This is an important moment for many progressives. In 2019, Congress held its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery.
To support the idea, Democrats invited influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates and actor and activist Danny Glover, who has appeared on The Atlantic Monthly magazine article revisited the issue of compensation.
Republicans turned to a virtual unknown: Coleman Hughes, a 23-year-old philosophy major at Columbia University.
At the hearing, Mr. Hughes, who looked his age, testified to a House subcommittee that the failure to pay reparations after the Civil War was “one of the greatest injustices ever committed.”
But, he continued, they should not be paid now. “There’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract from the issues we face today,” he said, pointing to common problems affecting black Americans such as poor schools, dangerous neighborhoods and a punitive criminal justice system. .
Some spectators booed. The Democratic subcommittee chairman, Steve Cohen of Tennessee, implored calm — “calm, calm” — but then said Mr. Hughes’ testimony was arbitrary.
More than four years later, Mr. Hughes, now 27, has emerged as a rare figure in a tense national conversation about how race should be factored into public policy: a young black conservative who argued in a podcast that – has a YouTube channel with about 173,000 subscribers – the school teaches his generation of students to focus on their racial identity while discouraging controversy that challenges their worldview.
Mr. Hughes is not the first black thinker to reject progressive politics or criticize educational institutions. But unlike most of his conservative mentors, Mr. Hughes was young and grew up in an education system they decried.
In his new book, “The End of Racial Politics: The Debate in a Color-Blind America,” to be released on February 6, Mr. Hughes recounts his experience growing up in the liberal enclave of Montclair, New Jersey, and then coming to the United States. Heading to Columbia, he said the campus culture there focuses on affinity groups, diversity, equity and inclusion programs, microaggressions and “white privilege.”
He used these stories to argue for a colorblind society.
The goal is not to avoid noticing race, which he says is impossible. (In fact, he admonished people who said things like “I don’t see color,” and asked them to use phrases like “I try to treat people without regard to race.”)
“The purpose of color blindness is to consciously ignore race as a foundational category for justification of distinctions between individuals and for public policy,” he wrote.
Mr. Hughes said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired his views and often repeated a memorable line from his “I Have a Dream” speech: One day, children “will not be able to Being judged based on the color of your skin.” skins, but depends on their character content. “
His arguments angered his critics, who said he ignored the deep racial inequalities plaguing American society in everything from schools to income to housing. And, they say, he deliberately misrepresented Dr. King’s speech, which also protested continued segregation, police brutality and black poverty.
“Even those who are still financially well-off still suffer from racism,” psychologist Monica Williams said during an online debate in which Hughes participated.
Mr. Hughes, in turn, offered a scathing assessment of progressives who, he said, view American society as white and non-white and view white people as historical oppressors. In his book, he calls them “the new racists.”
“The new racists,” he wrote, “are most likely to insist that people of European descent are not allowed to open Mexican restaurants.”
Hughes said in an interview that his views on color blindness are gaining wider acceptance. But he sees a long way to go before achieving a campus culture in which unorthodox views, whether of the left or the right, are not harshly suppressed.
“I agree that cancel culture has reached its peak,” he said. “But saying something peaked and then declined doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in a very good position.”
Mr. Hughes wrote in the book that his father’s family traced its ancestry to a slave gardener who worked at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Although he didn’t reveal specific details, he described a comfortable childhood in the New York suburb of Montclair, where he had a diverse group of friends who largely paid little attention to race.
He wrote that his first exposure to diversity programs was as a high school student at a private school, which led him to attend a three-day conference for students of color. It was there that he first heard terms like “white privilege” and “intersectionality.” The atmosphere, he wrote, was one of “suffocating conformism” and dissent was strongly discouraged.
At Columbia, he was baffled by students who complained they were surrounded by white supremacy. He found the campus to be “one of the most progressive, non-racist environments on earth.”
Why, he asked, “do these kids sound more pessimistic about the state of race relations in America than my grandparents (who lived through segregation)?”
