Coleman Hughes--Uncle Tom? Right-winger? Conservative? Kiss-up/sell-out to White Folks? A Review of His 2024 Book
Monday, 20 May 2024
Review of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America (Thesis, 2024) by Coleman Hughes (235 pp., including appendices, index, and source notes).
Coleman Hughes makes his case well in The End of Race Politics, but that case has been misunderstood (possibly maliciously) by many. Among his critics are people like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi who have a fairly obvious potential self-interest in misinterpreting Hughes. He makes the argument, logically laid out, that these critics have a strong vested interest in persuading everyone—or at least people of color and guilt-ridden white people—that racism is pervasive, intractable, and persistent. And that only people like them (“neoracists” is the term Hughes favors) can bring about justice and equality.
Uncle Tom or Kiss-up/Sell-out to White Folks?
Since I’m admittedly an old white guy, it’s not likely that anyone who thinks Hughes is an “Uncle Tom” or a “sell-out to white folks” would take my defense of him seriously, but it seems clear to me that he’s not. He does not deny that racism persists:
We all see race. We can’t help it. What’s more, race can influence how we’re treated and how we treat others. We are all capable of race bias. In that sense, no one is truly colorblind.
…
But to interpret the expression “colorblind” so literally is to misunderstand the philosophy of colorblindness that I seek to defend. … To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle:
The colorblind principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives (p. 18-19).
As Hughes makes clear, he advocates for anti-racism and against neoracism. The latter (as espoused by DiAngelo and Kendi, et al.), is, he claims, based on a number of falsehoods, while the former is based on ten points that should be “uncontroversial to anyone who supports the true anti-racist legacy of the civil rights movement” (outlined on pp. 42-43). These ten include opposition to “hatred and hostility directed at people because of their race” and embracing “our common humanity.” He presents these ten as pretty much self-evident—and they seem that way to me.
Harmful falsehoods “built into neoracist ideology” include “The Disparity Fallacy,” “The Myth of Undoing the Past,” “The Myth of No Progress,” “The Myth of Inherited Trauma,” “The Myth of Superior Knowledge,” “The Racial Ad Hominem,” and “The Myth of Black Weakness” (pp. 107-108). Hughes discusses all these in some detail.
Right-winger or Conservative?
Hughes is certainly not a conservative in the mold of late 20th century Republicans, but he’s no socialist, either. He writes of the “things we really care about” as being based on the need to address “poverty, disadvantage, and disparities of luck” (p. 11). So—not quite a “the-poor-deserve-what-they-get” right-winger. He strikes me as a pretty clear example of a liberal, if that means someone who despises injustice and arbitrary discrimination and who is comfortable with governments at all levels playing significant roles in society.
Possibly the broadest claim Hughes makes, one that he applies to race politics well but which could also be applied to all manner of conflicts world-wide and throughout human history:
Cycles of ethnic violence around the world show us again and again that a society doesn’t overcome injustice by creating new forms of it. They show us that the law of retaliation, the principle of taking an eye for an eye, is a simplistic and outmoded way to think of justice, one that leads to interminable hatred generation after generation (p. 120).
The End of Race Politics is a fine followup and complement to John McWhorter’s 2021 book, Woke Racism. Hughes credits McWhorter in his “Acknowledgements.”
I strongly recommend this book.
Coleman Hughes (1996— )
An excellent complementary essay—
Some articles about and critiques of Coleman Hughes:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=279995917588761
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/wd54z/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/us/coleman-hughes-black-conservative-colorblind.html?unlocked_article_code=1.pU0.SgB4._r7rDfAxaaoZ&smid=url-share
Note: Anyone may copy and publish what I or my guests write, provided proper credit is given, that it’s not done for commercial purposes, that I am notified of the copying (you can just leave a comment saying where the copy is being published), and provided that what we write is not quoted out of context or distorted.
Thanks for reading Letters to a Free Country! Subscribe for free—always/guaranteed—to receive new posts and support my work.
I like Hughes. Parham was good at first, but he went too far, almost embodying the (bad) parody of utilitarianism that Dickens creates in Hard Time, or the straight-faced argument of the Court in Lochner, which ruled a NY maximum work-week statute for bakers unconstitutional as it "infringed" on the their freedom to contract.
I would give this two likes if I could. The idea that racism is best addressed by a systematic program of reverse discrimination is not only false but pernicious. It sounds like something Vladimir Putin would concoct to make American polarization orders of magnitude worse. It reminds me of an old Firesign Theater skit where, at the end of the Civil War, the former slave Tom addresses his former masters. Tom informs them that slavery is not to end. Rather they will take turns on who gets to be masters and who gets to be slaves. And guess whose turn it is to be slaves now! Admittedly, the image of Massa slaving in the cotton fields while Tom reclines with a mint julep is an appealing one. In reality, though, something intrinsically evil is not made good by being applied to different people, not even the ones who had benefitted from that evil. Turnabout is never fair play. Of course, as an old white man I would be expected to say something like this. It is gratifying to see a young black man who agrees.