Morning Wire XX
[0] Over the past 10 years, our societies have become more and more fixated on racial identity.
[1] We've all been invited to reflect on our inner whiteness or inner blackness as if these racial essences define who we are.
[2] Meanwhile, American society has experienced the greatest crisis in race relations in a generation.
[3] That was Coleman Hughes speaking at a TED talk last year.
[4] He's the author of the new book, The End of Race Politics.
[5] arguments for a colorblind America.
[6] Hughes, who describes himself as a political independent, has made waves by pushing back on the DEI and anti -racism ideologies of the left.
[7] In this episode, we talked to Hughes about his new book and what he views as the path forward to a more colorblind society.
[8] I'm Daily Wire, editor -in -chief John Bickley.
[9] It's May 5th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
[10] Joining us now is Coleman Hughes, podcast host and author of The End of Race politics, arguments for a colorblind America.
[11] Coleman, thanks for coming on.
[12] Thanks for having me. So I wanted to start with an interview you did with the view that went viral last month.
[13] One of the hosts, Sunny Hosten, branded you as a conservative and suggested you're being used as a pawn by the right.
[14] Here's that moment.
[15] Your argument for colorblindness, I think, is something that the right has co -opted.
[16] And so many in the black community, if I'm being honest with you, believe that you are being used as a pawn by the right and that you're a charlatan of sorts.
[17] He's not a Republican.
[18] Who my vote?
[19] He's never voted for a Republican.
[20] You've said that you're a conservative.
[21] No, no. No, you did.
[22] You actually said that podcast that you did two weeks ago.
[23] I said I was a conservative.
[24] He's not.
[25] Yes, yes, he did.
[26] So, but my question to you, my question to you is, how do you respond to those critics?
[27] Okay, let's give him a little answer.
[28] First thing I want to, I don't think there's any evidence I've been co -opted by anyone, and I think that that's an ad hominem tactic people use to not address really the important conversations we're having here.
[29] And I think it's better, and it would be better for everyone if we stuck to the topics rather than make it about me. With no evidence that I just, I want to give you the opportunity to respond to the criticism.
[30] I appreciate it.
[31] There's no evidence that I've been co -opted by anyone.
[32] I have an independent podcast.
[33] I work for CNN as an analyst.
[34] I write for the free press.
[35] I'm independent in all of these endeavors and no one is paying me to say what I'm saying.
[36] I'm saying it because I feel it.
[37] What do you make of that encounter and the fact that it caused such a stir?
[38] And how would you define your perspective ideologically?
[39] So I'm a political independent.
[40] I've only voted twice.
[41] I'm 28 years old.
[42] So it's a function of my age.
[43] Both times for Democrats, Hillary and Biden, though I'm not opposed to voting for Republicans.
[44] So those are my politics.
[45] What I make of that appearance was that Sonny Hosten, rather than address my arguments, she sought to paint me as somehow a compromised individual, either financially compromised or ethically compromised.
[46] And instead of attack her on the same grounds, I just kind of calmly debunked her accusations and then moved back to the topic.
[47] And I think the contrast between how she was arguing in such bad faith and how I just calmly responded.
[48] I think that contrast is what made the moment go semi -viral because that's just something you don't see on daytime television.
[49] And so I think people were struck by that.
[50] Yeah, it was particularly effective.
[51] Before we get into your book, I wanted to ask you about something else that's been in the headlines.
[52] The anti -Israel protests we're seeing at elite universities.
[53] You graduated from Columbia, which has been a hub for these protests.
[54] Do you see a correlation with the kinds of protests that we're seeing on campuses and this emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia?
[55] Is there a crossover between this left -wing protest culture and DEI?
[56] Yeah, so I think the thing people don't understand about DEI and why people criticize DEI is that DEI is an ideology, which says that you can divide the world into oppressors and oppressed.
[57] White people are the oppressors.
[58] Jews are the oppressors, and the oppressed are black people, brown people, Hispanics, and so forth.
[59] And DEI departments, DEI bureaucracies, are examples.
[60] They're usually clusters of bureaucrats that basically buy into this philosophy, but it's the philosophy itself that is the problem.
[61] And that philosophy is very much synced up with the protest.
[62] 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 bureaucracy that have generally viewed white people and Jews as oppressors that are not really subject to the same protections as students, quote unquote, of color.
[63] And this really gets us to the premise of your book, which is that we need to strive for a colorblind society.
[64] First, how do you define colorblindness within the context of modern society?
[65] So for me, colorblindness isn't pretending not to notice race because as adults, at least, we all notice race.
[66] If your listeners could see me right now, they could see that I'm not a white guy.
[67] 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.
[68] So, you know, I tell you that I'm going to do my best not to treat you differently because of your race.
[69] 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.
[70] 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, socioeconomic measures, rather than based on the color of my skin or my racial identity.
[71] If you're for what I just said, you're for colorblindness as I am defining it in my book.
[72] Now you contrast this colorblind ideal to the concept of what you call neo -racism in its emergence in contemporary discourse.
[73] How do you define neo -racism and how does it differ from traditional forms of racism?
[74] Yeah, so the philosophy I just described as DEI is fairly close to the philosophy I call neo -racism in the book.
[75] It's a philosophy that says whiteness is inherently bad, and anything but whiteness is inherently good, inherently morally superior.
[76] This is a philosophy that was pretty marginal in American life for many decades.
[77] You could find it in critical race theory seminars for many decades, but you'd never encounter it if you're just a normal person navigating typical spaces.
[78] until about 2013, when we all got smartphones with cameras and we all were, you know, everyone and their mother was on Facebook, and that fundamentally changed how information spread.
[79] And what that caused was 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.
