0:02

Welcome to the Quillette Podcast. I'm

0:04

your host, Jonathan Kay, a senior editor

0:06

at Quillette. Quillette is where

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becoming a paid subscriber. This subscription will

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also give you access to all our

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articles and early access to Quillette social

0:27

events. Black people

0:29

don't need another apology. We need

0:32

safer neighborhoods and better schools.

0:35

We need a less punitive criminal justice

0:37

system. We need affordable health

0:39

care. And none of

0:41

these things can be achieved through

0:44

reparations for slavery. And the obligation

0:46

of citizenship is not transactional. It's

0:48

not contingent on ancestry. It

0:51

never expires and it can't be paid off.

0:54

For all these reasons, Bill H.R. 40

0:56

is a moral and political mistake. Thank

0:58

you. What you

1:00

just heard was an excerpt from

1:02

Quillette author Coleman Hughes, as C-SPAN

1:04

then described him, speaking on

1:06

the subject of slavery reparations to the U.S.

1:08

House Committee on the Judiciary on June 19,

1:11

2019. At the time, Hughes was still

1:15

an undergraduate student at Columbia University,

1:18

but his intellectual star was already

1:20

on the rise thanks to his

1:22

writing at Quillette and elsewhere. And

1:24

it wouldn't be long before he'd

1:27

start up a popular podcast called

1:29

Conversations with Coleman, as well as

1:31

a sub-stack called Coleman's Corner. During

1:34

this time, he's carved out a

1:36

niche as a smart, independent-minded writer

1:38

and speaker, gaining a substantial media

1:41

following in the process. But he's

1:43

also been criticized by some fellow

1:45

black intellectuals and activists who view

1:48

his traditionally liberal approach to race

1:50

and his rejection of grievance-based politics

1:53

as ideologically off-message. Earlier

1:56

this month, I interviewed Hughes over Zoom

1:58

about his new book called the

2:00

end of race politics, arguments for

2:02

a colorblind America. In

2:04

that book, Hughes harkens back to the

2:07

values espoused by Martin Luther King and

2:09

the original 1960s era

2:11

civil rights movement, and by

2:13

rejecting what he calls the

2:15

neo-racism embedded within modern progressive

2:17

orthodoxy. Here's a recording of that

2:19

interview. Coleman

2:22

welcome to the Collette Podcast. How have you been?

2:24

I've been good. It's good to be back. You

2:27

look very calm and relaxed. Last

2:29

time I saw you in person, I

2:31

think you were in the middle of that whole controversy

2:34

about reparations. I think you had

2:36

testified to lawmakers and there was

2:39

a big blowback on that. I

2:41

remember being like a very stressful time for you.

2:43

Yeah, it was probably a lot less relaxed. It

2:46

feels weird to say, Coleman's just released

2:49

this big controversial book on race politics.

2:51

It's a comparatively relaxed time in your

2:54

life, but I get the sense it is. No

2:56

question. I remember testifying before

2:58

Congress against reparations. Not

3:00

only did I have people jeering and booing

3:03

me in the room, but

3:05

I had people hissing at me as I

3:07

walked out of the room at

3:09

point blank range. Then

3:11

I had people noticing me on the street

3:13

and so forth. A book

3:15

is much more tame than that in that most

3:17

people who read it are reading it because they

3:20

like it. Most people who don't like it don't

3:22

encounter it. It's not like my 10

3:25

seconds of testimonies being broadcast on cable news

3:27

for people on the street to hiss at

3:29

me about. That was much crazier.

3:31

You have some pretty impressive endorsements here

3:34

on the back. Steven Pinker, Sam

3:36

Harris, John McWhorter, Glenn Lowry. Obviously

3:39

you've hit the big time in

3:41

terms of people noticing what your

3:43

ideas are. I remember the last

3:45

time I think we met in person was in Toronto

3:48

and there was a Quillette event and then

3:50

you and I went for Schwerma at this

3:52

place on Queen Street. It was like one

3:54

in the morning. I don't remember what we

3:57

talked about except that you talked about how

3:59

you had to get a early the next

4:01

day to fly somewhere but you really wanted

4:03

to go out and so you weren't

4:05

worried about this person you called future Coleman. Future

4:07

Coleman would be waking up the next morning. I

4:10

think I slept on your couch didn't I? I

4:12

just remember the shawarma. I

4:14

have a very strong memory for fast food. At

4:17

the time did you think future Coleman would

4:19

be writing a book and future Coleman would

4:21

be engushed over by the likes of John

4:23

McWhorter and Sam Harris? I definitely knew I

4:25

was gonna write a book. In

4:27

fact I probably thought I'd write it sooner

4:30

than I ended up writing it. It took

4:32

longer than I expected. So I was definitely

4:34

aware of future Coleman's aspirations and already working

4:36

towards them at that time. Let's talk a

4:39

little bit about past Coleman because apparently

4:41

past Coleman had an afro and also

4:43

past Coleman went to a private school

4:45

at one point. All these people

4:47

were trying to touch your head because it was a

4:49

novelty and then I think it's 2012 took the opportunity

4:52

for a three-day

4:55

trip to some kind of like identity

4:57

jamboree. You're in high school and you

4:59

described your motivations as just like wow

5:01

it's three days vacation from school but

5:03

in retrospect as you describe it it

5:06

was a kind of proto version of

5:09

identity awakening camp or something like that. Can

5:11

you describe what that was like? I mean this

5:13

is a 12 years ago. It seems

5:16

like this event was ahead of its time

5:18

right? The fact I was black

5:20

and Hispanic and not white

5:22

was part of the reason they sent me or they

5:24

offered to send me to this three-day

5:27

excursion. Yeah when I was in sixth or

5:29

seventh grade I had a huge afro which

5:32

became a problem for me because at this

5:35

new private school the white kids and the

5:38

kids of all races there really were not

5:40

used to seeing an afro. So it was

5:42

a novelty to them and they would almost

5:44

every day it seemed want to touch it.

