Two Roads: Colourblindness versus Neoracism

Coleman Hughes, the author of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, braved an appearance on the hyper-partisan American show The View to promote his new book. The opinionated hosts of the program, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin, might be clueless on most topics but their capacity for malice is never in question. Hostin did not hold back and attacked Hughes for being “a charlatan of sorts”. A half-black, half-Hispanic analyst for the not-so-conservative CNN, Hughes remained admirably composed during his brief exposure on prime-time television. Manfully he persisted in arguing the advantages of “colourblindness” over identity politics as a preferred mechanism for social engagement. Goldberg, Behar and Hostin, all left-wing identitarians, were not having any of it. Hughes was no more than “a pawn of the Right”, scolded Hostin. The ad hominem attack on Hughes meant that the hosts of The View, conveniently enough, never had to address the substance of The End of Race Politics with its clear-sighted critique of neoracists or, if you like, left-wing identitarians. (editor’s note: Hughes’ encounter with The View’s coven can be viewed in full here).

Coleman Hughes asks why it is unacceptable to refer to Chinese people as yellow and Native Americans as red, and yet black is acceptable for African Americans and white for Caucasians. Just as illogical, I would add, is the use by some of Black (with an upper-case B) and white (with a lower-case w) in the same sentence. Hughes graduated from Columbia University—“one of the most progressive, non-racist environments on Earth”—and witnessed first-hand a mounting obsession with racism, “white students and professors confessing their inner racism unprompted” and “black students claiming to experience racism every day”. The latter-day anti-racist creed pervading Columbia had all the features of traditional racism, albeit dressed in the guise of an emancipatory movement.

The real anti-racist emancipatory movement, according to Hughes, is the colourblind principle adopted by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). However, the triumph of colourblindness as a political creed was short-lived. The philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr—“judge a man not by the colour of his skin but the content of his character”—soon gave way to 1960s-style identity politics associated with Malcolm X (before his final recantation) and led to Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Adjudicating people by skin colour was once again socially acceptable, only now it was whites who were the object of discrimination. Whereas American racists of the past stereotyped blacks as “warm but incompetent” (although sometimes “cold but incompetent”), today’s neoracists categorise the white race as cold, exploitative, unempathetic and even genocidal. Only colourblindness, writes Hughes, allows two people with different skin pigmentations to acknowledge that reality without allowing it to prejudice their relationship. Racial bigotry, as Hughes points out, is clearly irrational given that our humanity is not a function of melanin.

The new generation of “anti-racists”, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo and Ibraham X. Kendi, have found various ways to confirm their neoracist analysis.

The new generation of “anti-racists”, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo and Ibraham X. Kendi, have found various ways to confirm their neoracist analysis. In its simplest form, this one sentence by Kendi encapsulates their argument: “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” According to Hughes, if we take that to mean whites reflexively, stealthily and even subconsciously discriminating against non-whites in (say) the jobs market, the claim turns out to be unsubstantiated by research: “The variable of racial discrimination has a relatively small effect on average income—that is, relative to the combined effect of all the other factors that determine income, such as a person’s overall skills, knowledge, abilities, and social network”. Moreover, whenever a negative social outcome appears to disadvantage whites, such as male suicide rates, Coates, DiAngelo, Kendi et al are not interested, showing that their concern about equal outcomes in society is lopsided: “Their real commitment is instead to de facto race supremacy: a program in which racial disparities must be eliminated except the ones that benefit people of colour”.

To these objections the neoracists will counter that their “modern” race-based analysis is not grounded in the perceptions (or false perceptions) of this or that individual, but “systematic racism”. As DiAngelo writes in White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018): “White is thus conceptualised as a constellation of processes and practices rather than a discrete entity (i.e., skin colour alone).” In other words, it does not matter what people think they know about themselves and their place in society, because racism—to borrow from Barack Obama—is in America’s DNA. Even if some white people are poor, as DiAngelo herself was as a single white mother in her twenties, “white privilege” opens doors as it opened them for her when she decided to enrol as an adult student at Seattle University. Had she been black, she insists, she would have experienced poverty in a very different way. Racial inequity, then, accompanies every human interaction and so any discussion of class or poverty without addressing race is flawed. The circularity in DiAngelo’s reasoning is the result of starting with the unproven (and unprovable) premise that racism imposes itself, directly or indirectly, on every circumstance: “Whiteness Studies begins with the premise that racism and white privilege exist in both traditional and modern forms, and rather than work to prove its existence, work to reveal it.” This, of course, is not so much sociology as ideology.

It also means that DiAngelo need never be wrong. If, for instance, a white person in one of her “anti-racist” workshops turns defensive and denies being racist, that is a case of bad faith. Why? Because DiAngelo has already “established” in White Fragility that white people are racist. In her latest book, Nice Racism: How Progressive People Perpetuate Racial Harm (2021), DiAngelo doubles down on her contention, insisting that all PC-observant progressive whites are racist. They might have good intentions but that is simply a case of “aversion racism”—the desire for a positive self-image that transfers racism to the murky domain of the unconscious. DiAngelo’s ideology provides her with God-like omniscience, the ability to know the darkest secrets of the human heart, as per the title of one of the chapters in Nice Racism: “Why it’s OK to Generalize about White People”. Not only is racism ubiquitous in white people, their “whiteness” has a diabolic quality. As she asserted in one of her diversity training seminars: “To be less white is: to be less oppressive, to be less arrogant, to be less trusting, to be less defensive, to be less ignorant, to be more humble, to listen, to believe, break with apathy and break with white solidarity.”

