Words&Dirt

Summary:

Coleman Hughes’s The End of Race Politics is a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun of a book. Its modest page-count shortens both barrels, but they still pack a punch at close range. The shell in the first barrel contains arguments in favor of Hughes’s “colorblind principle,” which impels us to “treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives” (19). In the second barrel resides a passionate polemic against what Hughes calls the contemporary movement of “neoracism,” the belief that “race matters for societal and historical reasons: that discrimination in favor of non-whites is justified on account of the hardships they endure––and hardships their ancestors endured––at the hands of whites” (17-8). Hughes calls neoracism “the latest form of socially approved bigotry” and rejects it roundly (44). Readers who decide to pull the trigger on this book should prepare themselves for its considerable kickback, and would do well to aim it carefully.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• I remember first discovering Hughes’s writing in the late 2010s, and then his podcast in 2020. Around that time, I had begun feeling like the most extreme versions of race-based identity politics in America were verging into bizarre and befuddling territory. This trend seemed especially concerning on the political left, which I had previously considered “my side” on most issues (I identify more as liberal/centrist these days). Just as I was becoming thirsty for balanced, non-hysterical perspectives on the topic of race, this young, brilliant new voice arrived on the scene. It’s not an overstatement to say that I felt––and still feel––that Hughes’s commentary restored sanity to the internal conversation I was having with myself about the problem of race in American life. There have been plenty of other writers and public intellectuals who have supported this process, but none of them has had as big an impact on me as Hughes.
• The End of Race Politics is Hughes’s first book. It was a pleasure to read and I found it intellectually satisfying in several ways. As mentioned above, the book is very short, which is both a strength and a weakness. To continue the shotgun analogy, Hughes has no problem inflicting mortal damage to “close range” targets––the silliest “neoracist” ideas and writers who have recently curried favor with elites and well-meaning citizens eager to assume the mantle of antiracism. He also makes a strong and sensible case for colorblindness, although it sometimes takes a backseat to his blasting of neoracist ideology. I think the book struggles, however, to successfully take down some of the more nuanced and sophisticated objections to Hughes’s perspective.
• Let’s start with what works well, which is a lot. Most of the book reads like an extended ELI5 (“explain like I’m 5”) post you might run into on reddit. He reinforces ideas that I thought were obvious to most people when I was growing up, such as “the way to move closer to achieving the goals we care about together is not by revitalizing race thinking but by extracting ourselves from its grip” and “race is not an essential part of our identities…race has nothing to do with who we are, deep down” and “we need to accept that no one’s lived experience is categorically superior to anyone else’s” (26, 62, 143). Such statements would feel patronizing except for the fact that the national conversation about race in America has become so warped compared to that of previous generations. We now need someone like Hughes to remind us that colorblindness was the original aspiration of the American abolitionist movement, the brave activists who fought against Jim Crow, and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement such as Martin Luther King, Jr. “Race-conscious” approaches, now all the rage, were for generations considered to be the main drivers of racist thinking and policies. Hughes does a great job of arguing that we need to ditch these neoracist views and return to the colorblind principle––the core value that generated such incredible progress for people of color over just a few short centuries and can be expected to create more progress in the future. This is “common humanity” identity politics in its most noble and potent form.
• The term “neoracism” is useful and easy to integrate into how we think and speak about these issues. I hope it gains traction in the media more generally because it serves as an excellent shorthand for distinguishing between neoracist views and “true antiracism,” which Hughes rightly points out is more aligned with colorblindness.
• In general, Hughes’s analysis of how neoracism has gained ground is on point. I especially enjoyed his description of how neoracist views––many of which are inherently inflammatory and divisive––spread more effectively on social media and drive more engagement on traditional media platforms compared to sober and unifying calls for colorblindness. He skillfully shows that this dynamic has led to a perception of increased racism and racist violence in America, when in fact these factors have decreased significantly since the civil rights era.
• Hughes’s discussion of how cultural factors influence societal outcomes is also enlightening. He drives home the point that cultures––which are not the same as race but often correlate with it––do not all share the same norms and values. This means it is therefore unreasonable to expect members of all cultures to be represented in education, business, and politics in proportions that precisely correspond with their share of the general population. This is yet another position that feels like it should be common sense, but is necessary to refute the simplistic models of “racial equity” (i.e. racial quota systems) that are presently being pedaled in our elite institutions and beyond.