5:47

Some would ask permission, some wouldn't and this

5:49

was a sharp difference from my prior experience

5:51

in public school in my town where it

5:53

was something like 30% black

5:56

kids at that time. So not only were

5:58

there more black kids were in afro all

6:00

of the white kids were used to actual

6:19

exasperation and frustration to

6:23

the point where I cried to my parents like I don't know how to make these kids stop. The

6:26

worst part about it is that it actually

6:28

wasn't mean-spirited or bullying in any way. If

6:30

it were, I probably would have stood up

6:32

to the bullies in a more typical sense but

6:35

it was actually all out of benign curiosity

6:37

which meant for me to shut it down

6:39

would have required a kind of subtle

6:41

boundary setting that I wasn't really capable of

6:43

as a 12 year old. In any event,

6:45

I ended up getting rid of the afro,

6:48

had a great time at the school and

6:50

I really loved the overall environment of the

6:52

school in every other way. When

6:54

I was a sophomore, I believe, or

6:57

a junior I forget, my school sent

6:59

a few kids to what was

7:01

called the People of Color Conference

7:03

which you correctly identify as a

7:05

kind of identity awakening camp and

7:07

it was there that I first

7:09

heard the concepts of intersectionality, critical

7:11

race theory, internalized oppression, whiteness, and

7:13

so on and so forth. Prior to that,

7:16

I had grown up with the ethic

7:18

that your race doesn't matter, your skin

7:20

color doesn't tell you anything deep about

7:22

who you are and that treating people

7:24

on the basis of their race was

7:26

wrong in every conceivable sense but at

7:28

this identity awakening camp, I was taught

7:30

that my blackness was essentially a kind

7:32

of magic, right? That it was like

7:34

a slice of God inside my soul

7:36

that white people didn't have and

7:38

that message was powerfully attractive to certain

7:41

kids. Anyway, when I went

7:43

back to my private school, I kind

7:45

of wrote this off as a weird little

7:47

excursion, little exception to my

7:49

general world and I never expected to see

7:51

it again. It's almost like I visited Utah

7:53

and saw how Mormons lived for a couple

7:56

of days and then went back to reality.

7:58

Fast-forward to a few years later. go

8:00

to Columbia University and suddenly people

8:04

of color conference is the dominant ethic

8:06

pushed by the administration, pushed by a

8:09

subset of the professors and

8:11

believed by a passionate minority

8:13

of the students who

8:15

kind of set the tone for the culture. When

8:17

I get to orientation we do an exercise where

8:19

the black kids go in one corner of the

8:21

room, the white kids go in another, the Hispanic

8:23

kids go in another, Asians, so on and so

8:25

forth. Very much the kind of exercise that would

8:27

have been done at this other conference. The

8:30

effect was to make me feel

8:32

far more conscious and self-conscious

8:34

of my race. What meaning

8:37

my race might impute into other people's minds. In

8:39

other words, I'm being asked to go to the

8:41

black corner of the room and talk about how

8:43

I'm a victim of systemic racism and

8:46

now I worry that people perceive me that way

8:48

and people have made this assumption about me. Rather

8:50

than encounter me as an individual who they don't

8:52

really know anything about, which is how I would

8:54

like to be encountered, now they perceive me as

8:56

the black guy who's a victim. I read

8:59

countless stories about these kind of

9:01

exercises where people are invited or

9:04

instructed to go as

9:07

part of their so called affinity group, Asians go

9:09

to one room and blacks go to one room

9:11

and so forth. One thing I've always just been

9:13

on a banal level curious about, once they do

9:15

that, what do people talk about? I can tell

9:17

you what people talk about is they look

9:21

into their past to

9:23

find examples of times, some

9:25

real, some exaggerated, and some

9:28

imagined when their blackness

9:30

was used against them, when they

9:32

were treated poorly because they were black.

9:34

Most people have something to draw from, some people

9:37

have a lot of stories to draw from, and

9:39

some people have almost none. Yeah,

9:42

so every permutation under the Sun

9:45

is real but what happens

9:47

is it kind of becomes a group

9:49

complaining session, right? Where you zero in

9:51

on the aspect of your life, often

9:53

narrow and unrepresentative moments of your life

9:56

where you were racially discriminated against, right?

9:58

Minimum you felt you were. were and

10:01

everyone eggs each other on to

10:03

make a mountain out of a

10:05

series of molehills. In

10:07

many ways, it's the opposite of what

10:09

a wise therapist would have you do,

10:12

right? Like a wise therapist or a

10:14

group therapy session would not be merely

10:16

a dwelling on the ways in which

10:18

you've been hurt in your life. Right,

10:20

it would be forward-looking. Yeah, it would

10:22

be forward-looking and it would equip you

10:24

with the tools to not dwell on

10:26

what has been done to you, right?

