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May 19, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:03:18
Not Everything Is About Race | Coleman Hughes
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Though we have different experiences, we do live in an objective reality.
There is such a thing as truth.
There is such a thing as facts.
And those facts can't depend on the fact that you're you and I'm me.
So we have to be able to have a conversation where we can disagree with each other, where no one by default trumps anyone else just by virtue of your skin color or your identity.
And that's the only way that we can actually have a conversation.
Today we welcome Coleman Hughes, a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist known for his work in the fields of race, politics, and culture.
Hughes has quickly become one of the most influential young thinkers in America, earning him widespread recognition, including being named to Forbes' 30 under 30 list in the media category in 2021.
Former fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, his writings have been featured in publications ranging from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Spectator and National Review.
In 2019, Hughes testified before the United States Congress during a hearing on reparations, where he eloquently argued against the idea, citing concerns about its potential divisiveness and ineffectiveness.
This testimony further cemented his position as a significant voice in the national conversation on race.
In February 2024, Hughes published his latest book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America.
In this book, Hughes advocates for a colorblind approach to politics and culture, challenging contemporary anti-racist movements that he believes perpetuate division and resentment.
He argues that we need to get out of the business of racial classification and rethink the long-run consequences of race-thinking and race-based policy.
Today, we cover a wide range of topics, including Hughes' viral appearance on The View, where he discussed race relations in America and the failures of Marxism when applied to race.
We also delve into the history of race-based riots, implications of the George Floyd case, Hughes' own experiences with racism in his life, and so much more.
Coleman Hughes' commitment to fostering dialogue and his fearless approach to contentious issues make him a truly compelling figure in today's intellectual landscape.
Plus, he's an excellent guest on today's Sunday special.
Really appreciate the time.
My pleasure.
So why don't we start where everybody's been starting with you, I'm sure, the last couple of weeks, and that is that interview on The View, which has always been my lifelong dream.
I've been begging to go on The View for legitimately years at this point, and they will never have me on to my chagrin and dismay.
But they did have you on, at which point Sonny Hostin declared that you were a charlatan and apparently a Republican operative, which seems kind of shocking since my understanding is that you have not voted Republican in any presidential election thus far.
Why don't you take us through what actually that experience was like in person?
Yeah, so The View is not my audience.
I was excited to be able to reach a kind of listener that would never normally listen to my podcast or buy my book, so I was excited to go on.
And one of their producers warned me that Sunny Hostin was going to come after me rather hard, and I didn't know who she was.
So I had no expectations.
I just had, you know, the typical level of anxiety going into a major TV appearance.
And what happened is that I had a pretty normal exchange with Whoopi Goldberg.
We disagreed respectfully.
But Sunny Hostin, you know, she claimed to have read my book twice, which was clearly not true because she had no idea what was in the book, obviously.
And She had an agenda to come after me from a particular angle that she didn't realize wasn't going to land.
She thought this was going to be some kind of knock-down blow to say that I've been co-opted by the right as if there's Koch Brothers money being funneled into my bank account to get me to say what I'm saying, whereas the truth is that I just believe what I'm saying.
And I've done a lot of research on this topic.
I feel strongly about it.
In terms of politics, I consider myself a moderate and an independent.
I've only voted twice because I'm 28 years old, both times for Democrats, but I'm open to voting for Republicans.
And so her critique had nowhere to land.
And the reason I think it went viral, and this is what I've gathered from people coming up to me telling me, You know, in some cases on the street coming up to me saying I saw you on The View is that so often on daytime television, on cable news, you see performative energy meeting performative energy.
It's basically all theater.
And you rarely see someone come with a kind of performative, canned attack, but the other person just respond kind of calmly with facts.
And that's what I did there, and I think that was so jarring to people that the moment went viral.
So, I mean, let's talk about that on a personal emotional level.
So obviously I've been in situations very similar where I'm under attack from, you know, people who disagree with me and it is very difficult to stay emotionally sort of calm and placid when you're being accused of things that obviously are untrue.
So how did you handle that?
Was that difficult or was it more just puzzlement as to what was going on?
No, I guess it ended up really well.
Obviously, I'm a normal human being.
I have anxiety.
I have, you know, my heart rate gets up in moments like that.
But really, The way I try to approach it is to actually listen to what she's saying, right?
Even someone who hates you, even someone who is, you know, a clown and someone who's bad faith, they might make a good point.
So I always just try to listen to people, actually understand what they're saying, and then respond to it on the merits.
And if you do that, and if you're very researched and very prepared, there's really not much to be afraid of.
So to switch to the topic of your book, which obviously is related to the interview, one of the reasons I think that Sonny Hostin assumed that you were a member of the right is because you're making an argument that very often is associated with the right, mainly because the left has abandoned what used to be its own argument with regard to race.
The left's argument for most of my childhood, actually, and most of my teenage years with regard to race, was the old MLK argument, which is that you're supposed to see people as individuals without reference, primarily, to their racial group.
That was a piece of information that typically could only be used for ill and was very rarely used for good.
And then it seems like the left has shifted away from that MLK message and now has embraced much more racial politics As a mechanism for electoral and political success.
So why don't you talk a little bit about that.
Why do you think that, first of all, what is the argument that you're making?
And why do you think it is that this has now become more associated with quote-unquote the right even though it was never historically a right-wing argument?
Yeah, my childhood mirrored yours in that sense.
I grew up in a liberal town.
I think I met one Republican my whole life as a kid.
And everyone took for granted that Martin Luther King's famous speech and his now cliched phrase, judge people by the content of their characters, not the color of their skin.
Everyone took that for granted as the obvious way to think about race.
It was a liberal position.
It was associated with the civil rights movement.
