The End of Race Politics?

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(The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America  is available for sale now.)

 

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America was published on February 6, 2024, by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Thesis was established in spring, 2023 in order to publish “urgent idea-driven nonfiction by thought leaders, journalists, and experts with a strong point of view.” The book is 235 pages long, inclusive of appendices, notes, and index. The pages are small. The font is not. The book is a quick read.

The End of Race Politics has been very positively blurbed by the intellectual celebrities Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, John McWhorter, and Glenn Loury. The average rating of its sixty-four Amazon reviews is 4.8 out of five stars.

Author Coleman Hughes was born in 1996. He grew up in the chic suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, home of Stephen Colbert, Christina Ricci, and other celebrities. He graduated from Columbia in 2020 with a degree in philosophy. He has previously worked for the Manhattan Institute and as an editor at its City Journal. Hughes hosts a YouTube channel. He is an atheist, he is handsome, he speaks in a calm and methodical way, and he is black.

The End of Race Politics argues against ideas promoted by prominent race hustlers like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and the leaders of Black Lives Matter. Hughes argues for a colorblind society, the triumph of merit over Affirmative Action, and uplift for black people starting with rigorous charter schools. Hughes harnesses social science research to buttress his points.

For decades, I’ve been reading work that pushes back against leftist approaches to race. Almost twenty-five years ago, I read Hating Whitey by David Horowitz. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes. I’m purposely using the “scales fell from my eyes” cliché because my experience was cliched. I was a graduate student at the time, who had spent most of my life on school campuses and in left-wing organizations. Horowitz was speaking truths that were buried, and silent, deep inside me. Truths that I didn’t think anyone was allowed to say. Truths that, once I saw them in print, changed me forever.

I went on to read authors dubbed “black conservatives.” Shelby Steele’s fever-pitch outrage encased, like a stiletto in a velvet-lined box, in Steele’s elegant prose, rendered him my “most quoted” black conservative author. Jason L. Riley’s deployment of key statistics; Larry Elder’s in-your-face boldness; John McWhorter’s fearless integrity; Glenn Loury’s firehose of facts; Thomas Sowell’s wide-ranging consideration of middleman minority theory; and Candace Owens’ outrageous willingness to state what we all know to be true, that George Floyd was a lousy role model: all these authors and all their gifts produced page-turning works and must-watch videos. I remember individual pages from their work where I encountered something I’d never known before, or was invited to put ideas together in a way that I never had before.

The End of Race Politics was not, for this reader, that kind of work. It is, though, the ideal book for a certain kind of reader. Hughes’ style is calm and methodical. He’s like Mr. Rogers without the personal warmth. Unlike Steele, he does not recount personal stories that engender rage or sorrow. Steele yearned to be a batboy as a youth but was denied because his skin color excluded him from segregated ballparks. Steele describes white academics robbing him of his own accomplishments. “You didn’t get to where you are today because of your own efforts,” white liberals insisted to Steele. “You are where you are today because of white liberal benefaction.” There’s none of that kind of engaging and instructive anecdote in Hughes’ book. The book is, for the most part, impersonal and dry. Ideas are clearly if unexcitingly expressed in simple, unadorned prose that should be transparent even to high school readers.

There is not a single idea in The End of Race Politics that I have not seen articulated in a Facebook post. For me, that made for boring reading. For a different kind of reader, though, this book is ideal – if you can get the reader to read it. It would be a gift to America if The End of Race Politics were required reading in every middle school and high school. Please consider purchasing this book and handing out copies to those who followed the social media BLM frenzy. Hughes doesn’t confront the reader. He speaks softly and he isn’t wielding a stick. Fellow travelers immune to other forms of passionate suasion may succumb to Hughes’ calmer, gentler approach.

“I’ve always found race boring,” Hughes states, in his opening line. But, “I didn’t choose the topic of race. It chose me … For most of my young life, I rarely thought about my racial identity.” Growing up in diverse New Jersey, he thought of his friends as individuals, rather than as skin colors. On rare occasions when a bully chose race as a cudgel, “The dominant value system would come down on them like a tornado.” Hughes says that such bullying tormented non-blacks, as well. As we all know from our own experience, the kids Hughes said had a hard time were “pale, skinny, nerdy, and awkward,” and “overweight, pimply, and white” and cursed with a speech impediment.

