscerally feel like “their identity is being attacked” by a black man advocating for a color-blind approach — that’s something they should take up with their therapists.
I know this sounds condescending, but I mean it. I’m in therapy myself, and that’s partly because I want to learn how to develop better coping mechanisms for blunting the impact of everyday thoughts and events that I don’t always have much control over. Any decent therapist, confronted with a patient who believed that their “identity was under attack” because someone expressed a view they disagreed with, would compassionately try to get them to a place where they did not react so negatively and emotionally to an event that is going to happen again and again and again. I’m not a therapist but I do know that one of the popular current frameworks, cognitive behavioral therapy, would maybe help the patient become more comfortable sitting with a strong emotional response, acknowledging it, and then letting it go rather than allowing it to spark a downward spiral, unwanted rumination, catastrophizing, and so on.
It seems particularly important for the TED staffers upset about Coleman Hughes to cultivate such resilience, because they are part of a very small minority when it comes to public opinion on this subject. Pew survey research from earlier this year shows that there is no racial group with a majority of members supporting the practice of selective colleges using race and ethnicity to make admissions decisions:
In his Free Press article, Hughes linked to this other Pew polling from 2019 asking the question in a different and more general way — there, the numbers are significantly less favorable to race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
Of course these are specific policy questions, and plenty of people in favor of RBAA would still disagree with the TED staffers that contrary views need to be suppressed (just as plenty of people opposed to RBAA would allow a pro-RBAA speaker on a local stage). So the staffers hold an even more radical — and surely much less popular — view than merely favoring race-conscious policies or framings.
If you work for an Ideas organization and you can’t psychologically handle your organization platforming someone expressing a popular view, and you don’t want to seek out therapy to gain more resilience, then you should honestly consider a different line of work. It’s just not a good fit, in the same way journalists who get deeply upset when their colleagues refuse to toe the activist line 100% on some fraught subject should go into PR instead. Jobs like “being a journalist at a major outlet” or “working for TED” are cushy by any sort of international or historical standard, to be sure, but for some people they’re not cushy enough, and such folks should seek out a job that will fully embrace their delicate nature: a big, comfy, plush sofa of a job.
Anyway, back to Chris Anderson. As these employees’ boss, he should obviously not say the mean-sounding things I’m saying. He also shouldn’t suggest his employees go to therapy or find different work. (Though I would reiterate that telling someone who might need therapy to consider it is not, in fact, inherently mean, and the fact that it’s taken as such points to the ongoing stigmatization of mental health care).
But he very easily could have effectively ended this conversation by telling his disgruntled staffers something like this:
We appreciate your feedback and we have heard it, but at the end of the day, as an organization sitting at the intersection of ideas and public speaking, we simply can’t outlaw or restrict speakers’ ability to express popular but contested views — even views some of us disagree with strongly. Heck, for this to be a truly robust and useful and thriving organization, we might have to sometimes platform people expressing certain unpopular views. But this particular case isn’t a close call, frankly. All the available evidence suggests Hughes’s views are popular, his talk was well-researched enough to get a green light from our fact-checking team, and while we seriously value you all as staffers and always welcome your feedback — TED is stronger when you provide that feedback — we simply can’t grant you veto power over individual talks, nor the power to alter preexisting editorial and production processes, especially after an approved talk has already been filmed.
Instead, Anderson appears to have been held hostage by a group of employees making rather hysterical claims — again, sorry for the harsh language, but that’s what this is. And not only did he fail to compassionately but firmly push back against these hysterical claims for the health of his organization (and to prevent the negative PR event that subsequently occurred, which I’m happy to contribute to given how ridiculous this is and how sick I am of these sorts of incidents), he went out of his way, in his response, to reemphasize how seriously he was taking them:
Many people have been genuinely hurt and offended by what they heard Hughes say. This is not what we dream of when we post our talks. I believe real progress can be made on this issue by each side getting greater clarity and insight from the other. We share more in common than we know. We all ultimately want a just world in which all can thrive.
Does Chris Anderson, the guy with the decades-long career in journalism and entrepreneurship, think there’s any merit to the claim that expressing the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr. constitutes “a dangerous” — a dangerous! — “undermining of the fight for progress in race relations”? Does Anderson think that the claim that hearing the views of Martin Luther King Jr. caused people to feel “genuinely hurt and offended” should be taken seriously and at face value, and merits a remedial action of any sort from TED?
I understand the difficult situation he’s in, and I’m not suggesting Anderson react with a fraction of the snark that is the luxury of every independent Substacker. But for him to publicly treat these views as reasonable, and to act like he’s just the neutral authority figure caught in in the middle of a genuinely tricky dispute with no clear answer — on the one hand are the people who think MLK’s views are so dangerous and harmful they shouldn’t be expressed onstage, and on the other are those who don’t, and who is to say whether or not MLK was a dangerous and harmful thinker? — just strikes me as cowardly. Sorry. That’s the only word for it.
There have been so many meltdowns within liberal organizations in recent years, often, as here, over nothing. Usually, the raw number of radical and/or hysterical staffers is small, but their bosses refuse, out of terror, to push back on their claims or to be the adults in the room. And thus embarrassing chaos blooms.
If these leaders exhibited just a little bit of backbone, fewer of these blowups would, well, blow up.
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