10:28

It would be a positive, ultimately empowering

10:30

lesson about how your life is in your

10:32

own hands, right? And your success

10:34

is in your own hands and encouraging

10:37

what the psychologists call locus of control,

10:39

which is the sense that you are

10:41

in control of your outcomes, which is

10:44

highly correlated with happiness and well-being and

10:46

so forth. So that's

10:48

all to say, I'm not against discussing

10:51

real instances of racism, I've discussed the

10:53

few real instances of racism in my

10:55

own life and I'm not against

10:57

discussing whole areas in

10:59

which society may be racist. I

11:02

am, however, against a toxic

11:04

dwelling on racism

11:06

as a kind of a mode of

11:08

social engagement, put it that way. This

11:10

is obviously a tangent but in my

11:12

ignorance, I'd always assumed the afro was

11:14

like a zero maintenance hairstyle. Why would

11:16

you assume that? Because

11:19

it's round, the Greeks considered the circle

11:21

the perfect shape. How do you ensure

11:23

it's round? But if

11:25

you sleep on it, if you sleep on

11:27

your right side and it flattens, how do

11:29

you ensure the thing with an afro is

11:31

that it's not set, right? The same afro

11:33

can be in 50 different shapes depending on

11:35

whether you slept on it, depending on the day.

11:37

The concept of a bad hair day applies

11:40

as much or more to afros than to

11:42

other hairstyles. Whereas this hairstyle I have is

11:44

completely zero maintenance, it's going to look the

11:46

same tomorrow no matter what happens. And for

11:48

those who are listening on audio and not

11:50

watching... I just have a fade, I have

11:52

a very normal type fade. My knowledge of

11:55

afro is like I grew up in Montreal,

11:58

most of my knowledge of black hairstyles watching

12:00

like the Jackson family on TV. back

12:19

that by survey data sounded more pessimistic

12:23

about the state of American race

12:25

relations than your own grandparents who

12:27

lived through segregation and then I

12:30

was dropped into a simulation where the real

12:32

racism dial was set close to zero

12:34

but the concern about racism dial was set

12:36

to 10. How would you navigate conversations

12:39

with people? You had to

12:41

get through four years of college and you

12:43

didn't want presumably every social encounter to be

12:45

a debate. So what was your coping strategy?

12:48

Well I think I used my social

12:50

intuition to pick my battles.

12:52

It helped that I was a

12:54

multifaceted person. I've never been obsessed

12:57

with politics. You know I

12:59

was really interested in music and philosophy so

13:01

I had lots of other things to talk

13:03

about with a typical friend or acquaintance other

13:05

than politics and half the time I would

13:08

just you know self-censor and let the conversation

13:10

move on because I didn't want to debate

13:12

someone but the other half of the time

13:14

I would just try to express my opinion

13:16

listen to them and then disagree with them

13:18

if they said something that didn't make

13:20

sense to me. Between that and trying

13:22

to write for the campus newspaper and

13:24

eventually writing for Colette, I did develop

13:27

a reputation as in the minds of

13:29

Columbia kids. I was a conservative, a

13:31

contrarian, and a dangerous person

13:33

essentially. That's all relative because to

13:35

be a centrist essentially is to

13:37

be perceived as on the far

13:39

right. I was told by my

13:41

friends that you know people would talk about me

13:43

behind my back and so forth. Running for Colette

13:45

cost you at least one date didn't it? Yeah,

13:47

I did. There's

13:49

a I matched on Tinder

13:51

with with a girl and she was a

13:54

fan of the band that I was in

13:56

by complete coincidence. So we were

13:58

I set her up to be on the

14:00

guest list to one of our performances and then at

14:02

the last second she reneged because she read one of

14:05

my Collette articles. But

14:07

just to be clear, your band

14:09

didn't sing songs about like intellectual

14:11

heterodoxy, right? No, it was

14:13

the Mingus Big Band, the Charles Mingus Big Band, which

14:16

in fact had some of the best black

14:18

protest music in American history, I would argue.

14:20

Well, I'm sorry about that. Don't be sorry,

14:22

this doesn't mean anything to me now. There's

14:24

a lot of books that I've

14:27

read about this cultural moment that

14:29

tend to be catalogs of

14:32

terrible things that happen. Like, hey, remember this

14:34

woman got cancelled because of her dress and

14:36

remember this professor got hounded off his campus

14:38

because he said the wrong thing. And it's

14:41

kind of a catalog of cancelled culture episodes

14:43

that I sort of already know about. Your

14:46

book is not like that. I mean, you make reference

14:48

to a few controversies, but you're

14:51

mostly interested in advancing your own

14:53

ideas. However, you do linger long

14:56

enough on a

14:58

few figures, just long enough

15:00

to skewer them in a very clever way. One

15:03

of them is this woman named

15:05

Robin DiAngelo, who pops up a

15:07

few times in your book and

15:09

you talk about the mode of

15:12

discourse about race that DiAngelo, who

15:14

markets herself as this expert in

15:16

anti-racism, this mode of discourse that

15:18

she asks people to follow. And

15:21

you actually take the time to analyze her tips

15:24

and say, well, she's saying if

15:26

you're talking to a black person, if you're

15:28

a white person talking to a black person,

15:30

you shouldn't be passive, but you also shouldn't

15:32

argue with them, but you also

15:34

shouldn't make them do emotional labor. And then

15:36

I think by negative inference, you figure out

15:39

that really the only way you can follow

15:41

all her instructions at once is if you

15:43

just are like very enthusiastic and just every

15:45

time they say something, you say, wow, that's

15:48

so true, that sounds so interesting, which is

15:50

not, it's not really a method of intellectual

15:52

engagement, right? It's more like a

15:54

sort of call and response religious type thing. When

15:56

you were at Columbia, did you find you were

15:59

talking to people? and they

16:01

were doing that to you? Well there was definitely

16:03

a certain kind of white Columbia

16:05

student that was so brainwashed

16:08

by this kind of... But there are well-intentioned, right?