John McWhorter, an African-American, argues in “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility” (Atlantic, July 2020) that DiAngelo’s account of whites is no less reductionist than its depiction of black people. It ignores the reality or even possibility of African-Americans with “ordinary self-regard and strength” not needing whites to be “exquisitely sensitive” in their proximity. DiAngelo’s depiction of blacks “as endlessly delicate poster children” constitutes “an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension”. What DiAngelo’s work teaches is “how to be racist in a whole new way”. Instead of “dignifying” blacks, White Fragility “diminishes” and “infantilizes” them. In the end, writes McWhorter, Robin DiAngelo has created a fantasy about black-white relations in which she has the starring (and lucrative) role of truth-teller. Any white who diverges from DiAngelo’s creed is a racist; any black who does so is in self-denial.

Any white who diverges from DiAngelo’s creed is a racist; any black who does so is in self-denial.

At the heart of DiAngelo’s neoracist analysis, therefore, is a conspiracy on the part of all white people to swindle all black people even if all white people, or at least most white people, are unaware they are part of the conspiracy. The systematic exploitation of people of colour began with “genocide towards Indigenous people” four hundred years ago and was followed by “three hundred years of kidnapping, enslavement, torture, rape, and brutality towards African-Americans, up through to the present day with mass incarcerations and police executions” and “white nationalism on the rise”. Concern about America’s porous southern border is really about the racism of “children separated from parents and incarcerated at the Mexico border”. One of the commonly asked questions at the “closing circle” of her diversity workshops is whether Dr DiAngelo believes a person of colour can ever do wrong irrespective of the subject of race. Given the context of four hundred years of (continuing) systematic racism, such a query, opines DiAngelo, reflects badly on those who ask such questions: “That so many do, powerfully illustrates how myopic, disconnected, and—might I say—how racist we are.” Here, surely, the “closing circle” is DiAngelo’s neoracist ideology.

This obsession about race contrasts sharply with Coleman Hughes’s advocacy for the principle of colourblindness. He poses a critical question: “Why assume that if you increase the number of thoughts people have about race, you’ll thereby decrease the number of bad thoughts they have about race?” Obviously, says Hughes, real and observable cases of racism might be addressed and remedied. In the bigger picture, however, it is not “by emphasizing differences but by emphasizing similarities” between people that division is lessened. Humans are prone to identifying with groups, but that is no reason to exacerbate our proclivity for tribalism by fixating on racial identity. Instead, “we need to start talking more about our common humanity—the idea at the heart of the abolition and civil rights movement”.

Ideologues do not make good historians or insightful social commentators. They (mis)interpret all events, past and present, to serve the overarching narrative. In 2020, for instance, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for spearheading the “1619 Project”. Her introductory essay in the New York Times erroneously claimed that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery”. Though credentialled historians attested to the inaccuracy of Hannah-Jones’s assertion, the Times moved ahead with publication. Hannah-Jones further claimed that “for the most part, black Americans fought back alone” against slavery and Jim Crow. As Hughes notes: “On her account, it’s as if the abolitionist Quakers, the American Anti-Slavery Society, various local anti-slavery societies, Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Grimké sisters never existed.” It was the cause of colourblindness, fronted by Martin Luther King Jr but supported by both blacks and whites in the 1950s and early 1960s, that saw off Jim Crow: “For neoracists like Hannah-Jones, white participation must be downplayed because whiteness must always and everywhere equate to evil.”

Martin Luther King Jr has posed a challenge to the radical neoracists, since he was so clearly motivated by the principle of colourblindness. King’s writings and speeches are definitive on the matter: “Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the whole human race.” Every Martin Luther King Jr Day, in order to “claim his mantle”, the neoracists have to reconfigure him as one of their own. This, according to Hughes, is done with opinionative pieces emphasising the radical side of King’s politics, his opposition to the Vietnam War and call for a nationalised health scheme along the lines of Britain’s NHS, for instance. The subtle insinuation is that King was a radical like the neoracists, his true legacy “sanitized, co-opted, and weaponized by conservatives and moderates”. On the subject of race, however, King was no Malcolm X: “Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White Power!’—when nobody will shout ‘Black Power!’” King never wavered on the point that, ultimately, his policies were inspired by class-based and not race-based justice.

