Coleman Hughes

- A prominent Black writer makes the case for a colorblind America, this week on "Firing Line."

- Welcome to another episode of "Conversations with Coleman."

- [Margaret] He's a writer, podcaster and television analyst who holds unorthodox views on some of the most charged issues in America.

- So much of what DEI has become has been a kind of Kafkaesque, bureaucratic, race-obsessed, kind of nodes of employees [laughing] that become a cancer within organizations.

- [Margaret] Coleman Hughes, who is himself descendant of a slave from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, advocates for a colorblind America.

A view he says reflects the values of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

- It's not a matter of debate, really, what he thought.

He laid it out in his books.

- [Margaret] His advocacy of colorblindness puts him at odds with prominent anti-racist proponents on the left today.

- In my view, their philosophy is straightforwardly racist according to the definition of racism used by the civil rights movement.

Actually - But does it follow that he aligns himself with the politics of the right?

- We embrace the vision of Martin Luther King.

The left is attempting to destroy that beautiful vision and divide Americans by race.

- [Margaret] What does Coleman Hughes say now?

[upbeat music] - [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, the Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, the Asness Family Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, the McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R Schwab, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. and by Pfizer Inc. - Coleman Hughes, welcome to "Firing Line."

- It's a pleasure to be here.

- You are a writer, a podcaster, a musician, and you have recently written a book, "The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a colorblind America."

The concept of a colorblind America is often misunderstood.

When you say, "A colorblind America," what do you mean?

- So when I say, "A colorblind America," I mean, you're white, I'm Black and Hispanic, but I'm gonna try to treat you without regard to your race, and I'm gonna ask you to treat me without regard to my race, to the extent that we can.

And we're both gonna ask the government to never treat us differently with regard to our race.

And wherever the state has an interest in helping disadvantaged people, we ask that you do that on the basis of class and socioeconomics, not on the basis of race.

That's what I mean by colorblindness.

Now, what the critics of colorblindness have portrayed it as is, "Pretending not to see race," right?

And that just seems totally naive, right?

Because everyone notices race.

We all see race, we can't help it.

And what's more, we're all capable of acting in racially biased ways, right?

None of us is immune from the very possibility of having a racist thought or even a racist action.

So to that extent, nobody is literally colorblind.

And I think the critics of colorblindness have used that as a way of rejecting what the real argument is, which is we really ought to be trying our best to treat people without regard to race, even though we do notice it.

That's what I mean by colorblindness, and that should be our North Star as a nation telling us when are we going forward and when are we going backwards?

We should be striving for a colorblind society the same way we strive for a peaceful society.

We know we're never gonna grab it, we're never gonna get to the perfect society, but we've got to know which direction we're going.

- It's an ideal.

- That's right.

- Why is it misunderstood?

- Well, there's been a long tradition in critical race theory starting in the 1980s, really.

It was a marginal philosophy confined to certain law schools.

- CRT.

- Yeah, you would've never heard of it in the '80s, or '90s, or 2000s unless you were in an African American studies graduate program or something like that.

99% of people had never heard it.

But it's this philosophy that's been around, and it defines itself in its founding texts in opposition to colorblindness.

What the critical race theorists said is that colorblindness is wrong, the civil rights movement, the rhetoric of the civil rights movement was wrongheaded, well-intentioned, but didn't go far enough, and we have to essentially say that all of American society is fundamentally white supremacist deep down in its core, so that the only way to fight racism is to burn it all down and start again.

So that's been out there for decades, it's just that most people ignored it, most people didn't know anything about it.

Then starting about in 2013, we had a situation where everyone got smartphones and social media, these two key pieces of technology.

Fundamentally, the way information spread changed, and people started seeing algorithmically boosted videos of, for instance, a white cop arresting a Black suspect, or a white cop shooting a Black suspect, right?

And these videos out of context would get millions of views, and it put the idea in people's head that there is suddenly an epidemic of racism.

So now, because of the way technology has changed and the way information has allowed this false narrative to spread, that becomes fertile ground for this old idea of critical race theory to seep into the culture.

So that's how you get to a point where the only narrative you heard, really, until my book in the elite spaces is that colorblindness is wrong, it's white supremacist, it's naive, et cetera.