16:11

Like these might be people who come from private

16:13

schools and they're self-aware that they don't maybe they

16:15

didn't know any black people in their childhood and

16:17

maybe in a well-intentioned way they were trying to

16:20

do the right thing, right? Of course, I think

16:22

all of them were. They were trying to do

16:24

the right thing and what people

16:27

have told them is the right thing

16:29

is if a black person is saying

16:31

something about race you must agree with

16:33

it and you must

16:35

by definition be ignorant. So you just

16:37

have to vocally agree with what

16:39

they're saying even if it doesn't make sense to

16:42

you. You have to turn off

16:44

the skeptical part of your mind. What

16:46

if what that black person is saying

16:48

to them as in your case would

16:50

be you're allowed to disagree with me?

16:52

Like does that cause a kind of

16:54

runtime error in their logic? I mean

16:56

there's often logical errors in all of

16:58

these philosophies, right? The fundamental logical error

17:00

of postmodernism is that everything is subjective

17:03

except for postmodernism which is itself objectively

17:05

true. It's a direct contradiction. It doesn't

17:07

make sense and this is Foucault and

17:09

this is countless thinkers

17:11

that are far more admired than they should

17:14

be in philosophy but yeah it's a

17:16

contradiction in multiple ways. So for instance

17:18

if you're black and you disagree with

17:20

me in the exact same way that

17:22

disagreement is valid but if you're white

17:24

and you disagree with me in the exact same

17:26

way then I default to being correct. That

17:29

can't be true if there's such a

17:31

thing as objective reality and objective facts.

17:34

It can't depend on what your

17:36

skin color is, right? It's not to say that

17:38

everyone has the same experience. It's not to say

17:40

that you shouldn't doubt yourself

17:42

and the narrowness of your own life

17:44

experience and be curious about

17:46

how other people's life experiences are different and

17:49

be curious about how they may know things

17:51

you don't know. All of that is true

17:53

but all of that is quite distinct from

17:55

saying because you're white you have to shut

17:57

up and listen to me when we talk

17:59

about racism. because you couldn't possibly be

18:01

right and I couldn't possibly be

18:03

wrong. That's positing infallibility

18:05

and it's a toxic way to

18:08

engage as human beings that

18:10

ought to presume kind of basic equality

18:12

between us. So you write in your

18:15

book that you find race kind of

18:17

boring but you don't

18:19

find identity boring. You

18:21

acknowledge or at least argue that

18:23

identity is something much more particular than race.

18:27

You talk about how a majority of Asian people

18:29

in the United States reject the

18:31

classification of Asian and they say, well, I'm Korean or

18:34

I'm Hmong or I'm Japanese or something. And you also

18:36

talk about the example of your own mother. I lived

18:38

in New York briefly but I never heard this. I

18:40

don't know how to pronounce it. New Yorkian. Play

18:43

on Puerto Rican, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's

18:46

a massive migration from Puerto Rico to New York

18:48

in the 1950s such that entire neighborhoods were

18:50

now the origin of West Side Story. Why

18:52

that was recognizable is because there's a whole

18:55

part of Puerto Rico that transplanted to New

18:57

York in the middle of the 20th century

18:59

and they're called New Eurekins often. You describe

19:01

her parents, one as being a minefield

19:03

here because you yourself argue that these

19:06

words are inept. Yeah. That

19:08

her own parents, one was black and one was white and that tragically

19:10

she died of cancer when you were 18

19:13

but that as I understand

19:15

your understanding of your mother, in

19:17

a way she kind of transcended

19:19

monolithic ideas of race. Yeah. So

19:22

she was a product of mixed race

19:24

parentage. Both her parents were Puerto Rican.

19:27

One was darker skin than me and one was

19:29

about as light skinned as you. As

19:32

we know in Latin America, there is everything from

19:34

the darkest of the dark to the wights of

19:36

the white. And so she was a product of

19:38

that and came out a mix of the two,

19:40

kind of light brown. And

19:42

she always described herself as either

19:44

Puerto Rican, New Eurekin from the

19:46

South Bronx. She grew up

19:49

speaking Spanish before she spoke English. She

19:51

didn't like the term Hispanic but she

19:53

would sometimes say Latina and so forth.

19:56

And I never heard her identify herself as black.

