Within Reason - #66 Coleman Hughes - Should We Take Race Out of Politics?

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

Coleman Hughes is an American writer and podcast host. He is the author of "The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So it's, this philosophy crops up which says that white supremacy is everywhere, embedded in the very institutions of the country, and therefore all institutions need to be destroyed and rebuilt. But it doesn't matter because

no one really believes it. Very few. Here's what changes. What changes is that, In 2013, everyone gets a camera-enabled smartphone and social media. Everyone in their mother is on Facebook, which means fundamentally the way people get information has changed. Before 2013, let's say in 2005 or something, if a white cop was arresting a black suspect and the situation went left, there was a fight, a struggle for a gun or something, and the cop shot the suspect. respect. In Topeka, Kansas. You would only hear about it in Topeka, Kansas. It would be in the newspaper, the local newspaper the next day. It might be on the local news. I would never hear

about it as someone that lived in New Jersey. And by the time it was in the newspaper, a journalist would have come and asked the family's side of the story, the police side of the story, and given a kind of more or less fact-based account of what happened. After 2013, if that same thing happened in Topeka, Kansas. Someone was recording it, and they probably started recording halfway through so that the context of the interaction was lost. They uploaded it using their smartphone to Facebook, where it got millions of views in a matter of hours without any journalistic context surrounding it. That fundamentally changes the way information spreads, and it leads to a false perception that racism is on the rise. Now, once everyone starts believing

that anti-black racism is on the rise, it creates fertile ground for these ideologies that have been in the air, in the academy for decades, that have, that coined terms like white privilege, that developed terms like systemic racism. And now these concepts just spread everywhere. All throughout, you can see it in my book. I have various graphs. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, mentions of racism. they're like, they go like this until 2013, and then they go like this. For people listening, my finger just went all the way up to one corner of the screen. That's when it becomes cool to think about people in terms of their race again. Yeah, I mean, it's not just considered

politically popular, which is another way I might have phrased that question, but also for a lot of people, I think if you don't see politics in this way, you're not just doing something wrong, but something quite deeply immoral. And the thing that I'm interested in is this shift in intuition that's happened sort of back and forth on whether or not race is relevant at all. And the case that you make in your book is that it shouldn't be. But I think a lot of people have criticized you and the writing that you put out under the misapprehension that you're essentially saying that we should ignore race entirely in all contexts when obviously sometimes it's going to be a relevant factor. So I suppose to help clear the air there, when do you think race is politically

relevant? So what I've said before is if you imagine an X axis and a Y axis, and on the X axis, you have low information to high information, meaning how much information I have about you as a person. And then on the y-axis, you have the stakes of the situation. Are lives at risk, or am I walking down a street in a sleepy town, you know, in Ohio? If you go to the quadrant that is high stakes and low information, meaning I don't know anything about anyone individually, and there's a nuclear bomb in Times Square, right? all I know is that probably the person,

I know probably the race of the person who, who knows how to defuse the bomb. Well, that's a situation where you have to judge people based on their race. You're not going to, you know, if the TSA is in a ticking time bomb situation, they're not going to stop the person that looks like Meryl Streep. They're going to stop the person that looks like, you know, Rami Youssef. sure sure and they can justify that only because they're in a low information extremely high-stakes situation the police may be in these kinds of situations sometimes as well most of us are in

the other three quadrants the vast majority of our lives and when we are in situations where we can actually get a lot of information about someone if you're meeting me in a coffee shop you're going to know more about me in a five-minute conversation than you would by assuming the stereotypes of black men and also we're in a coffee shop we're chatting nobody's life is at risk there's no reason to violate the general norm of treating people as individuals not on the basis of their race so that that's how i'd break it down yeah i remember uh i was in jerusalem once and we were sort of walking through the market and trying to get up to Alaksa Mosque. And we got to a point where these Jordanian guards with their automatic weapons stopped us and said,

Muslims only. And we went, oh, sorry, yeah, okay, we'll turn around. We'll go up the other entrance. And I thought to myself, you know, if I were in London or if I were in the US and someone said, hey, stop Muslims only. I might have said, well, hold on a second. How do you know that I'm not a Muslim? them, you don't know what my beliefs are, you can't tell, well, you know, I've got a beard, this

kind of, and I just suddenly thought, like, when it really starts getting real, that kind of pedantic approach seems to sort of go out the window a little bit. I mean, do you think that governments, you talk in the book about how it's better, and I think it's a truism, that it's better to treat people as individuals rather than based on any kind of category, and certainly any kind of racial-based category, but do you think that a government is capable of treating people as individuals. When it's making policy that affects an entire nation, is it possible for a government to see everyone as individuals, or does it inevitably have to start grouping people along lines, whether they be lines of ethnicity or race