However, there's always been a fringe among academics, elite intellectuals, the critical race theory fringe, which since the 70s and 80s has said that actually the civil rights movement was wrong.
They didn't go far enough.
And we have to think about race all the time.
American society is fundamentally racist.
The institutions are shot through with racism.
So we have to burn it all down and build it back up again.
Well, Kimberly Crenshaw is one of the big leaders of that movement, and the whole movement defined itself in opposition to colorblindness.
And what they did was very clever.
They wrote a completely false history of colorblindness.
They said that colorblindness was invented by conservatives in the 70s and reactionaries that didn't like the civil rights movement and wanted to reverse it.
So they basically invented this Trojan horse of colorblindness.
And so that they could sort of get racism in through the back door.
It's totally false.
And chapter two of my book is all about this.
I go back to the 1860s, to this guy named Wendell Phillips, who was one of the most important abolitionists.
Uh, and he believed Black people should have full rights right after the Civil War, so he was the more radical wing of the abolitionist movement, and he's the first person to push the idea and the word colorblindness.
He actually asked for a colorblind government, is how he put it in 1865.
So I go from there, and it's a straight line all the way through the Civil Rights Movement, Where one of the central demands of the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement was a colorblind, race-neutral regime of government.
This was at the core of the Civil Rights Movement.
And so what happened is in the late 60s and 70s, liberals abandoned this idea during the race riots, very similar to what happened during George Floyd, where you had every politician trying to outdo the other to show how much they cared about racism and implementing race-based policies everywhere from, you know, Microsoft to like a local town ordinance.
Liberals abandoned colorblindness.
And starting in 2013, this trend really accelerates.
The trend accelerates because everyone has a smartphone starting around 2013.
Smartphone with a camera and social media.
And so we get this narrative, false narrative.
People are seeing videos in their social media feeds of unarmed black Americans getting shot by cops.
And they're being told that this is a daily reality and that this never happens to white people, both of which are false.
But people believe it.
And that leaves an opening in people's minds for these fringe theories, critical race theory, to seep into the public.
And that's been called, Matt Iglesias called it the Great Awokening.
It was, I think, what many of us experienced starting in 2013, where suddenly everyone is talking about white privilege, systemic racism, how whiteness is evil, how black people are inherently morally superior.
And we get the whole complex of racial tensions and BLM that we've seen over the past about 11 years.
How much of that do you think is tied into the presidency of Barack Obama?
Because when he took office in 2009, he came into office with a basic argument, which was that we were aiming toward the post-racial society, and that he and his person was emblematic of that move in sort of the post-racial society.
There wasn't black America, there wasn't white America, there was just America.
No red states, no blue states, just the United States.
And then circa about 2012, probably with the Trayvon Martin case, you started to see the president start to inject himself in some of these issues in a lot more loud fashion.
There was the Henry Louis Gates incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he suggested that the police officer had acted stupidly in targeting Henry Louis Gates over his race.
It turned out it was a little bit more of a complex situation than that.
And he started sounding off a lot more loudly about these issues.
And for a lot of Americans, it was kind of an abrupt reversal.
And I think that abrupt reversal sort of carried on into 2013 and then in 2014 with the Ferguson riots in which the president again said people aren't making things like this up, even though the Ferguson case actually was largely made up in terms of the original hands-up-don't-shoot narrative and all of this.
Yeah, so you're exactly right about Barack Obama's trajectory.
His first term, he sounded a lot like me.
I mean, if you go back to his speech on race in 2008, it almost looks like something I would write.
By 2013, he was already drinking the Kool-Aid on BLM and so forth.
So my view is he didn't cause that trend.
He rode the political winds, essentially.
The trend was because of social media and camera-enabled smartphones.
That changed the political winds of the country fundamentally.
And Barack Obama was like a weathervane.
He felt he could no longer get away with the kind of old school mentality that he had in 2008.
So he rode the winds in the direction of identity politics, but he didn't cause it.
So when you look at sort of the roots of the radical fringe of the civil rights movement that you're talking about, that was calling for a rejiggering of America based on group, instead of based on individual and sort of the post-racial society, that crosses streams very heavily with Marxist thought.
There are a lot of people who have suggested, I think correctly, that basically what happened in the late 60s, early 70s, is that many of the arguments that had historically been made about class And did not work in the United States, because America is pretty obviously not a class-based society, unlike, say, many elements of Europe historically, where classes were basically baked into the cake, where you had a house of lords, for example, people with historic wealth.
You never had that in the United States.
de Tocqueville talks about the idea that the United States was shockingly middle class, that there really was no boundary between the middle class and the upper class, and that people could move freely within the classes.
And so the failure of Marxism in the United States, a class-based system, was transmuted into a race-based system, where instead of making the argument that people were inherently a part of a lower economic strata, the argument was that if one group, racially, was disproportionately a member of a lower economic strata, that is because society was racist, as opposed to being classist.
And so they grafted many of the Marxist arguments into a much more fragile area for the United States historically, which is race.
I think that's right.
I think if you go back and read a lot of the critical race theorists, they were very much steeped in Marxism.
They all swam in those waters.
They all admired Marx and the litany of scholars who came out of the Marxist school.
But they were dissatisfied with one aspect of Marx, which is that Marx didn't care about race.
I mean, he was a bit of a racist and an anti-Semite himself, but in his philosophy, he didn't focus very much on race, and they didn't like that.
So they added race to a broadly Marxist framework of looking at the world.
And those are the waters out of which critical race theory was born.
Now, there's another similarity to Marxism.
Which is, when you look at Ibram Kendi's school of thought, Ibram Kendi believes that if black people are 13% of the American population, black people should be 13% of everything.
That is, 13% of people in the bad parts of society, prisons, You know, being punished and juvenile detention, so forth.
