I've never met Coleman Hughes, but I'd like to. His intellect is prodigious. His ideas are heterodox, nuanced, and deeply informed. The force of his arguments commands attention and respect, even from those who famously struggle to engage with ideas other than their own. The clarity of his communication, and his unflappable demeanor, contributed to a memorable appearance on The View last week. Hughes appeared on the program to promote his new and important book, 'The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America' --- which takes a blowtorch to the false pieties and perverse ideologies of America's race obsessives. Several co-hosts around the table tried their best (and I do think it was their best) to combat his points. They failed, utterly.
Whoopi Goldberg was relatively polite, even as she attempted to paint Hughes as too young and naive to truly understand the nature and history of racism in America. Sunny Hostin's performance was the ugliest. It featured unfounded ad hominem claims against Hughes to try to disqualify his thoughts, and and she embarrassed herself with not-even-half-baked counter-points that Hughes effortlessly swatted away without so much as a harsh syllable. Brilliantly done:
• @coldxman's appearance on The View
— Jules Terpak (@julesterpak) March 27, 2024
"There's no evidence that I've been co-opted by anyone. I have an independent podcast, I work for CNN as an analyst, I write for The Free Press, I'm independent in all of these endeavors and no one is paying me to say what I'm saying" pic.twitter.com/sFFWv42MHU
Hostin's portion of this exchange demonstrates how much Hughes knows, and how little she does. It's clear that he's done the reading, quite literally, while Hostin (who was recently astonished to learn she's a descendant of slave owners) is reduced to reading cheap, misleading talking points off of note cards someone handed to her. It's not common to see a guest on The View generate more applause than the hosts who are grilling him, aggressively signaling to their politically-stacked studio audience that he is on the 'bad' side. But that's what Hughes achieved, bolstered by Americans' broad embrace of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's iconic and powerful 'character over skin color' societal plea. Many so-called 'progressives' have spent the last few years demanding that the country disregard King's admonition, insisting that race essentialism -- and even forms of racial discrimination -- are actually essential.
Too much of their immoral, racist bullying has either been crudely and haphazardly challenged, or not challenged at all. Hughes has set his mind to intellectually dismantling their whole program, brick by brick, in a cerebral, principled, and accessible way. His gifts, and the righteousness of his cause, are a potent combination. That's why his critics so often lower themselves to strawmen and cheap shots, to which Hughes is fully capable of responding in thorough, devastating fashion. Here he is taking apart a lazy, unfair attack from someone whose brand is accusing black conservatives of being 'grifters.' Hughes is neither a conservative, nor a grifter, as was established in the television clip above:
You’re clearly confused, Clay. Hope this helps.
— Coleman Hughes (@coldxman) March 29, 2024
The headline was terrible for several reasons.
One: I’m not a conservative and have never claimed to be, not even on that podcast where Sunny hallucinated that she heard it.
Two: my race should be totally irrelevant. The truth… https://t.co/W2VwiepaNQ
He went on: "The truth of the message can’t depend on the identity of the messenger. Yet in our race-obsessed society, many people would simply dismiss my message if I weren’t black. That’s precisely the kind of racial dynamic I’m criticizing. Because I’m a mature and happy adult, I don’t publicly denounce on every little thing that privately offends me—if I did I’d be angry on Twitter all day. And that’s no way to live a life. You shouldn’t interpret my lack of comment as approval. If you’re trying to find evidence of my “hypocrisy”, you’re going to have to do better than a headline that I had nothing to do with." The DEI/'anti-racism' hive mind is threatened by Hughes, his ideas, and his effectiveness as a communicator. This fear manifested itself last year, when his TED Talk was suppressed, following an internal tantrum at the organization. Institutional capture leads to institutional rot, which leads to humiliations like this:
This past April, I gave a talk at the yearly TED conference in Vancouver, Canada. In my talk, I defended color blindness: the idea that we should treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in our public policy. (This is also the topic of my forthcoming book.) Even though a majority of Americans believe that color-blind policies are the right approach to governing a racially diverse society, we live in a strange moment in which many of our elite believe that color blindness is, in fact, a Trojan horse for white supremacy. Taking that viewpoint seriously—while ultimately refuting it—was the express purpose of my talk...The day after my talk, I heard from Chris Anderson, the head of TED. He told me that a group called “Black@TED”—which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black”—was “upset” by my talk. Over email, Chris asked if I’d be willing to speak with them privately.
I agreed to speak with them on principle, that principle being that you should always speak with your critics because they may expose crucial blind spots in your worldview. No sooner did I agree to speak with them than Chris told me that Black@TED actually was not willing to speak to me. I never learned why. I hoped that this strange about-face was the end of the drama. But it was only the beginning. On the final day of the conference, TED held its yearly “town hall”—at which the audience can give feedback on the conference. The event opened with two people denouncing my talk back-to-back. The first woman called my talk “racist” as well as “dangerous and irresponsible”—comments that were met with cheers from the crowd...Two weeks later, Anderson emailed to tell me that there was “blowback” on my talk and that “[s]ome internally are arguing we shouldn’t post it.”
His first-person account goes on to detail the drama that ensued because politicized TED employees didn't want to publish this supposedly "dangerous" talk. After an absurd amount of negotiation and struggle, TED appears to have posted, then intentionally throttled, the video. Read the whole thing. And on the subject of reading, here's the link to Hughes' book.