or any other kind of factors, which, as you seem to imply, can at least sometimes be relevant? You're right. Governments cannot treat people as individuals from a public policy, perspective, they can't, you know, I mean, the IRS can't like learn my whole life story, right? Like, it can get my tax returns. And in that sense, it does treat me as an individual, but it's treating me based on categories. Like, you know, if you make between $100,000 and $500,000, you're being treated a certain way vis-a-vis the IRS, right? So the big question from public policy is what do we, how do we chunk people? How do we group people? My argument is that so many of our policies right now

group people according to race. They treat race as if it's a legitimate proxy for disadvantage. There's this perennial question of who is disadvantaged and who is not. Because the government has an interest in helping people who are disadvantaged. Well, how do you identify who's disadvantaged? people don't wear a badge on their forehead that said, I grew up without privilege and you grew up with it. So the government has to choose a proxy. So many of our policies have assumed that race is a good or the best proxy for disadvantage.

I give many examples in the book. But for example, during COVID with restaurants, deciding who got financial aid for failing restaurants. for restaurants teetering on the edge first, they said, okay, if you're a woman, if you're a person of color, you get it first, right? And that doesn't make any sense because there will be some restaurants run by people of color, run by women

that are actually not struggling. And there will be some restaurants run by white men that are struggling. So why not simply take the, what they had was the difference between your overall revenue in 2019 and 2020, right, because that would be a signal of how much you're hurting. They had that information. Why not just use that information as a straightforward proxy for who needs it the quickest? Who needs, who's bleeding the most? So my argument is that

we should use the best proxies we have for disadvantage in each case. In many cases, that's class. It's socioeconomics. It's income. It's wealth. Much better proxy for disadvantage than your skin color. Yeah, I like the idea of focusing on class, in part because I think that class is one of the undersung qualities of social justice, with everybody talking about group identities, about race and gender. And class very rarely comes up, even though for some political philosophies in particular, it's like the most important thing.

It's quite surprising that it doesn't have that prominence. but there are times when it seems that that won't be the best proxy right i mean like if you're talking about hiring disparities and those studies that show that you know an employee might be less likely to hire someone if they have a foreign sounding name or something like that that seems like a case to me where race or perceived race ethnicity is going to be a relevant proxy for disparity at the very least are there any other examples that you can think i mean do you agree with that example? Are there any other examples you can think of where actually, yes, race is the appropriate proxy for discrimination? So I think we're confusing slightly two issues.

One is racial discrimination and one is what the government should do from a public policy perspective. From a public policy perspective, I don't think the government should really ever use race as a category on which to base public policy on which to dole out. benefits and aid and so forth. On this question of racial discrimination in the labor market, yes, it is absolutely true. In my book, I cite the largest to-date stud meta-analysis of what you, the studies you mentioned are usually called callback studies. They'll send a bunch of fake resumes out that are identical except for the name. They'll give one a Chinese name, one a white sounding name, one a black sounding name, one a Muslim sounding name, and so forth. And they'll send a bunch of

see how many callbacks they get. And in the aggregate, basically what they find is that there's lots of discrimination against all the groups that you would expect there to be discrimination against. And in fact, they find like similar levels of discrimination against all groups, right? Like East Asians suffer almost as much discrimination as black people. South Asians suffer more discrimination than, and Arabs both suffer more discrimination than black people in in the largest meta analysis i've seen um and the way the way for a conscientious employer to avoid this issue would be not to hire someone because they're a certain race or to violate the principle of meritocracy it would be uh the best the best practice would be to

basically blind yourself to the name on the resume, right? Like, blind yourself to the name on the resume and actually, and then when you're interviewing people, do your best to treat them not according to race. Try to try your very best to hire the best people for the job and create blinding procedures in the pipeline to hiring people so that that kind of issue doesn't arise. Now, I don't see why more employers don't do that, especially employers that have been companies have been so quick to signal how serious they are about fighting racism yet don't do like the the kind of first thing you would think to do in that vein um so yeah i wouldn't say that the right response to that is some kind of reverse race

based policy i think people would point to the fact that you've just said that a lot of companies don't do this. I don't know why more companies don't do this. And maybe it is a good idea. Maybe they are just shooting themselves in the foot by not, by not blinding themselves to irrelevant factors. But given that companies don't, is there any room for the government to say here that because of the fact that companies aren't doing this? And because of that fact, people may be being discriminated against, yes, it would be great if we could convince companies of their own accord to install these kinds of blindness procedures. But so long as they're not doing so, the government needs to step in and make them do it. I feel like if the

