Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Why We Need to Change The Way We Think About Race & How DEI, Identity Politics & Wokeness Have Likely Furthered Racial Divides

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

What if everything you thought you knew about race, racism, and social justice was only part of the story?   In this explosive episode, Coleman Hughes, (Free Press writer, podcast host of Conversations with Coleman, and author of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America) joins Mayim and Jonathan for a deep, nuanced discussion about identity, equality, and the role of technology in shaping cultural narratives. From the rise of critical race theory and the decline of race relations post-2013 to the algorithmic outrage fueled by social media, Hughes breaks down the data behind America’s polarization and makes the case for true colorblindness. Is DEI making things better or worse? Are inherited trauma and systemic racism scientifically valid concepts? Hughes tackles how identity politics gave rise to Donald Trump, the difference between neo-racism and old-school racism and why he believes we need to talk about race less, not more.   Whether you agree or disagree, this is a must-watch for anyone grappling with today’s culture wars. Don't miss this thought-provoking dialogue.   Conversations with Coleman Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-coleman/id1716338488   Coleman Hughes' Book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/671726/the-end-of-race-politics-by-coleman-hughes/   Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/   BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can you tell us what changed in 2013? Everyone in America got two pieces of civilization changing technology. One is called the iPhone. One is called social media. 2013 was roughly the time when everyone and their mom was on Facebook. This changed everything in the following sense. Information is now filtered through an algorithm which is designed to show it precisely to the people that will be most angered by it, because that's what the algorithm does, maximizes for engagement.

Once we had smartphones and technology, that enabled a narrative to build that it was open season on cops shooting black people. If you're in an ideology which hyper fixates on race, you're trained to jump to, they're mistreating me because I'm black. I do believe that there are certain aspects of our country that are rooted in racism. where is that fixing going to happen? How long do we as a society keep waiting? The permanent basis for hope is that each new generation is an opportunity

to actually get past race as an obsession and as a reason for division. I don't believe there's any scientific basis for you inheriting trauma for things you did not yourself experience. I'm going to push you here because you set the gold standard for your business, Your website should do the same. Wix puts you at the helm so you can enjoy the creative freedom of designing your site just the way you want. Want someone to bounce your ideas off? Talk with AI to create a beautiful site together.

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With Amazon One Medical 24-7 virtual care, you'll get help fast without having to remain on the line to make an appointment. Amazon One Medical. Health care just got less painful. Hi, I'm I'm Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be breaking down some of the implications, some of the larger implications of where the media and social media in particular has a sway over the lens with which we see the world. And if that sounds like a big topic, we're going to narrow it down a little bit. What if everything that we've been told about the lens with which to see, for example, race? was influenced by a particular agenda, as it were. And it's not an agenda from the left. It's not an agenda from the right. It's kind of the agenda that we're all living in pretty much since the

advent of the technology that we're holding in our hands. We're going to be talking to Coleman Hughes. He's a writer and a podcaster. And he wrote, the end of race politics, arguments for a colorblind America. And I've been following Coleman's work on the free press for for quite some time. The idea that we're going to talk about today is that the lens with which we see race is, in fact, not a balanced lens. What Miami is talking about, if we're being totally direct, is that in 2013, race relations started to decline. And that was fueled by an incentive profit motive of social media algorithms to engage in outrage. Now, that isn't to say there aren't problems in the world and we, this conversation goes far beyond social media, but how we

look at race in America has fueled everything from the conflicts on university campuses to identity politics, which opened the door for a large part of the population to say, we need something different and that difference showed up as Donald Trump. Coleman Hughes is going to also be talking with us about what true colorblindness looks like. He's going to be talking about the disparity between the wokeness and the trumpness and how both of those sides have weaponized their position to give us a particular perspective on race that in many cases is not hopeful or optimistic. And he argues that we can get there with a more balanced understanding of what true equality

and true equity actually is. Of course, the large question is, what do we do? There's an attack on DEI now. People are concerned. And the question becomes, how do we create equality of opportunity so that everyone can contribute and participate and have the chance at the American dream? Before we welcome Coleman, want to remind everyone,

we are over on Substack. My MBELX breakdown is on Substack with our newsletter and, and never-before-seen episodes, never-before-seen behind-the-scenes clips. You can only get them over there. So please head over to Substack, become a subscriber, become a paid subscriber if you want all of the fantastic features. But there's a lot over there available for you.

So please follow us on Substack, and let's welcome Coleman Hughes to The Breakdown. Break it down. Coleman Hughes, welcome to the Breakdown. Good to be here. I'm a huge fan of your writing and very excited to get to talk to you. I tore through the end of race politics, arguments for a colorblind America. And obviously from your writing, I've been following bits and pieces of the train of thought

that is all in this book. Jonathan and I have a very strong interest in sort of understanding where the middle has been lost in our culture, meaning the left blames the right for X, Y, and and Z and the right blames the left for X, Y, and Z. But in a lot of places, it's the extreme ends of those spectrums that are being sort of attacked and debated. And one of the things I love about your writing in a particular this book is you tackle that stuff head on. You say, here's where we thought we were going, here's where it went, and how do we get back to some sort of middle. Can you sort of set the stage for us in terms of how you started writing and

thinking about race in the way that you do? Yeah, so I go into it in detail at the very beginning of my book. I'll give a kind of shorter version now, which is I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. Many people know Montclair. It has a well-earned reputation for being a liberal town, a town that's friendly to gay couples, interracial couples. It's a racially diverse town, so I grew up with friends of every race and I didn't think of them as belonging to a race. I thought of, I didn't think of him as my Hispanic friend. I thought of him as Javier. I didn't think, oh, this is my black friend. I thought this is Rodney, right? You know, I grew up in a situation where every Martin Luther King day, you know, we would have an assembly, we would watch his famous, I have a dream speech,

and see and absorb the quote about judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and that was the default ideal. That was widely shared. When I got to Columbia University, I encountered a very different, a very different philosophy towards race, which was instead of your race not being the most important thing about you, instead of it being about the content of your character, one's race was talked about akin to a kind of magic, right? So it's like if you're you're black in particular, but also if you're really anything non-white, it was talked about as if there's a kind of magic inside of you. And, you know, whiteness was this kind of dull, you know, black and white movie. And to have color was this kind of special. It was akin to, you know,

being told that, you know, when Harry is told he's a wizard in the Harry Potter series, it's like, you are different, you are blessed, you have something special. And I thought this was this was very strange and fetishistic in a way. It made me feel more alienated from people rather than less. All of it was well-intentioned, but all of it, all of it was really the opposite of what I had grown up with. And I became curious about this new approach toward race. Like, is this a new philosophy that's better than the one I grew up with, or is this a situation where, you know, we don't need an innovation in morality and actually MLK got it right, basically.

