Coleman Hughes on The Case for Color-Blindness

ladies and gentlemen this is the program on constitutional government at harvard uh in the department of government i'm harvey mansfield and our guest today is coleman hughes coleman hughes is an american writer 24 years old he's a recent graduate of columbia where he majored in philosophy and i first met him uh on the blog or is it an online journal quillette from australia and i was so impressed that i immediately became a fan and i've been looking for all his uh productions ever since then he also uh is associated with the manhattan institute and he writes for city journal he's uh i should mention a jazz trombonist and studied at juilliard he's a man who's uh both philosophical and political and perhaps both of those in the best sense he's calm he sees both sides of an issue as as a philosopher you could say and as a person interested in politics he's not a party man and yet he sees the necessity of coming to a conclusion not just ending with both sides he is say in between or comprises both of our parties the democrats who want to equalize all inequalities and the republicans who want to somehow respect inequalities even in a demo in a democratic country with a democrat in a democratic age he has given testimony to congress on reparations and he uh conducts uh what he calls conversations with coleman i recommend the recent one with uh andrew sullivan on her uh in honor on the election so uh he's going to talk today on the case for color blindness so colon thank you so much for that introduction and let me just first say it's an honor to to speak here uh or metaphorically here in this virtual space that that we've created i will try to keep my comments to 25 or 30 minutes and reserve the majority of the time for questions and and conversation so the topic for today is colorblindness and i always feel a talk with the word colorblind in the title should begin by explaining what that word does not mean we all see race we can't help it what's more race can influence how we're treated and how we treat others in that sense nobody is truly colorblind even people who are literally colorblind because their eyes lack the right number of cones can still effortlessly distinguish between people of different races but to interpret the word colorblind literally is to misunderstand it colorblind is a word like warm-hearted it uses a physical metaphor to illustrate an abstract idea um to a person uh uh to describe a person as warm-hearted is not to make a claim about the temperature of their heart but about the kindness of their spirit and in the same way to advocate for colorblindness is not to pretend that you don't see race that you don't notice race it's to argue for an ethical principle that we should treat people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy that's the principle i'm talking about when i talk about color blindness admittedly the confusion around this word is partly the fault of those who support it for instance the common phrase i don't see color is practically designed to produce the sort of confusion i've just guarded against whenever one is tempted to say that i think one should instead say i try to treat people without regard to race because that's really what one should mean and if the thesis of this talk could be stripped down to four words it would be those four without regard to race the point isn't to avoid noticing race which is impossible the point is to notice race and then disregard it as a reason to treat people differently and as a category on which to base public policy another source of confusion that i try to avoid and will avoid in this talk is the misleading word post-racial the post in post-racial suggests that there are two separate eras a racial era characterized by the presence of racism and a post-racial era characterized by its absence and the only question is which arrow we are currently living in because colorblindness in this framework would only make sense during the second racism-free era many critics of colorblindness have dismissed it on the grounds that we're not there yet which is to say we have not yet eliminated racial prejudice and they're right about that racism still exists racial prejudice still exists and probably will always exist to some extent but they frame the issue upside down colorblindness is not a synonym for the absence of racism it's an ideology created to fight racism if i had more time i could go through the long history of anti-racist writers and active activists from those that are well known such as such as martin luther king to those that are less well-known like a phillip randolph bayern rustin and many others who wielded the colorblind principle to great effect in the days of jim crow and even in the days of slavery without any sense of contradiction because the the validity of colorblindness doesn't depend on how much racism exists or what alleged era we're living in it stands or falls based on the soundness of the principle itself uh colorblindness is is rarely heard these days unless it's being attacked i find when i google color blindness race to distinguish it from the the um ocular condition nine of the ten articles that appear immediately explain why color blindness is wrong-headed counterproductive or racist and the tenth is a wikipedia page public figures have learned the hard way that supporting color blindness invites a wave of punishment in the public sphere consider for example senator bernie sanders who when he announced his presidential bid in 2019 went on the radio and had the audacity to suggest that voters should choose candidates and i quote not by the color of their skin but by their abilities and what they stand for this was in response to the criticism that he is a white male um so this was a classic expression of the colorblind principle and to my ear is a a an expression of basic sanity and years ago would have been lauded as a progressive statement but instead of being praised for it he was mocked most significant significantly by stephen colbert on on america's most popular late night tv show who sarcastically quipped yes like dr king i have a dream a dream where this diverse nation can come together and be led by an old white guy to laughs in applause by the audience now had colbert read what martin luther king actually had to say on the subject of voting he probably would have held his tongue this is what dr king wrote in his final book where do we go from here the basic thing in determining the best candidate is not his color but his integrity almost word for word what bernie sanders said