13% of wealth, 13% of every profession, 13% of professors, 13% of people in the media, and so forth, on down the list.
This is an idea very similar to the kind of Marxist diagnosis of society that led communist countries to ruin.
on almost every continent throughout the 20th century.
So that's the other similarity to Marxism, is the false dream of equal outcomes.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Well, one of the things that's been fascinating to watch inside the Democratic Party is the embrace of this by people who are pretty openly Marxist.
Bernie Sanders in 2016 runs, and he meets with shocking levels of popularity inside the Democratic Party, running on a class-based platform.
And then he basically gets shellacked for not being racialist enough.
And by 2020, he's now mirroring many of the arguments of Black Lives Matter, specifically in an attempt to sort of fill in that gap.
How much do you think the Democratic Party has been captured by this?
Is it possible for the Democratic Party to self-correct here?
Well, I hope that I can be, you know, I can be part of the solution here.
I mean, the fact that I was received so well by the Views audience.
I mean, that's the other part that was interesting.
That audience is mostly Democrat, if not completely Democrat, and they were clapping.
For me, despite the fact I was getting attacked by Sonny Hostin.
So I think people confuse the positions of the Democrat elites and Democrat leadership with the position of rank-and-file Democrat voters.
Rank-and-file Democrat voters often believe in colorblind policy and believe in my message that where we do have, where the government does have a legitimate interest in helping the poor, And the disadvantaged, if they want to do that, and if it works, they should do it on the basis of income, not on the basis of race, right?
If you're going to tell me you're going to help pay for the college tuition of someone whose parents make $30,000 a year, that makes sense to me, and you don't need to pay for the tuition of someone whose parents make half a million dollars a year.
Those sorts of income-based policies don't receive very much backlash if they work, when they work well.
So, to the extent that the Democrats can go back to that kind of message, I think they'll have more success electorally and they'll have a better profile of public policies.
Unfortunately, I think the Democrats are far too easily swayable by the activist fringe.
The easiest way to see this is with the word Latinx.
I mean, many people have made this point, but the word Latinx makes no sense with the Spanish language.
Almost no Hispanic people have heard of it.
Yet, you heard it coming out of the mouths of Elizabeth Warren and even Joe Biden.
When Pew finally did a poll and asked American Hispanics, do you like this word Latinx, 96% said either never heard of it or I don't like it.
Now, I could have told you that, but it's basically that 4%.
That 4% Who are who comprise the subculture in the bubble of Democrat elites and are often unable to get outside that bubble and realize that they have a totally different set of values, different way of speaking, different language than the voters that they need to reach.
It does feel like an insular clique, and this isn't true for just one party, but it's certainly true in this matter for the Democratic Party.
There's an insular clique that uses the language or uses sort of faith-based, skin-in-the-game attempts to demonstrate cultural solidarity with this ideology.
And so you mentioned Latinx, or another example would be using pronouns in your bio, which, you know, unless you are a trans-identifying person, is completely irrelevant and everybody will just assume that you are.
Exactly what you appear to be.
When it comes to some of the racial arguments, I think there's some of this going on as well.
One of the things that's occurred to me over the years, and I've said it many times, is that the Black Lives Matter movement has historically picked victims who are actually not the greatest examples of victims.
There are, in fact, black men who have been shot.
Unjustifiably by the police.
And those are never the ones who are famous.
It is always the black men who are in, at the very least, controversial situations with the cops, who are then made iconic by the Black Lives Matter movement.
And the only reason to do that, presumably, would be as a show of faith.
That if you're willing to say that this, too, is an example of systemic American racism, well then you're part of the club.
So Michael Brown is a great example of this.
Obviously, Hands Up, Don't Shoot was completely a lie, start to finish.
And Michael Brown ends up being an icon of the movement to the point where hands up don't shoot becomes the thing that people are saying years later.
People are still paying homage to the image of Michael Brown being an innocent victim of the police despite the fact that the federal government under Eric Holder found that that was not in fact the case.
You've written pretty extensively about the George Floyd situation.
Where there's basically two major questions.
One is there was never even the accusation that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd based on his race.
That accusation was never even made in court.
There was no evidence even presented to that effect.
And then there's the secondary question, which is whether Derek Chauvin actually even murdered George Floyd or whether George Floyd experienced some form of cardiac arrest based on the fact that he was saying he couldn't breathe before he even, he couldn't breathe even before they had him on the ground outside the car.
What do you make of the attempt to choose particular victims as opposed to others?
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right.
I mean, so a case like Philando Castile was just kind of straightforward, absolute tragedy that almost nobody who looked at it really disagreed with it and not for any significant period of time.
But that became a footnote in the Black Lives Matter story relative to these other examples, like Michael Brown, who, you know, I mean, the officer, I'm not sure the officer could have done anything different in that scenario unless he was a super cop.
And of course, George Floyd, which, you know, changed the world, and which people, you know, people were so deeply pressured to take the line that he was murdered.
That people have ignored all the counter evidence at trial.
So I've been writing about this recently.
Essentially, so let's just first talk about the ways in which the trial was unfair.
And this is something I don't think anyone has even really tried to disagree with me about, right?
You had one jury member who was wearing a shirt that said, get your knee off our necks before the trial, okay?
Before the trial, they attended a march commemorating Dr. King, where George Floyd's family members spoke, and he was wearing a shirt that said, Get Your Knee Off Our Necks.
And then he was selected to be in a jury about a trial about whether a knee on the neck constituted murder.
Okay, so you went to law school, right, Ben?
I did.
If you get this as a hypothetical, with the names removed, how many people in class are saying that that jury's objective?
Zero.
I mean, obviously, that is a peremptory challenge immediately that is upheld by the court.