And more than that, when I was at Columbia, I noticed that some of my fellow students, fellow black students in particular, would write in the campus newspaper things like, I encounter white supremacy every day on this campus. And so I would find those kinds of claims puzzling, to put it mildly, because I was, um, a black kid going around campus, you know, going to parties, plenty of opportunities to, you know, getting into trouble, to get into trouble and to encounter this racism. And I just really genuinely was not finding it. And so I had trouble believing that other black students on campus were like running into anything that I would rightly call racism every day. And I was further puzzled

why people would read those articles, share those articles, and like, narrate, a skeptical critique of them was to be found. And so I was not a person that was interested at all in race or the history of racism per se. I just was noticing a gap between what I felt was my lived experience and reality and a narrative. And I became, I just became curious about that gap. So I tried to read everything I could about it. I wrote for myself for a long time, just trying to understand what is going on here. And then eventually I tried to write for the campus newspaper, which was not a big fan of me. And then eventually I made my way to write for Quillette, an online magazine in Australia.

And that's really how I got my start. What is actually going on when a student says they were experiencing racism every day and your experience is so vastly different? What do you think is happening? You would think after all these years, I'd have a, I'd have like a super straightforward answer because that's the question that really got me into it. But there was a very interesting interview that Denzel Washington gave many years ago.

And this was at a time when, you know, I don't know if Al Pacino has ever won an Oscar, but at this time, Al Pacino had never won an Oscar, right? Which is surprising. And Denzel Washington said something about this. He said, you know, if I was Al Pacino, or if Al Pacino were black and hadn't won an Oscar after all these movies, three godfathers, you know, like all of his movies,

would he think it was because he was black? Would he, you know, what I assume it's because I was black and would there be any way to disprove that? Right. Because there really wouldn't be any way to disprove it. And it would be very easy to assume it was because you're black. fact, it could just be that, you know, you didn't win an Oscar. You know, what happens is you go through life and sometimes people are just rude to you for no reason, right? Like, the other day,

I asked, I asked a bartender for a fork because there were spoons at the bar and she, she gave me the most pissy response I've ever gotten from a service person. Like, I had asked her 10 times and was bugging her. But you never know what's going on for her that day? That's not the point. The point is this happens to people every day. And if you're in an ideology which hyper fixates on race, you're trained to jump to, okay, they're mistreating me because I'm black. So you interpret everyday rude interactions with strangers as racial as opposed to just assuming that this happens in New York a million times a day. People are just rude for no reason. And then when you're in an environment like Columbia, where Wokeness, if not a majority belief, is kind of like a sacred. It's something people don't criticize. No one is ever going to challenge you and say, well, have you considered that maybe that lady was just being rude to you and it had nothing to do with your race? No one's ever going to challenge you or ask that question. And so you get in an ideological echo chamber where it becomes easier to just have this distorted lens on the world. My Ambialx breakdown is supported by Superpower.

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Make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. One of the things that you talked about as possibly the most significant kind of statistic and chart that has ever been put out about race relations was this gallop poll that asks blacks and whites how they feel about relations with one another. And this date has been collected since, I think, 2001. And can you tell us what changed in 2013 and what that statistic is reflecting? Yeah. So it actually even goes for 2001, if I recall. So the basic story here is that throughout the 90s, certainly after the Rodney King riots, race relations just got. better and better and better every single year, to the point where in 2013 at their peak,

a flat out majority of every racial group in America believed that race relations were good. Majority of blacks, majority of whites, majority of Hispanics thought things were good. That was the high point. And then in 2013, you see a sudden precipitous decline and reversal in that trend, a total nosedive to the point where in 2021, basically half the number of people thought that race relations were good. So the question from the point of view of a social scientist is, what the hell happened around 2013? This is an area where partisans on each side like to blame the other party. So if you talk to Republicans, a very common talking point is that Barack Obama embraced identity politics.

and sent the country on a path towards oblivion. If you talk to Democrats, a very popular talking point is Donald Trump came to power, embraced white identity politics, and sent the country on a path to oblivion. Neither of these actually makes sense with the timeline because this trend starts halfway through Obama's term, not when Obama's elected, and it starts before Trump comes to power. So the question is, what is the best theory? In my view, the best theory is what happened is everyone in America, got two pieces of civilization changing technology. One is called the iPhone. One is called

social media. 2013 was roughly the time when everyone and their mom was on Facebook. This changed everything in the following sense. Take time travel back to like 2005. What happens if a cop gets, you know, you get a 911 call. A cop goes to investigate. a scene and sees a suspect matching the description. The suspect is black. They approach the suspect. Suspect reaches in their in their in their pocket for a wallet. Cop thinks it's a gun open fire, opens fire and shoots, right? What happens in 2005? How do you learn about that story in 2005? Well, if it happens in Topeka, Kansas, it will be on Topeka 7 local news the next day. it will be in the local Topeka newspaper.