kinds of things that you're describing there were mandated by the government tomorrow, we'd see a lot of perhaps legitimate pushback that this is a government encroachment on the freedom of the hiring process of companies. But if the companies aren't doing that, then, you know, would this be a legitimate road for the government to go down? It's an interesting and thorny question, and there might be differences between the UK and America here because civil rights law prohibits employers from hiring in a discriminatory way, even private employers. And so, yeah, this is a very thorny question. I'm not sure my intuitions are all crystal clear on here, because on the one hand, I would like employers to voluntarily adopt all of that. On the other hand, I'm uncomfortable

with state intervention on that account because it so quickly becomes so ridiculous. I mean, so for example, if I were to go to a Yemeni deli, all the delis in Harlem where I used to live, except for a few Dominican delis, they're all owned by Yemenis. I don't know why that is. But I always used to talk to them and one after one, they would always be from Yemen. Is there any pretense that they hire in a colorblind way? Well, no. They hire their cousins and their brothers and their friends who are all from Yemen, right? Would it be a wise use of government resources to tell that business you can no longer

run this as like a family Yemeni business? is you have to hire in a colorblind way. You have to treat every applicant the same way. And the government is competent enough to judge whether you're doing so. And that's a whole separate question. How good would the government would the state be at actually judging whether you were hiring meritocratically for your podcast? It's not clear to me they would do a very good job of that at all. and they might make many mistakes in misdiagnosing bias where it didn't exist

and in not diagnosing it where it did exist. And so there's a host of problems that would come along with that if there was some kind of heavy-handed top-down solution that I think I'd be uncomfortable with. We'll get back to Coleman Hughes in just a moment. But first, if you want a healthy mind, you need a healthy diet. That's where AG1, today's sponsor, can help. It's a comprehensive daily nutritional supplement. a blend of over 70 high quality ingredients with vitamins, minerals, whole food source nutrients and more.

Just take a scoop of the powder, mix it with water, shake it up and drink it. It takes me less than a minute, I usually have it before my first meal of the day, and it helps with brain, heart and immune system health, as well as aiding with focus and energy, even helping your nails and your skin. And with your first purchase, you'll also get a free one-year supply of vitamin D, as well as five free AG-1 travel packs. These things are great. They keep you healthy even when you're on the move. You'll also get a shaker and a scoop and a storage canister. And they're so confident you'll love it that there's also a 90 day money back guarantee. Try it for yourself at drinkag1.com forward slash within reason. That's drinkag1.com forward slash within reason. Now back to Coleman Hughes. Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's quite clear that in practice this would be a very difficult if not impossible thing to comprehend.

I don't know if that means that there should be nothing done, especially given the enthusiasm with which we want to see these kinds of practices privately brought on. It's what you're saying makes sense, of course, you know, if an Italian restaurant decides that they're only going to hire Italians, you know, am I going to be upset about that? Am I going to see that as a huge injustice? Like, probably not. It doesn't sort of scream injustice to me anyway. maybe there are some forms of businesses, especially when it comes to food, where this is more relevant than not.

But how, if not using the government, might we encourage people? I mean, we can write books and we can do podcasts and we can talk to people, but in practice, like, how can we actually convince people that this is what you need to do? Would it be a matter of saying, this is the just thing to do? You need to install these blindness procedures because it's the moral thing to do. Or would it be a case of trying to show that by doing so, you're going to make more money, you're going to have more competency in your company. What would be the right approach there? I guess both work. I mean, in the case of orchestras, they started blinding just because, for both reasons, I think, you know, when you audition for an orchestra, you audition behind a veil because they want to get the best person and they don't want to be biased by the fact that, you know, the, say it's a woman trombone player and some people are biased in that they'll see a woman trombone player and not actually hear that she's,

playing better than the man next to her because they're not really used to seeing a woman play that instrument. I can testify to that because I am a trombone player. So it makes sense for everyone. It makes sense for the woman auditioning. It makes sense for the judges hearing it. It's a win-win for really everyone and for the concept of merit and excellence and for the audience that wants to hear the very best musicians. So in that sense, it makes sense to appeal to business's self-interest. I think it also makes sense to appeal to our innate sense of fairness that really no one actually cares about disparate outcomes when we know that the process by which those outcomes were arrived at was a fair one. For example, nobody in the history of the NBA,

at least since it was integrated, has ever cared that it's like three-quoise, quarter is black. Nobody's scared. Why? Because we know that the process by which people end up in the NBA is extremely meritocratic, ruthlessly meritocratic. Yeah. And so nobody, people don't begrudge LeBron James. Not only do people not begrudge the racial makeup of the NBA, they don't really begrudged the amount of money that NBA players make because they know that it's a meritocracy that LeBron James is the best, Steph Curry is the best, and that the reason they make so much money is because we all love watching them and paying for them to play basketball. It's very simple.