- You write about how colorblindness aligns with the legacy of the civil rights leaders, but there are people who have argued that the views of Martin Luther King were more nuanced and complex than just simply opposing racial preferences.

King's daughter and the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute has said that he would have supported some race-based policies.

How do you respond to those criticisms, or those critiques?

- I don't need to respond to it because he wrote about it at length in his book from 1965 called "Why We Can't Wait."

Basically, in a nutshell, what Martin Luther King says is this.

Yes, we have to address racial inequality.

Yes, we have to do something special for Black Americans because Black Americans have been especially harmed.

Yes, we have to address the legacy of slavery.

How do we do all of these things in the best way?

Here's what we do.

We create a class-based program that addresses poverty on the basis of poverty that targets the Black poor because they're poor and the white poor because they're poor.

That is the best way to address these problems, on the basis of class, not race.

So I mean, it's not a matter of debate, really, what he thought.

He laid it out in his books.

- Why do you think the descendants of the civil rights era, the activists who are descendants of that generation, continue to promote these anti-colorblindness concepts then?

- Yeah, well, I think that they really wish Martin Luther King had supported something like race-based affirmative action, because if he had, then it wouldn't be so obvious that they are not carrying on his legacy.

- So you've made the case that Martin Luther King believed in colorblindness and wanted class to be the metric by which America addresses inequality.

What is the argument you make today for why we should use class rather than race to address inequality?

- Yeah, so my argument today is that all people with a heart and with empathy acknowledge that there's a huge difference between being born upper-middle class, two parents in the home, like I was, mom over my shoulder, helping me with my homework, cooking me healthy meals, no crime in the neighborhood I grew up in, raising me from a young age to know that I ought to go to college and that I can be anything I want, safe, loving.

This is what we refer to generally as privilege, right?

This is the good life.

There's a huge difference between that and shuffling between foster homes, dirt poor, violence in the neighborhood you grow up, having to fend for yourself, on and on and on.

This is the difference between privilege and lack of privilege.

And so the state has an interest in correcting for that, to some degree, where it's able to, right?

I think almost everyone would agree with that.

So the question is, how do we identify who is in the first category and who is in the second category?

Implicit in our race-based policies is the idea that the best way to identify those two groups is racially.

Black people and Hispanic people in this corner, white people and Asians in this corner.

My argument is that that is not the best way to actually decide.

The much better way to decide is to look at people's income, or their wealth, or even some combination measure.

You had certain people talking about adversity score, where you combine those measures with the level of crime and the census track that you grew up in.

Really, almost anything in this neighborhood of ideas is better than simply saying, "If you're Black, you are in the category of people that needs help.

And if you're white, you're not," - Is there any evidence that class-based policies would be better?

- So my argument about class-based policies is not that they would solve poverty overnight or that they would be any kind of magic-wand solution to our nation's problems.

My argument is really narrowly that class is a better proxy for disadvantage, on the one hand, and that number two, class-based policies tend to provoke less backlash than race-based policies.

And there's good reasons for that, right?

Nobody minds that the poor kid got more financial aid when going to college than the rich kid.

A lot more people would mind if the reason my kid didn't get into Harvard is because of the color of their skin.

I mean, that is just such a deep insult and-- - So you're saying race-based policies actually invoke more racism rather than less?

- Probably, they definitely invite racial grievance, right?

And so my argument is really that if we're going to have a healthy, multiracial democracy, it makes much more sense to condition people to prefer class-based policies over race-based policies.

- A lot of your work and also the work in the book debunks or argues against arguments that Robin DiAngelo Ibram X Kendi have posited in their arguments for anti-racism.

You label them neo-racists.

What is a neo-racist?

- Yeah, so they've billed themselves as anti-racists.

And in my view, their philosophy is straightforwardly racist according to the definition of racism used by the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King in his final book defined racism as, "A doctrine of congenital inferiority of a people."

He took it for granted that all groups of people could be racist.

More than once in his life, he said that Black supremacy would be equally evil as white supremacy.

So applying that definition to someone like Robin DiAngelo, who says in her book, "I strive to be less white, and by, 'Be less white,' I mean be less ignorant," okay?