And you living in New York or L.A. or Orlando won't hear about it at all, quite likely. In fact, even the residents of Topeka who hear about it, they're going to read it in the newspaper when a journalist has had a chance to ask the cop his point of view on the situation, to ask the family members of the deceased, their point of view on the situation, and you're going to get that information filtered through a lens of journalistic content. text creation. Say that exact same thing happens starting around the year to 2013 or 2014-15. What happens is halfway through the arrest, a bystander pulls out their iPhone, which

now has a camera, starts filming. By definition, misses the lead-up to what happens. So already you've got some context missing from the video. films the cops shooting the suspect uploads it to Facebook with no journalistic context once it's on Facebook

it is now filtered through an algorithm which is designed to show it precisely to the people that will be most angered by it because that's what the algorithm does maximizes for engagement has millions of views around the entire world

certainly the entire country and And so just looking at how the difference in how information spread once we had smartphones and technology, that enabled a narrative to build, a narrative that could not have been built prior to this, prior to this tech, that it was open season on cops shooting black people. The actual data didn't matter, but what mattered was the narrative and the videos. And once people believed this, that left an opening for ideologies that have been marginal, but kind of percolating in higher academia like critical race theory.

Critical race theory sort of had an explanation, right? If you see what's going on, all these cops seem to be killing black people uniquely. Critical race theory says, okay, well, I can explain that. Actually, America is fundamentally systemically racist. There's no such thing as race neutrality. all of our structures, in fact, are steeped in white supremacy, even if you can't see that easily. And that explains what's going on. So that took off.

And that's what explains the fact that race relations took a nosedive after 2013. Can you talk about what neo-racism is, as you see it? In the book, I make a distinction between what I call old-school racism and neo-racism. old school racism is exactly what it sounds like it's you know i i don't want a black man marrying my daughter i don't want i don't want my children going to school with black kids it's you know it's it's self-explanatory um it's it's a wolf in wolf's clothing if if by now you don't know that old school racism is is is immoral then there's there's really there's really no helping you i make that this i make the distinction between that and what i call neo-racism it's essentially

the same thing as wokeness with respect to race or social justice with respect to race. I mean, there's many names for it. But it essentially just reverses the polarity of old school racism. It's the style of racism that says white people are inherently evil. Whiteness is evil. Blackness to be of color is to be special, is to be morally superior, is basically to have an innate moral insight into right and wrong that the kind of depraved colonial white mind doesn't have. So the reason I call this neo-racism is because, you know, I really do think it is as much racism as the old kind of racism. It's just that the targets of the racism are are less sympathetic from the point of view of underdog dynamics, right? Black people are seen to be underdogs in America.

naturally this provokes sympathy when a black person is a target of racism. White people are not seen to be underdogs in America. And so there's less sympathy, certainly on the left of the political spectrum. But that doesn't make it any less racist to say that, you know, whiteness is evil, right? And if you complain about anti-white racism, you very quickly can get pigeon. hold as some kind of far-right neo-Nazi because like what you know you really care about you know white guys that are getting you know that are getting um insulted well i think it i think it actually has an extremely toxic effect on a political culture because for instance i remember sarah jong

at the new york times i mean this story this story is old now but five or six years old but she's got she has all these tweets just saying the most vile things about white people right um like comparing them to like goblins and and all this kind of just stuff where if it were any other race that person would just be fired quicker than you know quicker than you can you can you can imagine but they keep her they keep her they say well you know it's okay she didn't really mean it and so what message does this send to the typical white conservative American that maybe does take a certain amount of pride in their group membership, as many human beings do? Well, it says the other side hates people like me. And that's a fantastic way to

polar, polarize people to deliver them into the arms of a dangerous demagogue like Donald Trump. And in my view, it's just a rule of human nature that you can't expect a group of people to co-sign insults directed at their identity. Like that's, you can't expect that of people, of any group of people. So to me, we just have to have a rock solid understanding that outside of comedy clubs, it's unacceptable to attack somebody for their race. That has to be the norm that we raise our kids with in America. that is the best path towards a cohesive and healthy multiracial society.

What does colorblindness look like? You know, many of us are so used to quoting Dr. King and if you actually read the words, there's an inherent understanding of what you, kind of articulate as colorblindness. What does it mean to be colorblind? So this is a word that is, in my view, tragically misunderstood. When I set out to write the book as an experiment, I googled colorblindness, comma, race in order to not get a bunch of stuff on like red-green colorblindness. And what came back to me was literally 10 articles explaining why colorblindness was wrong, racist, not a single article defending it, which I thought was

interesting. And of course, a Wikipedia page was the 11th. So I figured, why is everyone attacking something that no one is defending? That to me is a tip off of something interesting there. And so I dove into it. And really, what it is is that critical race theory, which has been around since the 1970s and 80s defined itself in opposition to colorblind civil rights rhetoric. And you can read this in the early works of critical race theory. They say, I'm paraphrasing, colorblind civil rights in the style of Martin Luther King did not go far enough and failed for the following reasons. It did not acknowledge that rather than be included in the existing system, the proper thing was to tear the entire system down because it's infected with white supremacy

at its core. There's no such thing as race neutrality. We essentially have to construct the, you know, like parallel or opposite or separatist systems. It did a very good job within the academy of making the word colorblindness a toxic word that nobody wanted to touch. And there's tons of books that make this argument. And it just became this kind of truism. And it just became this kind of truism that colorblindness is wrong. You didn't even really know why. It's racist somehow. And the usual argument is that, you know, how can you, how can you attack or fight racism if you refuse to recognize that race is real? If you refuse to see race, how can you see racism, right? This is one of these kind of nonsense phrases that passes for insight, but actually doesn't make

any sense when you think about it because colorblindness is not pretending not to see race. Like Jonathan, I can see you right now. I can see that you're not a Chinese woman in front of me, right? And you can see that I'm not, you know, you can see that neither am I. So there's no use pretending we don't see race. What colorblindness means is that we're going to do our very best to treat each other without regard to our race where it matters, certainly in politics, right? And so I'm going to, I'm going to make my best effort not to treat you to any worse because of the race I assume

you to be. And I'm going to ask that you do the same thing. And then the even more controversial aspect of this for people is colorblind policy, that we're both going to ask our state, local and federal governments not to treat us differently on the basis of our race. So that's what I believe the colorblind philosophy is. It's a lot more defensible than its critics have allowed over the years. It's actually just verbatim what Martin Luther King argued for in his books, including the piece about class policy over race. Really, my version of colorblindness, it's just Martin Luther King updated for the 21st century.