We know that the system is fair and therefore no one cares about the unequal outcome. When people begin to care about the unequal outcome is when they suspect. that the system is unfair. People suspect without knowing that Jeff Bezos is not akin to LeBron James in terms of not having arrived meritocratically at his wealth, having cut corners, having bent the system, having cleverly done, used tax avoidance methods that aren't available to the rest of us, blah, blah, blah. I'm not saying any of these things are true. Just table that for the sake of argument. The reason that people get upset about unequal outcomes, both in the racial domain and the financial domain, is because they assume that the system by which

those results were arrived at was not fair. In cases where it seems obvious that it's, that it is not fair, such as in the case of, you know, employment, unconscious discrimination, that's the important thing to, to emphasize there, I think. You know, we, We've talked about how government-mandated blindness procedures would probably be a practical disaster and also the hope that we can convince companies to sort of for their own sake and for the sake of ethics, I install these procedures. If they don't, if they either refuse to or don't see the need to, do we just throw up our hands and say, well, I suppose there's nothing we can do here? Private companies will be private companies. Is there anything that we can do? Because if that communication fails, you know,

if we don't manage to convince them on a private level, what are we left with but to appeal to the government? Yeah, well, you know, I guess if, no, I would say if it fails, it fails, because, you know, it would depend. I don't think it would be that hard to persuade many people. businesses to adopt this kind of a thing? I mean, I know I had a few professors in college who graded blind. Like, you, everyone would type their essay in the same point font format, and you wouldn't put your name on it. And they did that because they didn't want to be prejudiced by anything,

by gender, by race, and also just by, you have a favorite student. You have a least favorite student, right? These are all prejudices that should not bear on the the grade. And it doesn't seem like a huge lift to get people to adopt those kinds of systems where they're practical. And so I guess I'm more optimistic that, you know, if people listen to this podcast and people buy my book and, you know, if it just becomes a more popular talking point, I don't see why we couldn't get people to adopt this. But again, if for some reason there's just total intransigence on the issue. Yeah, I would have to be really persuaded that the government mandate was a good alternative, which I'm not. I was listening to your

podcast with our mutual friend, Chris Williamson, and you mentioned in passing to him the phrase the new age of race obsession. And it was only mentioned in passing, but I was speaking recently on the podcast to a political commentator in the UK and form. politician himself, Rory Stewart, about the idea of obsession. Rory Stewart just had an argument with Sam Harris about the influence of Islam in the United Kingdom. And I asked Rory about this and said, well, where does this come from? If you don't believe that this is an existential threat like someone like Sam might, where does it come from? And he said, it's to do with what you're obsessed with. You know, like if you've spent most of your career talking about theology and

Islam, you might think that that's the most important thing. And I'm thinking that, yeah, okay, if you're a socialist, everything is seen through the lens of class. If you're a feminist, everything is seen through the lens of patriarchy. You talked about the age of race obsession. I don't know if you would sort of stand by that phrase or want to clarify that phrase, but if you think we are in such a thing, who is it that's obsessed? And where does this obsession come from. You've mentioned the development of the smartphone and the fact that people can capture instances of police brutality and use that to feed their ideological passions. But can that really be enough just that alone to inspire an age of race obsession amongst people?

Well, there are other factors that have to do with it as well. A few, I can mention. one is the decline of other obsessions the fact that there's a space left by the absence of religion in society and by the absence of nationalism I'm not saying this is a bad thing I'm speaking descriptively I think the fact that

Western Europe is basically secular that American liberals are basically secular means that, you know, atheism, as I think the new atheists would agree, has no content of its own. It's not a system of beliefs. It's an absence of theological beliefs and religious dogmas.

And the problem is that humans, we do have a need for some kind of belief, system for some kind of meaning, for some kind of direction, for some kind of rubric of how to live a life. And in the absence of religion and nationalism, the fact that God is no longer cool and country is no longer cool, it does leave a space for something new to become obsessed with, to use that word. And so that's part of the reason why it's especially among

younger people who are even less likely to have God and country as important factors in their belief system. It leaves a space for race and identity broadly,

intersectionality, you might say, to become become like a god and and um i think that we i certainly saw that on in college campuses when there was a group of students that no matter what book we were reading no matter what issue we were talking about the only way that they knew how to analyze an issue was through the lens of racism sexism and homophobia like literally at any any any classic text, Greek, Roman, Indian, Buddhist. The only way that they knew to talk about ideas was, oh, well, this is a white guy. This is a black guy. And so that's, oh, this is a man,

