Transcript: Coleman Hughes

A conversation with the American writer, podcaster, and CNN analyst

When it comes to race relations, many of us were raised with the ethos expressed in the famed Martin Luther King Jr. quote calling on society to judge people by the content of their character instead of the colour of their skin. Western society has moved away from that ideal — and my guest on this week’s program say it’s time we get back to it.

Coleman Hughes is an American writer, commentator, and podcaster, and an analyst for CNN. His new book is The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: We last spoke in 2020. Your ideas had a big impact on my thinking, so I'm excited to talk about your book today. I want to start with how you got pulled into the conversation on race, which you say you've always found a bit boring. Take us back to your experiences at 16, at the People of Colour Conference in Houston.

CH: When I was 16, I was a kid who cared about music. I cared about relating to my friends on the basis of shared interests, and all the other things a normal 16-year-old boy cares about. I did not care what race my friends were. I related to people, like I said, on the basis of interests. I grew up with the Martin Luther King ethic that your skin colour is not a significant feature of your identity; it doesn't tell you anything deeper about a human being. What matters are your qualities. So I took that for granted — until I went to the People of Colour Conference, which was a gathering of something like five hundred or one thousand private school kids from all across the nation.

It was there that I was first introduced to ideas that were then new to me, and new to most people. Ideas like white privilege and internalized oppression. Ideas like systemic racism, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and so forth. Whiteness and Blackness, as opposed to just the fact that someone is white. Dealing with racial essences, as abstractions. I would later learn that there was a name for these ideas — and it was intersectionality, or Critical Race Theory. But the basic difference was that whereas how I grew up, people were taught that a person's race does not matter and you shouldn't make it matter, at this conference, I was taught that if you're Black, you kind of have a magic inside of you. That Blackness, or really any non-white racial identity, is a sort of magic that makes you special, frankly. And it makes you special in proportion to how much it has victimized you. That was a fundamentally new attitude to me. It's not an attitude that I got from any of my extended family members, or anything like that.

When I came back from that experience, I thought it was kind of a fluke. I thought it was an interesting side quest. Kind of like visiting Utah and meeting a few Mormons and then going back to what was normal for me. Then, when I went to Columbia University, it turned out that that culture was the dominant ethos. It was reinforced by some professors, it was reinforced by the administration, and it was reinforced by the orientation program. In one instance, we did an exercise where the Black kids went to one corner of the room, white kids to another, Hispanic kids, Asian kids, et cetera. We all had to talk about how we either participated in, or suffered from, systemic racism. 

All of these kinds of things changed me from a mindset of looking at people — and hoping to be looked at — as an individual, to a mindset where I was hyper-aware that people were looking at me as a Black person, and therefore as a victim. Making assumptions about me that were encouraged by the exercise, and by the culture. By the dominant ideas about race. All of it made me feel more alienated rather than less.

TH: You argue in the book that race is not the most salient fact about a person and that the real problem of racism in America is that society keeps failing to enshrine colourblindness as its guiding ethos. To start, how do you define colourblindness?

CH: I define colourblindness as trying to treat people without regard to race, and demanding that the state treat us without regard to race — which is to say that public policy be race-neutral. So, the second half of that is more controversial for people than the first half. At least most people. I make a sharp distinction between my version of colourblindness and the version of colourblindness that some have advocated for, and that many have ridiculed, which is this idea of not seeing race. 

The problem with not seeing race is that as adults, in particular in America, at this point we all do see race. If it were ever in the cards for us not to, that prospect was ruined by the constant conversation about it. So, we all see race, and we shouldn't deny it. More than that, we are all capable of being racially-biased, and we shouldn't deny that either. What colourblindness should mean is not pretending not to notice race, which is impossible. It's noticing race, but then consciously disregarding it as a reason to treat anybody differently, and as a basis on which to make public policy. That's how I define colourblindness.

TH: This ethos of colourblindness sits in opposition to another ideology that's very popular right now, particularly in Canada. You've called that ideology neoracism, or “racism in antiracist clothing.” What are the beliefs that this ideology advances?

CH: Broadly, neoracism is a philosophy that sees whiteness as evil and that sees, let’s say, Blackness or POCness in general, as morally superior. You see this in many ways. You see it in someone like Robin DiAngelo, the bestselling author of White Fragility, when she alleges that white people should try to be less white. What does she mean by that? Well, she tells you what she means. She means you should be less ignorant, for example, and a whole host of bad personality characteristics that, on her account, are endemic to white people in particular.

You see it in Hollywood films like The Woman King, which, though it was actually about an African tribe that was prodigious in the slave raiding and trading of other Africans, made it seem like they weren't. That's the twin parts of neoracism right there. The idea that whiteness is evil and then Blackness is morally superior. 

Then, on the public policy end, you have someone like Ibram Kendi. His kind of neoracism is the idea that until it's the case that Black people, as 13% of the population in America for example, occupy 13% of every resource, every domain, that the government ought to racially discriminate. He explicitly defends that — to racially discriminate in favour of Black people against white people. Against any group that's overrepresented, and for any group that's underrepresented, until we reach racial equity. By which he means equal outcomes matching the census. So that's what I mean by neoracism. It's become a more influential philosophy in elite spaces over the past 10 years. Though it's not widely popular among non-elites.

