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--:-- John Bickley: Over the past 10 years, our societies have become more and more fixated on racial identity. We've all been invited to reflect on our inner whiteness or inner blackness as if these racial essences define who we are. Meanwhile, American society has experienced the greatest crisis in race relations in a generation. That was Coleman Hughes speaking at a TED Talk last year. He's the author of the new book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America.
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--:-- John Bickley: Hughes, who describes himself as a political independent, has made waves by pushing back on the DEI and anti-racism ideologies of the left. In this episode, we talked to Hughes about his new book and what he views as the path forward to a more colorblind society. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's May 5th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Coleman Hughes, podcast host and author of The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Thanks for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: So I wanted to start with an interview you did with The View that went viral last month. One of the hosts, Sonny Hostin, branded you as a conservative and suggested you're being used as a pawn by the right. Here's that moment.
--:-- Sonny Hostin: Your argument for colorblindness, I think, is something that the right has co-opted. And so many in the black community, if I'm being honest with you, believe that you are being used as a pawn by the right and that you're a charlatan of sorts.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Okay, let's give it a little answer. First thing, I don't think there's any evidence I've been co-opted by anyone. And I think that that's an ad hominem tactic people use to not address really the important conversations we're having here. And I think it's better and it would be better for everyone if we stuck to the topics rather than make it about me.
--:-- John Bickley: What do you make of that encounter and the fact that it caused such a stir? And how would you define your perspective ideologically?
--:-- Coleman Hughes: So I'm a political independent. I've only voted twice. I'm 28 years old, so that's a function of my age. Both times for Democrats, Hillary and Biden, though I'm not opposed to voting for Republicans. So those are my politics.
--:-- John Bickley: What I make of that appearance was that Sonny Hostin, rather than address my arguments, she sought to paint me as somehow a compromised individual, either financially compromised or ethically compromised. And instead of attack her on the same grounds, I just kind of calmly debunked her accusations and then moved back to the topic.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: And I think the contrast between how she was arguing in such bad faith and how I just calmly responded, I think that contrast is what made the moment go semi-viral because that's just something you don't see on daytime television.
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah, it was particularly effective. Before we get into your book, I wanted to ask you about something else that's been in the headlines, the anti-Israel protests we're seeing at elite universities. You graduated from Columbia, which has been a hub for these protests. Do you see a correlation with the kinds of protests that we're seeing on campuses and this emphasis on diversity equity and inclusion in academia?
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Yeah, so I think the thing people don't understand about DEI and why people criticize DEI is that DEI is an ideology which says that you can divide the world into oppressors and oppressed. White people are the oppressors, Jews are the oppressors, and the oppressed are black people, brown people, Hispanics, and so forth.
--:-- John Bickley: And DEI departments, DEI bureaucracies, are examples. They're usually clusters of bureaucrats that basically buy into this philosophy, but it's the philosophy itself that is the problem.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: And that philosophy is very much synced up with the protests you're seeing now on Ivy League campuses, where Jews in general are seen as oppressors, as colonizers, really, that very much syncs up with the DEI bureaucracy that have generally viewed white people and Jews as oppressors that are not really subject to the same protections as students, quote unquote, of color.
--:-- John Bickley: And this really gets us to the premise of your book, which is that we need to strive for a colorblind society. First, how do you define colorblindness within the context of modern society?
--:-- Coleman Hughes: So for me, colorblindness isn't pretending not to notice race because as adults, at least, we all notice race. If your listeners could see me right now, they could see that I'm not a white guy. But what colorblindness really should mean at its deepest level is that we try our very best to treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in our public policy.
--:-- John Bickley: So I tell you that I'm going to do my best not to treat you differently because of your race, I'm going to ask that you do the same to me. And we're both going to ask that our government does not treat us differently based upon our skin color.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: And whenever the government has a legitimate interest in trying to help disadvantaged people, we'd ask that they do that on the basis of class, income, wealth, socioeconomic measures, rather than based on the color of my skin or my racial identity.