one of the things that I really appreciate about the way that you write, and in particular in this book, is you give voice very explicitly to the things that people are going to challenge you about. So every time I would read something, I'd be like, but what about? And you would then follow up with, you're probably thinking, but Coleman, what about dot, dot, dot. And every single time that I ran into one of those kind of conflicts, you know, because of the framework in which so many of us are raised, you address it. One of the things, though, that is a challenging point for me is, I believe what you're saying to be true. I also have not seen it happen in our lifetime where there is a way to address the gaps that exist for different socioeconomic groups. And in many cases, those do impact black people and brown people disproportionately. So where are the fixes? Because we've been waiting a long time for them, right?

Where are the fixes that allow us to say we're going to address the problem in terms of funding and resources and support and education when children are in preschool, as opposed to trying to wait until they're going to address the problem. in terms of funding and resources and support and education when children are in preschool, as opposed to trying to wait until they get to college when there's already been a social indoctrination around oppression, around systemic racism, and an outrage over how can you not have affirmative action anymore? This is what was supposed to get me

to the place that everyone else was at because they had the resources in their high school to be tutored for the SATs, right? Where is that fixing going to happen? And I mean, how long do we as a society keep waiting? Something I talk about in the book you mentioned here is that we focus way too much on what happens after 18 and not what happens between zero and 18, which is really where these are the crucial years where you can have the deepest impact on a child's life, a child that grows up in poverty, in a single parent household, in a crime-ridden neighborhood, in a failing public school. school, so forth, if the state is not able to drastically improve the quality of that child's life between zero and 18, what are the best evidence-based policies that would actually help, you know,

you're picturing a black kid in the ghetto probably with no father at a failing public school, right? That really is the picture one has in one's head, I think, when one talks about racial disparity. So in the book, I talk about an amazing experiment done by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who himself grew up with that profile and went on to go to Harvard and study what could be done for kids that grew up like him. He got a very unique opportunity to take over a dozen of the lowest performing public schools in Houston. And what he did essentially is he fired half of the teachers that weren't good. He fired all the principals. He basically was able to have a level of control over these schools that is absolutely impossible in a normal

scenario as a result of unions and so forth. And he, I think he extended the school day. He gave regular assessments and concentrated tutoring based on those regular assessments. and he instituted what he called a culture of high expectations, which is just basically a tough love charter school model, high discipline, this kind of thing, less forgiveness for, you know, bringing your kid to school late, for example, like, you know, just a culture of high expectations. And he was able to bring math and reading scores up by,

by a truly impressive amount, an amount that is just rarely seen in social science experiments with the kids that are in the toughest situations. So this is an astounding experiment, and it yielded fantastic results, and it's completely impossible to implement on a wide scale at this moment. You burn it down. You burn it down and you start over. Right. Right.

You burn it down. You support the charter schools that, work, which is not to say all of them work, but the ones that do, uh, do function much more like this. And, and, and so, yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a hopeful, there's a glass half full read on, on those kind of things and the glass half empty read. Glass half, empty read, glass half full is that it's, there's, there's, there's low hanging fruit in terms of what's possible to, to, to achieve, uh, in terms of making kids lives better. You know, there's also some good evidence that the Head Start programs and universal pre-K, if it doesn't end, change test scores,

it lowers the rate of crime commission to have had a good pre-K, public pre-K program from zero essentially to five years old. So there are things that can be done. They're just incredibly difficult to do as a result of practical barriers like unions and so forth. And there's also, I think, a way in which our whole racial disparity conversation usually focuses on adults competing for status. Like we talk about DEI and corporations as if, like, that matters compared to the problem of intergenerational child poverty. We have a navel-gazing focus on a culture, as a culture, on the things that don't matter quite as much. And that crowds out our ability to cohere and come together on on the solutions that that would matter. So that's sadly the kind of glass half empty read.

I mean, if we're talking about intervening earlier, we're talking about equality or trying to increase equality of opportunity versus focusing on outcome. Yeah, I mean, I did not grow up in Montclair. You know, I grew up in a shitty part of Hollywood. And I was part of the busing program of the 70s and 80s, which I've talked about here a lot, that took kids. from neighborhoods like mine, you know, like I didn't grow up with money. And I was put on a bus and I was sent into a part of town with people who had a Mercedes and a BMW. Like, we didn't have even one of those, right? And I always felt like, you know, the kid who didn't fit in.

Like it was, but it was much more of a notion of if you're not raised with those resources, those things will seem foreign. There's an adjustment. I want to circle back to something about the university environment and, you know, this might be a bit of elite. But what's happening to the layperson right now is that the right has swung hard against DEI and identity politics that the left had, you know, sparked, that had sparked on the left. Can you make a connection between what was happening at the universities with critical race theory? what was happening on the left with the intensity of identity politics and the country embracing Donald Trump? I think there's no doubt that identity politics was an wokeness and bashing whiteness.

This was something that was only ever truly deeply appealing to like 5% of the population, a very small slice of liberal elites below a certain age. and that group of people has a lot of outside influence over institutions, over mainstream media, outside of Fox, over corporations, over museums, over nonprofits, and so forth. And so a lot of liberals didn't realize just quite how alienating all of that rhetoric was because the backlash was in places they don't go. go or look or know anybody who, you know, but that definitely gave an open, opening to a guy like Donald Trump whose essential message is you should never be ashamed of anything ever,

including all of the terrible things you may have done. His power is that he can't even feel shame. And so he just does things that no one would consider to do because most of us have a normal amount of shame. He's like the antichrist of wokeness or something because you had wokeness telling white men essentially you should just feel guilt. You should wake up in the morning and just breathe in guilt just for existing, which is crazy. And then you had Trump saying you should not feel guilty for anything, for any reason,

no matter how many, oh, you cheated on your pregnant wife, who cares? Don't feel ashamed of anything. You're perfect. You're amazing. And so these two messages, clearly there was a symbiosis in them and clearly wokeness empowered Trump. There's no doubt about it. I'm not saying it's the only thing that did, but it definitely did.

