The Patriot Post® · The Case for Colorblindness Is as Compelling — and Vital — as Ever

On the first page of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Coleman Hughes describes himself as a black person who always found race “boring.” Growing up in New Jersey, he gave little thought to his racial identity or to those of his friends. “I didn’t think of them as ‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘Hispanic,’ and ‘mixed race,’” he writes. “I thought of them as Rodney, Stephen, Javier, and Jordan.”

Then he went to college.

“In four years at Columbia, hardly a week passed without a race-themed controversy,” Hughes recalls. During orientation, students were directed to sort themselves by race and discuss how they “participated in, or suffered from, systemic oppression.” The school newspaper promoted the idea that white supremacy was prevalent on campus. One professor was adamant that all people of color were victims of racial injustice, Hughes relates, “even as my daily experience as a black person directly contradicted that claim.”

Though he still considered race itself boring, he was fascinated by the racial obsessions of American cultural elites, especially those who call themselves “antiracists.” The more he explored those obsessions, the more convinced he became that the principle of colorblindness is the only ethical and workable basis for governing and living in a multiethnic democracy. That principle Hughes defines simply: “We should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.”

Hughes’s book makes the case for that approach, and for rejecting the racial doctrines popularized by advocates like Ibram X. Kendi, the founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Kendi, like many on the left, contends that racism permeates American life and the only way to overcome it is with explicitly race-conscious policies. As he put it in “How to Be an Antiracist,” his 2019 bestseller: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

It is illogical to call such views “antiracist,” since they are grounded in racial awareness and score-settling. Hughes’s theme is that the only true antiracism is colorblindness — treating skin color as irrelevant, stigmatizing all expressions of racial hostility or superiority, and recognizing that when it comes to the requirements for human flourishing, all people are fundamentally more alike than unalike.

In progressive circles today, an insistence on colorblindness is anathema. When the University of California compiled a list of “microagressions” that instructors were to avoid, among the verboten phrases were articulations of colorblindness, such as “There is only one race, the human race.” During an appearance on ABC‘s “The View” by the soft-spoken Hughes, cohost Sunny Hostin said disparagingly that he is considered “a charlatan” — for enunciating ideas that Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed.

But the notion that public policy should be steadfastly race-blind was for decades a central principle of the civil rights movement. The NAACP argued again and again that it was illegitimate for government or law to take race into account. “Classifications and distinctions based on race or color,” Thurgood Marshall, the group’s chief counsel, wrote in a 1948 brief, “have no moral or legal validity in our society.”

In his compelling debut book, Coleman Hughes argues that the way to achieve justice is to refuse to focus on race.

In a chapter titled “The Real History of Colorblindness,” Hughes demonstrates that this conviction was at the heart of the anti-slavery and civil rights movements. He quotes numerous abolitionists and civil rights champions who emphasized the colorblind principle, from Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass in the 19th century to Marshall, Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph in the 20th. As for King, his legendary 1963 exhortation to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin was no anomaly. Hughes fills a page and a half with quotations from King’s speeches and writings that are wholly at odds with the idea that race is all-important. “Let us be dissatisfied,” King said in 1967, “until that day when nobody will shout 'White Power!’ — when nobody will shout ‘Black Power!’ — but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.”

The belief that America is permeated with racial bigotry, conscious and unconscious, has become ubiquitous on college campuses, in media newsrooms, and in other left-of-center strongholds. Terms like “whiteness” and “systemic racism” appear far more frequently in published sources than they used to. How did such ideas spread so rapidly? And what happened to undermine what was until recently Americans’ upbeat view of the nation’s racial progress? Hughes reproduces Gallup Poll findings to show that for years after the turn of the century, more than two-thirds of both black and white Americans considered race relations good or even very good.

That era of good racial feelings took a nosedive after 2013. By 2021, the percentage of those who felt relations between racial groups were good had fallen to 43 percent among white respondents and 33 percent among black respondents.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that whatever happened after 2013 represents the biggest setback in American race relations in at least a generation,” Hughes laments.

What could have caused such an abrupt collapse in racial optimism? Hughes rules out a major political development like the election of Barack Obama or Donald Trump. As he points out, the plunge didn’t begin until five years into the Obama presidency and was underway three years before Trump took office. Nor was there any measurable increase in actual racism, such as a rise in white supremacist activity or police shootings of unarmed black people. According to all available data, both of those had been steadily declining.

Hughes suggests that what caused the change was — technology. It was around 2013 that the use of smartphones and social media reached a “critical mass,” increasing by several orders of magnitude the speed at which information could be spread. And the kind of content most susceptible to being posted online — retweeted, blogged, and shared on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram — is “anything that appeals to our tribal identities, us-versus-them narratives, or historical grievances.”

Thus, when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, the claim that a racist policeman had gunned down an unarmed an innocent black kid whose arms were raised — though largely untrue — circulated with turbocharged speed. The less incendiary facts of the case — Brown had punched the cop and tried to steal his gun, and his hands were not in the air — moved much more slowly. It isn’t a new insight that the digital revolution has given dangerous misinformation a powerful boost. But Hughes is the first writer I know of to link that insight to the recent upsurge in racial pessimism.

There is much more to Hughes’s calm and cogent book. Without ever raising his voice, he demolishes, one by one, the “antiracist” myths that have grown so voluble and defends the oldest and most honorable of all American values: the “self-evident” truth that all persons are created equal. We have yet to achieve the full flowering of that value. But this gifted young writer makes an elegant and persuasive case that the long-overdue embrace of colorblindness is the surest way to get there.