--:-- John Bickley: Now you contrast this colorblind ideal to the concept of what you call neo-racism in its emergence in contemporary discourse. How do you define neo-racism and how does it differ from traditional forms of racism?
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Yeah, so the philosophy I just described as DEI is fairly close to the philosophy I call neo-racism in the book. It's a philosophy that says whiteness is inherently bad and anything but whiteness is inherently good, inherently morally superior.
--:-- John Bickley: This is a philosophy that was pretty marginal in American life for many decades. You could find it in critical race theory seminars for many decades, but you'd never encounter it if you're just a normal person navigating typical spaces until about 2013, when we all got smartphones with cameras and we all were, you know, everyone and their mother was on Facebook.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: And that fundamentally changed how information spread. And what that caused was a scenario where people were now seeing unrepresentative misleading clips of police firing on unarmed black Americans, preferentially promoted in their social media algorithms, which gave the false impression that racism was on the rise when in fact it's been on the decline for many, many decades.
--:-- John Bickley: When that happened, the ground became fertile in people's minds for this philosophy of neo-racism or DEI to spread way beyond the narrow corners of the academy where it used to live into your social media feeds, into your K through 12 classrooms, where now you have kids essentially being taught that whiteness is a bad thing, you know, taught to be ashamed of their race.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: You have black kids and Hispanic kids taught to wear victimhood, exaggerate their victimhood, and wear it as a kind of badge of pride. And all of this has wreaked havoc on race relations. All of it is a backslide from what is the proper goal, namely the goal of the civil rights movement, which is to denounce racism in all its forms whoever it directed at and to really emphasize our common humanity the fact that beneath this skin we are all more alike than we are different.
--:-- John Bickley: And the essential fact about you is not the race or the group that you belong to. It's your personal qualities. It's how you treat people. It's your values and so forth.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: So that's how I describe it. Now you bring up the civil rights movement. There's an ongoing attempt to co-opt Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in recent years, We're being told that his message was far different than most people think it is, which is that he doesn't want people judged by the color of their skin. But now we're being told that it's a very different vision, a much more DEI and sort of Marxism aligned vision.
--:-- John Bickley: Can you explain that debate and where you stand on that? Which side you stand on?
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Oh, yeah. Well, as for Marxism, that's just a historical fact. He rejected Marxism. Anyone can read his essay called My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, where he explicitly talks about why he rejected Marxism.
--:-- John Bickley: But on this larger question of what did Dr. King believe, every year on Martin Luther King Day, there's a series of articles, you know, Huffington Post, various liberal outlets, left-leaning outlets. They're all the same article. They all say the same thing. They say Dr. Martin Luther King was a radical, and they imply that he would kind of agree with woke anti-racists like Ibram X. Kennedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Black Lives Matter movement, and so forth.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: But they all do the same thing, which is they lie by doing a bait and switch. They say Martin Luther King was a radical. And then the only quotes and arguments they can pull from to prove that have nothing to do with race. They have to do with other topics like, for instance, MLK was against the Vietnam War before that was a popular position.
--:-- John Bickley: So he was considered an anti-war radical. He was a pacifist, which was very controversial at the time, you know, in the mid-60s. and he was also for things like universal health care and a guaranteed minimum wage what you would call today kind of democratic socialism of a bernie sanders variety again that was very controversial then too none of those have anything to do with the issues he is alleged to have been a radical on namely racial identity the importance of race he never wavered on that issue he always felt that the important thing was common humanity not to divide black from white not to judge people based on the color of their skin, but rather on the content of their character, and steadfastly against policies that discriminated in any direction on the basis of race.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: No one's ever been able to show that he supported those things because he didn't, and he was very clear about that. So you have many scholars on the left saying that the right are the people that have sanitized and co-opted Dr. King's legacy. In fact, closer to the opposite it is true. It's the so-called anti-racists that have had to ignore half of what Dr. King said in order to make it seem like he would agree with what they're doing today, which he wouldn't.