this is a woman. And there's sexism there. And that was it. That's all they had. And not only that, I think, especially in America since the late 90s, we haven't had a huge geopolitical adversary since the Soviet Union dissolved. We haven't had a geopolitical adversary to make us feel like we are living in history as Americans with enemies to watch out for. I suppose the war on terror was a bit of that, but that also receded by 2013. And so, I think is it a, I don't if it was Kissinger or who was it that said that war unites nations and peace divides them um i think you know the the peace uh the peace of the of the second half of the obama administration uh and and the trump era the fact that like americans do not feel under threat really by anyone

in these years also makes us focus uh on internal division more. I can see the logic in that, and it may well be true that certainly the reverse is true, I think that as soon as an existential threat arises, such as a war, people kind of forget about the other things that were important to them, you know, five minutes ago internally. Given that, we're in a state of relative peace, and the United States is in a state of relative peace, and even when it's not, it's protected on both sides by oceans. And so people never really get seriously scared, except for maybe in the case of nuclear war, that America is going to be destroyed by a foreign enemy.

Given that that fear isn't there to bring people together, and I don't think we'd want it to be there for the sake of doing that, what else can we appeal to or what can we have that will bring people together in such a way that will maybe fill that gap and make them less obsessed with things like race politics? Yeah, well, I mean, my hope is that people can get behind the project of increasing human well-being broadly on a race-neutral basis that, I mean, there are many ways you can go about that. I mean, you can get as creative with that as you want, and you can go set up bed nets, malaria bed nets in Africa and feel good about how you're contributing to the world. you can donate all your money to charity you can become an effective altruist you can do any number of things you can just do something in your local community that that helps uh you become a teacher any number of things can help increase human well-being and and be kind of construed as fighting the good fight without becoming obsessed with the racial aspect of humanity uh and i hope more and more that people can get behind those projects.

I mean, I think, well, one thing I think is essential is to not teach our kids to focus on race because this is one of the big misunderstandings that people like Robin DiAngelo have. They believe that kids are born racist or, or at minimum, develop racism extremely early. And so, at the earliest possible age, need to be deprogramed from their racism via intensive conversations about racial identity. They believe that you should be teaching kindergartners, look, you're black, you're white, you're Asian, you're black, and that means you're oppressed. You're white, and that means your people are the oppressor people and you're privileged. and that this is the way that you educate kids

out of the racism that they've been weaned on necessarily. Totally backwards. It's actually, it's precisely backwards. What almost every parent knows is that kids are not born caring about race. They need to be taught to care about race.

The way kids are born, they see that people are different. and they're curious about that, they're like, oh, mommy, you know, why is that man darker and why is that man lighter? That kind of thing is, is curiosity-provoking to kids, but they don't ascribe any deeper meaning to it. They don't, they effortlessly make friends with kids of different races. They're born with the correct attitude of colorblindness. It's only adults that poison their minds with, with making race significant. and I think that that

it's very important that that stops. Has there been much empirical research about let's say racial bias in children? I know people are studying all the time implicit racial bias and as we've already talked about workplace discrimination, that kind of stuff. But when it comes to children specifically,

do we have anything in the world of science to refer to? I would say we have stuff in the realm of science. We have stuff in the realm of like Scare quotes again for the listeners. Yeah, thank you. There's a lot of studies that don't replicate and that are junk science and that are at the heart of apologies, replication crisis, file, drawer effect, so forth.

Most of those studies involve showing dolls to children of different races and getting their reactions, showing them cartoon characters of different races, getting their reactions. I mean, the studies come out every possible way. I think I cite five or six of them in the appendix of my book. If I, unless I cut the section out, I think I included that. There's very little, there's really no scientific, solid scientific findings from the sum total of this research. And certainly none that trump the common sense observation of most parents that kids don't care. until they're taught to care.

Yeah, you mentioned a moment ago that kids are born colorblind, a term I'm surprised hasn't come up in this conversation yet, but at the same time, in the same breath, you said that children obviously notice that people are different colors, people are darker or lighter than other people. So listeners who haven't read your book

or haven't seen your previous interviews might be a little confused by what you mean there when you say that people are colorblind and yet they notice race. So can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, so in my view, colorblindness doesn't mean pretending not to notice race. We all notice race, at least adults. You know, listeners that are watching this podcast are going to notice that I'm not a white guy and that you're not a black guy.

The point of colorblindness isn't to pretend you don't see race. it is to try your best to disregard race as a reason to treat anyone differently so and the critics of colorblindness have had too easy a time they've had a field day being able to say

oh colorblindness that's ridiculous we all see race right and and what I'm saying is okay let's concede we all see race but actually talk about what the deeper value of color blindness is, which is not treating people differently on that basis once we notice it.