Okay, so then add to that the fact that you have, in their interviews, you have several jurors, seated jurors and unseated jurors, saying that they were afraid for their safety if the trial were to come out one way.
We all know what that means.
If it were to be an acquittal, the whole city was going to go up in flames.
They knew that their names were going to come out some months after the trial.
And if you are associated with the acquittal of perhaps the least popular defendant in American history, certainly in modern American history, you know, understandably you fear for your family.
Okay, so there's that.
There's the fact that the jury wasn't sequestered in one of the most talked about trials in modern American history.
There's the fact that everyone knew the city of Minneapolis, which had been traumatized, historically traumatized by the riots of the past year, would go up in riots again if he was acquitted, yet the trial wasn't moved.
Every judgment call that a judge could make to make it fairer went in the wrong direction.
Okay, so putting all that to the side, actually looking at the facts of what happened, You had two different theories of what killed George Floyd.
You had the positional asphyxia theory and the adrenaline surge theory.
The positional asphyxia theory was that Chauvin had so much weight on his neck and back that he couldn't take full breaths.
Floyd couldn't take full breaths and he died in exactly the way you would imagine.
You know, asphyxia.
He literally couldn't breathe.
He couldn't expand his lungs because there was so much weight on his back.
That was the prosecution's theory and they had Dr. Tobin back it up.
Not a crazy theory, it's possible.
Then there was the theory of the guy who did the actual autopsy, Dr. Andrew Baker from Hennepin County.
His theory was totally different.
It had nothing to do with getting full breaths, nothing to do with positional asphyxia.
He believed that George Floyd had an adrenaline surge because of the whole altercation.
Physically struggling for minutes and minutes on end and what happens is your body surges with stress hormones, which asks your heart to beat faster.
The problem was George Floyd, he had a very enlarged heart.
He had severe a hypertensive artery sclerosis, which means his arteries were constricted, one 90% constricted, one was 75% constricted, very severe.
He also had fentanyl in his system, a significant amount of fentanyl in his system and trace amounts of methamphetamine and other drugs.
And you put all this together and his heart could not respond to the demands of the adrenaline asking it to beat faster. So that was Dr.
Baker's theory. Also not a crazy theory.
Very much possible. Now these were both plausible theories.
Nothing ruled either one out.
And if you're a jury and you have two theories, one of which implicates the defendant and one
of which doesn't, you were supposed to acquit because that's reasonable doubt.
It could be the case that Chauvin killed him because of the weight.
It could also be the case that he died because the struggle his heart gave out as a result of the adrenaline brought on by the whole situation, in which case Chauvin didn't kill him.
So that right there, that should have been reasonable doubt on all three charges.
But of course, you know, this was one of the least fair trials that I've ever seen.
And so that's my view of what should have happened.
I'm not saying Chauvin was a good cop.
I'm not saying he handled the situation well.
I'm not saying he shouldn't have been disciplined in some way for that arrest.
But there was certainly reasonable doubt on the criminal charges.
What did you make of, obviously, Radley Balko came after you pretty hard over all of this.
What did you make of his critiques of your speaking out about all of this?
Yeah, so his critiques on the point of the autopsy were uniformly wrong.
I think where he did make some good points was on the training.
So for example, they were trained to be aware of positional asphyxia, right?
They were trained to be aware of this and they were trained to roll them into the side recovery position as opposed to staying on their back.
What Balko doesn't talk about is the fact that they were also trained on a bunch of other stuff, which is more favorable to Chauvin's defense.
For example, they were trained that if someone is talking, then they're breathing.
That's in their training, okay?
Floyd was talking for five minutes.
In fact, he was yelling.
So if you train officers to be aware that people often lie to get out of arrests, which is true, and you say, no matter what they say, if they're talking, then they're breathing.
And then you see a guy that's breathing for five minutes and who claimed to be claustrophobic even though he was just sitting in a car, locked car, voluntarily.
Obviously, you know, it's very possible that officers are going to think, he's fine, he's talking.
This is my training.
My training is that if they're talking, they're fine.
They were also trained that there are situations in which you can stay on a suspect in the prone position, not rolling them over if the situation isn't code four, meaning there's a, for instance, there's a hostile crowd or something like that.
And they were very worried about the crowd encroaching and attacking.
And obviously hindsight is 20-20.
We know that Floyd died and that their attention should have been fully focused on him.
But you don't judge officers with 20-20 hindsight.
You judge them based on what was reasonable at the time.
So I think there's a lot of counter evidence, even on what Chauvin was trained, that make it more defensible, or more understandable, given what he was trained to do.
So let's talk about some of the myths that you talk about in your book with regard to race and racial justice.
So obviously, you know, there are those of us who are advocates of the idea that justice, that there should never be a modifier to justice.
There's just justice.
There's no such thing as social justice or racial justice.
There is just what is just or unjust.
In a particular circumstance, in the minute you add a modifier, you actually move into the realm of injustice.
As soon as you say social justice, you're doing so at the detriment of individual justice.
If you say racial justice, then what you're doing so is at the detriment to the individual and the circumstances because you're obviously substituting another priority for that priority.
You go through a series of myths in the book about race.
Why don't we go through some of those myths right now so that you can sort of fill in the audience on what those myths are.
The most obvious one is one that Thomas Sowell has spent a lot of time on, is the myth that disparity equals discrimination.
That just because things don't end up the way that Ibram X. Kendi wants, where 13% of every industry is black, this means that the industry is discriminating against the group that is disproportionately either underrepresented or overrepresented in that industry.
Yes, so let me start here with that.
People often mistake me for saying that racism doesn't exist.
It's one of the most common criticisms I get.
I think it's one of the most common criticisms Sowell has gotten as well.
It's absolutely not what we're saying.
Racism does exist.