A normal amount of shame is the title of my memoir. It can feel hard to balance multiple things if you take a kind of strict perspective of colorblindness. Is there a place as you see it? And I'm not asking you to speak for all black people. This could be a personal question or it could be a personal question or it could be one that you see on a larger level. Is there a place for a very specific kind of pride in your identity and emphasis on the specialness of your particular heritage or, you know, ancestry?

You talk a bit about, you know, kind of the story, right, that we carry. Is there a place for that in this conversation? Yeah, I think there's a place for it. There is the way to think about it, I think, is sort of like being a fan of a sports team. It's like I grew up with the New York Mets. I prefer the New York Mets. I don't like the Phillies and the Braves.

I actually dislike those teams. But also, at the end of the day, that is just a kind of benign, indulgence in rooting for something, right? Because it's fun to root. At the end of the day, I actually don't get any joy. I don't want to hurt any Patriots fan. I don't want to hurt a Patriots fan. I actually see them completely as completely valid people. And I don't think in any situation where the stakes were high, I wouldn't treat them any differently than I would treat a New York Giants fan. It's just kind of like a fun indulgence, right? You know, if I'm half Puerto Rican as well, if I want to go to

Puerto Rican pride parade, wave a flag, and eat arros con pollo, I can do that. And it's special to me because my grandma cooked it. And, you know, I grew up listening to Hector LeVos and Mark Anthony. And, you know, there's a certain shared experience that I'm likely to have with other people of Puerto Rican descent that you're not likely to have if you don't have that. It doesn't mean you can appreciate those things. So you can feel a kind of emotional and psychological attachment to your culture without treating people from other cultures as less than. So to me, that's the right balance to strike. You know, as long as you're not hurting anybody, as long as you're not making demands of the

state to treat your group special because you feel it special, that's really the key. It's like, okay, I feel Puerto Ricans are special. Well, I think all Puerto Ricans should get a subsidy from the government for being amazing. That's the move that I think is dangerous. I think there should be a firewall between our own preferences and how we want to live our life and what's special to us and what deal we strike with the state. I think also what's happening right now is we're sort of searching for an equilibrium where on one side identity to politics went so far.

Everything was about race and identity, as you described. If you were not white, you had some sort of magic. and there was a level of promotion of that. And then recently, the Trump administration has gone so far as to scrub any identity off of public websites, removing the fact that, you know, there were, the word gay, for example, from anything related to the Pentagon or in the history of the military. Is that too far? Like, where is a middle ground, you know, should we be erasing and not acting retroactive? If I can, sorry, if I can just insert before you answer, part of the problem was the chaotic

ridiculousness with which this was done. Googling the word diversity also eliminated like biological diversity research. I mean, it's literally like fourth grade social studies experiment is what feels like the government is approaching in terms of handling diversity. But now I'll let Mr. Hughes answer. No, I pretty much agree with both of what you guys said. I mean, there is a small way to do it and the Trump administration has not done it the smart way, it's hard to find anything that they have done the smart way as a result of the general clown car nature of who's involved with the administration and just the lack of attention to detail and, um, and ethics and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, is the

person to become the face of sort of anti-DEI policies because I agree with many of those policies. I agree with rolling back race-based affirmative action in the federal government. I have seen some instances where I felt there was a weaponized over compliance with certain things. So when somebody takes away, you know, an information page on the Tuskegee Airmen, like, I don't think anyone in the Trump administration asked them to do that or that was implied in any executive order. I think that's, there are some situations where someone says, you know, a left-leaning bureaucrat likely says, oh, you did an executive order saying we have to get rid of DEI, well, I'm going to make this a news story by taking out a story about black people in

the Air Force, even though that's not actually what you're asking me to take out. And now that's, I'm going to hang that on your head. So I think there's some of that as well, but that doesn't, I don't think that accounts for most of it. It's interesting. I had not considered trying to sabotage from within at that level, which is an interesting theory. and could definitely have the pushback, blowback that you're talking about. I'm at a loss for sort of how to approach certain aspects of the conversation because when I saw the documentary of the 13th, I was deeply moved, you know, by DeVernay's, you know,

analysis of kind of the evolution of the criminalization of blackness in America. But I do believe that there are certain aspects of our, country that are rooted in an inherent racism. Is that an incorrect assessment? I mean, are we allowed to disagree? You know, like, there are places that I clearly agree with you, but I also feel, I do, I feel very strongly that, that I see the way everything is structured.

I see, I don't know. I just, when I go other places in the country, it definitely seems like there's a very different way that people are treated. I have black friends from the South. You know, the experience is very different. Can you put some meat on the bones of what about the 13th resonated? The line that is drawn is a very clear one, you know, from past slavery to really no alleviation. Like some things were done.

with the passing of the amendment, but it was incomplete. And it seems like there's a pretty specific straight line between slavery of the past and slavery of the present. I mean, it's a sharp lens that she's taking. I mean, Spike Lee used to talk about the NBA as a form of a market that we're all, you know, watching. So I don't mean to paint with a broad stroke, but it really touched me and I'll just be honest like I believe it.

I believe that there were certain things that never got right and that that inherent hatred of the other and of minorities really persisted and still does persist. So a couple different points. One is I do think the prejudice against black people and and minorities is a real thing in America and around the world. The best studies that measure it are audit studies. Like you send out two identical resumes. You give one a white name, one a black name, one an Arab name.

