Coleman Hughes discusses whether the future should be “colorblind.”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/coleman-hughes-on-how-america-racializes#details
Coleman Hughes is the host of Conversations with Coleman. Racialized, his first book, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.
EXCERPT:
Hughes: I think we should foolproof our systems against bigotry as much as possible. So I gave the example of cameras on traffic lights handing out tickets instead of cops. If racist cops are the problem, take the cop out of the equation, have it be automated. If you’re a teacher, grade your students blind, so that racial bias could never possibly be a problem. There was a news organization that did a careful sting operation on the housing market, where they sent trained actors of different races into a real estate office and saw how they were treated differently. We should fund and do more things like that. Make society more and more like a blind audition in order to take racial bias out of the equation.
Education is one of the only ways in which the state gets to intervene in a person’s odds of success at a very early age. One of my critiques of those I would call elite woke writers and thinkers is that many of their policies and solutions take people from the age of 18 and rig their life racially after that, in the name of helping them—things like affirmative action and diversity inclusion initiatives for adults. But you actually have far more influence over a person’s life trajectory from the ages of zero to 15. Those are the most crucial years of intervention, as a person’s brain is forming. Of the $23 million in New York that was earmarked for putting teachers through “anti bias” training, every cent of that wasted money should have been put towards early childhood initiatives, cognitively rich universal pre-K programs, and experiments in schooling like charter schools, towards making the environment for poor kids from ages zero to 15 and 18 as safe and as cognitively rich as possible. That word “safety” is another crucial one. Nothing in life matters if you feel unsafe, if you live in a neighborhood with lots of crime, and everything else is secondary and tertiary. It is one of the biggest disparities between the poor and the wealthy. In fact, what the wealthy use a lot of their money to buy a premium for is to live in safe neighborhoods.
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