He connected with a number of like-minded students and professors, including John McWhorter, who said he considered Mr. Hughes like a son. (Mr. McWhorter also writes for the New York Times op-ed page.) Christian Gonzalez, a college friend, said their experience was sometimes disorienting, with some students occasionally accusing them of being pro-white Supreme.
“It’s hard to swim against the tide when 80 percent of the people around you have a different perspective,” said Mr. Gonzalez, now a doctoral student. “You might start thinking you’re crazy.”
Kmele Foster, 43, a libertarian-leaning political commentator, became friends with Mr. Hughes after seeing some of his work online. He said black conservatives of his generation had far less to contend with than Mr. Hughes did.
“I suspect,” Mr. Foster said, “that Coleman entered a polarized environment at college where his views would be more clearly opposed and that he might be better prepared for what was to come. .”
Mr. Hughes said he began writing for Quillette, a conservative website, after Columbia University’s student newspaper was mostly uninterested in publishing his opinion pieces.
He described the social condemnation and sometimes isolation he felt. For example, he once matched with a classmate on Tinder but was rejected after she discovered his work. “Right before the date,” he recalled, “she said to me: ‘I just read your Quillette article. I would never date someone who didn’t believe racism existed.”
“That’s not even close to what I’m saying,” he added. “That’s not what I would say either.”
However, his Quillette article caught the attention of Republicans on the House Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee. Some of Hughes’ friends advised him not to testify, saying it would be a bad look to accept an invitation from House Republicans.
Despite the apparent hostility of some in the audience, Mr Hughes sat calmly throughout the hearing, occasionally sipping from a bottle of water. But he said the questioning made him uneasy.
“People were shouting ‘Shame!’ “It was on him as he walked out the door. “Coleman was a hard man to shake,” said his friend and author Thomas Chatterton Williams, who shared many of Hughes’s views on race. Knew he didn’t feel good about it. “
Mr. Hughes turned the experience into music. Mr. Hughes studied briefly at the Juilliard School before attending Columbia University, where he rapped and played jazz trombone under the stage name Coldxman. After the hearing, he wrote a song called “Blasphemy,” which was released last year on his album “Amor Fati,” a Latin phrase meaning “love of fate.” In one poem, he said: “Charge me with thinking, throw me in jail to serve the sentence I wrote.”
He joined the right-leaning Manhattan Institute as a fellow and continued to write occasionally for Quillette. After abandoning a more high-profile career path as a commentator—like signing on as a columnist for a major publication or joining a cable news channel as a contributor—he started his own podcast, “With Coleman dialogue”.
This independence helps insulate him from counterattacks.
Relying on yourself meant “if you didn’t like Coleman’s position, there was no employer to target,” said Mr. Williams, the author. “There’s no university to complain about, no newspaper to tweet angrily about.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s accepted. One of the most confusing things, Mr. Hughes said, was a talk he gave at the annual TED conference last year.
In a 10-minute speech, Mr Hughes called for public policy to help people based on income, which he said was “the best way to lower the temperature of tribal conflicts in the long term”.
Audiences were mostly positive, but a handful of critics, including TED staff, complained that the talk was disturbing, harmful and inaccurate, despite being fact-checked by the organization.
According to accounts provided by Mr. Hughes and TED chief Chris Anderson, some employees launched an internal campaign to prevent Mr. Hughes’s talk from being publicized.
As a result, the talk was not initially included in TED’s most popular podcasts, Mr. Anderson said. TED also hid the presentation from its website until a few months later, when Tim Urban, a prominent speaker on the TED Talk circuit, pointed it out.
Mr. Anderson invited Mr. Hughes to participate in a debate with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie — in which the psychologist Ms. Williams also participated — so that TED could present the opposite the opinion of.
“This is very much a case of heckler veto,” Mr. Hughes said. “I said: ‘Okay, fine. I’m going to do this extra debate, even if you don’t let anyone else do it.”
Hughes said he has no plans to attend this year’s TED conference but would not object to returning if invited.
Mr Foster, a political commentator, said such experiences can be stressful, even for those with the thickest skin. people. ‘”
audio producer Palin Behruz.