The best of those studies, most comprehensive, have found that there's a little less racism in America than there is in Europe. And that there is pretty comparable amounts of, of racism in those domains against black people, Arabs, Indians, and even East Asians. Racial prejudice, in-group favoritism. These are parts of human nature that it's possible to lessen and to keep a lid on, but not possible to get rid of any more

than we could get rid of murder as a phenomenon, right? We're never gonna have a society was a zero murder rate, but that doesn't necessarily mean murder is baked into the culture, right? So, so that's just to say to, to acknowledge that first. As for the supposed link between or the symbolic link between the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery except, except as punishment for a crime, a link between that and mass incarceration, I mean, I just, I think it's total nonsense. It's just total nonsense. First of all, the reason that there was this exception in the 13th Amendment, which made it okay to prescribe force labor as

punishment for a crime, was for a progressive reason. Namely, there was a movement at the time in the 18th century and the 19th century, part of the Enlightenment era, to get rid of the death penalty. The death penalty was beginning to be viewed by some, like Cesar Baccaria and Thomas Jefferson, as barbaric. So as an alternative, as a lesser punishment, as an alternative to the death penalty, the proposal is usually a lifetime and servitude, which is why you had to keep that exception if you were going to abolish servitude. So it was actually for a morally progressive reason that those kinds of exceptions were made, not for any nefarious, like the vibe of the 13th and similar arguments is that somehow there's this like mustache twirling, conspiracy where, you know, white people created this exception to slip slavery in through the back door for another 150 years. It's total nonsense. And not only that, if one wants to have a serious conversation about the causes of mass incarceration, which again, begin, mass incarceration begins

in like the late 70s, really in earnest, the late 1970s, 100 years after the end of slavery, in the midst of the worst crime wave the country has ever seen, beginning when crime starts ticking up in 1963 and peaks around 1990, visible in the fact that the murder rate in New York City in the early 90s was 10 times what it is today, right? Went from like 3,000 murders a year to now it's what, 200, 200. So if one wants to have a serious conversation about the car, causes of mass incarceration, I think one has to do that in a data-based way, understanding

why it is that prisons in America all around the country started ballooning in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s. I think one can have that conversation. I honestly do not see what slavery has to do with it in any way that isn't just an attempt by a writer to create a certain vibe around the conversation. conversation. So, like, really good books on this are John Faf locked in the true causes of mass incarceration. And the more you read about this, you know, you'll also encounter complicating stories,

such as the fact that two-thirds of black congressmen and women in the 90s voted for the famous crime bill. It was popular in black communities because those were the ones suffering the most violent crime. The Rockefeller drug laws in New York City, which created a template for harsh drug laws around the country, you know, mandatory minimums, three strikes in your out, all this stuff. It was all pushed for by the black community because they were sick of their neighborhoods being absolutely destroyed by heroin and later by crack. And so with a fuller understanding of how mass incarceration came to pass, that doesn't exonerate the mistakes people made, the overly harsh policies. But it also, to me, bringing slavery into the conversation, it's just a way of pulling the wool over your eyes and making it seem like it's a black and white issue and therefore avoiding all the extra.

extremely difficult questions, which is, what do you do when actually, actually 85% of people are in state prison, not federal prison, and half the people there are there for violent crimes, right? So those are the facts. You could watch the entire 13th and not even know that. You could read all of the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and come away with the impression that weed is the reason for mass incarceration, which is just statistically, completely illiterate. You could release everyone who is in prison for marijuana and barely make a dent in the prison population in this country. So I understand that Ava DuVernay is a fantastic storyteller. I mean, clearly she is because you're not the only one that's touched by her.

But there is something fundamentally dishonest and not adult about the way she talks about the prison system. And I think that's important to recognize. There's a Morgan Freeman interview that you talk about in the book. Can you talk about that? Yeah, there's a famous Morgan Freeman interview. Probably your audience has probably seen it. I think it's with Charlie Rose back in the day. He says, you know, I don't want Black History Month.

Why? We don't have White History Month. And Charlie Rose goes, well, how are we going to get rid of racism then? and Morgan says, well, stop talking about it. You know, I'm going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. You can call me Morgan. I'll call you Charlie. It's profound not only because of what he's saying, but because of Morgan Freeman's inherent charisma.

But if one unpacks it, it's like what point is he trying to get at? I think the point he's trying to get at is that I make this analogy in the book, which may seem kind of silly, but I think it actually gets at something really. which is like, let's say you and I are given a goal. And our goal is to reduce the amount of hatred between New York Yankees fans and Boston Red Sox fans. Right? We're trying to get these folks to get along. And so we come up with a plan.

We are going to raise every single child in New York in Boston to love baseball, every gym period, will be baseball. Every child by the age of five will know the rules of baseball, will play baseball every single day. We are going to raise a culture of baseball akin to what soccer is in Brazil, right?

When these kids grow up, you know, would this strategy end up increasing or decreasing the amount of hatred between New York, Yankees, and Boston Red Sox? Well, it seems to me it probably increased the level of hatred because now you've got the ones in New York are going to love baseball

even more, they're going to be even more attached to the Yankees and the ones in Boston are going to be even more attached to the Red Sox. So by increasing the salience of baseball, we've increased the hatred between baseball teams. So the analogy I'm making is, this is the Morgan Freeman's point, is like, if we talk about race all the time, if we make kids think about their race, we make, you know, younger and younger, you know, we do these workshops where the white kid is now thinking of herself as a white kid, the Asian kid is thinking about what his Asianness means in this culture and so forth, would this end up increasing or decreasing the overall amount of racial tribalism in the world? Well, it's not obvious to me that it would decrease because you might just be making

everyone's race more important to them in ways that you can't really predict. And once you put, once you let that genie out of the bottle, I don't, I don't think it's obvious that you're going to, that that's going to steer in a more morally upright direction as opposed to, as opposed to creating more raw material for racial grifters and entrepreneurs and agitators to kind of to work with. So I think there is definitely something to be said for talking about race less. And to be clear, I don't mean like not talking about race less. real examples of racism. So real examples of racism should absolutely be talked about. And the last

thing I'll say about that is I think it's important to recognize that, and I think most parents observe this, is that children naturally don't care about race until they are told that they should, which is a good thing, right? Like, a black kid and a white kid with no training or influence will naturally bond and become best friends over the fact that they both like trains or whatever, whatever it is. And that kind of innocence is very important to protect, I think, for as long as possible

because, and to reinforce with the kind of Martin Luther King philosophy because the permanent basis for hope is that each new generation is an opportunity for people to get, to actually get, get past race as an obsession and as a reason for division. So that's also part of the wisdom behind what Morgan Freeman is saying there is, is we keep this thing alive by the amount we talk about it. And by not talking about it, we actually can let the kind of natural colorblindness

of each generation perhaps flourish. You talk about the myth of inherited trauma. you do not believe that there's a notion of inherited trauma. And, you know, part of the argument that you make is, you know, we can all trace ourselves to some form of slavery at some point. I think the question you ask is, are we all traumatized? Like, we would all be traumatized if that were the case. I'm one of those people who believes we are all traumatized in a variety of ways.