um it's a curious feature of our national discourse that the resonance of dr king's message now depends entirely upon the identity of the messenger uh in one study that has not yet been published the behavioral scientist from brown michael bernstein asked people to rate a quote squarely in the colorblind tradition on a racism scale from one to five and here's the quote black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy and god is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men god is interested in the freedom of the whole human race so one group in this study was told that the quote was by dr king which is true and the second group was told it was by donald trump in the first group roughly two percent of people said said the quote was racist in the second group some 50 of people said the quote was racist so when it comes to colorblindness we are we've become very much in the habit of judging a statement not by the merits of the message but by our estimation of the messenger yet even when the messenger is a complete unknown it can still be dangerous to utter the word colorblind approvingly um consider the case of the novelist amelie wen zhao zhao was raised in china before immigrating to america as a young woman and she had dreamed of writing young adult fiction since she was a child in 2014 she formulated the idea for writing her first novel which was to be based on the tale of anastasia and and included a noble struggle against a brutal system of indentured servitude and she hoped with this novel to draw attention to the real issue of human trafficking especially as it existed in her home country of china in a saner world you might imagine this book would have been celebrated but in ours it was denounced the reason is that in describing the system of indentured servitude she portrayed in her novel she had unwittingly committed the sin of colorblindness the blurb for her book began like so in a world where the princess is the monster oppression is blind to skin color and good and evil exists in shades of grey comes blah blah blah blah the book so the idea that non-racial oppression might exist even hypothetically in a book offended the online fiction community and overwhelmed by the criticism she or she she received for for everything from white supremacy to the lesser but still damning charge of tone deafness she canceled the publication of her novel until further notice so if you're just scanning the internet or if you if you're on a college campus or in corporate america it would appear that virtually everyone has unanimously rejected color blindness as a backwards value um old-fashioned out-of-date a a way of maintaining the white supremacist status quo yet even as it has become virtually taboo among elites colorblind policies continue to dominate in the court of public opinion especially on the issues of hiring and college admissions so in 2019 the pew research center asked people whether employers should only take a person's qualifications into account even if it results in less racial diversity and 74 percent of americans agreed that agreed with that statement and not only did a majority of americans as a whole agree with this statement of you know colorblind hiring even at the expense of diversity a majority of each individual racial group whites blacks and hispanics also agreed with this message this roughly the same percentage agreed that colleges quote should not consider race and admissions in elite circles the debate over colorblindness does fall along party lines essentially pitting democrats against republicans but in the wider public colorblind policy enjoys considerable bipartisan support for one example that same pew poll found that over 60 percent of democrats opposed racial preferences in hiring and admissions even at the expense of diversity and probably an even stronger indicator of the bipartisan support for colorblind policies is the recent vote on prop proposition 16 in california about a month ago proposition 16 was a referendum on re-allowing affirmative action in public universities and employment after those had been banned in 1996 and and i i think uh you know the backers of reinstating racial preferences figure that with all of the hatred of president trump with the uh the the diversification and and um browning of america that they had an you know an excellent chance to reinstate racial preferences at the state level in a state like california which is notoriously blue and has gone has gone blue in every presidential election for the past three decades and a majority non-white state uh they were wrong of course um the prop prop prop 16 was um um a lit was voted down by a margin of over two million votes uh not only that every majority latino county in the state sided with colorblind policy over racial preferences that a state like california upheld the ban on racial preferences by such a large margin is all the more significant given the enormous disparity in corporate backing for each side among the supporters of racial preferences were facebook twitter uber lyft yelp dropbox patreon reddit united airlines wells fargo and four major california sports teams on the other side was simply the will of the majority of californians without a single comparable corporation and this brings me to the heart of the colorblind ideal though whites and conservatives are more likely to support colorblind policies than minorities and liberals the racial and political divides are tiny when compared to the vast chasm between highly educated elites of all colors in corporate america journalism silicon valley hollywood academia on the one hand and everybody else on the other so in order to understand uh the critique of colorblindness the the hatred of colorblindness among elites uh we have to understand an ideology that has swept university campuses and much many other elite spaces over the past five to ten years the ideology i speak of goes by many names some people call it social justice there's intersectionality wokeness political correctness the successor ideology left modernism the journalist dan hitchens simply calls it the thing because he considers it to be so recognizable uh but difficult to describe uh for the purposes of this talk since i'm not dealing with the gender or sexuality aspects of the ideology i'm just going to call it race consciousness as opposed to color blindness race consciousness refers to a family of ideas partly derived from the black nationalist movements of the 1960s and partly from a post-1980 trend in legal studies called critical race theory and what unites these ideas uh is their