This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 3rd,

2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Does your race define how you think?

If it doesn't, why does it raise such ire when people don't go along with the thinking that is expected of them?

Eric Smith is a visiting scholar at the Cato Institute and a professorick in Composition at York College of Pennsylvania.

We spoke last month about race essentialism.

Race essentialism is the idea that every individual within a race pretty much thinks and acts and believes

and hopes and dreams and feels the same.

Everybody is basically a kind of clone.

It's like a racial version of the Borg from Star Trek.

And it's not something I'm fond of.

So it is the notion that by virtue of your birth you have a certain amount of

melanin in your skin you have a certain genetic background, therefore your opinion on X current public policy

issue ought to be this.

Yes, but I think the most salient aspect of all of this is historical.

People who look like me have a particular history in America and that makes us all the same. So I mean it does

seem to align with immutable characteristics like skin color things like that but

ultimately it's we all went through this a hundred years ago

therefore we have this attitude today which is also erroneous so that's my

issue with it. Okay so what does that give us the you know how does that rear its ugly head in terms of how we engage with one another in public?

Well, Gyatry Spivak called it strategic essentialism, which is a, you know, a political

...