When he was sixteen, Hughes was tapped by his “fancy private school” to attend a People of Color Conference in Houston. The conference conveyed critical race theory. Hughes noted that the atmosphere at the conference was “less scholarly than spiritual.” “Dissent was never welcomed … You could no more challenge the doctrines being taught than you could argue that God doesn’t exist from a Sunday morning church pulpit.” Hughes’ indoctrination into race mongering continued at Columbia. “In four years at Columbia, hardly a week passed without a race-themed controversy.” Being black was conflated with being a victim.

Race indoctrination made Hughes more conscious of his blackness, and made him feel apart from his peers who were not black. He recognized the falsity of what he was being told. He knew he was not a victim. “I was dropped into a simulation where the Real Racism dial was set close to zero, but the Concern About Racism dial was set to ten.”

Hughes defines his opponent as “neoracism,” which, he insists, is “racist, destructive, and contrary to the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement.” Neoracist ideas “pave the way toward a social and political hellscape where skin color – a meaningless trait – is given supreme importance.” Robin DiAngelo’s ideas would create a world where the only thing white people can do that isn’t racist is agree with whatever any black person says. Ibram X. Kendi is a power-hungry, race totalitarian who can’t define racism but who demands racism against whites. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” Kendi says. In opposition to neoracism, Hughes proposes colorblindness as a goal. Colorblindness, he argues, “is the wisest principle by which to govern our fragile experiment in democracy.”

Hughes’ mother was Puerto Rican with a very black father and a white mother. She thought of herself as Nuyorican, that is, someone of Puerto Rican background who grew up in New York City. She’s just one example of a person who did not define herself as “black,” although others did. Hughes goes on to point out that race is a continuum. Arbitrarily dividing people by race lacks scientific support, and yet government programs do just that, very imperfectly. Asian Americans have widely diverse average incomes. Hughes compares, for example, the low average income of American Hmong and the much higher average income of Americans from the Indian subcontinent.

Hmong are from Asia and they are underrepresented on American college campuses. Hughes cites a low-income Hmong doctoral student who applied for a special program for students from underrepresented groups. Her application was turned down because she was subsumed into the larger overall category of “Asian” and other Asians are not underrepresented on college campuses and tend to have higher average incomes. Hughes cites other absurd situations where applicants were arbitrarily excluded from programs awarded to persons from various racial categories, in spite of ample qualifications to be part of that category.

Hughes mentions that the blacks who benefit from Affirmative Action are most likely not blacks from groups we think would most qualify. That is, like Barack Obama himself, they are not descendants of American slaves. They did not grow up in the South or in urban ghettoes. They do not speak black English. Rather, beneficiaries of programs to aid blacks are often generationally wealthy American blacks or recent immigrants from relatively wealthy African nations like Nigeria or Kenya or from the Caribbean, and, like Kamala Harris, are children of highly educated, high-earning, fully acculturated, white collar parents.

“Even if it were possible to create rational racial categories … those categories still would not map onto the things that we should really care about … poverty, disadvantage, and disparities of luck.” Rather than using race as the deciding factor in who gets government and institutional largesse, Hughes proposes socioeconomic status as a criterion to certify qualifications for handouts. Hughes supports his proposal with references to quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., including “As I stand here and look out upon the thousands of Negro faces, and the thousands of white faces, intermingled like the waters of a river, I see only one face – the face of the future.”

It’s not hard for Hughes to find quotes from neoracists that are a combination of absurd, frightening, and evil. “I strive to be less white,” says Robin DiAngelo. ‘To be less racially oppressive … more racially aware … better educated about racism … to be open … interested … compassionate.” New York Magazine published a video featuring real black people insisting that white people are “violent … genocidal … ignorant … oppressive … dicks … lack empathy … take what is not theirs.”