• This is a minor point, but as someone who cares about the subtleties of writing, I appreciate Hughes’s stylistic choice to use the terms “black” and “white” without capitalization. This bucks contemporary fads and appropriately deemphasizes the importance of these labels.
• Throughout the book, Hughes does a nice job of anticipating objections to his arguments, articulating those objections in a fair way, and then responding. This pattern is where his philosophical training tends to shine, demonstrating his commitment to reason and logical consistency over tribalist or historically-contingent views.
• There are several areas, however, where I think Hughes’s efforts to head off of his opposition fall short. Most of Hughes’s criticism of neoracism is leveled at Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. This is unsurprising since these two public figures have probably done more than anyone else in recent years to advance neoracist ideology. But they’re also easy targets. Both writers have committed to positions that non-neoracists find confusing and nonsensical, such as Kendi’s insistence that “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas” and DiAngelo’s assertion that “Only whites can be racist.” Their books are replete with poorly-argued, non-evidence-based neoracist platitudes that are easy to dismiss (e.g. Kendi: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”). Although they certainly bear responsibility for being neoracism’s most ardent evangelists, I wouldn’t say they’re anywhere close to the movement’s most sophisticated thinkers. I think Hughes missed an opportunity to engage with other writers who present more nuanced and challenging views. Just a few from my recent reading list include Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Heather McGhee, Ta-Nehisi Coates (who does get one mention), and Richard Rothstein. To be clear, I doubt any of these writers would self-identify as “neoracists,” but it would have been interesting to see if Hughes thought they fit the bill.
• I think Hughes is guilty of occasionally misrepresenting the views of neoracists. One good example is his claim that neoracists endorse “a type of de facto race supremacy” in which they “deny our common humanity…[and] deny that all races are created equal” (33). I can’t speak for DiAngelo because I didn’t read her book, but I have read Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist cover to cover and can say with confidence that this is not true of him. I’m critical of many of Kendi’s views, but nowhere in his work have I encountered denial of our common humanity or the idea that people of any race are superior to people of any other race. Surely there are some crazy neoracists out there who fit Hughes’s description, and “anti-white” rhetoric has become frustratingly acceptable on social media, but I have a hard time believing that these extreme examples represent the majority of folks who would self-identify as “antiracist.” I think Hughes goes too far trying to make neoracists look just as bad as actual race supremacists.
• There were also times when I felt Hughes was cherry-picking a small number of eye-popping examples and using them to make a broader point that didn’t hold. This was mostly in Chapter 3, where Hughes argues that neoracist ideology has captured elite institutions––government, medicine, education, and media. I think it’s obvious that neoracist attitudes and policies are present in all of these institutions to some degree, but I didn’t find his presented evidence convincing enough to conclude that neoracism is dominant in these massive organizations throughout our society. There’s no doubt that neoracism has transcended its status as “a fringe ideology believed by a few radical academics and activists,” but I’m not sure it has fully broken “into the mainstream” in the way Hughes describes (88).
• I found Hughes’s problematization of “systemic racism” largely convincing, especially his point that this label is used to inject unproven and vague claims of racism into causal narratives for various social outcomes when other explanations are more plausible. But he totally ignores some of the most powerful examples of systemic racism that continue to have negative impacts––notably our nation’s shameful history of housing discrimination (i.e. “redlining”) and trends of disinvestment in public goods during periods when people of color began demanding equal access. These issues have been thoroughly documented by Richard Rothstein and Heather McGhee, among others, and I would have loved the opportunity to learn what Hughes thinks about this research.
• Overall, I think The End of Race Politics makes a valuable contribution to America’s ongoing debate about the character of modern racism and possible ways of ameliorating it. I was already on board with colorblindness when I picked the book up, and found plenty of additional reasons to keep supporting it. Additionally, I just want to say how exciting it has been to watch Hughes’s career take off. He’s such an incredibly smart and talented man who has made a significant cultural impact at a very young age (he’s not even 30 years old!). I’m looking forward to seeing where his journey leads next.