The entire neoracist narrative, writes Hughes, is strewn with myths and fallacies. One is “The Myth of Undoing the Past”, the idea—as Ibraham X. Kendi puts it—that “the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination”. Hughes advances the case of his African American grandfather who personally experienced the pain, anger, humiliation and loss of income associated with the Jim Crow era. While directly compensating his grandfather “might go some way towards redressing the injustice he’s suffered”, discriminating against a young white person today in favour of a black job applicant because of Jim Crow-era discrimination “simply adds a new injustice to the growing sum of injustices, past and present”. The solution to bigotry, historical or otherwise, is not the introduction of new forms of bigotry, under the guise of positive discrimination or DEI, but “putting an end to discrimination once and for all”. Coleman Hughes, in line with John McWhorter, suggests the neoracists are prey to “The Myth of Black Weakness”, the notion that “black people are in a state of constant emotional vulnerability and need”.

Coleman Hughes, in line with John McWhorter, suggests the neoracists are prey to “The Myth of Black Weakness” …

Closer to the truth, maintains Hughes, prominent blacks in America have disproportionate cultural clout, given “their ability to enforce social norms that punish speech and behaviour they find uniquely offensive”. In terms of culture, at least, white Americans do not hold the same sway, as demonstrated by the good-natured reaction of the Mormon community to the irreverent Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. The truth, as claimed in The End of Race Politics, is that although some Mormons were “privately offended” at the mocking of things they hold to be sacred, the Mormon community had no choice but to react “surprisingly well” because they possess no cultural heft: “As if to prove my point, it was ultimately The Book of Mormon’s portrayal of Africans—not its main target by a long shot—that led the showrunners to actually alter the script and rewrite the parts that offended some blacks.” Hughes aptly refers to Hollywood’s submission to ostensible black sensibilities—that is, “the equation of blackness with goodness and whiteness with evil”—as wokewashing.

On the economic front, in contrast, white Americans—statistically speaking—are still wealthier than black Americans, and yet we experience our lives as individuals; so how does a white working-class person benefit from the fact “that people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos belong to the same race as you?” Because we experience lives as individuals, the median wealth of white people is irrelevant if you earn less than that. Moreover, if we are to equate wealth with economic power, then most Americans, of whatever race, have “basically no power whatsoever—no ability to throw around their wealth so as to impose their will on society”. If there is clear and measurable injustice in America, writes Hughes, it is between “the top 10 percent of American households who own 60 percent of the nation’s wealth” and “the bottom 50 percent of households who hold only 3 percent”. While DiAngelo and her fellow neoracists, today’s self-anointed social-justice warriors, generalise about the power and privileges attached to whiteness, ordinary white working families in America continue to struggle to make ends meet. No wonder Hughes characterises neoracism as “a deep political problem for the country as a whole”.

Race-based affirmative action has done little to improve the lot of genuinely disadvantaged black Americans. For instance, the percentage of students from disadvantaged backgrounds attending Ivy League schools remains intractably low—“between 2000 and 20011, less than 5 percent of Harvard’s student population came from the bottom quintile of income, while about 70 percent of their students came from the top quintile”. This despite the fact that during the same period some 14 per cent of Harvard students were black. In other words, the black students taking advantage of race-based affirmative-action protocols are mostly middle-class, a disproportionate number of them “not even descended from American slaves but from post-1965 African or Caribbean immigrants”. The same scenario applies to corporations such as Microsoft and CBS that have established “a racial diversity quota” for black managers and black writers respectively. Hughes observes: “Race-based policies (as opposed to class-based policies) tend to benefit the people of that race who need them the least.”

Joe Biden, during the 2020 campaign, remarked: “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

This last point, given the growing (though still minority) electoral support for Republicans over recent years, to the consternation of left-wing identitarians, is not entirely lost on African Americans, or Hispanics for that matter. Joe Biden, during the 2020 campaign, remarked: “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” While Biden has since regretted using those particular words, securing the black vote by demonising his political opponents has been a constant theme of his presidency. Only a few weeks ago, in his Morehouse College Commencement Address, he repeated the mantra of the neoracists: “Extremists close the doors of opportunity; strike down affirmative action; attack the values of diversity, equality, and inclusion.” By this account, only Biden and the Democrats can protect the rights and freedoms of vulnerable minorities. From this perspective, at least, Coleman Hughes, as a person of colour, is an identity traitor.

The End of Race Politics obviously takes a different view. Ultimately, all that the neoracism will achieve, as outlined in Hughes’s epilogue, “Two Roads: Anti-Racism vs Neoracism”, is African Americans being “tied to a rehearsed sense of victimhood, and people of colour never allowing themselves to participate fully in the privileges of freedom”. The tragedy of this is that black Americans, in an alliance with white Americans, won the great dispensation of freedom with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. To continue to conceive of African Americans as victims is to deny themselves the fruits of their hard-won victory, “which is to return home from the battlefield and get on with the business of living, loving, and flourishing”.

The neoracism that Hughes so effectively demolishes is not only irrational and counterproductive to the well-being of African Americans, but the tip of an iceberg which looks like a Western manifestation of totalitarianism. Nevertheless, Hughes’s re-conceptualisation of the American Dream is encouraging: “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 cancelled”.

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America
by Coleman Hughes
Penguin, 2024, 256 pages, $69.00

Daryl McCann, a regular contributor, has a blog at darylmccann.blogspot.com.