Hughes summarizes race hustlers’ worldview. “Being white is tantamount to being arrogant and ignorant about race, to feeling guilty and defensive about it, to be closed minded, uninterested in and uncompassionate toward the struggles of non-white people, to engaging in racist patterns of social interaction.”

In this, as Hughes accurately assesses it, religious environment, there are things that white people cannot say and that only black people can say. In the high church of Woke, the value of a message depends entirely on “the identity of the messenger rather than the content of the message.” He cites a study that disseminated a King quote. Some study subjects were told, accurately, that King said the quote; others were told that Trump said it. When Trump said it, the quote was assessed as racist. When King said it, it was not racist. Further, Republicans and Democrats assessed the quote differently. Not only the identity of the speaker, but also of the hearer affects how words are heard and assessed. This experiment provides a clue to one of Hughes’ bête noirs: tribalism. Assessing a quote requires work. Some feel insecure about their own cognitive abilities. Tribal affiliation can fix that. You don’t have to think. You can just nod when the tribe tells you to. Going along with what your gang thinks is much easier and less risky than original thought.

A related study asked, “Would People Agree with Hitler When his Statements are Directed Against Whites Instead of Jews?” An online summary of this study reports that, “Agreement was significantly higher for 7 of the 9 statements in the anti-White frame compared to the anti-Jew or anti-Black frame. Of note, 55% of college students agreed with at least one of the three Hitler statements applied to White people.”

Hughes likes hard evidence. He adduces evidence to support his assertion that white supremacy doesn’t have the power it used to have. There are black mayors, black congressman, black senators, black SCOTUS justices, black CEOs, and a black vice president and president.

Hughes provides a list of nine characteristics of neoracists. Most of us have noted these characteristics, including “They endorse racial discrimination,” and “They endorse racial stereotypes;” they do not support policies that would end racism; they do not actually help the black underclass. He lists seven myths of neoracists, like the myth of no progress and the myth of inherited trauma.

Hughes points out that Kendi’s “When I see racial disparities, I see racism” formula is poppycock. One immediately thinks of the NBA, where 17% of players are white. White people are not prevented from playing in the NBA because of anti-white racism. Blacks dominate the NBA because they play basketball better than others. In my own state of New Jersey, occupations reflect divisions of labor that sometimes go back a century and sometimes are quite new. Some Asian ethnicities dominate in nail salons while other Asian ethnicities are frequently doctors. Italians manage trash hauling. Greeks own diners. Hughes lists several diseases that kill whites at higher rates than blacks. The black suicide rate is about one-third that of whites. Clearly, of course, Kendi is wrong, and racism is not responsible for all or perhaps even most racial disparities.

Hughes points out that automated traffic camera systems have been condemned as racist because they assign more tickets to blacks than to whites. The cameras are machines that operate on objective data. Race hustlers calling for the removal of the “racist” cameras render citizens, including black citizens, less safe.

Hughes provides a list of ten qualities of supporters of a colorblind worldview. Such people remain committed to the principles of Martin Luther King. They oppose stereotyping and prejudice. Hughes sketches a history of the colorblind worldview. Neoracists insist that colorblindness is a recent invention and a ploy by white supremacists to hold on to power. Hughes demonstrates that this is not true, and that past heroes of the fight against racism advanced colorblindness as an ideal. These heroes include Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Wendell Phillips, John Marshall Harlan, Thurgood Marshall, and Bayard Rustin.

In another historically revisionist project, neoracists insist that MLK was much more radical than he is perceived to be. Neoracists also insist that white supremacists attempt to tame and coopt King by making him less radical. In fact, though, Hughes says, MLK was radical on certain issues, like class and foreign policy. “He favored universal health care … and he strongly opposed the Vietnam war.” When it came to race, though, he was opposed to neoracism. He argued for one race, the human race. Hughes quotes King. “Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White power!’ when nobody will shout ‘Black power!’ but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.”