20:00

After she died, I remember once talking to

20:02

my dad where he kind of casually referred

20:04

to her as a black woman. I almost

20:06

stopped in my tracks. I was like, you

20:08

saw mom as black? And

20:12

it brought the whole thing home to me. I

20:14

use that as an entryway to the question of what do

20:16

we mean by race? To what degree

20:18

is race a social construct? And

20:21

then I kind of go from there

20:23

in the book. Could you explain a

20:25

little bit because it occupies several chapters

20:27

of your book? So I'm asking the

20:29

summarize why you see anti-racism as the

20:31

doctrine is now called by progressives as

20:34

neo-racism. So the civil rights leaders of

20:36

the past from Wendell Phillips

20:38

just after the civil war down to

20:40

A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Dr. Martin

20:42

Luther King and so forth. What

20:45

they believed in was racism

20:48

is inherently wrong and racism is

20:51

defined as a doctrine of

20:53

congenital inferiority of a people. That's how

20:55

Dr. King put it in his final

20:57

book. They took for granted that racism

20:59

can be pointed in any direction by

21:02

any group of people towards any group

21:04

of people and they condemned it in

21:06

every direction from black to

21:08

white, from white to black, from Asian

21:11

to Hispanic and on down. Martin Luther

21:13

King repeatedly said in his lifetime that

21:15

black supremacy would be equally evil as

21:17

white supremacy. In principle, they believed racism

21:20

can go in every direction, but it

21:22

just so happened that the racism that

21:24

was most present in their lifetime was

21:26

anti-black racism and that's what

21:28

they were fighting. They believed in a

21:31

colorblind government that is a

21:33

legal regime that cannot distinguish black from white,

21:35

as Wendell Phillips put it, who coined the

21:37

term colorblind so far as I know. And

21:40

they believe that when we try

21:43

to address policy towards the disadvantage,

21:45

we should define the disadvantage based

21:48

on class and socio-economics

21:50

not based on race. That

21:52

is essentially my view as well and it comes

21:54

straight out of the civil rights movement. Since

21:57

the civil rights movement, there have been various

21:59

trends on the left which have rejected its

22:01

core ethos, anti-racism

22:07

of the type Kendi and D'Angelo

22:10

espouse. And they reject the

22:12

idea that racism can go in all

22:14

directions, instead proposing that only white people

22:16

can be racist and only black people

22:18

or people of color in general can

22:20

suffer it. That opens the door to

22:22

all kinds of policies which discriminate against

22:24

white people, including policies that

22:26

happen during COVID such as triaging

22:28

emergency aid for restaurants based on

22:30

race as opposed to financial need,

22:32

triaging aid for farmers based on

22:35

race as opposed to financial need,

22:37

even going as far as to

22:39

recommend different categories for

22:41

vaccine priority because certain categories were

22:43

too white and all of that's

22:45

allowed by the idea that white

22:47

people can't even in principle suffer

22:49

racism. From Kendi, we get the

22:51

idea that the state's obligation

22:53

is in fact to racially discriminate,

22:56

that laws ought to racially discriminate

22:58

up until the day when black

23:00

people as 13% of the population

23:02

occupy 13% of every

23:04

other resource of value, every other domain

23:06

of value in society. Something

23:08

that has never happened in any society

23:11

ever, something that has not happened in

23:13

our own society even among different white

23:15

ethnic groups or different black ethnic groups

23:18

where racism can't explain the disparities

23:20

that are nevertheless large. So

23:23

we get both this regime of

23:25

racially discriminatory laws from Kendi, we

23:28

get a racially discriminatory psychology

23:30

and social MO

23:34

from D'Angelo and

23:36

all of it stands opposed to what the

23:38

civil rights leaders of the past envisioned

23:40

as the healthy end goal for our country

23:43

which was a society where I don't treat

23:45

you differently because you're white and I

23:47

ask you not to treat me differently because

23:49

I'm black and we both ask the

23:51

government to not treat either of us differently

23:53

because of our race. We'll

23:56

get right back to the Quillette podcast following

23:58

this short commercial break. on behalf

24:01

of an upcoming meetup featuring heterodox

24:03

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24:07

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24:09

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24:11

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24:13

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24:16

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24:18

thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Steven

24:21

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25:00

of the conversation. Dissident Dialogues, it's

25:03

not just an event, it's an intellectual

25:05

journey. And now back to the

25:07

Colette podcast. When

25:09

we talk about Kendi, I guess he's so

25:11

famous we can just use one name, but

25:14

we're obviously talking about Ibram X Kendi. Until

25:16

reading this book I actually didn't know

25:18

how loony some of his arguments were.

25:21

You describe an article he wrote in

25:23

Politico where he wanted the United States

25:25

to create an anti-racism czar or some

25:27

kind of committee whose members could not

25:30

be fired by the executive and would

25:32

have the power to like veto any

25:34

legislation if they thought it was racist.

25:38

It strikes me it's kind of weird that Politico

25:40

published that. However I should say that as I

25:42

was reading your book some of the craziest stuff

25:45

like that, a lot of it

25:47

was clustered around 2020 and 2021 when there

25:52

was because of the

25:54

murder of George Floyd you did have

25:56

a lot of extreme stuff

25:59

like that. white people

26:01

washing the feet of black people

26:03

in public. New York Times publishing some

26:06

crazy op-eds. You

26:08

talk about Yale University's Child Study

26:10

Center. I brought in

26:12

a psychiatrist Aruna Kilanani and

26:15

her presentation, like she didn't try and

26:17

hide it, her presentation was called the

26:20

psychopathic problem of the white mind

26:22

and then she gives this presentation where she

26:24

rhapsodizes about killing people. Obviously some

26:27

of the ideas you're discussing are still

26:29

very popular now, but would you say

26:31

that that initial flourishing of call

26:34

it neo-racist radicalism really

26:37

did crest in 2020.