In the literature, there is racism against minorities in the labor market.
Sowell, you know, having grown up in the 1930s in the Jim Crow South, is highly aware that racism exists.
The argument, however, is that if racism were the main reason why people succeeded or failed, we would see a totally different landscape of success than, in fact, what we see.
So, for example, what we see is that Indian Americans, South Asian Americans face discrimination in the labor market, yet Indian Americans are the highest earning ethnic group.
However, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis earn far less than average.
Is it that one group is receiving more discrimination than the other?
Well, no.
Nigerian Americans do better than average, and whatever racism black people as a whole experience, Nigerians are also experiencing, and yet they do better than average.
You see different white ethnic groups.
uh make very different sums of money right if you look at russian americans as opposed to french americans you're talking about a difference of 80 cents on the dollar and i don't think anyone is discriminating against different ethnic white groups chinese americans earn something like it's like it's like 60 cents on the dollar between mong americans and chinese americans and you and i could not tell among american apart from a chinese american so what you see is that actually The vast majority of what determines whether a group is successful in America, modern America, are all the other things.
The human capital, the social capital, the skills you bring to the table, the level of education, not how much discrimination you face.
The discrimination seems in the literature not to matter very much to determining outcomes.
That's the argument.
What's happened is that you have a whole group of scholars, a whole portion of academy that believes that discrimination, that disparities are only caused by discrimination.
There's just no evidence for this belief.
If that were true, we would see a totally different landscape of disparities.
So when it comes to sort of a subset of that fallacy, or maybe an extension of that fallacy, there's an attempt very often to redirect from statistics where this is obviously true to statistics that are historically based.
So what you'll see is a movement from, you're talking about income statistics, which are very real because they're in the here and now, and so if one group has a lower income than another group, or one group has a Greater level of income mobility than another income group.
You can see how current policy shapes the income of these various groups and you can rule out whether discrimination is true or not.
And so, then there's a misdirect.
And the misdirect typically is to wealth in communities.
And because wealth, obviously, is going to contain vestiges of the past.
Obviously, if your grandfather was wealthy and your grandfather is wealthy because he engaged in racism or because your great-great-great-grandfather engaged in racism, you can carry that forward.
The attempt is to suggest that because there are vast wealth differentials in American life,
that those are either largely or entirely due to discrimination historically,
and that it's impossible to overcome those wealth differentials.
And what that means is that the way that wealth is typically built is through income.
So if you actually wish to fix that in the future, you need to change income trajectories, not wealth
distributions.
There's an attempt to say, for example, with regard to reparations.
Well, the way to fix the wealth disparities of the past is to simply redistribute the wealth that already exists among different racial groups in order to make up for discrimination of the past, without mentioning that if you don't change the income trajectories of the groups right now, the wealth differentials will just re-emerge incredibly quickly, no matter what level of redistributionism you use.
Yeah, there's also, I mean, so I think the wealth argument, they certainly have a stronger point to point out the ways in which black people were disadvantaged in the booming post-World War II housing market.
I think that's a good point.
I think it gets taken too far, however.
If you just look at the building of wealth among Asian Americans, the vast majority of whom arrived after 1965, after that glorious boom period, and arrived here with very little, coming from countries like China and so forth, which were largely still third world countries at that time.
And the extent that they've almost caught up in median wealth with white Americans just in the past 50 years is a testament to the fact that America is still the best place for someone who is poor to build wealth within two generations.
There's no place better for that on planet Earth right now.
I think you're certainly right to point out that this attitude which blames everything on the past, it's anti-scientific, it's just not the truth, and it's certainly not a helpful mindset in terms of encouraging people to do the healthy things that are going to get them to succeed in the only life that we do have.
There's very rarely an attempt to actually try to measure or create some sort of metric for how much has past discrimination contributed to current income trajectories, for example.
Somebody will say, okay, well there was racism for your parents and therefore there's an income trajectory now without attempting to actually measure to what extent that's true because it turns out that there's a vast panoply of answers from 0% to 100% and the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
But the arguments seem to be 0% or 100%, pick one.
And that, of course, is really stupid and also doesn't get you to anything like the
multifactorial analysis that's going to be necessary to correct the behavior.
When you pick the 100% analysis, which is what Ibram X. Kendi does in his intellectual ilk,
when they make the 100% argument that all disparities are attributable to either past
or current discrimination, that it's all discrimination, the reason it seems like
they're doing that is because they want to make then another false binary argument.
The false binary argument is if you argue the reverse, if you argue that the disparities
between groups are largely attributable at this point in time to individual decision-making
within groups being different, that people make different, if you pick any two groups in America,
Age groups, sex groups, like literally any groups in America, there will be disparities because individuals within those groups make different decisions.
You could take a random room around the United States, draw a line down the middle of it, and there will be disparities between the two groups on a wide variety of topics because the individuals are different in those two groups.
What he instead suggests in another false binary is he says, well, if you're saying, for example, that black Americans earn less than white Americans and it's not due to racism, then you must be suggesting That black Americans are inferior to white Americans.
Then you're a racist, right?
Because anti-racism would be trying to correct for all the discrimination.
If you say it's not discrimination, it must be because you believe that black people have lower IQs or because you believe that black people are genetically inferior to white people or something like that.
What do you make of that argument?
The truth is that groups differ on all kinds of cultural attributes, and we all know this.
Ethnic groups differ.
Groups of the same race differ culturally.
What we mean by the word multicultural society is that there are many cultures in one society.
If you believe that culture matters, which most people do, then you have to admit that culture matters plus cultures differ equals cultural differences matter.
And there's so many ways you could look at this that don't even involve the question of race.
Look at the historic differences between white Americans from the North and white Americans from the South on every outcome measure from income to crime to all sorts of cultural and values differences between two groups of the same race.