But, yeah, what's your... What's your sort of take on this notion of, you know, the trauma that has been inherited by certain communities? Yeah, so I don't believe there's any scientific basis for you inheriting trauma for things you did not yourself experience. I do believe, obviously, that many people are traumatized by their childhoods or by things that have happened to their adult selves. I don't think that I can be traumatized by something that happened before I was born. I'm going to poke at you right here because there's significant research about intergenerational trauma. Most of it came out of some of the studies done in Israel on Holocaust survivors. And what is referred to generally is epigenetics, which is that the environment in which you were, in theory, incubated.

The cell that was you was in your grandmother. and my grandmother was fleeing Eastern Europe when I was, you know, not born. And there's some tremendous, really interesting research about epigenetics. So I don't know how far you want to take that back. And maybe that's, you know, sort of a reframing. But there is evidence that, you know, there are phenomenon that are a combination of coping mechanisms and also the, you know, the neurotransmitter and cortisol milieu, you know, that we exist. in?

Epigenetics in theory allows for the idea of transmission of something from parent to child expressed in which specific genes are turned on and off in the germline. My understanding as recently as a few years ago is that the consensus among epigenetic researchers was that we haven't found the inherited trauma mechanism yet. But obviously it is to me what epigenetics promise is that it's theoretically possible, not that it's already been proven. But I'm not an epigenetic researcher, so you should not take my word as gospel on that. If it turns out to be true that epigenetics finds that my parent going through something

stressful or traumatizing turns on certain genes that would not otherwise be turned on that affect my genetic expression, then we are going to quickly find out the entire world his trauma because as as ignorant of it as most Americans are, black people are not the only folks that have been enslaved. You know, two years before the Emancipation Proclamation, 25 million Russian serfs, which is this same thing as being a slave, 25 million Russian serfs were emancipated. How many descendants would that be today? I mean, I'm going to push you here, because the experience of black slavery was a removal of a variety of disparate communities that in many cases did not speak the same language or have the same cultural milieu.

They were transported a world away where there was a systematic destruction of any specific culture that was then grouped into a larger culture of enslavement. there was a complete loss of an entire cultural narrative, which is not the same as what happened in Russia. It's not even the same as what happened to the Jews in our diaspora. We were able to maintain our narrative globally, right? Well, it's not the same, but what we're talking about, there are many different kinds of trauma. So, for example, you're highlighting the loss of a culture as a result of transport overseas and so forth. that's a kind of a trauma, but there are equally traumas that slaves did not experience like famine,

right? How many famines have there been in China and India in the past 120 years? I mean, countless. And how many people had to survive those famines and watch their family members waste away and potentially eat them in certain situations in order to survive? So, yeah, it's never the same. But the question here is, is trauma inherited? If the answer is yes, then, the whole world is going to be traumatized. That's my point. It's not that every trauma is similar to every other trauma with respect to its shape. Are you a spiritual person?

Do you have a higher power figure in your life? The reason I'm asking is a lot of what Jonathan and I do here is kind of this intersection of science and spirituality. And trauma is one of those places where, you know, people feel like maybe if there's some larger collective consciousness, if there's something bigger than me, it's holding experience for me, for my ancestors. You know, many of us are asked to do visualizations where we, you know, commune with our ancestors and release them of pain that they've experienced.

Is that something that you understand or have any personal connection to? I understand it, but I don't have a personal connection to it, I guess, is what I would say, because my view is that you should do whatever makes you a better, wiser, happier person. as long as it's not hurting anyone else or or or or or hurting yourself so in that sense i'm very much pro spirituality i'm pro experimenting with spirituality and seeing what works for you i've been a fan in my own life of meditation um i've done meditation retreats so not not in a while um and i found that to be really helpful ultimately though no i'm not i'm not I'm not someone who believes in a specific higher power or in a specific holy book or anything like that.

But I'm very much pro having a practice and experimenting with practices that are constructive for you. Oh, okay. And one more question. You're a musician. What do you play? What do you like? I play trombone. Trombone is my best and main instrument. I play I get around on piano and drums as well. but I play trombone professionally around in New York City all the time. And I'm most trained in jazz, but I really genuinely do love all genres. I don't know if I love metal, but like anything but metal, I pretty much really enjoy. That's awesome. I actually wanted to play trombone.

The public school I went to had a music program. My arms were not long enough. And so I took up trumpet. So I was a trumpet player in jazz band. but always love the trombone. Coleman Hughes, it's really such a pleasure to get to talk to you. The book is The End of Race Politics, arguments for a colorblind America.

Highly recommend it and really appreciate the ability to talk to you about things that we agree on and also things that we don't agree on. And I appreciate your time and the clarity with which you present all of these ideas. I really, really appreciate your time. This was an awesome interview. You guys asked very good questions.

