"When we first spoke, on the phone, Wax explained that she was wary of the media, which she claimed has sometimes misquoted her and has frequently taken her comments out of context."

"Therefore, she was going to record the formal interview. She also said that she planned to occasionally adopt the role of interrogator and ask me questions, such as why some countries were 'shithole countries.' During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Wax expounded on her beliefs that people of Western origin are more scrupulous, empirical, and orderly than people of non-Western origin, and that women are less intellectual than men. She described these views as the outcome of rigorous and realistic thinking, while offering evidence that ranged from two studies by a eugenicist to personal anecdotes, several of which concerned her conviction that white people litter less than people of color."

Writes Isaac Chotiner, in his introduction to his interview with Amy Wax, "A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again" (The New Yorker). Yikes. It sounds like she was right to be wary, but she did the interview. I haven't read the transcript yet. I'll update when I have.

UPDATE: The boldface is Chotiner, the rest Wax:

My reading of this was that you are not only embracing cultural-distance nationalism but saying it may, in fact, be necessary to save the country. Is that correct?

Well that’s a little bit of an overheated way of saying it....
Why are successful, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, technologically advanced, democratically sound countries so rare and so few, and why do they clump up in one tiny corner of the globe, namely Europe, the Anglosphere? We also have Japan, which is a wonder, I think, in many ways, a very admirable country. Perhaps Taiwan. And why is the rest of the world essentially consisting of, in various degrees, failed states? Why do we have a post-Enlightenment portion of the world and a pre-Enlightenment portion of the world? And I guess, to be really crude about it, you would use Trump’s succinct phrase: Why are there so many shithole countries? Of course the moment you say that, people just get outraged: Oh, my God, you are a racist for saying that. And that, of course, lets them off the hook; they don’t have to answer the question, which is convenient..... Do the people make the culture? Is it something that drops from the sky, or is it something about how people think, what they do, the habits that they have, the values that they have, the practices that they engage in?...

I would not use the word “innate.” To me, “innate” is a term that looks to heritable, or genetic factors. Now you can broaden it and say innate to a culture, but I would probably not say that, because it is so misleading. So, I’m really not saying anything about biology. Nothing at all....

Can you define racism for me? Is so-and-so a racist? Where are we getting with that? Define racist. I have no idea what you mean. It is a bludgeon that is a promiscuous term. You define what a racist is, and I will spend two seconds addressing that question because it is sterile.

You think that in the U.S. today that’s a sterile question?

Yes, I do, because it prevents us from dealing with real, down-to-earth, concrete problems....

So I would say our country’s culture is best preserved if most of the people in our country are of European origins, because those are the people that created our system, but that certainly doesn’t exclude bringing in other people....

What I find really interesting... is how do big Swiss people produce little Swiss people?... I’m Jewish. Why are Jews so Jewy? How did that happen? Why do French women, at least until recently, look so French? I mean, what is going on? I have a friend who’s Dutch, a Dutch artist, and he’s very well off, and, every morning, he gets up and cleans the front window of his house. It sparkles. I said, “Why are you doing that?” He said, “Because I’m Dutch.” So people do differ, there are these differences, and we just take them for granted....

What about [Trump's] calling into question whether a judge of Mexican heritage could make a fair judicial decision? Do you think that is racist?

Well, first of all, Mexican is not a race. It’s an ethnicity. It’s actually a national identity, isn’t it?

I think if the person had been from El Salvador or Venezuela, the President would have made the same comment. I think we’re getting lost in niceties here. We’re both smart people, Amy, or at least I’m somewhat smart. You know what he was saying. Come on.

O.K., but you’re patronizing me because you’re trying to use the word “racist”—

O.K., bigoted, would bigoted help with this?

—where race is not the operant category. You see, you’re saying, “Oh, you have to expect that, when you say something about a Mexican, it’s something about race.”

So what do you think Trump was trying to say there?

Well, I don’t really know. I guess he was trying to say something like, “I worry that people from particular backgrounds might have divided loyalty.” Just like people who are Jewish are sometimes accused of being too loyal to Israel, to the detriment of the United States. That is not a racist question. That is a question where the answer to that is, No. 1, both normative and positive. Normatively, we, as a country, give the benefit of the doubt to people from different backgrounds that they are loyal to our country, without evidence to the contrary, so that’s a presumption that a President shouldn’t be indulging.

Once again, I think we’re now having a discussion about the content of what he said, and we can’t have that discussion if you just go off on this ridiculous heresy hunt: “Is he a racist? Isn’t he a racist? Is that racist? Is this racist?” That’s really, as far as I can tell, eighty-five per cent of what the discussion now is about on the progressive left. It is so pointless, and it’s so shallow. O.K.?...

I just don’t want to go down the road of defending President Trump. He’s just one person. The real reason President Trump was elected, I think, to the extent I know anything about politics at all—and I know very, very little—is that a lot of people really were relieved to see someone stand up to the thought police of the progressive left wing.

It's a fair interview. A good interview. Chotiner tried very hard to out Wax as a racist and she had a full opportunity to be precise about what she's saying and why it's not racist. Clearly, Chotiner has a broader definition of "racist" than Wax and Wax's effort to get to a tighter definition of racism — to exclude ethnicity and culture — is not going to work on Chotiner (and on many New Yorker readers). You can see that easily from the transcript.

The headline, however, overreaches. It's execrable pandering. Embarrassing clickbait.

AND: There's something so desperate and, simultaneously, arrogant about the "smart people" argument: "We’re both smart people, Amy, or at least I’m somewhat smart. You know what he was saying. Come on."