In my book, I cite a study of a sociologist who looked at different Black American groups in New York, Black Americans as opposed to Black Caribbeans, and found large cultural differences in terms of, you're looking at, you know, Black immigrants from places like Jamaica, who have a different, carry a different culture and have different outcomes as a result.
These are two groups of the same race.
How can it be racist to say that the culture might be behind the outcome differences?
So, this is one of the biggest false arguments that people make.
smearing you as a racist for the common sense and highly empirically backed finding that culture matters.
If you raise people in a culture that strongly values education, where your parents are over your shoulders, encouraging you to do your homework and helping you do your homework from a very young age, reading you books when you're three years old, giving you a head start, teaching you to read before you get into kindergarten, In the modern world, where those skills matter, that culture is going to do better than a culture that is doing the opposite, where very few people are reading to their kids before kindergarten, for whatever reason.
And it's not racist to point out that that matters.
You know, one of the areas where, again, I think that the reason that you got so much ire from Sonny Hostin is because one of the things that you debunk here is a tool that is very frequently used, which you call the myth of superior knowledge.
This basic idea, which is that unless you're a member of the supposedly discriminated against group, you can't even define the terms that are being discussed.
And so if you are a white person and you talk about all of this stuff, then your opinion is of no consequence.
The problem for you, of course, is that you're not a white person.
And therefore, when you debunk the myth of superior knowledge, this makes you a sort of race traitor to the myth itself.
The myth itself requires a certain level of racial solidarity in support of the myth, because if there's somebody who walks out and says, well, I'm black and I don't support what you're saying, well, then that suggests, obviously, that there is no special knowledge held by black Americans about racism, at least in terms of its definition.
Right.
So I think what, yeah, what people do here is they take a kind of common sense truism and then they build it into a totally radical false belief.
The common sense truism is that you, Ben Shapiro, have some life experiences that I don't.
And I, Coleman Hughes, have some life experiences that you don't.
I'm, you know, I'm from North Jersey.
I'm from a family that is half black and half Puerto Rican.
I spent a lot of time in the Bronx with my family growing up, and I've been to Puerto Rico, and you grew up in LA, is that right?
Around there.
So there's a bunch of stuff, local knowledge, that you're going to have that I'm probably not going to have.
And there's a bunch of stuff from my life that is knowledge that I'm going to have that you're not going to have.
Now that's just always true as a virtue of all of us living our own kind of unique paths in life.
And what people, the people I call neo-racist in the book, what they do is they take that grain of truth and build it into a philosophy where I as a black person know certain truths about society that you couldn't possibly know and cannot refute me on no matter how much evidence you have.
So for example, if I say as a black person, because in my experience I know that I know that the reason that there's a disparity in police shootings is because the police are racist, as opposed to because they're encountering black criminals much more often than white criminals.
I just know that because I'm a black person.
And for you as a non-black guy, as a Jewish guy, to come at me with evidence or facts, I can just dismiss it because, well, of course you're going to say that.
It's easy for a white guy to say.
And in fact, I cite in the book this hilarious example where Thomas Sowell had a great book called Intellectuals in Society, and he made some of the points I'm making in this interview now.
And there was a famous review in the London School of Economics, I believe, where they dismissed him.
They said, oh, this Thomas Sowell guy, easy for a rich white man to say.
Now they didn't check to see that Thomas Sowell is the furthest thing from a rich white guy.
He is a black man that was born I think in 1933 in the Jim Crow South in a house without running water, or rather without hot water.
He moved to Harlem when he was 10 and in his teens at one point lived in a homeless shelter for teens.
So and yet he had come to the conclusion based on scholarship and evidence that racism didn't explain probably the majority of disparities that we were now seeing.
So this is all to say that Though we have different experiences, we do live in an objective reality.
There is such a thing as truth.
There is such a thing as facts.
And those facts can't depend on the fact that you're you and I'm me.
So we have to be able to have a conversation where we can disagree with each other, where no one by default trumps anyone else just by virtue of your skin color or your identity.
And that's the only way that we can actually have a conversation.
So, I mean, I can ask at this point on a personal level.
Obviously, you are, as you say, biracial, black and Puerto Rican.
And what have your experiences been with regard to racism in the United States?
I've experienced a few examples of racism.
I mean, I can give you the four or five times where I think I'm pretty sure I was treated differently as a result of my race.
So, okay, I'll give you two examples.
There was one time on Columbia's campus where I was wearing a wife beater.
I don't know if we call the t-shirts that anymore, and jeans.
And I went into some writing office, and there was this kind of cranky old administrator who didn't think I was a Columbia student, probably thought I was riffraff from Harlem or something, and didn't believe me when I said, I'm here to see the professor.
So that was literally, that was like one incident in all four or five years of college for me.
Okay, and it had no bearing on anything.
It was just annoying for about three minutes.
Okay?
I'll give you one other example.
The only other example that comes to mind post-18 years old is I was in Times Square and I bought something from, you know, some fast food joint and the security guard thought I was stealing on the way out.
And I got a little upset.
I was like, screw you.
I just paid for this.
Go talk to the person.
Now, the punchline is the security guard was African.
It was an African guy.
It was not a white guy who thought I was stealing.
And then 20 seconds later, he checked to see I bought it.
And then I went on my merry way.
So those are two examples where I'm pretty sure I probably would not have been suspected that way, were I white or Asian, say.
They had no bearing on my actual success.
I think that there is a kind of, in the black community, there is like a very deep focus on sharing these kind of stories where we were treated differently, building them into a narrative about how black people are still held back, and also ignoring, really dishonestly, all the ways in which American society has tried to give black people a leg up, right?