Hughes acknowledges that neoracists control many arms of American culture and life, including education, media, and government. He quotes New York Times writer Sarah Jeong who bragged publicly about getting pleasure from hurting white men. Hughes mentions government programs that distribute money to non-whites. Government decision-makers wanted to distribute newly developed COVID vaccines to non-whites first, “even though this approach was guaranteed to lead to more overall deaths.” The neoracist domination of education is very well known. Hughes cites Dr. Aruna Khilanani, who was invited to talk at Yale. She said, “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor.” Minneapolis public schools introduced a new hiring system that replaced the old “last hired first fired” policy with a new policy that protects non-white teachers. Regardless of seniority, non-white teachers would be fired last; whites would be fired first. Neoracist educators taught students that being on time, adhering to objective reality, performing well at one’s job, and being able to write were all “white” qualities.

Hughes cites skewed media coverage of police shootings as examples of neoracism in media. Hughes lists several whites shot and or killed by police under suspicious circumstances. These events were not covered by mainstream media; shootings and deaths of blacks were covered. This bias brainwashed the public into accepting the false BLM narrative.

Neoracism is spreading, Hughes alleges. He includes charts that show that Americans’ beliefs about racism have changed. As blacks progress and white supremacy recedes, people asses race relations as worse, not better. Hughes attributes this change to the smart phone and social media. Black people who use social media are more likely to cry “Racism!” than those who do not use social media. These perceptions are not based in facts. When asked how many unarmed black men are killed by cops each year, respondents insist that the number is over a thousand. In fact, though, in 2019, the real number was 12. Neoracists’ excessive harping on race has just made matters worse. If we talked less about race, Hughes argues, things would improve.

We should, Hughes insists, talk about culture. For life for the black underclass to improve, culture must change. China, a once relatively powerless and famine-ridden country of peasants, with no strong history of piano playing, now produces great pianists. Japanese from internment camps went on to get great educations. American Jews, a hated minority, rose from penniless immigrants, worked hard and became an affluent group. All these examples show that people can and do move on from their pasts into more rewarding futures.

Studies show that resumes topped with various ethnic names, including black, Indian, and Chinese, result in fewer callbacks than resumes topped with WASP-sounding names. But Indians and Chinese, in spite of such documented discrimination, go on to make money anyway. Giving a less qualified black person a job and turning away a more qualified white person is unfair, it can’t fix past discrimination, and it endangers society.

Hughes concludes with a recommendation for a colorblind approach as the solution to the problem of neoracism. As part of this approach, any expression of racism, against blacks or whites, should be stigmatized. Schools should adopt blind grading systems. In fact, on standardized and other objective tests, these already exist. Charter schools that demand performance in accord with objective standards should be established.

A few aspects of this book didn’t work for me. Hughes produced a quick and easy read. That will be a good thing for many readers. But he does have end notes and an index, and he left out citations that he should have included. Hughes must know that he’s saying things that have been said for decades. For example, Hughes is a proponent of class, not race, as a criterion for Affirmative Action. That is, employers and universities should offer special programs based on an applicant’s poverty or other deprivation, rather than the applicant’s skin color. Current Affirmative Action programs are more likely to help well-to-do blacks rather than the underclass who need it most.

Hughes doesn’t credit Richard D. Kahlenberg. Kahlenberg is “arguably the nation’s chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions.” Kahlenberg’s 1997 book The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action was named one of the best books of the year by Norm Ornstein writing in the Washington Post.

When recommending charter schools, Hughes should have mentioned Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s 2004 book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. The publisher describes that book thus, “Black and Hispanic students are not learning enough in our public schools, and their typically poor performance is the most important source of ongoing racial inequality in America today … The racial gap in school achievement is the nation’s most critical civil rights issue … An employer hiring the typical Black high school graduate or the college that admits the average Black student is choosing a youngster who has only an eighth-grade education … Scattered across the country are excellent schools getting terrific results with high-needs kids. These rare schools share a distinctive vision of what great schooling looks like and are free of many of the constraints that compromise education in traditional public schools.” The Thernstroms strongly recommended charter schools.

