The End of Race Politics (Coleman Hughes)

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2024

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As one of the few black students in his philosophy program at Columbia University years ago, Coleman Hughes wondered why his peers seemed more pessimistic about the state of American race relations than his own grandparents–who lived through segregation. The End of Race Politics is the culmination of his years-long search for an answer.

Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcaster and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy and applied ethics. Coleman’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The City Journal and The Spectator. He appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2021.

Shermer and Hughes discuss: why he is considered “black” if he is “half-black, half-Hispanic” • what it means to be “colorblind” • population genetics and race differences • Base Rate Neglect, Base Rate Taboos • institutionalized neoracism • viewpoint epistemology • affirmative action • gaps in income, wealth, home ownership, CEO representation, Congressional representation • myths of Black Weaknes, No Progress, Undoing the Past • reparations • the future of colorblindness.

Contemplative yet audacious, his new book, The End of Race Politics, is necessary reading for anyone who questions the race orthodoxies of our time. Hughes argues for a return to the ideals that inspired the American Civil Rights movement, showing how our departure from the colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment marked by draconian interpersonal etiquette, failed corporate diversity and inclusion efforts, and poisonous race-based policies that hurt the very people they intend to help. Hughes exposes the harmful side effects of Kendi-DiAngelo style antiracism, from programs that distribute emergency aid on the basis of race to revisionist versions of American history that hide the truth from the public.

Read Michael H. Bernstein's review of Coleman Hughes book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America: https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/revisiting-colorblindness/

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. The Michael Sherber Show One angle I guess to get into the subject of what it means to be colorblind that I was thinking about is listening to your book and reading some of your other writings
0:33.2	is you're one of my favorite authors but I would say you know along with
0:38.0	I don't know Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins and others I would not say you're one of my
0:42.0	favorite black authors and in fact if I
0:44.5	said it that way like oh along with Shelby Steele and Thomas Sol and John
0:49.0	McWhorter one of my favorite black authors I mean that would be kind of insulting like what there's white authors and black authors and you like the white authors in some different way.
1:00.0	I mean that would be, it's almost time about to say you know I have some black
1:03.5	friends or I know some black people that I like I mean that's kind of racist and I
1:08.2	think that's part of your point you're making here. Oh yeah absolutely I mean I don't I didn't grow up thinking about
1:17.6	people in terms of their race I thought about people in terms of their
1:22.2	individual personalities their individual personalities, their
1:23.9	individual values, capabilities, etc.
1:27.0	And I grew up in a very multiracial diverse suburb outside of New York called Montclair, New Jersey.
1:35.0	And, you know, I really, I grew up listening to Martin Luther King's speech every Martin Luther King day in assemblies at school,
1:45.0	feeling goosebumps at all the places that most people feel goosebumps in that I have a dream speech and really believing,
1:52.0	taking serious a dream speech and really believing taking seriously the now cliche dictum that you should
1:58.3	judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Clearly that's, that should be the goal.
2:05.0	That should be the North Star in our,
2:08.0	in the way we think about race, the way we teach about race.
2:12.0	And in the past... we teach about race.
2:12.8	And in the past 10 years, you know, starting around 2012 and 2013, I began to encounter
2:20.8	in various forms and in various places a philosophy which rejected that and instead
	...

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