Many black Americans will share these kinds of stories I'm sharing, but if a white guy were to enter the room and say, actually, can I share a story?
There was one time where, you know, my manager told me, we really want to hire you or promote you.
You're actually the best candidate for this job, but we need to get a black or Hispanic candidate, and I'm really sorry.
There's tons of white guys who have shared these kinds of stories, either on conservative podcasts, where it's safe to do so, or in memoirs, or over a drink.
But those stories would be laughed out of the room.
As Americans, we can all share our experiences of being treated differently as a result of our race and have a really good faith, honest conversation where no one's experiences are just dismissed as meaningless, but they're all integrated into this shared reality we're living in.
And we can talk to each other about them and rejigger society and teach our children the right way to treat people and so forth.
But the conversation, unfortunately, you know, from the left has been, white people shut up, listen to us black people.
And that can't be the template for interracial harmony.
So right now there's a lot of talk on the right particularly about the idea that maybe wokeness and DEI have hit their high watermark, that we're going to actually hit the other side of the hill very soon because things were so hot during the George Floyd era and the post Floyd kind of ruckus that was happening around the United States that now maybe there's the backlash is taking root and maybe there's going to be sort of a drawing away from the more extreme manifestations of all of this.
I'm kind of doubtful of that, only because it seems like it's so deeply embedded in so many of the elite institutions that you've been discussing at the very beginning.
And it manifests in a wide variety of ways, including, I think, some of the college protests that we're currently seeing over Gaza.
I mean, it's a much broader sort of rubric.
The DEI intersectionality rubric is obviously much broader than just black and white.
Obviously, it encompasses all sorts of purportedly Victimized groups and they're stacked up in a particular hierarchy and depending on whether they can form a coalition or not with other members of the victimized group against the pervasive, the so-called prevailing system, alliances form.
Do you think that we've hit the other end of woke and DEI or do you think that this is going to continue to be kind of a bubbling and burgeoning problem in society?
So I actually think both things are true.
I think wokeness and the DEI ideology, which casts white people as villains and blackness as goodness, inherent goodness, that peaked around 2020, 2021, perhaps into 2022.
And it has declined since then, but it's not going away.
It's declined and perhaps plateaued, but you're totally right to say it's so entrenched in so many institutions that it's not going to keep declining.
We're not going to hit the other side of the hill, as you said.
So it's both true, it peaked, but it's also here to stay at a certain threshold.
What it feels like to me is that the most acid forms of this thing burned everybody and somebody moved off the most acid forms, but then a slightly less acidic form has sort of diffused itself throughout the society and continues to diffuse itself even into the halls of power, so much so that what seems like a pretty easy win for the President of the United States, who campaigned as a moderate Democrat, you voted for him in 2020, that even he has to kind of pat it on the head. He refuses to sort of dissociate
from the ideology as a whole because he seems to believe that it's still politically valuable for
him to kind of wink and nod at the ideology while maybe sort of dissociating from its most
extreme manifestations.
Right. And I think in support of your point that we're not where we were before this whole
thing started, it's really useful to remind people just how good race relations were perceived in
in like 2012, right?
Before all of this started, before BLM, you literally had 60%, a clear majority of black Americans, polled by Pew saying that bias was not an issue they were facing.
Racial bias was not an issue they were facing, and that number had just been getting better and better every year since the 90s.
We were just, we were going on the path to a situation where the vast majority of black people felt good about the issue of racism, that it was not a big problem in their life.
You had a majority of black Americans and white Americans and Hispanic Americans all saying race relations were good.
in the year 2013.
Then it all plummeted.
So we're not back to those numbers.
We're not back to the pre-identity politics, pre-great awokening world.
We're just better than we were in 2020 and 2021.
So I guess the question becomes, how do we get back to a better world here?
Because what politics seems to have become in the United States is a series of reactionary ping-pongings where the woke react in a particular way and then people on the right react, not sometimes with the sort of individualistic Cool, you know, sort of MLK answer that we all used to grow up with, but they've reacted also in group fashion, because it turns out that when you're labeled a group, very often people start to find a group identity in being labeled a group.
So if the basic idea is that white Christian males are the bad guys, eventually what you might get is white Christian males considering themselves an actual interest group, which is something that historically, at least in the last 40 years, white Christian males have not.
They've considered themselves a series of individuals who live in communities.
But when you have a targeting of white Christian males as a group, it's not
too hard to see how people could start thinking of themselves as an actual put-upon group, and
that in turn reinforces the other side. And so you have this sort of weird pendulum of
swinging side to side as opposed to approaching the middle again. Yeah, we need people with the bravery to
opt out of the pendulum on both sides.
We need people on the left have to stop playing the game of black identity politics of accusing every everything they don't like of being racist of of doing what Sonny Hostin did to me on The View, and people on the right have to resist the urge to react to that by going in the other direction and saying, screw it, we're all doing identity politics, so let's do white identity politics.
We need people with the bravery to say no to all of that and get us out of this vicious cycle.
And remember that, you know, America is, you know, it's one of the greatest countries on earth.
It's where everyone around the world wants to come.
There's a reason that it's, there's a reason people want to come here because we have something great.
We have a great credo, a great philosophy, and that's a large part of the reason for our success.
So let's not abandon the American ideal of judging people as individuals.
Because we're having an emotional tribal response to realities, political realities, right now.
We'll get to more on this momentarily.
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So, now let's do the hard thing, which is to take all of this principled talk and bring it down to the level of crass politics.
So, we're facing an election in 2024 in which we have a series of wildly unpopular candidates facing one another.
The two main candidates in Joe Biden and Donald Trump obviously are below water in terms of approval rating.
They're running neck and neck largely because very few people are deeply enthusiastic about voting.
I mean, full disclosure, I've been very open about this.