Hughes points out the many problems with Affirmative Action. All non-whites are now dogged by assumptions that they have achieved what they have achieved not because of their own merit but because of Affirmative Action. That’s just one problem. Other potential problems include disastrous mismatches. Richard H. Sander has argued that Affirmative Action actually hurt not helped the number of black lawyers. Given the above-mentioned inadequate schooling, absent Affirmative Action, relatively underprepared black applicants might be more likely to apply to a lower tier law school, get accepted, do well, graduate, and go on to practice law. With Affirmative Action, top tier law schools actively recruit black applicants. These recruits are less well prepared to keep up in elite schools, they are more likely to drop out, and less likely to have careers. A terrific summary of the problems with Affirmative Action is a 2005 article by Marie Gryphon writing for the Cato Institute. That article is here. Hughes might have cited it or another equally good resource.

Hughes points out that assessments of racism in the US got worse even as, by objective standards, things got better. He attributes this unfortunate trend to smart phones and social media. There’s another obvious cause that he doesn’t explore. For a long time, both blacks and whites defined themselves in relation to white supremacy. White liberals applauded themselves as champions of the underclass. Blacks became used to applauding themselves as survivors of racism, or they used racism as a crutch. “I failed at x, y, z because the white man kept me down  … I don’t have to follow the rules that others follow because I’m black and society is out to get me.” These attitudes became so much a part of people’s self concept that defeating them was no easy task.

Hughes is an atheist and two of his blurbs come from New Atheist godlings, Pinker and Harris. Hughes acknowledges that Christianity and the larger Judeo-Christian tradition was inspiration and guide for the Civil Rights Movement. Hughes rejects Christianity, saying that “the decline of Christianity in American culture has been beneficial in many ways.” He acknowledges, though, that that decline “has created an ideological vacuum.” Hughes bemoans neoracism and other forms of tribalism. He doesn’t put two and two together. Neoracism and tribalism have arisen at least partly because of that ideological vacuum. Identity, membership in one’s own tribe, was a keystone of spiritual life before Christianity. Ancestor worship, celebration of one’s own and hatred of the other, including the very separate moral systems depending on tribal membership that irk Hughes, are features of non-Judeo-Christian religions worldwide. You can’t eliminate religion;  you can only replace it.

Hughes defers to Martin Luther King as guide. Putting up a mortal man as determiner of a value system is risky. King was, in public, a peerless representative. In private, he was an imperfect person. That will become more obvious in a short three years when various unflattering files are opened, as Pulitzer-Prize-winning King biographer David Garrow has pointed out in a 2019 Standpoint article.

So, Hughes wants America to make a 180 and reverse course on several key pillars of every day life. Our schools, media, government, and day-to-day interactions must change. Hughes leaves unaddressed two key questions: why and how.

As he himself says, Civil Rights leaders answered the why question. In fact atheist Hughes quotes the exact scripture that many of those leaders, and we, their heirs, would turn to. It’s Galatians 3:28 and it’s a verse that I, as a feminist, cherish. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

A fish doesn’t know it is in water, and many of us today living in a Western civilization partially formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition don’t realize how revolutionary this verse is. If you’ve ever lived overseas, you’d know better. When I lived in the Indian subcontinent, it was unquestioned that Brahmins were a higher form of life than the rest of us, and Untouchables were not even human. In Islam, diyah, or compensation for a death, is on a sliding scale, with Muslim males commanding the highest price. According to the International Religious Freedom Report for 2012, “The calculation of accidental death or injury compensation is discriminatory. In the event a court renders a judgment in favor of a plaintiff who is a Jewish or Christian male, the plaintiff is only entitled to receive 50 percent of the compensation a Muslim male would receive; all other non-Muslims are only entitled to receive one-sixteenth of the amount a male Muslim would receive.” On what basis, in our brave new post-Christian America, do we argue for the equal worth of human life?

Like many atheists, Hughes uses constructions like, “we need to” and “we should.” Why do we need to, and how will we make this come about? Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo command troops. We saw their troops set fire to cities in the summer of 2020. They rioted, they looted, they killed, they toppled statues. People obey neoracist commands because they are afraid. What force will Hughes wield to enact his policies? He does not say.

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery