Discussing Neo-Racism in Higher Education with Coleman Hughes

The following is an edited transcript of a recent interview between Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley and writer, podcast host, and author Coleman Hughes on a Sunday Extra edition of Morning Wire. They discuss Coleman’s new book “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America” and how his push back on DEI is making waves.

JOHN: Joining us now is Coleman Hughes, podcast host and author of “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.” Coleman, thanks for coming on.

COLEMAN: Thanks for having me.

JOHN: So I want to start with an interview you did with The View that went viral last month. One of the hosts, Sunny Hostin, branded you a “conservative” and suggested you’re being used as a pawn by the Right. What do you make of that encounter and the stir it caused – and how would you define your perspective ideologically?

COLEMAN: 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 I voted for Democrats – Hillary and Biden, though I’m not opposed to voting for Republicans. So those are my politics. What I make of that appearance was that Sunny 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 attacking her on the same grounds, I just kind of calmly debunked her accusations and then moved back to the topic. 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. I think people were struck by that.

JOHN: Before we get to 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 we’re seeing on campuses and the emphasis on Diversity Equity and Inclusion in academia? Is there a crossover between this Left-wing protest culture and DEI?

COLEMAN: So I think the thing people don’t understand about DEI and why people criticize DEI is that DEI is an ideology. DEI is the 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. DEI departments and DEI bureaucracies are usually clusters of bureaucrats who basically buy into this philosophy. But it’s the philosophy itself that is the problem 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 bureaucracies that have generally viewed white people and Jews as oppressors who are not really subject to the same protections as students of “color.”

LISTEN: The Morning Wire interview with Coleman Hughes

JOHN: This gets us to the premise for your book, and many of the statements you’ve made publicly, which is that we need to strive for a colorblind society. First, how do you define color blindness within the context of modern society?

COLEMAN: For me, color blindness isn’t pretending not to notice race because, as adults at least, we all notice race. 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. So, I tell you I’m gonna 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. 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, socio-economic measures, rather than based on the color of my skin or my racial identity. If you’re for what I just said, you’re for colorblindness as I define it in my book.

JOHN: You contrast this colorblind ideal to the concept of what you call “neo-racism” and its emergence in contemporary discourse. How do you define neo-racism and how does it differ from traditional forms of racism?

COLEMAN: 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. 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 were just a normal person navigating typical spaces. Until about 2013, when we all got smartphones with cameras, and everyone and their mother was on Facebook, that fundamentally changed how information spread. And that caused 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. 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. It then spread into your social media feeds, into your K-12 classrooms, where now you have kids essentially being taught that whiteness is a bad thing and taught to be ashamed of their race. You have black kids and Hispanic kids taught to exaggerate their victimhood and wear it as a kind of badge of pride. 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’s directed at, and to emphasize our common humanity. The fact that beneath this skin, we are all more alike than we are different. 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. So, that’s how I describe it.

JOHN: 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 remember it — that he doesn’t want people judged by the color of their skin — but that he actually had a different vision, a much more DEI and sort of Marxism-aligned vision. Can you explain that debate and which side you stand on?

COLEMAN: Well, as for Marxism,  it’s just a historical fact that he rejected Marxism. Anyone can read his essay called “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” where he explicitly talks about why he rejected Marxism. But on this larger question of what did Dr. King believe? Every year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, there’s a series of articles in the Huffington Post and various liberal outlets, Left-leaning outlets, – and 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. Kendi, Ta Nehisi Coates, the Black Lives Matter movement, and so forth. 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. So he was considered an anti-war radical, he was a pacifist, which was very controversial at the time, 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 ideas, however, 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. 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, the opposite is closer to the truth. 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: What do you see as the main drawbacks of anti-racism or neo-racism, particularly in its effects on social progress and its impact on black individuals?

COLEMAN: 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. 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 the sort of anti-racist, DEI programs that do nothing to address the root cause of the problem. 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 0 and 18, at the pre-K age, and at the K-12 level. Things like race-based affirmative action at the college level, corporate DEI programs, they don’t even touch the source of the issue. And yet those have been the focus because neo-racism has misdiagnosed the problem.

JOHN: What are some of the policies or approaches or even philosophies that would be helpful for addressing those ages 0 to 18?

COLEMAN: 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, and 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. I think that kind of thing is really the direction we have to be moving toward. Unfortunately, in any normal scenario, all of his interventions are impossible due to unions and so forth. I think that’s really the direction we have to go in.

JOHN: 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 the fight against these issues, this neo-racism?

COLEMAN: Well, unfortunately, elite institutions are the places where neo-racism 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. It has become unacceptable to question someone’s allegation of racism. And so it, it’s become very normal for there to be 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. And there has to be a critical mass of people in these institutions who say, “enough.”

JOHN: Are there alternatives now? Or do you see them in the works — these institutions or education models that are providing some hope in terms of really addressing the issues that will actually elevate people who are in poverty status?.

COLEMAN: 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. Someone like Ian Rowe is a great resource on that issue, he runs charter schools in New York. 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. And, yeah, 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 you can only do if you’re like a legitimate, resourced, journalism outlet – but without the woke bias, without the liberal slant that has been endemic in most journalistic institutions.

JOHN: Well, we’re certainly sympathetic to that view here – trying to provide an alternative to this liberal slant in the media is part of the reason we created this show. Coleman, thank you so much for joining us today.

COLEMAN: Thanks so much.

JOHN: That was Coleman Hughes, author of “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America” – and this has been a Sunday // Extra edition of Morning Wire.

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