I'm a supporter of President Trump.
I've raised money for President Trump.
I did not vote for him in 2016.
I did vote for him in 2020.
I'm voting for him in 2024 against Joe Biden.
You know, you suggested that you'd voted the last two presidential elections for the Democrats, for Hillary Clinton, and then for Joe Biden in 2020.
When you look at the field of candidates in 2024, what do you see?
Yeah, so I see, I think, I forget who it was that said this, but there are two candidates that are defined by their weaknesses.
Biden's weakness, of course, is that he is not just old in terms of the number, but old in terms of how he speaks, how he walks.
Everything about him screams of someone you would not really let, you know, if that were your grandfather, you'd be telling him, you know, granddad, you got to stop driving.
Like, you know, he's at that stage.
And Democrats have been extremely tempted to just deny this, right?
But it's there for everyone to see.
Now, in the case of Trump, you have someone who tried to steal the election last time, who is not, again, not committing to a peaceful transfer of power necessarily.
And I think if he loses, he's probably going to do the same thing.
If he loses, it's not fair.
If he wins, it was fair.
You've got a lot of indictments, some of which I think are just like lawfare, but some of which are, you know, legitimate.
And just like more generally, you have someone whose level of chaos I don't think is compatible with being in the Oval Office, which has always been my biggest problem with him.
And so I think you have two candidates that are very much disliked.
You know, like I'm someone that would, I think, be a very winnable voter for a different Republican.
And then you've got RFK, who is, you know, very charismatic, at least to me, and tempting, but also untested and so forth.
So it's a it's a very depressing scenario right now.
And I don't I have no idea who I'm going to vote for or if I will vote.
And I think a lot of people feel that way.
So let's put it differently in terms of this.
What would have to change for each of the candidates that you just discussed to earn your vote?
So I think Trump could probably earn my vote by saying, look, I'm done.
I'm done pretending I won the last election.
I'm looking forward.
I want one more term and then I'm out.
Biden's a disaster.
He's too old.
Let's not relitigate the last election.
And to kind of come clean about For him to come clean about that would go a long way to restoring my confidence that he is looking forward and wanting to govern the country rather than wanting to settle scores with all the people that have been trying to persecute him.
And they have been trying to persecute him.
So I'm worried he's going to be a score-settling, bitter president because he's a small person and an egotistical person rather than be The best qualities about him, which is, you know, the guy that got the Abraham Accords, the guy that gets things done, the guy that's a strong president that can stand up to the other strong men of the world, the guy that can kind of be our bastard against the other bastards of the world.
I don't think he's going to do that, but that's how he could win my vote.
How Biden could win my vote is by getting up there in front of the media, doing hard interviews, Fielding all the questions, not disappearing, not doing like the lowest amount of public appearances and press conferences of any president in recent history, but showing us that he is cognitively sharp, that he's up there, he's home.
And that he is up to the task of governing for four more years.
So I don't think he's likely to do that either, because I don't think he can do it.
And I shudder to think at what he's going to look like three years from now.
Keep in mind, he's going to be president three years from now.
How much worse is he going to look then?
Um, you know, as for RFK, I think he could win my vote very easily with, you know, moderating a few of his opinions on kind of his attacks on our military.
I don't totally jibe with.
But, you know, yeah.
So that's what it looks like for me right now.
When it comes to policy, the argument that I've made with regard to the 2024 election is that many of the arguments that are made with regard to Trump about how he's a fascist or a tyrant or all of the rest of this sort of stuff, a lot of that is wildly exaggerated.
We already have a term of him and it wasn't that.
And meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, you have a president who really has used executive orders in truly unprecedented ways, who's used the, effectively used the administrations of government in ways that are pretty
extreme.
So in other words, it's sort of smart person tyranny as opposed to dumb talk.
And so one of the things that I've said before about President Trump is that if you were
to think of basically the, if you were to think about politics as a sort of coffee filter,
The filter that is American government has been more effective with Trump than it actually has been with Biden.
Because Biden appears to be more moderate in persona, this has meant that more poisons and toxins are getting through the filter of the coffee.
And with Trump, because they're kind of like rocks as opposed to toxins, they're actually getting filtered out in terms of actual political policy by the time the coffee hits your mug.
What do you make of that argument?
That may be true.
Yeah, that may be true.
I mean, I think all the institutions were on absolute high alert during Trump's four years because, to your point, the way Trump spoke in 2015 was deeply concerning.
Some of the things he was talking about doing Uh, we're highly concerning and, you know, and I know this is, like, I was worried he was a fascist, the way he was talking.
And then he had four years of governing like a typical Republican, and in fact, um, doing certain policies that were to the left of what even Obama would have done.
You know, there are certain policies he did with the First Step Act, for example, commuting sentences for federal prisoners, drug crimes, making funding for black colleges automatic rather than having to be re-upped every year.
Had Obama done that, I think Republicans would have accused him of playing identity politics.
So, Trump ended up governing very differently than he talked.
And I think that was, maybe that was obvious to some people who really kind of got Trump, but it was not obvious to me who didn't get Trump in 2016.
And so I'm certainly much less afraid of a Trump presidency now than I was in 2016, because I understand the vast gulf between what he says and what he does.
He talks in a stream-of-consciousness way, and so entertains ideas far crazier than what he would actually do.
So that's definitely true, and it may be true that because he talks so crazy, I think the institutions, the immune system of America reacts to him in a way that we react to no other president.
Yeah, so, I mean, the case that I've made to people is that if you want to prevent Trump from denying the election outcome, then he should win.
And then he wouldn't have to worry about it.
Well, Coleman, I really appreciate the time.
The book is wonderful.
People should pick it up right now.
The end of race politics.
And thanks for what you're doing.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Ben.
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