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Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeif, and today's episode features Coleman Hughes.

Coleman is a young rising star who just graduated from college this past May, but he's already a well-established public intellectual, writing about topics such as race and social justice. He's a fellow at the

Manhattan Institute and writes for publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,

and City Journal, and has his own podcast, Conversations with Coleman. So as you may have noticed, I don't talk a lot about race and social justice on this podcast or online,

and that's mainly because I feel like these conversations usually produce, let's say, lots of heat and not much light.

But I consider Coleman to be definitely an exception

to that rule. And I felt like our conversation really was interesting and helped clarify my

thinking about some issues that have been on my mind in this area, such as how to decide what

counts as racist, or why people disagree about whether the colorblind approach to race

is a good ideal or not. So I really enjoyed our conversation. I found it refreshingly

nuanced and, as I said, clarifying. And I hope you'll agree. So here is my conversation

...