Favorite Quotes:

Humans have an inbuilt tribal instinct––a tendency to identify strongly with a group, to aim empathy inward toward its members and suspicion and hatred outward. That tendency appears to be baked into each of us at a biological level. That is our “hardware.” The question is whether we use our “software”––cultural ideas, early childhood education, political discourse, art, media, entertainment, and so forth––to amplify our natural tendencies or tamp down on them. The neoracist mindset, wittingly or not, amplifies them.

I dream of a different society, one that recommits itself to the ideals that people like Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston defended and sometimes died for––a society that’s stronger because of its commitment to fostering unity, not division; a society that doesn’t promote racial stereotypes like DiAngelo, or racial discrimination like Kendi. It’s a society that instead embraces our common humanity, one that recognizes that the way to move closer to achieving the goals we care about together is not by revitalizing race thinking but by extracting ourselves from its grip and ensuring our policies and institutions embody a commitment to colorblindness. (25-6)

A logical outgrowth of this belief in the unity of the human family is the belief that race is not an essential part of our identities––that race has nothing to do with who we are, deep down…

Racist ideologies insist that race inevitably shapes our values and perspectives. But abolitionists and civil rights leaders throughout history have disagreed. They’ve argued that we can and should form our values and perspectives independent of race. (62)

If it strikes you as odd that today’s neoracists sound nothing like Dr. King yet claim his mantle, it should. They do not carry his mantle. They enjoy the moral authority of being seen as the carriers of his legacy while simultaneously betraying the very ideals that he stood for. (66)

Perhaps raising the overall salience of racial identity actually increases interracial tensions. Perhaps the more frequently we talk about racial identity and the more we emphasize its importance, the more race becomes a container not just for the good elements of human nature (e.g., empathy, altruism, kindness, understanding) but also for the nasty elements of human nature (e.g., hatred, paranoia, bullying, insecurity). Though it is difficult to prove this claim with data, this hypothesis would certainly be consistent with the data shown in this chapter––namely a declining perception of race relations over the same time period as a roughly tenfold increase in media mentions of race.

That’s my hypothesis: racial talk makes racist thought. At the very least, it seems at least as likely to be true as the alternative. Based on what evidence do neoracists believe that talking more and more about race will lead to a decrease in racist thoughts and impulses, rather than an increase? This is widely assumed and nowhere justified by evidence. On what basis do they believe that we as a society can drastically increase the total number of race thoughts we have per day but somehow (with surgical precision) increase only the kind of thoughts that are benign? (100-1)

It’s common knowledge that cultures differ from one another. What else could the “multi” in “multicultural” mean? What else could we be referring to when we promote “cultural diversity”? Moreover, culture matters a great deal in shaping who we become. Anyone who isn’t a genetic determinist––in addition to anyone who has decried rape culture, gun culture, or consumer culture––understands that culture matters.

Put those two beliefs together––cultures differ and culture matters––and you should arrive at the conclusion that differences between cultures matter. Yet in the context of racial inequality, the very mention of culture remains off limits. (110-1)

The more I have studied disparities in multicultural societies, the more I have found the language of “overrepresentation” and “underrepresentation” to be fundamentally misleading. These words assume that there is something normal or “to be expected” about seeing different ethnic groups represented at precisely their share of the total population in every domain, statistic, and occupation, when in fact nothing is more normal than for different subcultures to specialize in particular sectors and occupations and experience very different group-wide statistics as a result. The vast majority of such disparities are not plausibly explained by bigotry, systemic racism, or unfairness but by demographic and cultural differences between the groups in question at a particular time. (113)

Human history shows us how wrongheaded the neoracist conception of justice is. It shows us that taking an eye for an eye doesn’t stop injustice; it instead participates in it. It creates new injustices in a misguided effort to remedy old ones. It then demands that those new injustices be remedied by yet newer injustices in the future. The neoracist logic of retaliation will lead inevitably to a cycle of wrongful discrimination that never ends. (120)

Mainstream American society isn’t morally confused about white supremacy; it’s an ideology that most Americans reject on moral grounds. By contrast, many Americans are morally confused about neoracism. They’re fooled by the self-proclaimed “anti-racist” label that neoracists have adopted. That moral confusion makes neoracism a more dangerous threat to the dream.

White supremacy is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. It has long been exposed for what it is, and people aren’t fooled by it. Neoracism, by contrast, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It uses the guise of anti-racism as a lure to garner support from well-intentioned––if misguided––people who want to support the cause of anti-racism but are no longer sure how. (129)

Trying to transform victimhood into a chronic condition should strike us as highly counterintuitive. Suggest you had a traumatic experience and went to a therapist for help. A wise therapist wouldn’t tell you to accept chronic victim status and abandon all hope of recovery, to surrender your autonomy and think of yourself as forever trapped in your experience of trauma. The wise therapist would instead help you develop strategies for moving past the trauma you suffered, empowering you to escape the trauma’s gravitational pull by rediscovering your autonomy.

Neoracists promote exactly the opposite of what a wise therapist would. They promote a mindset that treats hardship as something that people are powerless to overcome––a mindset that undermines autonomy and agency.

There’s a healthier way of viewing the historical suffering of people of color. I’m grateful to my enslaved ancestors for the hardships they endured and overcame. Their victim status wasn’t imagined––it was real. They truly suffered through no fault of their own. But what they suffered doesn’t affect me personally. I don’t and can’t feel their pain. To claim otherwise would be a dishonest bid for sympathy.

