Coleman Hughes was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of MI’s City Journal. MI has compiled his City Journal publications online here. He is the author of the book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, published last month by Penguin Random House.
Hughes was invited to talk about the subject of his book on The View this week. I have posted the video below. Rich Lowry takes it up in his New York Post column today.
The video is only ten minutes long and worth watching to the end. Hughes is a composed and powerful advocate for the position that we should be taught to treat each other equally without regard to race. It’s a principle most of us were taught growing up and believe to the core of our souls. A few observations about the video:
The principle of equal treatment seems to have been reviled and rejected by every major institution in American life — the Supreme Court is an embattled exception. Its self-evident rightness nevertheless abides. Even the in-studio audience applauds Hughes’s articulation of it in various manifestations.
Hughes invokes Matin Luther King’s argument in Why We Can’t Wait supporting distinction by socioeconomic class rather than race to mitigate disadvantage. One of the ladies of The View — the inaptly named Sunny — seeks to trump Hughes by virtue of her friendship with MLK’s daughter Bernice.
Why We Can’t Wait is dedicated to King’s children by name, including Bernice — “for whom I dream that one day soon they will no longer be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” That’s the heart of the argument Hughes makes.
Ms. Sunny alludes to quotations of King in 1968 that argue for the debt America owes to the descendants of slaves (although she doesn’t put it quite that way). She suggests that King’s views had changed by the time of his death.
It is obvious that the lady has never read Why We Can’t Wait. King himself made this argument in the closing chapter of the book. He nevertheless went on in that chapter to support a race-blind Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, not a race-based program of reparations for blacks or the like.
Hughes makes exactly this point in response to Ms. Sunny. The relevant pages to which Hughes alludes are 128-130. Ms. Sunny denies that King argues what he argued. This is a straightforward question of fact with respect to which Hughes is right and Ms. Sunny is wrong.
Ms. Sunny then resorts to patently stupid ad hominem argument — as Hughes himself points out, “to avoid having the important conversation that we’re having here.” Again, Hughes is right and Ms. Sunny is wrong. Ms. Sunny responds that she’s just giving him an opportunity to respond to the criticism of others. Cue the laugh track.
• @coldxman's appearance on The View
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