rejection of colorblindness colorblindness in this view is a cop-out it's a way of maintaining the status quo of white supremacy that pervades the country where colorblindness insists that race is ultimately meaningless race consciousness contends that race is an inescapable fact of life and an important shaper of our perspectives where colorblindness sees race as something we should want to transcend race consciousness sees it as something we should want to affirm and build upon where the colorblind ideal holds that public policy should be race neutral race consciousness holds that racial disparities caused by the sum of past racist policies can only be solved by means of public policy that takes race into account so these two ideologies are natural enemies and it's therefore hardly surprising that advocates of race conscious the race conscious style of anti-racism have zeroed in on colorblindness as the enemy still the extent of the attacks on color blindness is sometimes surprising so for example the best-selling author ibrahim x kendi in his latest book how to be an anti-racist says quote the most threatening racist movement the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right's unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular americans drive for a race neutral one so yeah to say that colorblindness is wrong-headed is one thing to say it is is worse than the alt-right is quite another it's impossible to understand the hatred directed at colorblindness without first understanding critical race theory this was an intellectual movement that originated at harvard law school in the 1980s so we partly have uh you all to thank for that or your institution rather understanding critical race theory can seem daunting because it's many of the crucial texts are written in unintelligible academies that that is only accessible to those who've been steeped in it for years um but in order to unders it can be explained in plain english and it can be boiled down to two core principles so the two core principles are the neutrality principle and the power principle the neutrality principle is best explained by analogy as children most of us grow up in a home where everyone speaks the same language in roughly the same way when we encounter a person who speaks our language in a strange and different way we learned to say that such a person has something we don't they have an accent they speak with an accent and we speak without one at some point most children have an epiphany there is no such thing as speaking without an accent everyone has an accent because the word accent just refers to any particular way of speaking including ours what's more we realize that our accent must sound as strange to others as their accents do to us in other words we learn that there's no neutral zone from which to judge other accents as deviations there's no such thing as a view from nowhere critical race theory holds that most of us are in the same position as the child who has not yet had this epiphany but instead of accents the sight of our confusion is the value structure of society itself by which i mean the standards we use to separate right from wrong legality from crime excellence from failure and truth from falsehood though the dominant dominant inherited value structure may look objective and neutral critical race theory reveals it to be a white value structure garbed in the clothes of neutrality take for instance affirmative action with a colorblind principle against the use of race neutral standards and college admissions critical race theory holds that these standards are not in fact neutral even if a college admissions officer could not see the race of an applicant the standards they would use to they would apply neutrally were originally created in and therefore shaped by a society that excluded black people so far from being universal or objective or meritocratic these standards are thought to have no validity outside of the particular culture in which they evolved the neutrality principle extends to things as fundamental as the pursuit of truth itself according to critical race theory thinkers who claim the mantle of reason impartiality and scholarly detachment thinkers who make it their goal to transcend all truth distorting biases even if they understand that they can never perfectly do that thinkers like this failed to realize that their cherished values of reason and impartiality are not themselves universal but were created by a particular white european culture and are therefore stamped with the parochial biases of that culture as a prominent critical race theory puts it critical race theorists objective reason or knowledge cannot exist because one's position in the social structure of race relations influences what you would call knowledge or rationality for instance cultural differences between black people and white people can't be studied through a neutral frame of reference because any frame of reference assumes the perspective of either the oppressed or the oppressor what's crucial to recognize about critical race theory is that it does not just allege that some particular neutral standards are really biased it makes a deeper claim that neutrality like speaking without an accent is not possible to begin with along with the related ideas like objectivity universal validity and impartiality the concept of neutrality is considered to be an illusion every value structure every set of standards used to judge the world and to judge people has its own arbitrary bias just like every person has an accent so that's the neutrality principle the second principle of crt is called the power principle um and um so so if you think of the neutrality principle by itself the claim that no value structure is neutral would not constitute a reason to reject any particular value structure that's where the second core principle of crt enters in although every value structure has its own bias they are not all equally powerful in the west crt alleges that with the white european value structure characterized by notions like reason objective truth and individualism dominates all the rest so the purpose of critical race theory is not simply to understand the neutrality principle for its own sake but to use that understanding to dismantle the power hierarchy that places white values and white people on top the power principle motivates critical race theory's special definition of racism as distinguished from mere prejudice under the neutrality principle alone it would not make sense to single out any particular value structure or any particular culture for