26:40

It peaked in 2020

26:42

and 2021 as a result of the

26:45

death of George Floyd, the public outpouring

26:47

of grief and

26:49

sorrow and rage in response to that. However,

26:52

it was a trend that had been trending

26:54

upwards since 2013. And we'll get into why

26:57

that's the case because you have a very

26:59

interesting analysis about why we'll get into that

27:01

in a bit. But yeah, it's certainly fallen

27:03

from a peak since 2021,

27:06

but to say it's fallen from a peak is not to say

27:08

we're in a good place about it. I mean, as I think

27:10

I've said before, if you were in 1946, you could say, you know, violence,

27:14

global violence is peaked, but that

27:16

wouldn't necessarily mean the world was a very peaceful

27:18

place or that you're in a good spot. It

27:21

just means it was recently worse than it's ever

27:23

been. Reading your book, I got the sense either

27:25

you're an extremely self-aware person about how

27:28

your ideas can be attacked and have

27:30

been attacked and or you had a

27:32

very smart group of readers

27:34

who read your manuscript and pointed out possible

27:36

counter arguments because there are several points in

27:38

the book where you stop and say, look,

27:41

I want to be very clear. I'm not

27:43

arguing this and I want to acknowledge this.

27:45

So one of those points is where you talk

27:48

about colorblindness. Could you explain

27:50

for our listeners the

27:52

difference between the kind of individual-based

27:55

civil rights approach you have to

27:57

the issue of race and the

27:59

idea of complete colorblindness

28:01

as that term is sometimes used

28:03

to set up a straw man

28:05

argument against your type of argument.

28:08

Yeah, the caricature of colorblindness is

28:10

that it's just pretending not to

28:12

see race. And if

28:14

you pretend not to see race or

28:16

if you really are truly colorblind and

28:18

literally can't see race, then

28:21

people argue you can't see

28:23

racism. Although from your book, I learned that

28:25

clinically colorblind people can actually distinguish black and

28:27

white people. Oh, sure. If

28:29

you have red, green colorblindness, you could easily tell

28:32

I was that I'm not white. Yeah. Anyway,

28:34

some defenders of colorblindness have set up

28:36

a very convenient target for enemies of

28:38

colorblindness by using the phrase, I don't

28:40

see race. The other side can

28:42

simply say, well, actually you do see race. So

28:45

stop pretending you don't. And that's a powerful

28:47

argument, which is why my version of colorblindness

28:49

is not to pretend you don't see race.

28:51

We all see race. And

28:53

more than that, we're all capable of being racially

28:56

biased in theory, right? And we should all be

28:58

aware of that possibility. Colorblindness,

29:00

I argue, is trying your best to

29:02

not treat people according to their race,

29:05

to not treat people differently as a

29:07

result of their race, to interrogate that

29:09

not only within yourself, but

29:12

also to demand that of the

29:14

state. On the surface, being an anti-racist

29:16

should mean that you're downplaying the importance

29:18

of race, which I think you do

29:20

in good faith in this book. Race

29:22

is boring. It doesn't define us. Let's

29:24

move on and talk about other things. And

29:27

I'll quote here, the

29:29

hallmark of believing something is a social

29:31

construct is taking that social construct less

29:33

seriously, relaxing the rules and

29:35

norms surrounding it. Neoracists do just

29:38

the opposite. They police the rules of

29:40

race with the zeal that they could

29:42

not possibly have if they really believed

29:44

it was just a social construct, which

29:46

rings true to me, but you're essentially

29:48

accusing them of intellectual dishonesty here. Now

29:51

or maybe going beyond the realm of, oh,

29:53

it's all well-intentioned. I don't think it's intentional

29:55

because I think people can live in contradiction.

29:57

I think they think they think it's a

29:59

social construct. social construct, but their behavior

30:01

doesn't match that belief. Who

30:04

are the people in society most likely to get

30:06

up in arms about the

30:08

fact that a person with white skin

30:10

owns a Mexican restaurant? Well, it's not

30:12

Mexicans, really. It's not your average Mexican

30:15

that is likely to get mad at that fact. In

30:18

fact, if it's good Mexican food, they're

30:20

likely to be flattered. The people that

30:22

are likely to get mad are elite

30:24

anti-racists that have this particular neo-racist philosophy.