--:-- John Bickley: What do you see as the main drawbacks of anti-racism or neo-racism, in particular its effects on social progress and its impact on Black individuals?
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Okay, so one of the negative effects it's had on Black people is to persuade us that current discrimination is the main cause of Black standing relative to white Americans. It's made a kind of toxic victimhood mentality the norm where I really don't think that that kind of a mindset, which blames white supremacy for everything, is useful.
--:-- John Bickley: First of all, it's not true. And so it's a misdiagnosis of the problems that still do pervade, especially intergenerationally poor pockets of black America. The problem in those places is not white supremacy, but neo-racism has so convinced enough people that white supremacy is the problem that all the efforts have been directed essentially at these sort of anti-racist DEI programs that do nothing to address the root cause of the problem.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: The root cause of the problem with intergenerational poverty, both black, white, Hispanic, and so forth, is that we have to do a much better job helping people between the ages of zero and 18 at the pre age and at the K through 12 level.
--:-- John Bickley: Things like race affirmative action at the college level corporate DEI programs they don even touch the source of the issue And yet those have been the focus because neoracism has misdiagnosed the problem.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: What are some of the policies or approaches or even philosophies that would be helpful for addressing those ages 0 to 18?
--:-- John Bickley: I think the most important study that I know of that points the direction of where we ought to go is by the economist Roland Fryer at Harvard. He did a study where he was able to essentially take over 11 or 12 of the lowest performing public schools in Houston. He fired half the teachers, fired almost all the principals, extended the school day. He looked at how the best charter schools in New York City operated, and he imported those protocols into the public schools. And he was able to raise test scores, all kinds of good results, which are extremely rare to see in public school research.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: And I think that kind of thing is really the direction we have to be moving towards. Unfortunately, in any normal scenario, all of his interventions are impossible due to unions and so forth. But I think that's really the direction we have to go in.
--:-- John Bickley: What role do elite American institutions play in perpetuating racism? You have a lot of experience in them, so do I. How can they be transformed into allies in this fight against these issues, this neo-racism?
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Yeah, well, unfortunately, elite institutions are the places where neoracism has taken its firmest and deepest root. So I'm talking about elite universities, Ivy League universities, corporations, museums, all these kinds of elite spaces, journalism and media, where it has become normal to essentially judge people based on the color of their skin.
--:-- John Bickley: It has become unacceptable to question someone's allegation of racism. And so it's become very normal for there to be just false examples of racism. It's become difficult to speak or disagree about topics related to race for fear of one's career, fear of getting fired, fear of getting canceled.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: And there has to be a critical mass of people in these institutions that say enough.
--:-- John Bickley: So at the K-12 level, you've seen certain charter schools that are extremely successful with precisely the kids that the system has generally given up on. Not to say all charter schools are successful, some are terrible, but the ones that are good are really good and they are better than public schools at dealing with kids that come from disadvantaged backgrounds, single-parent homes, and so forth.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Someone like Ian Rowe is a great resource on that who runs charter schools in New York.
--:-- John Bickley: At the college level, you have the University of Austin in Texas, which has tried to pioneer a different approach, a less ideological approach, or rather a classical liberal approach, really. an approach that values free speech and viewpoint diversity, which at this point, most of the elite colleges and universities have abandoned as an ideal, choosing instead social justice, anti-racism, anti-colonialism as their highest ideals.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: So I think those two educational models at the K through 12 level and at the college level point a direction forward. In terms of media, I write for the Free Press, which Barry Weiss started as an alternative media source, giving people really rigorous journalism, long-form journalism, investigative journalism, the stuff that you can only do if you're like a legitimate resourced journalism outlet.
--:-- John Bickley: But without the woke bias, without the liberal slant that has been endemic in most journalistic institutions.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Well, we're certainly sympathetic to that view here, trying to provide an alternative to this liberal slant in the media as part of the reason we created this show in the first place.
--:-- John Bickley: Coleman, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Coleman Hughes: Thanks so much.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Coleman Hughes, author of The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
