For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress held its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery.
To support the idea, Democrats called on influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had revived the reparations issue in an op-ed in The Atlantic, and actor and activist Danny Glover.
Republicans turned to a virtual unknown: a 23-year-old philosophy professor at Columbia University, Coleman Hughes.
At the hearing, Mr. Hughes, looking very much 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 us from the problems we face today,” he said, pointing to endemic problems affecting black Americans, such as poor schools, dangerous neighborhoods and a punitive criminal justice system. justice.
Some in the audience booed. The Democratic subcommittee chairman, Steve Cohen of Tennessee, called for calm – “cool, cool” – but then suggested Mr Hughes’ testimony was presumptuous.
More than four years later, Mr. Hughes, now 27, has emerged as something of a rarity in the tense national debate about how race should be factored into public policy: He is a young black conservative who advocates — in writing of, a podcast and YouTube channel with about 173,000 subscribers — that schools have taught students of his generation to obsess over their racial identity while blocking arguments that challenge their worldview.
Mr. Hughes is not the first black thinker to reject progressive politics or criticize the educational establishment. But unlike most of his conservative mentors, Mr. Hughes is young enough to have grown up on the very pedagogy they decry.
In his new book, “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,” out Feb. 6, Mr. Hughes recounts what it was like growing up in the liberal enclave of Montclair, N.J., then heading to Columbia , where he said the campus culture was fixated on kinship groups, diversity, equity and inclusion programs, microaggressions and “white privilege.”
He uses these stories to argue for a color-blind society.
The goal is not to avoid noticing race, which he says is impossible. (In fact, he admonishes people who say things like, “I don’t see color,” and asks them to use phrases like, “I try to treat people without regard to race.”)
“The goal of colorblindness,” he writes, “is to consciously ignore race as a reason for treating individuals differently and as a category upon which public policy is based.”
Mr. Hughes says that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired his views and often repeats a memorable line from his “I Have a Dream” speech: that one day, children “will not be judged by their color. skin but from the content of their character”.
His arguments have angered his critics, who say he ignores the deep racial disparities that plague American society, in everything from schools to income and housing. And, they say, it deliberately misrepresents Dr. King’s speech, which also protested persistent segregation, police brutality and black poverty.
“Even those who are still financially well off still suffer from racism,” Monica Williams, a psychologist, said in an online discussion in which Mr. Hughes participated.
Mr. Hughes, for his part, has a harsh assessment of progressives who he says see American society in white and non-white terms, with whites as historical oppressors. In his book, he calls them “neo-racists”.
“Neo-racists,” he writes, “are the most likely to insist that someone of European descent should not open a Mexican restaurant.”
In an interview, Mr. Hughes said his views on color blindness were gaining wider acceptance. But he sees a long road ahead in realizing a campus culture where unorthodox views, left or right, are not shouted down.
“I would agree that the cancellation culture has peaked,” he said. “But to say that something peaked and then declines doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in a very good place.”
In his book, Mr. Hughes writes that his father’s family can trace its origins to a slave gardener who worked at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. And while he has nothing to do with the specifics, he describes a comfortable childhood in Montclair, a New York suburb, where he had diverse friends who largely paid little attention to race.
His first encounter with diversity programs, he writes, was as a high school student at a private school, which sent him to a three-day conference for students of color. It was there that he first heard terms like “white privilege” and “intersectionality.” There was an atmosphere of “repulsive conformity,” he writes, with dissent strongly discouraged.
At Columbia, he was confused by students who complained that he was surrounded by white supremacy. He found the campus to be “one of the most progressive, non-racist environments on Earth.”
Why, he asks, “did these kids sound more pessimistic about the state of American race relations than my grandparents (who lived through segregation)?”
He connected with some like-minded students and professors like John McWhorter, who said he considered Mr. Hughes like a son. (Mr. McWhorter also writes for The New York Times Opinion section.) Christian Gonzalez, a college friend, said their experiences sometimes felt disorienting, with some students occasionally accusing them of espousing white supremacy. .