30:27

Who are the people most likely to

30:29

get mad that a white girl wears

30:31

a prom dress with a

30:33

Chinese pattern? It's not Chinese people. Certainly

30:36

it's not Chinese people in China. It's

30:38

not Chinese immigrants that have just arrived

30:40

on our shores. They're likely to find

30:43

that amusing and flattering and to have

30:45

a warm reaction to that. The people

30:47

likely to say, well, you're white, you

30:49

shouldn't be wearing Asian clothes are

30:52

the same people who say race

30:54

totally isn't real and is a social

30:56

construct. That's a contradiction that they have

30:58

to reconcile. My argument is that

31:01

if we say that race is a social construct,

31:03

then we ought to live that way. We

31:05

ought to relax the rules and norms surrounding it and

31:08

not complain so much about

31:10

the sort of fake issues

31:12

like cultural appropriation. So

31:15

we just saw at the Grammys, Luke

31:17

Combs performing Tracy Chapman's old

31:20

song, Fast Car with Tracy

31:22

Chapman. Great performance, everyone

31:24

loved it. Luke Combs

31:26

fans got to see Tracy Chapman, Tracy

31:28

Chapman fans got to be introduced to

31:31

Luke Combs. He is white and

31:33

she obviously got paid, I

31:36

think handsomely for his cover of

31:38

her song. Her song was a

31:40

hit then but his song I think is an even bigger

31:42

hit. Everyone was happy with

31:44

this scenario. No one was offended,

31:46

neither Tracy Chapman nor Luke Combs

31:48

had any problems and it was

31:51

a totally positive moment until a

31:53

few writers had to make

31:55

the obligatory argument that he was

31:59

a white man taking a black woman song

32:01

and that why is his song such a

32:03

big hit when Tracy Chapman's version wasn't quite

32:05

as big a hit though it was a

32:08

hit. Obviously, it's a ridiculous argument on so

32:10

many levels. First of all, there's been nothing

32:12

more normal in American music than for artists

32:14

of one race to do another artist of

32:17

another race's song. I mean, that's been happening

32:19

since recorded music started. How many of

32:21

the old jazz standards sung by Billie Holiday

32:24

or Ella Fitzgerald or Nat King

32:26

Cole were written by white or

32:28

Jewish songwriters like arguably most of them,

32:31

right? Nobody thought that that was weird and if

32:33

they did, you know, you'd be laughed out of

32:35

the room for complaining that Nat King Cole stole

32:37

a song from a Jewish musician by doing a

32:39

cover of it. You talk about how Michael

32:42

Bernstein, a sociologist, found that 55% of

32:44

college students in his studied sample agreed

32:46

with at least one of three quotes

32:48

from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf once he

32:50

swapped out the words Jewish and white.

32:53

As much as I found it disturbing,

32:55

I also thought, well, it kind of

32:57

makes sense. Like if you're going to

32:59

talk about whiteness as this

33:01

like conniving ethos of

33:04

greed and self-advancement and

33:06

exploitation, that is kind

33:08

of the way old school anti-Semitism was, right?

33:11

Oh, absolutely. I mean, a lot of

33:13

the anti-whiteness rhetoric, it's just the classic

33:15

anti-Semitic playbook but swapping Jews for white

33:18

people in general. That's kind of the

33:20

genesis of that Bernstein study is that

33:22

observation. At least in Canada, where I

33:25

live, you sometimes hear people drawing these

33:27

arcane distinctions between whiteness and actual white

33:29

people and they say, no, no, we're

33:31

not talking about actual white people. We're

33:34

talking about this ethos called

33:36

whiteness, which is this evil ethos. Is

33:38

that distinction, is that something you've heard in the United States or

33:40

is that just something we talk about in Canada? That's

33:43

a BS argument that people fall back

33:45

on when they don't want to own

33:47

their bigotry. Can you imagine this in

33:50

reverse? Can you imagine if someone said,

33:52

when I say that blackness means laziness

33:54

or blackness means criminality, I'm not talking

33:57

about black people, I'm just talking about

33:59

black people. How would

34:01

that go over with the black community?

34:03

Would they say, oh, that seems

34:05

reasonable. He's not talking about

34:07

us. He's just talking about our essence.

34:10

No, it's absolutely absurd to expect someone

34:12

to distinguish between black people and blackness

34:14

or white people and whiteness, or

34:17

Asian people and Asian-ness, or

34:19

Jewish people and Jewishness. As

34:22

much as we attack cancel culture and

34:24

social media and stuff, is it possible

34:26

social media, we'll talk

34:28

about the negative effects in a bit,

34:30

but there has been a positive thing

34:33

in calling out the extremism in progressive

34:35

circles through the traditional

34:37

tools that originally had been weaponized

34:39

by people who promote call-out culture.

34:42

Social media is behind this whole trend to

34:45

begin with. So the fact that people are

34:47

also using social media to fight it is

34:49

kind of unsurprising and masks

34:51

that social media is the source of the

34:53

problem. Pretty much every year from

34:55

2000 until 2013, the number of black

34:57

people who said bias was a big

34:59

issue went down every single year, essentially.

35:02

Then in 2013, trends reversed. So

35:04

the question is, what happened in 2013?

35:06

It wasn't Obama and it wasn't Trump.

35:09

It was something else. And I argue

35:11

that it was the fact that the

35:13

critical mass of people had two pieces

35:15

of technology, camera-enabled smartphones and social media.

35:19

And that changes how information spreads,

35:21

how quickly information spreads, and

35:24

therefore changes what information we

35:26

receive. So in 2005,

35:28

if a police officer is

35:30

arresting a black suspect and that police officer

35:32

is white, something goes horribly wrong. You might

35:35

hear about that on the local news the

35:37

next day. Maybe it makes your local news,

35:39

maybe it makes your local newspaper. And when

35:41

it hits the newspaper, it's surrounded by journalistic

35:43

context. Let's say that same thing happens now

35:45

in 2013, 2014. What

35:48

happens is probably someone was there to

35:50

film it and they probably started filming

35:52

right when the interaction went left, therefore

35:55

leaving out everything that led up to the

35:57

incident. They've posted it on Facebook as an

35:59

album. of context clip and it's gotten

36:01

millions of views within hours. That

36:04

is a fundamental change in the way

36:06

information spreads and in the kind of

36:08

information that gets to your brain. And

36:11

it's all preferentially boosted by

36:13

algorithms that show you the things

36:15

that are going to make you

36:17

most angry because anger equals engagement.