Coleman, tell us about a new podcast, which we're really excited about. Yes, I'm relaunching my podcast called Conversations with Coleman. Now it's produced by the Free Press, which is a magazine I've been writing for for some time. And I'm very excited about it. So you can listen to Conversations with Coleman, wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. I think it's important that we had this conversation because it's very rare for me to get to speak to someone who's done so much research about something that I think I know so much about. Like I have so many strong opinions about so many things. And in reading his book, I realized, oh, I don't have to say racism doesn't exist for me also to say

the lens with which we've all been taught to approach things like this may not always be the entire story. And the fact that we now have information and can share information and it has has so little context is something that we talk about all the time. Why wouldn't it apply to this? Meaning that has to apply to everything, the notion that everybody is allowed to have opinions, spread opinions, and provide no more information. And you do, you get a huge cultural momentum around different kinds of movements.

And maybe that's not the whole story. And what's the way to achieve true coexistence and true equality and equity? That's his interest. He's not coming from this perspective of like, I don't believe in racism and you're all crazy. It's saying what does it actually mean to honor, you know, the leaders of the civil rights movement who believed there is a way forward. There is injustice and there is indignity. But how do we move forward? And that's what I'm interested in in talking to someone like Coleman.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We can try and do things for a positive end, which have really. disingenuous and often misleading results. And this is an area where I definitely have not done the research. But what's interesting is how to break apart the cultural narratives that each side has from the actual statistics. And statistics also are biased in terms of some people cherry pick these statistics, some people cherry pick others.

I don't know what's true when he says if you. release those people for marijuana infractions, you're only releasing a small percentage. It could be that the first two strikes were for marijuana and then you get something, someone who's already been in the criminal justice system, and then they feel less able to navigate life, and then all of a sudden they go into larger crime. I took it one step further. I'm like, wasn't the government the ones who were bringing crack cocaine into these communities? That's what I've been taught.

I didn't want to get to everything because I don't want him to be like that. It's a conspiracy theory. I don't know. But these are the things I've been told. And in many cases, they're true. The different sentencing requirements for crack cocaine versus Coke, which had a predominantly different demographic of use where people who were using cocaine, all the bankers who just kind of got off Scott Free.

And anyone who was caught with crack cocaine was sentenced immediately to prison. These are huge discrepancies. And I have, I don't have the data, but what I do find. very interesting is there's more to the story than we have been told and there is a level of discrepancy between the narratives we've been told and the idea that swinging too far one way can have this recoil effect where it really you lose trust you know the large vast majority of the people that you speak about who are somewhere in the middle when one far end of a political party or group or who is who is motivated by trying to do good pulls us so far off center that

you get a recoil and you lose the trust of the people who you were trying to do good for. Well, and that's what I think these conversations are important. You know, they can be sobering in that we don't have to choose one extreme. There's a lot of truths in the middle. And they don't sell headlines. You know, they really don't. They don't sell headlines. They don't get likes and shares.

But he's got some interesting statistics in the book. And this was one of my favorites. And what he says is the points that he's making here are not to pass judgment on any particular group or say that one group cannot achieve what others can. But he said that there are many large disparities that can't be explained by racism. In the 1990s, over four-fifths of donut shops in California were owned by people of Cambodian descent. It's like an interesting statistic. right? During World War I, black soldiers from northern states scored higher than white soldiers from southern states in various tests of mental ability.

In 1920, Jews accounted for half the lawyers and three-fifths of the doctors in Hungary, even though they were only 6% of the total population. So these are things showing that there are many other factors, right? And for me, those are the things that make me hopeful because on either end of the extreme, there's not a lot of hope. it's either we're so far gone that we'll never get this right and everyone needs to atone for every sin that they possibly contributed to historically or there's no problem and you're all crazy and everything you think is a conspiracy theory those are your choices with the two extremes and i think what colman hughes and thinkers like him are trying to do is say wait a second what if neither of those perspectives is actually accurate and they're both biased because of their personal desires for political gain and eyeballs, right? What if there's a truth that's somewhere

in between and we don't have to be swayed by either of those extremes? We get to say, what is the information? Also, what's the hopeful interpretation of this? You can be an optimist without being tone deaf to what's going on around you. That's actually what I see here. I think the optimism is huge because there has been a criticism of the left, that they just only see negativity, that there's no celebration in the things that are actually working. And when he talks about the fact that race relations were increasing and improving and getting better and that it was through the algorithms, which we know are programmed to enlist rage and incite rage, because that's what keeps people most engaged, there's a

profit motive controlling our attention, which has these massive ripple effects on how society sees themselves, their neighbors, how safe we feel. And that can be exploded beyond what's actually happening. And I also want to say, though, as kind of a bit of a caveat to that, is that for many people, especially those who feel isolated and who are in underserved populations or, you know, socioeconomic brackets that get left out, there's also an equalizing factor that occurred with the internet and with smartphones where information could finally be shared. And your story could finally be seen. And you could finally connect with people all over the country and all over the world

who may be experiencing what you're experiencing. So to me, it's not only for nefarious reasons that we have this explosion of information, connection, and sharing. But the fact is, and I can't judge it by the people of color that I know, but I know a lot of people feel very disenfranchised. I know that people from certain socioeconomic brackets are left behind. In many cases, they're told by certain aspects of the government, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And if you can't, there's something wrong with you or you're too stupid or incompetent to learn, to achieve or to be able to have the life that you want.

So that must feel very isolating. And I would imagine if you then have access to other people experiencing that, yeah, you want to find people who are having your same experience. Of course, it's going to get amplified. For sure. And this goes to creating equality of opportunity, fixing. the low-income schools fixing the food shortages, giving opportunities early on as much as we possibly can to empower as many people as possible to participate and succeed. And what it starts with, which I think we can all agree on in which Coleman talks about

extensively in the book, what we can all agree on is we are all humans. And that's what Dr. King said when he looked out on the faces of people, I believe it was at the mall. He said, I don't see the black future or a white future. I just see a joint future for the human. human race. That's sort of, you know, something that I think we all literally can agree on. Really highly recommend you check out the book. And make sure to follow us on Substack for more on this and all of our episodes. There are so many awesome things that we're providing on Substack that you can't get anywhere else. And we hope that you will join us from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We will see you next time. It's My and Biolix breakdown. She's

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