prejudice because every value structure is considered to be prejudiced but the power principle makes a distinct a distinction between value structures that exert power and those that do not according to critical race theory only those that exert power can be called racist hence the common formula racism equals prejudice plus power compare this to the colorblind worldview which defines racism as a deviation from race neutral treatment to treat someone without regard to their race is to treat them according to rational objective standards to treat them with regard to race is to give into your irrational biases to stray outside the goalposts of impartial treatment framed in this way racism can flow in any direction whites can be racist towards blacks blacks towards whites asians towards hispanics so forth unlike in crt racism is symmetrical and omnidirectional anyone can perpetrate it anyone can be victimized by it in critical race theory racism is asymmetrical and unidirectional it only flows from the top of the power hierarchy downward in critical race theory racism is like a river it's an ongoing process flowing all the time it's not a discreet act or individual it's a dynamic system as a result the proper response to racism is not to content yourself with acting in a race neutral manner because to act neutrally is to allow the system to continue to let the river flow pulling everything inside with its current the proper response is to interrupt racism to put your hand in the river metaphorically to actively attack the dominant white value structure with the ultimate goal of dismantling the racial hierarchy so a key implication of critical race theory's definition of racism is that it eliminates the need to discover particular racist individuals or particular racist acts in order to prove broader allegations of societal racism racism in this view doesn't refer to people or to racist acts but to an ever-present state of affairs in which white people sit at the top of a hierarchy so particular acts of racism don't need to be cited to prove the existence of systemic racism any more than particular atoms of water must be cited to prove the existence of a river racism surrounds us all the time in this view but we're like the proverbial fish in water the truth remains invisible to us until we learn how to look so then that's the new that's the power principle and combined with the neutrality principle it constitutes the core of of critical race theory now i'm i'm nearing the end of my time here but uh let me just say a a few things in in in critique of critical race theory and then a few things in defense of colorblindness in philosophy the neutrality principle has a history of advocacy and criticism dating back millennia and and to be clear critical race theory though it started in legal studies really belongs in the philosophy department because it's making claims that are much wider than than merely the law at its best the the notion that neutrality is an illusion is is just an acknowledgement of the role that culture plays in shaping our values right if you grow up listening to hip hop uh exclusively because of where you come from you you might find it to be more beautiful than country music and vice versa and it's unclear that there's any objective or neutral place to stand from which to judge one as better than another you know what's better indian cuisine or chinese cuisine well that's that's that might depend on whether you were reared eating one or the other and it's unclear that any person's subjective preferences are objectively wrong um so you can make a strong case for this kind of this relativity if you're talking about fashion or cuisine or music preferences but anytime you're talking about the pursuit of knowledge the principle becomes incoherent philosophers have long observed that it's possible to make claims that can't be scored as true or false because they're they contain an internal contradiction to take a simple example consider the the paradoxical claim this sentence is false if you think about that claim if it's true then it must be false but if it's false then it must be true in other words it's an incoherent statement it it refutes itself and critical race theory is plagued by the same problem the neutrality principle rules out the possibility that any set of principles could apply universal universally but critical race theory advertises itself as a set of principles that applies universally a set of principles you ought to accept regardless of your particular racial or cultural background so in other words critical race theory presents itself as exactly the sort of thought system that it says cannot exist so that's the the fundamental contradiction of critical race theory and um as i said i'm nearing my time so i would just like to end by saying a few words in defense of the notion of of colorblindness um i read yesterday in the washington post that facebook is now changing its hate speech algorithm it used to have a a race blind hate speech algorithm such that it would ban it would treat equally the comments i hate black people and i hate white people and i hate asians and to the extent that this algorithm would score one of those as inadmissible it would score all of the others as inadmissible uh yesterday the washington post reported that facebook is changing its algorithm in in one way which is to uh to ease up on anti-white hate speech so the standards for anti-black hate speech are are staying the same but it's now going to allow more more statements it's going to have a a weaker filter for anti-white statements because it's it's it's received some criticism apparently for treating those as the same this is a classic a classic point of conflict in in public policy or in private policy in this case between the colorblind vision and the race conscious vision the colorblind vision ultimately treats all statements of racism the same notwithstanding the the deep historical differences in anti-black racism and anti-white racism you can perfectly under well understand why the statements i hate black people and i hate white people don't actually hit people the average person in the same way because of the history of slavery and jim crow and white supremacy and whatnot still the colorblind vision insists that as martin luther king put it black supremacy is ultimately as dangerous as white supremacy the notion of reverse racism for instance the scholar kimberly crenshaw has said that it's something that was invented in the right-wing think tanks this is this is uh simply historically inaccurate you know the a phillip