36:19

So you basically have a fundamental

36:21

change in the kind of information

36:23

that we experience and that's the

36:25

direct cause in my view of

36:28

the Black Lives Matter movement, of the

36:30

myth that it was open

36:32

season on police killing unarmed black

36:34

people. And everything we've talked

36:36

about with respect to neo-racism

36:39

and cancellations is all

36:42

downstream of that. You wrote your book

36:44

obviously before the current conflict in Gaza,

36:47

before the Hamas terrorist attacks and then the

36:49

Israeli invasion of Gaza. But I can tell

36:51

you that among my friends who are Zionists,

36:53

there was a period and some are still

36:55

doing it, that all they did, they were

36:58

just watching this stuff on their phone, getting

37:00

themselves worked up about it. And then other

37:02

people who are more passionate about Palestinian rights,

37:04

it was the same thing. They

37:07

were also glued to their phone, but they were

37:09

being radicalized on the other side. You know, this

37:11

plays into some of the material you have in

37:13

your book about the maybe inescapably tribal nature of

37:15

the human brain. What solution is there for

37:18

that? I'm not sure if there is

37:20

a solution, but there are, I think there are things

37:22

we can do. One thing we

37:24

can hope for is that as technology

37:26

evolves, culture evolves with it and that

37:28

we develop norms of not jumping to

37:31

assumptions based on video clips. Another thing

37:33

is community notes model on Twitter is

37:35

working better than any other attempts at

37:37

fact checking I've seen in a sense

37:40

that when someone says something really misleading

37:42

on Twitter, rather than fact check it,

37:44

you crowdsource a community context note and

37:46

those context notes are nine times out

37:49

of 10 very helpful to you understanding how

37:51

what's being said might be misleading. I've seen

37:53

it done by the right and the left.

37:55

There are people like Jonathan Hight that have

37:57

thought about the micro solutions. much

38:00

more than I have. In general, staying off our

38:02

phones more of the time I think would be

38:04

a good thing. Phone-free classrooms

38:06

seems to me a no-brainer. Everybody I know talks

38:08

about you on social media, but you yourself are

38:11

not a huge user of social media as far

38:13

as I can tell. Yeah, you're not

38:15

the first person to say that. I think I've... Yeah,

38:17

I don't use Twitter as much as I used to.

38:19

I think using Twitter is not

38:21

the most pleasant experience. I'm not a person

38:23

that wants to live my life online. I

38:26

look at what's happening far more than I

38:28

comment and I try less and less to

38:30

just be reactive and jumping on whatever

38:33

is the latest thing because it's

38:35

less satisfying to live that way in my view.

38:37

You have an interesting analogy where you

38:39

talk about kind of a thought experiment.

38:41

You talk about people who are trying

38:44

to solve the problem of all this

38:46

hostility between Yankee fans and Red Sox

38:48

fans and you say,

38:50

well, you know, the imagined response would

38:53

be, oh, let's just talk about

38:55

baseball in general and how important baseball is

38:57

and how amazing baseball is. But then you

38:59

say, well, that's

39:01

probably going to make the problem worse because

39:04

if all you're doing is talking about the

39:06

amazingness and existential importance of baseball, then people

39:08

are going to be like, well, yeah, that's

39:10

exactly why it's like so important that people

39:12

hate the Yankees and love the Red Sox

39:14

or vice versa. And you kind of make

39:16

an analogy to race. But isn't your life

39:19

kind of a little bit, I guess by

39:21

necessity, lived in a kind of contradictory state

39:23

since because you have this argument to make

39:25

against how fixated people

39:27

are on race. You yourself have to

39:30

talk about race because you can't argue

39:32

against that idea without talking about race

39:34

and race is in the title of

39:36

your book. It's called the end of race politics. Is your

39:39

ultimate goal that you're not going to have to write

39:41

books like this and people talk about race less and

39:43

your next book is going to be about music? Well,

39:46

I don't really value books about music all that

39:48

much. Although I do like Ted Joya. Ted Joya

39:50

is a really great music writer. So yeah, my

39:52

next book definitely wouldn't be about music. As I

39:54

say, writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

39:56

That's a good one. But yeah, I mean, it's

39:59

only a seeming pair For instance,

40:01

is it a paradox that an

40:03

atheist like Sam Harris or

40:05

Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins has

40:07

spent so much time talking about God,

40:10

right? Well, it's only a seeming paradox

40:12

because they live in a society where

40:14

most people believe in God and they

40:16

think there is no God probably and

40:18

that the whole idea of God's importance

40:20

is a myth and a pernicious one.

40:22

So how are they going to convey

40:24

that message other than to talk a

40:26

lot about the idea of God? I

40:29

argue that race is not a significant

40:31

attribute and I live in a society

40:33

where a lot of people think it is. I'm

40:36

going to have to spend a lot of time talking about

40:38

the idea of race in order

40:40

to convey why it's less important and

40:42

why we should view it as less

40:44

important and less real than many people

40:46

do. Coleman Hughes is the author of

40:48

The End of Race Politics, Arguments for

40:50

a Colorblind America. Coleman, thanks so much

40:53

for being on the Colette Podcast. Thanks for having me, John. Thank

40:56

you for listening to this episode of the

40:58

Colette Podcast. Colette is where

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