Yeah, I liked the analogy that you gave once about how actually, literally, color-blind people still see different colors. You know, it's just that they're, I guess, they would think about the world of color and the relevance of color and the uniformity of the relevance of color to be different. The work that you're doing is focusing on, I think, if I can say so, a resistance to seeing things through the lens of race from the sort of side or perspective of those social justice advocates, people who are demanding equity in society in the workplace and saying that when we observe racial groups as groups in these contexts, it can lead to disaster. There's also, of course, the other side of the coin to this, which is people who are seeing people through the lens of race from exactly the opposite side, who say, actually, I think we should be seeing things through the lens of race so that we can begin discriminating against people because they're essentially sort of traditional racist, as it were, as opposed to what I think you've described as neo-racists, which is the group that I've just mentioned. Do you observe what a lot of people are scared of and warn about and complain about, which is this supposed rise, especially in the age of social media, and especially of social media is so deregulated or so unregulated, a rise in people seeing things through the lens of race from this other more traditionally pernicious perspective as well? Are you as worried about that?

Do you think it's as significant a threat to American society? It's something to always remain vigilant about. It's, you know, in the past 10 years, polls have shown something like 10% of Americans agree with just explicitly anti-black racist beliefs. It's not a small amount, you know. When you say anti-black, specifically racist beliefs, like what kind of beliefs are you talking about? something like I would not want my child to marry a black person or something or I would I would I would take issue with uh or black people are um inferior just like straight up um racist beliefs 10% really 5 to 10 yeah 5 to 10 so anyway between 1 in 10 1 in 20 people will agree with those on surveys um which is not nothing but it's also you know, far smaller than it once was.

It is on the order. I mean, there's a word for this effect in survey, among survey experts, but you basically never get below a certain, you never get below a certain number when you ask people crazy shit.

Like, you never zero out on the crazy people, whether you're talking about ghosts, UFOs, or even crazier, you know, crazier ideas than that. Though I suppose UFOs have seemed like a less crazy idea recently. But tabling that,

I think white supremacy has been really delegitimate in the past 50 years of American history. And I don't think it's coming back in full force, probably at any time in my life. However, it's absolutely something we have to remain vigilant about. I mean, we, you can't, you should not fall asleep at the wheel on white supremacists on the richer spancers of the world because they're out there and they believe what they believe and they absolutely have a, have an interest in gaining power. So it's something I condemn, you know, the difference between racism on the right and racism on the left is that everyone knows

racism on the right is wrong. It's obvious. Everyone knows a guy in a clanhood is evil and represents an evil philosophy. There's no confusion about it. People are legitimately confused when they see the woke style of anti-racism on the left and are confused into thinking that it's good for the country and that it that it's a positive force so the reason i spend time um i spend so much more time on the left is because i think it's it's more important for someone like me to um explain the ways in which far left anti-racism is actually incorrect uh because it's not so obvious to people And what across the board has generally been your feeling of the response that you've gotten to this work?

I mean, I know that there are particular examples of negative reactions, whether it be there was a review in current affairs by Nathan J. Robinson, which you replied to in your substack or your sort of infamous incident on The View. Is that the name of the show, the view that you were on recently? but when you're sort of just on the on the Twitter verse when you're sort of looking at YouTube comments on interviews and things what's the general feeling I mean are people accepting your your ideas quite positively from what I've seen of the work that you're doing the comments sections and maybe it's just because of the type of audience that are watching the kinds of podcasts that you're on it's almost unanimously you know this guy's a breath of fresh air he's speaking common sense he's making so much sense I suppose if it were true what you're saying that the world has become obsessed with this idea of seeing the world through race and it's kind of immoral to not do so. Why is it that I'm observing that when you say these things, it's being received almost unanimously, positively, if not by, you know, some individuals in the media? The effect you're seeing is a difference between elites and non-elites, mainly. It's...

Yeah, if we're talking about media, legacy media, universities, in particular, Ivy League and elite universities, what I'm saying is highly controversial there. At a place like Ted, what I have to say is highly controversial. almost everywhere else what I'm saying just goes down like almost obvious common sense almost to the point of being a boring message

and so that's what you're seeing I mean that the people in the common sections feel like I'm just saying something obvious common sense we shouldn't be judging people on the basis of their skin color it's only the people at these elite institutions that view what I'm saying as

as as contrarian and this highlights the just the totally different worlds I mean it's the elite world is almost like a dark matter world relative to the the rest of the universe right it's like it's

we're on the same earth but we're not really on the same we're not really living in the same domain and I think the my favorite way to to illustrate this is always with the word Latinx. For years, you saw the word Latinx. You saw, I think Joe Biden used it.

I think Elizabeth Warren was using it in the late 2010s. And, you know, every legacy media outlet was using this as the new term for Hispanics and Latinos. And when Pew finally did a poll of actual American Hispanics and said, how many of you prefer this term? the number was 4%. 96% I had never heard of it, which I think was the most popular within the 96% or had heard of it and disliked it. Yeah, the fact that most people hadn't even heard of it, I think, is the most telling response there.