“It’s hard to swim against the tide like that when 80 percent of the people around you have different opinions,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who is now a doctoral student. “You might start to think you’re crazy.”
Kmele Foster, a 43-year-old political commentator with a libertarian bent, befriended Mr. Hughes after seeing some of his work online. He said black conservatives of his generation had much less to contend with than Mr. Hughes.
”I suspect,” Mr. Foster said, ”that Coleman, going into a polarized environment at college where it was more clear that he had his views, was probably better prepared for what was going to happen to him.”
Mr. Hughes said he began writing for the conservative Quillette website after the student newspaper at Columbia was mostly uninterested in publishing his views.
She described feeling social rejection and sometimes isolation. There was the time, for example, that he matched with a female classmate on Tinder only to be rejected once she discovered his writing. “Right before the date,” he recalls, “he said to me, ‘I just read your piece Quillette. I could never date someone who doesn’t believe racism exists.”
“It’s not even close to what I said,” he added. “It’s not something I would ever say either.”
His articles in Quillette, however, caught the attention of Republicans on the House Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice. Some of Mr. Hughes’ friends advised him not to testify, arguing that accepting an invitation from House Republicans was a bad look.
Despite palpable hostility from some in the audience, Mr Hughes sat calmly throughout the hearing, occasionally drinking from a bottle of water. But the riots upset him, he said.
“People were shouting ‘shame! at him as he was walking out the door,” said Thomas Chatterton Williams, a friend and author who shares many of Mr. Hughes’ views on race. “Coleman is a very hard guy to shake, but I know he didn’t feel good about it.”
Mr. Hughes channeled the experience into music. Mr. Hughes, who studied briefly at Juilliard before enrolling at Columbia, raps under the stage name Coldxman and plays jazz trombone. After the audition, he wrote a song called ‘Blasphemy’ which was released last year on his album ‘Amor Fati’, a Latin phrase meaning ‘love for one’s fate’. In one verse, he says, “Accuse me with thought and put me in prison, serving sentence for sentences written.”
He joined the right-wing Manhattan Institute as a fellow and continued to write occasionally for Quillette. Abandoning a more high-profile career as a commentator — like signing on as a columnist with a major publication or joining a cable news channel as a contributor — he started his own podcast, Conversations With Coleman.
This independence helps him insulate himself from upset.
Being alone, “there’s no employer to target if you don’t like Coleman’s position,” author Mr Williams said. “There is no university to complain to, no newspaper to angrily tweet at.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s acceptable. Mr Hughes said the most complicated episode involved his talk last year at the annual TED conference.
In his ten-minute presentation, Mr Hughes called for public policy to help people based on income, which he called “the best way to lower the temperature of racial conflict in the long term”.
The audience was mostly positive, but a handful of critics, including TED staff members, complained that the talk was upsetting, harmful and inaccurate, even though it had been vetted by the organization.
Some employees launched an internal campaign to prevent Mr. Hughes’ talk from being promoted, according to accounts provided by Mr. Hughes and TED chief Chris Anderson.
As a result, Mr. Anderson said, the talk was not initially included on TED’s most popular podcast. TED also buried the presentation on its website until several months later, a prominent speaker on the TED circuit, Tim Urban, pointed it out.
And Mr. Anderson asked Mr. Hughes to participate in a discussion with Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times columnist — the same one that Ms. Williams, the psychologist, participated in — so that TED would have an opposing perspective.
“It was very much a veto situation,” Mr Hughes said. “I said, ‘Okay, okay. I’ll have that extra conversation, even though you’re not forcing anyone else to do it.”
Mr. Hughes said he does not plan to attend this year’s TED conference, but also would not be opposed to going if invited back.
Mr Foster, the political commentator, says such experiences can weigh on people, even those with the thickest skin: “It can be very painful for people to suggest that when you take a position, it’s some kind of betrayal People .'”
The sound is produced by Parin Behrooz.