[80] 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, into your social media feeds, into your K -12 classrooms, where now you have kids essentially being taught that whiteness is a bad thing.
[81] taught to be ashamed of their race.
[82] You have black kids and Hispanic kids taught to wear victimhood exaggerate their victimhood and wear it as a kind of badge of pride.
[83] And all of this has wreaked havoc on race relations.
[84] 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 really emphasize our common humanity, the fact that beneath this skin, we are all more like than we are different.
[85] And the essential fact about you is not the race or the group that you belong to.
[86] It's your personal qualities.
[87] It's how you treat people.
[88] It's your values and so forth.
[89] So that's how I describe it.
[90] Now you bring up the civil rights movement.
[91] There's an ongoing attempt to co -opt Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in recent years.
[92] We're being told that his message was far different than most people think it is, which is that he doesn't want people judged by the color of their skin.
[93] But now we're being told that it's a very different vision, a much more D -E -I and sort of Marxism -aligned vision.
[94] Can you explain that debate and where you stand on that, which side you stand on?
[95] Oh, yeah.
[96] Well, as for Marxism, it's just a historical fact he rejected Marxism.
[97] Anyone can read his essay called My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, where he explicitly talks about why he rejected Marxism.
[98] But on this larger question of what did Dr. King believe?
[99] Every year on Martin Luther King Day, there's a series of articles, you know, Huffington Post, various liberal outlets, left -leaning outlets.
[100] They're all the same article.
[101] They all say the same thing.
[102] They say Dr. Martin Luther King was a radical.
[103] And they imply that he would kind of agree with woke anti -racists like Ibrahim X. Kennedy, Tanahasi Coates, the Black Lives Matter movement, and so forth.
[104] But they all do the same thing, which is they lie by doing a bait and switch.
[105] They say Martin Luther King was a radical.
[106] And then the only quotes and arguments they can pull from to prove that have nothing to do with race.
[107] They have to do with other topics like, for instance, MLK was against the Vietnam War before that was a popular position.
[108] So he was considered an anti -war radical.
[109] he was a pacifist, which was very controversial at the time, you know, in the mid -60s.
[110] 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.
[111] Again, that was very controversial then, too.
[112] None of those have anything to do with the issues he is alleged to have been a radical on, namely racial identity, the importance of race.
[113] He never wavered on that issue.
[114] 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.
[115] No one's ever been able to show that he supported those things because he didn't, and he was very clear about that.
[116] 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.
[117] In fact, closer to the opposite is true.
[118] 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.
[119] What do you see as the main drawbacks of anti -racism or neo -racism?
[120] In particular, its effects on social progress and its impact on black individuals.
[121] Okay, so one of the negative effects it's had on black people is to persuade us that discrimination, current discrimination is the main cause of black standing relative to white Americans.
[122] 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.
[123] First of all, it's not true.
[124] And so it's a misdiagnosis of the problems that still do pervade, especially intergenerationally poor pockets of Black America.
[125] 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 these sort of anti -racist DEI programs that do nothing to address the root cause of the problem.
[126] 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 zero and 18 at the pre -K age and at the K through 12 level.
[127] Things like race -based affirmative action at the college level, corporate DEI programs, they don't even touch the source of the issue.
[128] And yet those have been the focus because neo -racism has misdiagnosed the problem.
[129] What are some of the policies or approaches or even philosophies that would be helpful for addressing those ages, zero to 18?
[130] 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 Friar at Harvard.
[131] He did a study where he was able to essentially take over 11 or 12 of the lowest performing public schools.
[132] schools in Houston.
[133] He fired half the teachers, fired almost all the principals, extended the school day.
[134] He looked at how the best charter schools in New York City operated, and he imported those protocols into the public schools.
[135] And he was able to raise test scores, all kinds of good results, which are extremely rare to see in public school research.
[136] And I think that kind of thing is really the direction we have to be moving towards.
[137] Unfortunately, in any normal scenario, all of his interventions are impossible due to unions and so forth.
[138] But I think that's really the direction we have to go in.
[139] What role do elite American institutions play in perpetuating racism?
[140] You have a lot of experience in them, so do I. How can they be transformed into allies in this fight against these issues, this neo -racism?
[141] Yeah, well, unfortunately, Unfortunately, elite institutions are the places where neo -racism has taken its firmest and deepest root.
[142] 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 on, based on the color of their skin.
[143] it has become unacceptable to question someone's allegation of racism.
[144] And so it's become very normal for there to be just, you know, false examples of racism.
[145] 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.
[146] And there has to be a critical mass of people in these institutions that say enough.
[147] Are there any alternatives now to the existing systems?
[148] Do you see institutions or education models that are providing some hope in terms of really addressing the issues that will actually elevate people from a poverty status?
[149] So at the K through 12 level, you've seen certain charter schools that are extremely successful with precisely the kids that the system has generally given up on.
[150] Not to say all charter schools are successful, some are terrible.
[151] 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.
[152] Someone like Ian Rowe is a great resource on that who runs charter schools in New York.
[153] 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.
[154] So I think those two educational models at the K -12 level and at the college level point a direction forward.
[155] In terms of media, I write for the free press, which Barry Why started as an alternative media source, giving people really rigorous journalism, long -form journalism, investigative journalism, the stuff that you can only do if you're like a legitimate resourced journalism outlet.
[156] But without the woke bias, without the liberal slant that has been endemic in most journalistic institutions.
[157] But we're certainly sympathetic to that view here trying to provide an alternative to this liberal slant in the media as part of the reason we created this show in the first place.
[158] Coleman, thank you so much for joining us.
[159] Thanks so much.
[160] That was Coleman Hughes, author of The End of Race Politics Arguments for a Colorblind America, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.