randolph who um founded the march on washington movement um he he used the term reverse racism and warned against it um one of the virtues of the colorblind principle is that in the long run you have no idea how the power imbalances of society are going to shake out there are already places in america such as atlanta detroit where almost everyone in a position of power is black places that have five or six consecutive uh black mayors for instance and in the long run the principle that all racial discrimination is ultimately equivalent it's ultimately making the same mistake of attributing value to something meaningless like skin color it's a principle that is exportable over long times and distances because or rather it's applicable over long time spans and uh in many different spaces because it always sides with the victim of racial discrimination regardless of what the the specific power imbalances of a locality uh entail right the the one of the lazy assumptions of critical race theory is that white people are everywhere and always in power um i think it's it's con the the truth is considerably more more nuanced than that for instance is it a form of power to be able to make facebook which is almost a public utility at this point uh treat your group special um is it a form is it a form of power you know white people in the in the cultural space at this moment are seeing places like facebook devalue their feelings and weight other feelings higher and you know ultimately to signal that sense for a revolutionary movement say black lives matter or critical race theory is that you signal how you're going to treat the enemy by how you conduct your own movement this is why martin luther king would so often say well we don't wish to triumph over the white community or or anything like that he would be very clear about that because you understood that the way you conduct yourself when you don't have power is an indication of how you'll how you how you'll conduct yourself when you do this is one of the important virtues of color blindness it's not an idea that was invented in the conservative think tanks to maintain the white supremacist status quo as it's often caricatured it was an idea that was formed in the crucible of the civil rights movement to avert the chaos that has plagued most multi-ethnic societies throughout history um and it's a it's a technology for averting that chaos for for helping everyone just for for guaranteeing that we're going to move closer and closer to a nation that doesn't discriminate against anyone on the basis of skin color and i'll finish i'll finish with an op-ed i read a few months ago in the new york times there was there was an op-ed which addressed the notion of color of um orchestral auditions behind a blindfold the the way they conduct uh orchestral auditions if you're auditioning for the new york philharmonic is the judges hear you behind a blindfold they can't tell if you're a man or a woman if you're black or white all they can hear is the sound you're producing and this is an innovation that came about i believe in the 70s in order to combat the bias of judges you know you see a small woman playing the tuba and you hear her differently than you would if she were a large man because your bias plays tricks on you right it's also a perfect metaphor for colorblindness in the in the purest sense you literally cannot see the person right and you're enshrining that value and how you choose people moreover a black musician who goes to such an odd such an audition can be absolutely guaranteed that he didn't lose the job because of race and that he didn't gain it because of race um so this op-ed suggested despite all of these virtues we need to get rid of this get rid of the blindfold why because there aren't enough black musicians in classical orchestras now the notion that there are cultural differences between the music that black people and white people are raised on that could account for the uh the lower amount of black musicians that get into orchestras um is dismissed out of hand all that matters is the end result and any amount of racial discrimination to get there is what's justified so what's at stake in this conversation about colorblindness uh is the following question are we creating a nation however imperfectly that is inching closer and closer towards uh making every space more like a blind audition or are we inching closer and closer to a nation where the veil has been taken away and your race is relevant everywhere you walk um i think we ought to think very long and hard before we take the second of those options so with that i'll conclude my talk and open it up for questions um coleman uh i'd like to start with the first question if i may um i can't help i don't want to violate the principle of color blindness but i can't help noticing that the main defender of colorblindness as a black man martin luther king and the main critics the critical race there's a bunch of white guys at the harvard law school um now what has happened to the standing of martin luther king in our country the black man for whom we have a national holiday or for whom uh many streets and boulevards parks are named um what why is it that that that blacks have have gone to the um to be uh in imprisoned um by a a theory that comes out of um to put it mildly nazi germany well there's a few things to say about about martin luther king i think someone recently said uh wesleyan great writer recently said something about obama that i think applied it applied to obama but it also applied to dr king which is that um he has managed to avoid cancellation um like i said at the beginning if you take a martin luther king quote and you just say that say it verbatim you may get cancelled if you're white even if you're black frankly so the strange thing about dr king is we all venerate him nobody ever speaks ill of him but also he's basically ignored so he's in this he's in this uncanny valley where he is he is not exactly canceled but he's also not listened to um which is a a a strange place to be in it speaks to the the moral authority and credibility that we feel his message has the awkwardness of acknowledging that the main thrust of anti-racist activism is exactly the opposite of what he stood for um that's a that's a very awkward thing for the anti-racist movement to acknowledge because they would lose some moral credibility if they outright said what is true which is that we reject dr king's goal that's the truth but that can't be said out loud um the other thing about the what's often said about martin luther king if you look up if you