TH: You’re arguing that this sits in total opposition to the ideals of the Civil Rights movement. Give us a brief outline of why you argue that.

CH: Let’s look at the long Civil Rights movement, starting just after the Civil War, with Wendell Phillips, who led the American Anti-Slavery Society — and, so far as I know, coined the term colourblind — and who advocated for what he called a government colourblind. All the way through the NAACP,  A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, and the other great Civil Rights leaders that we think of as the classical Civil Rights movement. Here's what they stood for: They stood for an end to racism, legal and otherwise. What they meant by racism, they were quite clear. Dr. King, in his last book, defined racism as a doctrine of congenital inferiority of a people. They considered it obvious that racism can be pointed in any direction, at any group of people, from any group of people. Dr. King more than once said that Black supremacy would be as evil as white supremacy. Bayard Rustin made the same point clear. A. Philip Randolph made the same point clear. It just so happened that the racism that was rampant in their age was racism against Black Americans. And so that's why they fought it. 

The neoracist movement, starting with Critical Race Theory and onwards, had a totally different definition of racism, where white people, even in principle, cannot be victims of racism. Because white people have power and Black people don't. So, they rejected the definition of racism employed by the Civil Rights Movement and substituted one that ruled the very possibility of anti-white racism out of existence — opening the door to various policies, including policies as we had in America during COVID, which triaged emergency aid to failing restaurants according to the race of the restaurant owner, rather than according to the financial need of the restaurant. And so that's the one element in which it rejects the Civil Rights Movement.

And then second way is on the public policy end, which I've already implicitly touched on. But Martin Luther King in his book, Why We Can't Wait (1964) has a great chapter, that everyone should read, on what he recommends should be the paradigm of the state towards the issue of the legacy of slavery and racial inequality. In a nutshell, he says, “Yes, these are deep problems and the state has a compelling interest in addressing them. But the way they should be addressed are not on the basis of race, but rather on the basis of class.” He proposed something he called the Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, which would be an anti-poverty program that would target the poor because they are poor, not Black people because they are Black. And this would have the twin benefits of also benefiting the white poor, which describes millions and millions of people in America. It would have the benefit of being a better proxy for disadvantage, and being more practical, and leading to less backlash. So better, not just pragmatically, but also philosophically. 

That's my position as well. Insofar as you can find me an evidence-based policy that works, that lifts up people that are disadvantaged, I'll support that policy on the basis of class rather than race. That's what the Civil Rights movement stood for — and that's the policy that is rejected by neoracists, who believe that essentially all policies should be directed on the basis of race.

TH: You've raised the issue of the policy during the pandemic for restaurant owners. You also tackled this in your TED Talk. For listeners who are not aware of that policy, what was the outcome?

CH: This was a policy called the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. Listeners will remember, and I have to imagine the same was true in Canada, that restaurants were in extremely dire straits in 2020. Some more than others. I have the exact numbers in my book, but an extremely high percentage of restaurants were on the verge of being shut down, and some did actually shut down. In America, the federal government's response to this, reasonably, was to create a fund to help those restaurants, and it earmarked $28 billion for that fund. But here was the catch. For the first few weeks the fund was open, it was only available to restaurants owned by people of colour, women, or veterans. So if you were a white man, and you owned a restaurant that was on the brink of failure, the only way you would be eligible for those funds in the first few weeks is if you happened to be a veteran — which the vast majority of white men are not, obviously.

So what happened is that a group of white men sued alleging racial discrimination, against the 14th Amendment, which of course it was. That lawsuit won. But by the time a judge ruled that the program had to stop, about $18 billion of that $28 billion was already gone. So the judge ruled, I believe, that the remaining $10 billion now had to go to the white men that were initially put at the back of the line, which apparently it did. There were some three thousand restaurant owners in the priority group — that is, people of colour, women, veterans — who were promised money before that judge order came in and then unpromised the money after that order came in. So the net result was something close to only 40% of eligible restaurants ended up getting any money at all, which I suppose was just a failure of putting enough money in the piggy bank to begin with.

But the net result was also that thousands of white men got discriminated against, and then several thousand people of colour and women at least had the appearance of getting discriminated against, because they got the email saying, “You've got the money,” and then were unpromised the money. So, this was just a giant and totally unnecessary mess of discriminating against everybody, of people feeling the sting of racial discrimination, for no reason. My argument is: Why could they not just have done it on the basis of financial need? You get put at the front of the line — they already had that information, it was part of the application — based on how much you're struggling. Right? We'll prioritize you, we'll triage it, on that basis rather than on features of your identity that you have no control over.

TH: The ethos behind this, the ideology driving all of this has been very difficult to unpack in public, and has been difficult to contest in public. One of the reasons for that, that you touch on in the book, is the ad hominem attacks and the accusations of anyone who disagrees with it being racist. But there's also a number of myths and fallacies underlying the whole structure of the ideology that I think you do a really great job of unpacking. One of those is the myth of inherited trauma. Now, you point out you yourself are a descendant of slaves. You trace your lineage back to an enslaved man on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Plantation. But you don't believe in inherited trauma at all. Why not?