That's right, yeah. And so how do you get to a situation where you're a presidential candidate like Elizabeth Warren, who has to get the Hispanic vote. You have to win over the 96%, right? You have a very deep interest in talking to them the way they want to be talked to. And yet you're using a term Latinx, which almost no Hispanics actually like, it actually doesn't even make sense with the phonetics to the Spanish language, because you can't really end words in X, and X. The way you get there is by living in an elite bubble

where everyone around you just lives in a different culture, essentially a subculture, and takes for granted that Latinx is normal and what people want to be called and have very little contact with the world outside that bubble. So that's the way that you get to see all these YouTube comments supporting me. while my ideas are described as, quote, highly controversial.

Yeah, so then who is the book for? Who is this message for if most of the people in the world are going to receive it? Like, yeah, sure, of course. I mean, they might see the book on the shelf and go, why would I even buy a book that's trying to convince me not to care about race? I haven't cared about race in a long time. Like, are you wanting the elites to read this book? Or do you want people to read this book to become aware of, like, what the elites believe?

Like, what's the goal here? all of the above i want elites to read the book and and be persuaded that the philosophy the woke philosophy that has that has pervaded the elite is is toxic and we have to course correct um i want the people in elite institutions who already agree with me to gain more confidence in their point of view and be able to have more courage to to speak up And then the people for whom all of this is like Greek and happening in a far away, you know, eliteville, yeah, I would like to tell them what's going on. Yeah. I mean, it's also not just the, I mean, it's not just the elites, like the people sort of running universities and professors.

But if you went on to a university campus, for example, where, I mean, maybe you'd consider students at Ivy Lee, call it. colleges to be part of the elite or nearly part of the elite or something like that. But I don't even think you'd need to go to an Ivy League college. I think if you go to basically any university campus, the same thing's probably true in the UK. And you interview people sort of on the street, on the campus. And you say, you ask them questions like, you know, do you think race is relevant? I think that they're unlikely to just be saying, yeah, no, not at all. I think they're going to come up with some kind of attempt at nuance. Well, and the world. world that we live in, blah, blah, blah. If you ask them, I mean, they're a entertaining, they're meant

for entertainment, really, these videos are people interviewing students saying, you know, what do you think that black people are better at, the same way they might say, what do you think women are better at? And people list off, you know, they're independent and strong and they're creative and all this kind of stuff. And then they say, well, what do you think men are better at? Oh, nothing. Oh, what do you think white people are better at? Nothing. And it's almost like, we're, they'll do one better like the cut in the arm of New York Magazine did, I think. What do you think white people are better at? Colonizing, oppressive, being insecure, and down and down and down the list. Yeah. So, I mean, it's not just, when we say elite, it's not just the sort of old man in the

suit at the private dinner with the stake in front of him. It's also sort of university campuses, right? So, like, who are you considering? No, I consider this, 95% of this capture. elite. I consider 95% probably of students at Ivy League campuses elites. That's all included in who I'm talking about. Sure. Okay. So it's quite a large group then, like larger than people might understand when you say the word, like elite. Yes, it's larger than people might understand, but it's very small relative to, it may not be more than 5% of the nation. Yeah. I mean, do you see this lasting because like I'm I'm continually amazed at the fact firstly that this occurs on university campuses uh it's obviously amazing footage you know we sort of laugh at it

because it's so stunning but the other thing that amazes me is that is just the universal contempt with which such like videos are reacted to online I mean I think you would have to be someone who thinks in their in their heart of hearts when they see this interview go out that they've done and people saying this person's a bigot they don't even realize it you'd have to just convince yourself that the world is so racist and morally corrupt that all of these people are just are just coping all of these people are just secret racists but surely with the amount of pressure coming from social media this is unsustainable you talked about the age of race obsession growing up in a world of social media where people can, you know, take clips, sometimes out

of context, sometimes without providing necessary context, and, you know, give birth to this ideological movement. Surely the pressure from social media is also going to have to crush it at some point, right? I don't know. I hope so. I think, yeah, you know, with the internet, everything's possible. Information is so widely available that it becomes difficult to, impossible to maintain orthodoxies over a long period of time. I mean, that is definitely one source of perennial hope on these kinds of questions. And the problem is that the incentive structure of social media is always to profit off of conflict and division and whatever

issue taps most deeply into my most base and animal self. That's going to be the incentive structure of social media for the foreseeable future. You know, whether that, whether that just, whether that leads to endless thirst trap videos or endless, you know, police shooting videos, it's like, in some sense they're the same thing, because they lead directly to more engagement and to more money. Those incentives are fundamental. Or on the other side, it could be videos of an illegal immigrant committing a crime, right? Because that taps right into people's sense of nationalism and sense of us versus them,

which gets clicks and gets engagements. So a narrative like I'm pushing, which is one of common humanity transcending race and transcending difference it is at an inherent disadvantage on social media because it's not it's appealing more to reason and common sense than to emotion and tribalism do you think that this sort of Elon Musk

