Q&A With Coleman Hughes, author of “The End of Race Politics,” who just experienced the mother of all book tour appearances
Coleman Hughes, host of the podcast Conversations With Coleman and a polite but resolute critic of antiracist ideas, stepped last week into the shrieking maw of social justice orthodoxy on ABC’s “The View” to promote his book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. With hosts like Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin seeming anxious to tear into a young writer they clearly saw as a proxy for conservative reaction, Hughes seemed in line for an exhausting experience. The setup promised classic culture war theater: staged conflict without resolution or surprise.
Something interesting did happen, however, and it wasn’t the ferocious conflict-laden exchange that went viral and tickled conservative pundits like Dave Rubin and Megyn Kelly so much, The Root wrote an article complaining. The surprise came in the first moments when the studio audience burst into spontaneous applause after Hughes suggested, “We should try our very best to treat people without regard for race both in our personal lives and our public policy.”
It would be the first of several outbursts speaking less to a race issue than an informational one. Here was evidence that ideas dismissed in elite circles as radical and “dangerous” may be popular and widely accepted, even among fans of the most aggressive idea-policing show on TV.
“This was the audience of The View,” Hughes says, adding that the crowd’s reaction suggested the antiracist ideas they were confronting “do not have deep subscription in the Democratic party base even.”
What happened after those first few seconds was so offensive and surreal that a disbelieving Hughes was knocked into something like a fugue state mid-segment. It started when Goldberg offered a scolding introduction that can only be described as a parody of condescension:
“I don’t want to say it’s your youth,” she began. “You have to also take into consideration what people have lived through in order to understand why there has been such a pointing [sic] of… very specific racial things. Like women couldn’t go to get into colleges. If you are a black person, there are a lot of colleges that wouldn’t accept you.”
Watching this, I wondered: does Whoopi Goldberg really think Hughes doesn’t know colleges were segregated in America? Is she proposing to teach him this on air? I would have exploded, but Hughes, a measured, forgiving personality, said something conciliatory about the experiences of different generations before moving to a larger point.
“The default right now in a lot of areas of policy is to use black and Hispanic identity as a proxy for disadvantage,” he said. “And my argument is that you actually get a better picture of who needs help by looking at socioeconomics and income that picks out people in a more accurate way.”
The crowd again burst into spontaneous applause. Tension on set picked up. ABC’s Sunny Hostin, who apparently went into the segment gunning for Hughes and seemed the only host who’d read any part of his book, quickly stepped on audience cheers to begin questioning.