Coleman Hughes on the New Racism The rise of a new race consciousness has turned elite American institutions into neoracist strongholds. By Coleman Hughes
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My book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, is about our turning away from a central idea that animated the work of the great civil rights leaders of the twentieth century: color blindness. The principle of color blindness does not mean that we pretend we don’t recognize race. The definition I espouse is that we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.
But our society keeps failing to enshrine color blindness as its guiding ethos. It is this ongoing failure that has allowed state-sanctioned racism to emerge again and again in new and different forms—most recently through the movement I call neoracism.
Neoracists and white supremacists are both committed to different flavors of race supremacy. They both deny our common humanity. They both deny that all races are created equal. They both agree that some races are superior to others, and they both agree that not all people deserve to be treated equally in society. The animating feeling behind neoracism is that people of color are morally superior to white people—that people of color are better at being good people. That’s at the core. The truth, which should be obvious, is that no race is morally superior to any other.
Martin Luther King never wavered on the importance of our common humanity and the goal of transcending race. Nor did he waver on his preference for class-based policy over race-based policy.
Today’s neoracists sound nothing like Dr. King yet they claim his mantle. They enjoy the moral authority of being seen as the carriers of his legacy while simultaneously betraying the very ideals that he stood for. It is the rise of this race consciousness that’s turned elite American institutions into neoracist strongholds.
I will lay out here some of the reasons I think neoracism is a detrimental ideology that undermines social progress and that harms black people in specific ways. First, I will illustrate this with a story about my paternal grandfather.
Warren Hughes was born to a poor family in segregated Washington, D.C., in 1933. After receiving a degree in engineering from Ohio State University (one of the few blacks in those days to receive such a degree) and serving in the Korean War, he secured a job as an engineer with General Electric. For his ninetieth birthday, he wrote a short memoir, which included his reflections on navigating General Electric as a black man:
It was in September 1959 that I got a more permanent position in Cincinnati, Ohio, working for General Electric. That’s when I began to recognize that the outlook for a Black engineer in those days was different from that of a White engineer. I was told, in fact, that General Electric allows you to advance two ways: one is the management way up, and the other is technical.
I was told by a well meaning White engineer that I should not strive to go the management route because the White guys who were the technical experts (welders and welding specialists) would not work for a Black manager.
My grandfather accepted this advice and concentrated on his technical expertise, and while he was recognized for his excellence, after ten years he began to be frustrated when white managers, people who were not as skilled or experienced as he was, were placed over him. When it was about to happen again, he decided to finally ask for a management job.
I decided to go ahead and talk to my boss about the position. My boss was genuinely shocked that I asked because I had never given him the impression that I was interested in management. Well, he gave me the job immediately. Interestingly, I found that the White guys—yes, they were all specialists in their fields—liked working for me. In fact, I had no problems whatsoever with them.
My grandfather went on to have a stellar career, eventually reaching the executive level by the 1980s. Had he continued to believe the advice given by his white colleague, who overstated the amount of racism at General Electric, he would never have sought out the management position that led him to greater success. He may have lived his whole life telling himself that racism had held him back—and his experiences would have given him ample reason to believe this story.
Just as there is a danger in not recognizing and understating the amount of racism in society, there is a less obvious (and therefore more pernicious) danger in overstating it. To exaggerate the extent of antiblack racism in society is to reduce every black person’s incentive to reach higher.
Neoracism is a dangerous ideology that seeks to ignore and subvert reality.
Neoracism takes grains of truth and builds them into a powerfully seductive narrative. The neoracist narrative is this:
White people have always had power in society—power that they’ve used to create systems like slavery and Jim Crow that oppress people of color. Even though these systems were destroyed, American society has made little or no progress redressing the wrongs that white people have inflicted on people of color in the past and continue to inflict on people of color in the present.
All around us, policies and institutions give rise to racial disparities. Wherever racial disparities exist, racism—past and present—is the cause. White Americans are largely oblivious to the racism they perpetuate. There is no real way for them to understand the many ways in which people of color are made to suffer. Justice demands we undo the wrongs of the past. Wherever possible, we need to give people of color preferential treatment.
As seductive as this narrative is, it depends on several harmful myths and fallacies built into neoracist ideology. I’ll discuss four here.
The first is The Myth of Inherited Trauma. Around the time I enrolled at Columbia University in 2015, I encountered a new attitude toward America’s history of white supremacy. It consisted first and foremost of acting as if the entire history of American racism had happened to you personally—as if the pain endured by slaves had been passed down from generation to generation, like a genetic illness.
Students would ask, “Don’t you know about PTSD—Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder?” Sometimes these questions were paired with appeals to epigenetics—a nascent subfield of biology that looked like it might one day give the idea of inherited trauma a scientific basis.
I am a descendant of slaves. I learned about slavery not just through history textbooks but also through family lore. I have a well-preserved record of my enslaved ancestors. My grandfather, Warren Hughes, traces his ancestry to Wormley Hughes, a gardener on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. Because of interest in Monticello, there is unusually robust evidence of our family’s roots.
Whenever I have faced challenges, physical or mental, I remember that my enslaved ancestors had overcome much worse. But whatever traumas I’ve endured are caused by events that have happened to me in my lifetime, not to them in theirs.
