Asians are, you know, they have the largest income gap between the top and the bottom of

any group in America. And I think that most people can probably see this anecdotally, right?

Like they can drive around Scarlet State on New York. You'll see a lot of Asian people there,

right? Like a very wealthy suburb like that. And if you go down to Sunset Park in Brooklyn,

like are those rich people that you're seeing around there? Absolutely not.

Hello and welcome to Wise Is Happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.

This week that I'm recording this, which is in September, late September, I learned the news.

We all learn the news of the death of a philosopher who I really love named Charles Mills. He was

born in England, but the son of Jamaican parents. And he had an incredible career over a huge

variety of philosophy. Probably most famous book was called The Racial Contract, which is sort of

about how race and racial hierarchy is embedded in a lot of the what we think of as kind of like

rational enlightenment thought of the Anglo-Saxon tradition that race wasn't some other thing out there,

but was sort of shot through in the way that the sort of liberalism was born as a philosophical

tradition. And I saw this great clip that was floating around that was just like a three or four

minute clip of him explaining basically the social construction of race in the clip he's describing

the fact that what we mean by race, what we answer when so instance what your race is is an answer

not about human biology. It's not about the human genetic code. It's an answer about society

and it's answer about where you are in a certain social system. And this is you know, a fairly clear

obvious point one that we've returned to time and time again, but it's worth taking a second

think about particularly in the run up to today's conversation when we think about the census and

the racial categories and the census where the racial categories that we see in polling you know in

the in the run up to the California recall or afterwards when you go through polling results,

...