look up martin luther king radical you will get 20 to 50 of the same exact article and what that article says is you can read one of you and you've read them all martin luther king was really a radical and all of the uh centrists and conservatives claiming his message and claiming that blm is is perverting it well they haven't really read dr king and they're quoting him out of context and martin luther king really would have been for everything we're doing uh making everything about race and you know reparations and affirmative action and so forth um the the the strange thing about this is that there are you know i i've read you know hundreds of pages of martin luther king speeches and writings and virtually every three or four pages there is something that if said today you would be cancelled for that's just the truth it's trivially easy to find 20 martin luther king quotes expressing color the colorblind ethic in the in the simplest terms and very difficult to find any quotes of him expressing that race is is a crucial aspect of your identity to dwell upon and affirm and the grain of truth to him being a quote-unquote radical was squarely in the domain of economics and foreign policy martin luther king was a pacifist he wanted out of the vietnam war at a time when it was very difficult to say that publicly and he was discouraged from saying so publicly he was considered a radical at the time because of that of course the vietnam war in retrospect it's not such a radical opinion today to have to judge that to have been a mistake right and he was also for things like full employment and universal health care uh which again are not considered so radical today but at the time were considered radical so the domains in which he was radical had nothing to do with the ultimate goal with respect to racial identity they had to do with economics and foreign policy um thank you so to remind you people um if you want to ask a question click on participants at the bottom and then you can raise your little blue hand but stay muted please um until i can see that and i can call on you then so and the young people harvey students eric students just just go for it i didn't mean to intimidate anybody i have a question too and um this is why why do you think the elites feel so secure in their positions as to be at the forefront of basically a movement that would dismantle them or really in principle would do that and isn't that security the reverse of the what must be a kind of despair and defeatism at the bottom of critical race theory that there's a sense that nothing will ever really fundamentally change or at least black people will never really catch up or surpass white people that said that's an excellent question whoever asked that um it remind oh you asked it oh i thought you were ventriloquizing someone else excellent question um it reminds me of of tom wolf's uh uh book radical sheik where he um he he got himself invited to a party thrown by leonard bernstein for the black panthers either the late late 60s or early 70s so it's you know all of these you know upper east side or upper west side you know new york top tippy top one percent elites who you know go to the metropolitan opera and and so forth in the same room as the black panthers the burly you know muscled ak-47 probably not ak-47 but you know gun-toting black panthers and the obvious irony of it is uh uh they are supporting the black panthers they're throwing this party in support of their cause which uh the explicit goal of which is to get rid of people like them um and i think the um the psychoanalysis of that is has something to do with white guilt uh white guilt is a tricky term because i think as shelby steele has noted it's misnamed it's not actually guilt it's really a terror and it's a terror at the thought that you yourself might be a racist it's a terror of the thought that you might be what what we have judged to be the the worst reflection of our country's history you might be part of that problem um and the the terror that that strikes into the heart of many white people is perfectly understandable and it's also uh it it also scrambles one's judgment of issues and one's ability to distinguish the right kinds of anti-racism from the wrong kinds of anti-racism there is also uh i think another aspect of this which is sort of what's sometimes called slacktivism it's it's uh i think of of the you know the the celebrity videos that come out in the in the wake of uh george floyd's death in police custody that show all of these like you know predominantly white celebrities saying things uh you know anti-racist things many of which are perfectly laudable sentiments but you know things most people don't really need to be told uh and and one observation about this is that it's an easy way to feel that you are doing good in the world without actually sacrificing anything um you know the the one of the differences between race-based activism and class-based activism is that if you're in the top one percent if you're living very comfortably um you can do a lot with symbolic politics symbolic racial politics that doesn't actually hit your bottom line like bernie sanders would you know bernie sanders really started out much more in the colorblind tradition as i as i noted although he was sort of i think pushed in the direction of race consciousness by the forces on the left but he's he's someone that would actually hit hit those celebrities a little bit where it hurts that we finalized the decision or anything like that but i wanted to explain i think we have one of those i think somebody uh somebody's somebody's unmuted yeah i'm muted um okay so so yes that that that would be and then the very very last aspect i think you're right critical race theory does not actually have concrete goals it's very light on actual public public policy prescriptions um and very heavy on anger emotion and and vague demands for dismantling the power hierarchy which i think people intuitively sense is unlikely to amount to anything concrete certainly not to any concrete gains for black people um and so it can feel like in some sense it's a safe thing to support because because it's not likely to actually affect much maybe that's the sense people have okay i really want to encourage younger people and people who disagree with coleman to ask questions undergrads and if you're if you don't want to ask them in on video just ask them um in chat you can do that too but um caleb guerrero please unmute yourself and ask your question oh hello uh my question is uh so one thing that i've noticed is that racism against whites