The Content of Our Character

In The End of Race Politics, the first book by writer/podcaster Coleman Hughes, the author recounts his switch from elementary school in his racially diverse hometown in New Jersey to Newark Academy in sixth grade, where he was one of the only Black students in attendance. His classmates took to touching his afro. This led to so much frustration for Hughes that he eventually told his parents about it. His parents talked to the principal, and by his second year at the school, people stopped touching his head.

It wasn’t until Hughes as an adolescent got the opportunity to go to the People of Color Conference that he learned to call this hair touching a microaggression. Through this act, so the theory went, the kids in his class perpetuated discrimination against him. Hughes didn’t see it that way. “As annoying as their behavior was, the obvious goodwill behind their actions softened my judgement of them.” He thought that the kids were merely curious about Afros and wanted to touch his—to the point that it drove him crazy.

At the time, people only spoke of microaggressions at fringe academic conferences like the one Hughes attended, but they would proliferate during Hughes’s young adulthood to the point that by 2020 they dominated conversation about race relations. Hughes has spent years shaping his contrarian voice to this reflexive instinct by many to dub various actions and phenomena racist. The End of Race Politics is his collection of arguments that such explanations for human behavior are often false and deeply corrosive to society.

Hughes takes aim at the ideas of such noted recent authors on the subject of race as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, among others. “They agree that viewing ourselves and others through the lens of race is central to improving our society, our relationships, and even our private lives.” Hughes points out that this is also what white supremacists believe. Take those who emphasize race as a central perspective through which to see society—no matter their choice of favored race—and place them in one area. Hughes occupies the other area.

Hughes argues we should instead operate from a place of colorblindness, which was the philosophy that noted civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston followed. As confusing as the word “colorblind” might be in this context, these thinkers didn’t suggest we pretend not to see race. That’s impossible. They instead insisted that we aspire to see past race to the character of individuals. Hughes describes his own dream for race relations in some of the same terms as MLK’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

The people who, unwittingly or not, seek to make race a bigger part of the conversation seek to create a world opposed to such outlooks. “What sets enemies of the dream apart is their insistence that race matters regardless of circumstance—their insistence that race matters for reasons that go beyond our individual choices, beliefs, and values.” Hughes calls the new group of people who emphasize race in every instance “neoracists,” and much of his book deploys fact-based studies and observations to show the wrong-headedness of such perspectives.

As one example, Hughes writes of a study that involved sending 6,500 fake emails supposedly from prospective college students to 4,000 college professors requesting to meet for mentorships. The emails were identical except for the racially- and gender-coded names of the potential mentees. The study showed that “[m]inorities were less likely to receive a response in every field of study except for fine arts.”

So, textbook discrimination, right? How do we solve it, according to Hughes? Not through conventional means. “Corporations, nonprofits, and schools have devoted enormous amounts of time and money to ‘combatting racism’ by creating diversity and inclusion task forces—despite little evidence that such efforts actually reduce discrimination against minorities.” Far more effective, according to Hughes, would be to create blind processes wherever possible, ensuring data such as candidate names don’t bias decision makers against individuals. Do these institutions of our society really want to combat racism, as opposed to posture as though they want to do it? If the answer is yes, then these types of blind processes have been proven to help. Wouldn’t that be the less racist approach?

Emphasizing skin color is exactly the kind of approach neoracists promote and Hughes rejects. Most striking is Hughes’s comparison of George Floyd’s murder to the scarily similar but far less publicized 2016 murder by police of white man Tony Timpa in Dallas, Texas. Unfortunately, after Timpa’s murder, there was little uproar, even though a YouTube video exists of the incident. Hughes points out that, if we’d taken Timpa’s murder by police more seriously at the time, George Floyd might still be alive.

Such hypocrisy cuts to the heart of Hughes’s problem with neoracist thinking. “If this new anti-white bias is justified—if we should accept a concept of justice based on racial-historical bloodguilt, and if we should care about some lives more than others based on their skin color, as racists of all sorts have long claimed—then everything that leaders of the civil rights movement thought about basic morality, and everything that the world’s philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about revenge and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window.”

What, in the end, did MLK stand for? What, in the end, do we? Hughes’s work serves as the perfect antidote for the fever dream that for decades has been building about how we should combat racism. How about we follow the model of our most famous civil rights leaders and try not to be racist toward anyone?