So that is a straightforward claim that whiteness equals ignorance.

I mean, that is racist according to my definition of racism.

Let's call a spade a spade here and call out racism when we see it.

- In response to calls for colorblindness, Kendi writes, "The moment we stop identifying by race is the moment we cannot see racial inequality.

The moment we can't see racism is the moment racism and white domination becomes eternal."

So what do you say to this argument that prioritizing colorblindness puts racial progress at risk?

- No, I think it's precisely backwards.

The difference between me and Kendi is that his definition of racism, which is extremely radical, is that if Black people are 13% of the population, and white people are, say, 60%, Black people should be 13% of every possible domain of value in American society.

13% of cops, 13% of teachers, 13% of wealth, 13% of prisoners, and on and on and on.

And likewise, white people should be 60% of everything.

I think that's an absurd and really dangerous definition of racism, because what it justifies is a kind of top-down, heavy-handed manipulation of policies to discriminate against one race and discriminate in favor of another race until the end of time, until this mythical moment where we get to equal outcomes, which will never, ever, ever happen.

- You talk about the disparity fallacy, the presumption that any racial disparity must be the result of racism.

And you cite Thomas Sowell, who argued that disparities were driven by other factors aside from discrimination.

Of course, Sowell appeared on the original "Firing Line" at least once in 1981.

Take a look at what said in this clip.

- I don't find anything faintly resembling an even representation of people in any institution anywhere in the world, broken down by any way.

There's been a recent study of military forces around the world in which they can find no country in which their military force represents even approximately the ethnic composition of the society.

Well, what's amazing to me is that this notion that people would be evenly represented except for these institutional policies, that notion has had such momentum behind it without a speck of evidence being asked or presented.

- So what's the difference between malignant disparities and benign disparities?

- Yeah, I owe a huge debt to Sowell in this respect.

The way I summarize his ideas in my book is essentially disparities are kind of like tumors, which is to say, they seem very scary, but actually most of them are benign, right?

They can come in malignant and benign flavors.

So a disparity can either be because people are getting discriminated against unfairly, or it can be a case like the NBA, where it's something like 70% African American, though Black people only comprise 13% of the population, huge disparity.

No one suspects that it is the result of discrimination.

So that's a benign disparity.

So the question is how do you tell the difference between benign disparities and malignant disparities?

And the way you do that is by actually looking, doing real, hardcore, evidence-based research to see if people are being discriminated against.

That's not what 90% of so-called experts and scholars do nowadays.

They just basically look at a disparity and call it racism.

For instance, that's what Kendi says, he says, quote, "When I see disparities, I see racism."

This is a totally unscholarly, unscientific way of viewing outcomes in a multiracial, multiethnic society.

And it's dangerous, again, because it leads people to create policies that actually discriminate.

- One race-based policy that you opposed was affirmative action, which was overturned by Supreme Court last year.

You supported the overturning of it.

And I wonder how you expect or how you suspect it will impact the make-up of incoming college classes?

- Yeah, it's a very good question.

So I wanna say one thing before I answer it.

We have to remember that affirmative action is an elite issue.

When the Princeton sociologist, Thomas Espinshade, studied this, he wrote that only 1% of Black 18-year-olds every year are affected by race-based affirmative action, because the other 99% either don't graduate high school, do graduate high school, but don't go to college, or go to state schools and other schools that aren't selective enough to even need affirmative action.

So this is an issue that affects a really tiny slice of mostly very privileged people, and that's part of why it gets so much airtime.

So with that out the way, your question is, how will it affect that narrow slice of people?

The research suggests that at a place like Harvard, the number of Asian students will go up, the number of Black and Hispanic students will go way down.

And that's what would happen if they simply kept everything the same and took out race as a variable.

Now, the question is, will they do that?

They may not do that, and they're not legally obligated to do that.

So I think it's perfectly legal and maybe even wise for them to come up with a system that looks at other variables which are not race and factor those into their decisions about who to admit.

- What other variables?

- So there have been some schools that, for instance, say, "We're going to admit the top 10% of students by GPA at every high school in the state," for example.

It's called the top 10% policy.