What I do feel is gratitude for their courage––gratitude that they were able to stay strong and give me the chance to live a life free of the oppression they suffered. Chronic victimhood is not a workable strategy for living a fulfilling life. Living a fulfilling life requires exercising whatever agency you have. But chronic victimhood undermines that agency. It tries to convince you that you’re powerless, that victimhood is something that defines you––something you can never get past. (139-40)

My experience gives me only a partial understanding of things. When I see something with my eyes, hear it with my ears, or understand it with my mind, I see it only in part, hear it only in part, understand it only in part. It’s precisely because my experience gives me only partial knowledge that I need to engage with other people––that I need to learn about their experiences. Their experiences give them knowledge that I don’t have. Granted, my experiences give me knowledge that they don’t have as well. But that’s the thing about lived experience: it’s just the starting point that each of us has for understanding things. Each of us needs to move past our limited perspective and learn about the lived experiences of others so we can achieve a more complete understanding of the world. We need to accept that no one’s lived experience is categorically superior to anyone else’s; our experiences are simply different. (143)

Neoracists believe that white people have power and black people don’t, and that this asymmetry in group power means that black people can’t be truly racist and white people can’t truly be victims of racism. The crux of the problem with this view is that we, as individuals, never experience having the average traits of our racial group. We experience only the lives that we have individually. If you’re a working class white person, what good does it do you that other white people who you will never meet control vast amounts of wealth? How do you, as an individual, benefit from the fact that people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos belong to the same race as you? The truth is that you don’t. Yet you suffer the loss of neoracist sympathy just the same. The “prejudice plus power” equation, they say, applies equally to you. From the neoracist view, tens of millions of white Americans share in the downsides of being viewed as powerful without sharing in the upsides of actually having power. That is a deep problem with neoracism as a philosophy, and it is a deep political problem for the country as a whole. (151)

There’s a different narrative of race and racism in America––a story of missed opportunities to achieve a colorblind state. Key chapters in that story include the founding of our republic on the backs of slaves, the ratification of a weaker version of the Fourteenth Amendment that opened the door to Jim Crow, a Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation (Plessy), another Supreme Court decision that fell short of affirming colorblindness (Brown), the betrayal of colorblindness at just the moment when the civil rights movement was enjoying its greatest success, and the rise of race consciousness that’s turned elite American institutions into neoracist strongholds.

This series of missed opportunities describes what I view as the real problem of racism in America: our society keeps failing to enshrine colorblindness as its guiding ethos. It is this ongoing failure that has allowed state-sanctioned racism to emerge again and again in new and different forms––most recently throughout the movement I’ve been calling neoracism.

So if that’s the real problem of racism in America––our society’s failure to enshrine colorblindness––how do we solve it?

The short answer is that we need to seize the current opportunity to recommit ourselves to the principles of the civil rights movement. We need to condemn neoracism for what it is: racism in anti-racist clothing. We need to encourage employers, decision-makers, and educators to implement colorblind processes that eliminate the opportunity for racism against minorities. We need to support class-based policies instead of race-based policies. We need to embrace our common humanity and the colorblind philosophy that follows from it. We need to embody that philosophy in race-neutral public policies. And we need to strive to ensure that our personal relationships don’t get infected with toxic race thinking of any sort. (153-4)

The neoracist road leads to a grim world in which whites and minorities eternally swap the roles of the oppressor and the oppressed, the guilty and the blameless––a world with no conception of the common good but one where individuals put the interests of their own racial group first, whatever the costs to others. The neoracist pursuit of false equity results in a war of all against all. Instead of realizing the dream of true racial equality, we’ll realize a nightmare of endless racial strife.

The alternative is the dream I described earlier: a nation where people live in safety and enjoy the freedom to pursue their own happiness; a nation without second-class citizens, where the spirit of democracy prevails and politicians are held accountable to the people they serve; a nation that provides every child with a challenging education that develops the skills they need to grow into responsible adults; a nation where economic growth is steady, recessions are rare, and jobs are plentiful; a nation that provides quality health care to all its citizens and that invests heavily in caring for those who can’t care for themselves; a nation where people are free to move from place to place and can afford to buy or rent homes in areas they want to live; a nation where people can enjoy their neighborhood without fear of crime and violence; a nation that leads the world in technological innovation but ensures that technology serves people, and not vice versa; a nation where people have many different beliefs but maintain a shared commitment to resolve disagreements with speech, not violence, and where people are free to engage in honest, open discussion without fear of being ostracized or canceled; a nation whose wise management of difficult trade-offs on issues like immigration, national security, and wealth inequality sets an example for the rest of the world; a nation in which children hear their grandparents’ stories about the “old days” and marvel at the progress we’ve made. (178-9)

Rating: 8/10