Twitter takeover pro free speech transformation of Twitter has made things better or worse in that regard I mean, a lot of people have celebrated and celebrate the muskification of Twitter because, you know, free speech is back, you know, accounts which were banned for saying pretty like, you know, basic mainstream opinions are now not being banned. You know, when they are banned, it's often reversed by direct appeal to Elon himself. He seems to actually be using the platform quite a lot. And people think this is great, you know, free speech, wonderful. But at the same time, inevitably, it has turned Twitter into a place that is more prone now, surely, to the kind of thing that you're.

that you're describing there. I mean, I open Twitter today and I still use the platform, but I'd be lying to myself despite being one of the people who would have thought broadly this is a good thing. I'm glad that this oppressive social media regulation is starting to be broken down. I must say that even I was surprised opening Twitter in recent sort of months to see that it really has just become something quite different. I mean, there's a lot more, it seems to me, arguments. There's a lot more just footage that you're talking about, just footage of people fighting, footage of people dying, this pornography, you know, this whole sort of opening up of social media seems to have emphasized the worst things about it. Do you agree

with me, as I suppose what I'm asking, that that's been made worse? And if it has been made worse, is that like a worthwhile tradeoff? It's a good question. To be totally honest, it's not something I have a strong opinion on. So my weekly held opinion is probably, yeah, I guess it's gotten a bit trashier. You know, from my eye, the problem

with bots sending me messages is exactly the same as it was before Elon, which I find interesting because he seemed allegedly really focused on solving the bot issue when he was in negotiations to buy.

Seems kind of the same as it was before. Like, you know, once a day I get a message from a not real person. As for the politics of it all, yes, I think there was clearly there was censorship that was one-sided pre-Elon. I think everyone has tried to deny this. There was shadow banning, and everyone at Twitter was a liberal. So what seemed fair to the Twitter censors, what seemed to be right down the middle, to the rest of the country seemed like a liberal slant. I don't really see, like, you can cherry pick the example

of a conservative getting banned in pre-Elon, but you're just not being honest. Like, it was... Or a liberal getting banned, do you mean to say? You can cherry pick a liberal getting banned. But, but you're just, you're just, you're just, you are cherry-picking. I mean, it was, you know, it was obvious.

and I think the Twitter files confirmed it. Yes. That said, it wasn't like, what was the censorship widespread or like it would be in China or Russia? Absolutely not. It was marginal. Most conservatives could say what they wanted to say. And so it was a problem, and I think that problem no longer exists. And I celebrate that.

On the other hand, yeah, and I'll also say, I love the community notes function. I think it's fantastic. Way better than the kind of aggressive heavy-handed fact-checking that some people want to see. It's actually, I think it's crowdsourced and it actually works very well. I mean, 99% of community notes I've seen have been very fair additions of context to whatever the content is. And so that's a good thing. increase of like... I'm not sure if you can still do this, but I think I signed up or clicked something to be, you know, one of the people that can sort of submit and rate these community

notes. And I've never actually used it or done it, but what it means is that when you're scrolling through Twitter and you see community note at the bottom, I would say 10 or 20 times the amount of tweets that I see have something underneath that says rate proposed community notes. And so I click on that. And what I can see is all of the suggestions that people are giving for potential community notes. And it's a fascinating insight into, into what people think is important. And you can watch people actually arguing with each other in the community notes function as to what should count. I do think that's a, because as you say, it's crowdsource. It's a really interesting approach to essentially fact checking, right? But even with that,

the fact that that even needs to exist on social media means we know that there's a problem here that needs to be solved. And that problem existed before this whole Elon Twitter thing. But look, I am still agnostic as it sounds like maybe you are too on whether this was, on the whole, a good thing or a bad thing. But the stuff that you were just describing in the context of this discussion, the sort of feeding argumentation, feeding, click baity videos, surely that part at least has gotten worse. If you very may well have, I just, you know, I'm not, I'm not the best bellwether of, of this trend. I'm very open to that being true. Well, we've already mentioned it. The book is, well, we haven't actually mentioned the title, the end of race politics, at least I don't think so. The book will be linked in the show notes

and the description, as well as I suppose maybe your Twitter account too, if people are interested to seeing what your side of Twitter is like. Coleman Hughes, thanks for coming on the show. Very good to be on the show.