If it were biologically true that people literally inherit the trauma experienced by their distant ancestors, then not just black Americans but virtually all people would be traumatized. What human alive doesn’t have ancestors who suffered trauma? Think specifically about the trauma of slavery. Slavery has been ubiquitous in the world throughout history. For most of recorded history, slavery was a fact of life. Indeed, slavery has existed in so many societies dating back thousands of years that it would be easier to compile a list of societies that didn’t have slaves than a list of those that did.
Though inherited trauma has no scientific basis, we are in danger of making it true through social contagion. If we allow the Myth of Inherited Trauma to thrive, then we run the risk of creating genuine psychological suffering for black people. It encourages an attitude of perpetual victimhood. It treats victimhood as if it’s a genetic disease—something permanent that cannot be overcome.
Suppose you had a traumatic experience and went to a therapist for help. A wise therapist would help you develop strategies for moving past the trauma. Neoracists promote exactly the opposite of what a wise therapist would do.
Then there’s The Disparity Fallacy. As Ibram X. Kendi, the writer and activist who heads the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, puts it, “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” The Disparity Fallacy assumes that all disparities are malignant.
But benign disparities arise naturally because of cultural and demographic differences between groups. Here are some examples of large disparities that cannot be explained in terms of racism for or against these groups of people:
In 1950, the persecuted Japanese minority in California (some who had been held in internment camps during World War II) had more years of education in America, on average, than whites.
In the early twentieth century, black Caribbeans owned the majority of businesses in Harlem despite being a minority relative to the black American population.
In the 1990s, over four-fifths of doughnut shops in California were owned by people of Cambodian descent.
The point of these examples and others like them isn’t to pass judgment on any group. The point is instead to illustrate how common it is to see large disparities that aren’t explained by racism.
Calling an outcome unfair requires showing that the process that yielded the outcome was unfair. Yet neoracists often label outcomes unfair without examining the processes that produce them. Think about how this principle applies in a domain like professional sports. Is anyone suspicious about 75 percent of NBA players being black? Does anyone accuse the NBA recruitment system of antiwhite racism? No. Most people feel confident that the system is not racist. They feel confident that the system is broadly meritocratic. If it turns out that most of the best players are black, then so be it.
Then there is The Myth of Undoing the Past. Neoracists would argue that what motivates them is the need to right past wrongs. White people in America oppressed black people for a long time. It’s now time to make up for that history of oppression. Our society as a whole needs to start boosting black people up, and if necessary to start pushing white people down. Only in that way can we repair the history of injustice.
This assumes the way to combat injustice is with more injustice. That is false. Cycles of ethnic violence around the world show us again and again that a society doesn’t overcome injustice by creating new forms of it.
If my grandfather was discriminated against for a job in the 1950s, it doesn’t undo the effects of that discrimination to discriminate unfairly against a white job applicant today. Doing that won’t compensate my grandfather for his loss of income, or for his pain, anger, or humiliation by discriminating against a white job applicant in the present.
Compensating my grandfather directly might go some way toward redressing the injustice he’s suffered. That’s why I have always supported reparations paid to specific living victims of government abuses. But a new act of discrimination aimed at some other person would just add to the tally of wrong people have perpetrated against one another throughout history.
If, as Ibram X. Kendi argues, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” where does it end? What is the internal limiting principle on the idea of undoing past racism? I have never heard one articulated, and I worry there is none.
Finally, I’ll describe The Myth of Black Weakness. Neoracists say to qualify as racism, discrimination, stereotyping, prejudice, hatred, or hostility need to target people who lack power in society. They say only white people have power. As a result, neoracists insist that discriminating against white people on the basis of their skin color, promoting invidious white stereotypes, being prejudiced against white people, and expressing hatred or hostility toward them on account of their race doesn’t count as racism.
Neoracists stereotype white people, but they also stereotype black people. Neoracists depict black people as being emotionally fragile—almost childlike. They portray black people as being in a state of constant emotional vulnerability and need. Similarly, some neoracists have suggested that black people aren’t inclined toward hard work or self-reliance.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture even included a graphic on its website (which was later removed) claiming that hard work, self-reliance, and the nuclear family were attributes of “white dominant culture.”
The book Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun was adopted by the former schools chancellor of New York City, Richard Carranza, as part of an administrator training program. The book lists several traits of “White Supremacy Culture,” including perfectionism, objectivity, and “worship of the written word,” which it describes as a tendency to more highly value people with strong documentation and writing skills. It’s difficult to imagine a more insulting and demeaning image of black people—or of any people. Yet this stereotype is a part of the neoracist worldview.
At this moment in American history, we have a choice. We can follow neoracists down the path of endless racial strife, or we can recommit ourselves to the principles that motivated the civil rights movement—and not just the civil rights movement but also the abolitionist movement and other movements around the world that oppose unjust discrimination. Those principles include a belief in our common humanity—the idea that what it takes for human beings to flourish has nothing essential to do with our skin color or ancestry or any of the other traits that people have used throughout history to divide themselves.
I dream of a nation in which children hear their grandparents’ stories about the “old days” and marvel at the progress we’ve made.
From The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, by Coleman Hughes, published on February 6 by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2024 by Coleman Hughes.
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