is sometimes a lot of times ignored or minimized or even normalized what do you think the consequences of that are does it cause more division does it make us lose progress in our journey to fight income to fight racial equality well i think a baseline truth about most people is is that they do not appreciate being targeted and denigrated for things that are completely out of their control that's not a truth about black people that's the truth about human beings to the extent that you do that you show that you are devaluing the well-being and the feelings of that particular class of people this is historically what black people have complained about rightly throughout most of uh american history much of the consequence of white supremacy was not merely economic um and much of the much of the the the gains of the civil rights movement were not economic they were they were symbolic and emotional and psychic to be recognized for once as as equals it has an effect on people and i think uh there there's another aspect to anti-white speech which is i think worth mentioning uh which is that honest it's often to make statements about white people can often be a coded way of making a statement about a certain type of white person it's it's often not necessarily meant as a denigration of white progressives i think it's sometimes implicitly meant as a denigration of white conservatives or quote-unquote rednecks you know at least that's how i think it's sometimes meant um and of course the the fastest way the fastest way to lose people if you're trying to build political coalitions or if you're trying to persuade someone to your point of view the fastest way to lose them is to denigrate them based on characteristics that they can't possibly control that is uh what i've believed my whole life instinctively and also as a result of growing up in a you know very di racially diverse and progressive town which in the early aughts took progressiveness to mean martin luther king's style of progressiveness um so yeah the the consequence of that is to understandably alienate many white people who feel well at minimum i should have the right to complain about racism directed towards me and i should ha there shouldn't i shouldn't have to contend with some highly academic theory that says actually it's not possible there's nothing that could be said that would be bad enough about my race to be marked as racism that that's not an operating system for a multi-racial society every race has to feel that there is there is a line um and there's there's the same line for everyone that once it's crossed we all recognize that as as an affront to the group in question so i have a question here in chat by i believe in undergrad would color blindness then be dismissive of media representation and existing diversity programs in areas such as stem would it implicate a really staunch defense of meritocratic systems i i would say in general yes the answer to that is yes i think there are exceptions to that rule i think for example if you run a police department the value of racial diversity in having a police department that reflects the community being policed is so great that it outweighs the importance of a strict race-blind meritocracy however in most cases that's not true a few things one i think what most people actually want um as demonstrated by the pupils i've cited is a system that is fair a system that whatever outcome it yields was arrived at through a fair process i think we misidentified the problem as inequality in itself rather than unfairness and poverty so for example nobody nobody actually laments um you know the fact that great athletes are like extremely well paid because it's so obvious that athletics is a completely meritocratic domain it's obvious to anyone who watches soccer or the nba or the mlb now in these other domains there's legitimate questions in in in admissions to college colleges if your parent is a professor which is obviously skews white if your parent is a donor which also skews white uh you're not you're not getting meritocracy in the door either you're getting a leg up and people understandably feel well if if many kids get a leg up in these things and those kids are disproportionately white well why not have affirmative action to balance that out and i think that's actually a legitimate argument at the end of the day i think the meritocracy is is such a good idea that we should always have it in our sights as as our north star to you know progressively make progress towards a society where all of these arbitrary privileges unearned privileges are being equalized i do believe in that um but what many diversity programs end up being are uh soft quotas quotas in in in practice right where we need this many people who look this way in order to insulate ourselves from the critique that our our process is racist and what it does is it it certainly puts the idea that any black person hired is a diversity hire even if nobody says it out loud people think it and it may not be true um it it also masks the actual problems of the the pipeline issues of under-preparedness in the black community that that could in principle be addressed and that should probably be item number one on the issue on the agenda of any anti-racist item number one in other words should be how do we create an education system and a culture and a community of entrepreneurship and success that in the long run you know gets rid of the need for programs that give us a leg up because there is only there is only one way of achieving achieving long-term prosperity and success as a people and that is to cultivate the skills and and values that reliably lead to success in in what we now have which is an information economy that's the one way all of the other ways are stop gap solutions um you know it's it's duct tape on a sinking ship there is one long-term solution to that problem and that's where many charter schools have been doing a pretty good job of pointing a you know a path towards that and there are non-profits doing doing good work um but that's what i would say to that i'm all right diana and then eliza and then ashland please uh hi coleman i really enjoyed what you said so far uh i've got a quick question about a recent change in naming practices uh it's seemingly overnight uh black has become always uppercase and white lowercase as far as i know journalistic outlets have embraced this and my students have certainly embraced it i just wondered what you made of it is that crt at work i mean i guess my uh you know uh impulse is to say either capitalize both or lowercase both