Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness
Coleman Hughes is a 24-year-old phenom. He’s part of what I consider to be a vanguard of black thinkers who reject race consciousness and advocate for colorblindness — people like Kmele Foster, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, and Thomas Chatterton Williams. The five of them did what I thought at the time was possibly the best podcast I had ever heard (see here, with the equally great Part I here), talking about race and “anti-racism” from different perspectives, but from the shared (and rare) core assumption that we should all strive for a world where we don’t treat people differently based on the color of their skin. (Radical, I know!) Since listening to that podcast, I have followed each of these men more closely and have become more familiar with their different ways of thinking and expression, and I have to say I am the most impressed with the youngest. Listening to (or reading) Hughes, you get an impression similar to that you get when you read a book by Thomas Sowell: that you are in the presence of someone ten times smarter than you, but that you’re grateful for the opportunity because you know you are going to learn something. I think I would have felt the same about 24-year-old Thomas Sowell, had I encountered him at that age, but it’s more daunting to have that experience when someone is that young.
Last night as I drifted off to sleep I listened to Hughes give a talk on colorblindness. I fell asleep when the talk concluded after 30 minutes and missed the Q&A, which remains as a treat for me today, but the 30-minute basic talk at the beginning of this audio is just fantastic and is wholly worth your time.
Hughes begins by talking about what colorblindness is not; namely, a literal blindness to race where we don’t “see” color. Of course we see color, and racism will almost certainly always be with us. What we are striving for, he explains, is a world where we don’t treat people differently because of the color of their skin. We will see race, and then ignore it in our dealings with people. He goes on to discuss some common objections, offer some defenses, and discusses Critical Race Theory — making that impenetrable morass of words comprehensible to the layman. It’s a tour de force, delivered in his typical calm and rational style that appeals to me a lot.
I’m a contributor to Hughes and you can become one too, at his Web site. He is a great man and is destined for greater things.
Our esteemed host wrote:
Alas! We can’t even get the government to stop treating people differently based on the color of their skin!
The Dana in Kentucky (fa23a0) — 3/23/2021 @ 9:11 amYay! I got in the first comment!
I am particularly disappointed, though hardly surprised, that the Biden Administration dropped the lawsuit against Yale for discrimination against Asian applicants. Asian-Americans have done everything right, according to the American dream: they worked hard, and brought up their children to work hard in school, to get the best grades, just as American Jews did before them, and what was the result? Harvard’s and the Ivy League’s “Jewish quota”, something which didn’t end at Yale until the early 1960s.
In The Winds of War, Herman Wouk put it in understandable terms: the Jews had been doing “rather too well.”
But, rather than learning from the mistakes of the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, the Ivy League, purportedly our greatest repositories of learning and wisdom, decided to repeat them, this time where Asians were concerned, because if they didn’t, too many Asians would be admitted.
In America, if you are an identifiable group, and your group is doing the right things and succeeding, you must be put back in your place.
The Dana in Kentucky (fa23a0) — 3/23/2021 @ 9:23 amDana #2
Fred (d109df) — 3/23/2021 @ 10:18 amWho wants that to happen? Who is that intended to advantage?
If the establishment perceives you as a potential rival to itself and its posterity, you must be
1) Subordinated,
2) Coopted, and
3) Kept in your place, divided, and turned against each other.
It’s how them that has gets.
nk (1d9030) — 3/23/2021 @ 10:21 amGreat post, I love a positive take on race. It’s basically non-existent, and of course no discussion of the subject will be positive.
And guy talk good.
Dustin (4237e0) — 3/23/2021 @ 11:00 amI grew up in a place that was almost entirely white at the time, except for a few Native Americans who had left the res. But I never heard a racist word from my parents, and the idea of treating people differently according to physical characteristics was contrary to my religious upbringing. The sense I got as a young child was that those outward differences made the world more interesting.
It wasn’t until I went to college that I actually knew any black people. There was also my stand partner in orchestra, whom I knew for a year and a half before I heard someone mention that one of her parents was black, and I thought “Oh, that’s why she has caramel-colored skin and fuzzy hair.” I had noticed those features, but they didn’t stand out as much as her lively personality and wonderful soprano voice. (She sang solos in the top choir.) I never saw her as belonging to a different category of human being. Now the woke would say that my failure to see her “blackness” first and foremost was evidence of racism.
A couple of other students I knew at the time were more obviously black, but it didn’t seem to make them any more different than all the other ways that individuals differ from one another.
Now I live in a place that’s very multiethnic, with a lot of people whose racial/ethnic identity is not obvious, and I have mixed-race relatives. It seems ridiculous to view everyone as a representative of one or another huge category of people when many of them could just as well be assigned to one of the other categories, and (more fundamentally) when the individuals in those categories differ from each other in so many ways.
Radegunda (f4d5c0) — 3/23/2021 @ 12:12 pmFred asked:
If applications were treated strictly without regard to race or ethnicity, Asian students would be, to use the euphemism, “over-represented” in Ivy League student bodies.
The current discrimination is intended to give advantage to black and Hispanic applicants, but if black and Hispanic applicants were the only ones given an advantage, and all others treated without regard to race, the ones facing the greatest disadvantage would be non-Hispanic white applicants.
The best thing to do is simply treat all applicants without regard to race or ethnicity, and let the chips fall where they may.
The Dana in Kentucky (fa23a0) — 3/23/2021 @ 1:46 pmI am particularly disappointed, though hardly surprised, that the Biden Administration dropped the lawsuit against Yale for discrimination against Asian applicants.
Given that the Students for Fair Admissions (the same group suing Yale, with the support of the Trump DOJ) lost its case against Harvard, and current Supreme Court precedent, it’s not surprising.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 3/23/2021 @ 3:36 pmCorrection: Students for Fair Admissions did not sue Yale initially, but did sue the university last month. They have also appealed the First Circuit decision to the Supreme Court also last month.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 3/23/2021 @ 3:40 pmThere is always a market for a black to comfort white prejudice and sell out his own people. White conservatives will write the check. Larry elder made a movie about being a RICH uncle tom.
asset (e0cb67) — 3/24/2021 @ 12:09 amI started listening to this. It’s good. Thanks for the recommendation
Time123 (36651d) — 3/24/2021 @ 7:33 amAs counterpoint, consider how the Democrats (who steadfastly supported Jim Crow for 80 years) are calling any law that tries to reassure voters that elections are fair as “Jim Crow.” Which is a little like Germans calling W a Nazi.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 3/24/2021 @ 12:43 pmThere is always a market for a white pundit to attack “racist white people” and comfort white leftists’ prejudices. He’ll get rich doing it.
Will Mr. Hughes get to talk about Colorblindness om NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN? Of course not.
DN (eb9ca3) — 3/24/2021 @ 1:07 pm@13 nobody writing me a check. As for vote security. Some years ago the democrat leadership said you want every voter to have a voter ID ok we will give a national voter ID to all citizens that will be fraud proof with national registry. The Republicans said NO! A national voter ID would allow to many democrats to vote. we want state voter ID’s where they can be manipulated to prevent as many democrats from voting as possible!
asset (f7f30c) — 3/24/2021 @ 2:03 pmThank you for this. I enjoyed listening to Coleman Hughes.
DRJ (aede82) — 3/24/2021 @ 8:04 pmThank you so much! I was looking for this.
celeb networth (8bef88) — 3/26/2021 @ 5:40 am