Now, obviously this is a policy that would increase racial diversity substantially because you have some schools that are mostly Black, mostly Hispanic, and you're getting the top students from that high school.

But it's not a race-based policy in the sense it's not targeting race directly.

Now, whether this is a good policy is up for a particular school to decide.

That's not really my purview.

But I'm not opposed to policies that increase diversity as a side effect.

I just don't think that you can use race directly and say, "You're getting into this school because you're this color, and you're not getting into this school because you're this color."

- After the bridge collapsed in Baltimore, there were some on the right, including Republicans, who quickly raced to blame Baltimore's Black mayor and Maryland's Black governor, and invoked DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, for the tragedy.

Elon Musk apparently rushed to blame safety incidents recently in airplanes on DEI standards changing.

You dedicate most of your attention to racial thought on the left.

Are you concerned by how it's emerging on the right?

- Yes, I am, I think so.

So for instance, the fact that people are calling a mayor and a government a DEI mayor or a DEI governor, this-- - Because they're Black.

- Yeah.

- And they were elected by the populace of their city or their state.

- That's right.

So the whole point of criticizing a DEI admin is to suggest that they were hired with lower standards because they were Black or Hispanic, and that happens quite a lot.

It does not happen notably in situations where people are elected.

But it's a ridiculous kind of characterization, and so I think the people on the right and in the center and increasingly liberals on the left and Democrats are totally correct to criticize DEI, to criticize the idea that, "I've got to lower my standards as an employer to hire someone to make sure that my company has a rainbow aesthetic or else I'm evil," right?

But that some people on the right are taking that too far, and just seeming to equate any Black person with the ideology of DEI.

- That's racist, would you call that racist?

- I don't know, it's stupid, it's certainly stupid, and I think that's enough.

[Margaret laughing] - So- [Coleman laughing] - Arguably racist, yeah.

- On the point of DEI, according to Axios, mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion and corporate earnings calls have plummeted more than 75% since its peak in 2021.

Some companies have abandoned their DEI programs, others have deemphasized them.

It seems as though there has been a backlash or a course correction with respect to these policies.

And I wonder if your analysis is that brings us closer or further away to a colorblind society.

- I think it absolutely brings us closer.

What was going on in the summer of 2020 when every corporation in America was almost blindly increasing their DEI expenditures, and so forth, without kind of any skepticism of whether they were doing good, I mean, that I think definitely created toxic consequences in workplaces that is now being course corrected, I think.

And so ultimately, we want to get to a situation in which people view race as less and less important.

And so if there's a version of DEI that is benign, that is really just about making sure corporations are reaching out to different types of candidates than they would normally reach out, but then judging them by meritocratic standards, if there's a benign kind of DEI, then I'm for it.

But so much of what DEI has become has been a kind of Kafkaesque, bureaucratic, race-obsessed, kind of nodes of employees [laughing] that become a cancer within organizations.

And that's where we are, and I think it's a good thing people are now rolling that back and scaling that back.

- The arguments you make for colorblindness have aligned you with Republicans and conservatives on the right who also argue for colorblindness.

Do you have any concern that those arguments could be adopted by those who actually have a different agenda than yours?

- Yeah, I think that's always true.

It's always possible for arguments to be taken by a group of people whose values you don't share.

It's as true of woke arguments as it is of sort of anti-woke arguments.

But what's really happened is not that Republicans woke up and suddenly embraced colorblindness.

What happens is that Democrats and liberals used to all believe in colorblindness, and then abandoned it.

And so my hope is that I can be part of the process of the Democratic Party remembering and rescuing the value of colorblindness because actually the Democratic voter base does not want a regime of race-based policies.

It's mostly elites who believe that these policies are good and popular.

And so I think that's really what needs to happen.

- Yeah, I mean, so your argument is for a resurgence of the classical Martin Luther King colorblindness- - Absolutely.

- into the mainstream of our democratic process.

- Yeah, I think Democrats would be very unwise to cede this moral high ground, just from a strategic perspective, very unwise to cede that value to the right.

- Coleman Hughes, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Thanks for having me.

[upbeat music] - [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, the Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, the Asness Family Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, the McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R Schwab, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

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