uh but it does seem to me that these moments where naming practices shift are very significant so you know in the 60s the shift from negro to black and then a decade or two later the shift from black to african american although both terms you know continue in usage so so this does seem to me kind of a new moment uh if black is now always to be uppercase and white to be lowercase i've noticed the same thing and i don't remember if it was brookings or several websites have you know marked this change and given the reasons for it one of the reasons given is that um black is an ethnic group it's sometimes said like jewish or italian and as such it should be capitalized just like you you might capitalize those words um i i suppose i can see the logic in that however um it does it it does seem to me there does seem to me to be a certain type of person who enjoys capitalizing black and lower casing white there's some kind of perverse joy at the thought that you know one has this you know the capital this is more it's more um dignified i suppose whereas white with lowercase just kind of seems like a color um my instinct is always to lower case both but i would be perfectly fine uppercasing both but i do think you're right to put your finger on this is a kind of a kind of symbolic manifestation of critical race theory and what's telling about it is that it's often in the wake of societal discord over the question of race that publications do this so some publications did this in response to george floyd um so it's clear this is not a this is not simply a neutral a decision taken purely to um to to enshrine the principle that ethnic groups should get capitalization it's something about anti-racism this is this is we're playing our role by now capitalizing black giving it more dignity but not doing the same to white i i i agree it rubbed me the wrong way when i first noticed it and i actually first noticed it years ago in a critical race theory texts but i would honestly have to know more about the rationale for each individual publication doing it before i really passed judgment eliza hi um so i'm wondering i believe in dr kendy's most recent book he actually agrees that black people and people of any race can be racist because white people do not always occupy positions of power so it it does have to do with like it's it's prejudice and power certainly but even he grants that black people do have modicums of power um and therefore can you know combine that with prejudice um so do you think that this dynamic instead of unilateral understanding of racism can be compatible with the race consciousness or critical race theory um so you're right dr kennedy in his book he he this is his one major break from the rest of the race conscious anti-racist movement and he flags it as as a kind of uh going against the orthodoxy of his own clique so to speak that he really disagrees with most of the folks around him in that black people can be racist towards whites um and i i thought that was uh i would commend him for it because he has no you know obvious reason to to make that break other than principle um my my sense is that that will just be i think a lot of people who read kendy's book will probably gloss over that passage and um and especially when all of the other books in the genre don't agree with him will probably the the gravity of the opinion that racism equals prejudice plus power and black people don't have power seem still to be winning the day in that space so far as i can tell and that does make it incompatible with uh colorblindness um but we will see what we'll have to see there there's certainly there are certainly ways to be a very committed anti-racist to to make anti-racism your you know your life's project and do that within the framework of color blindness that's not what we're seeing today but it's it's perfectly coherent and it's in fact what the civil rights movement was um so colorblindness and race consciousness can't really be married they're opposites but anti-racism really what i'm talking about is a different form of anti-racism a healthier form of anti-racism that makes more sense uh in the long run um and and really should be the path that anti-racists increasingly take thank you ashton please and then nicholas hi so my question goes back more towards the affirmative action for college admissions and i was wondering so given the correlation pattern we currently seen between race and ethnicity and education achievement and the fact that as you cited the general population um showed support for color blindness and college admissions do you think that more socioeconomically based affirmative action programs would do a better job at addressing inequality while maintaining colorblindness or do you think that that solution would also fall short given the fact we do not currently live in a colorblind world and it wouldn't address the unique experiences that minority students faced when compared to their white peers good question so one thing i one thing i'll say just to frame it is um often it's portrayed in in the in the in the media and in the public as if it's race conscious policy like affirmative action it's a choice between that and a choice between doing nothing to help black people and given those two options it kind of seems like a no-brainer to go with the first but it's a false choice the real choice as you highlight is between policy based on skin color and policy based on socioeconomics and then the the key question to ask is which one of those is a better indication of privation and lack of privilege is it skin color or is it um socioeconomics i would certainly argue it's the latter and insofar as we have the best proxy for disadvantage in our hands we shouldn't go to the second or third best proxy um so yes i would be if it makes sense to correct for anything socioeconomics makes much more sense for a college to care about than than skin color and you see you know the product of um the result of caring exclusive exclusively about you know or largely about skin color at elite universities especially like like harvard um is that probably half of the black students on campus um and there are a few studies from the mid-2000s on this are children of black immigrants recent black immigrants to the country not black americans descended from slavery and many of them are you know middle-class black immigrant kids it's not uh which just goes to show it's not a skin color is not a great proxy for a disadvantage in these in these kinds of cases so to the extent that affirmative action is justified in terms of helping people who have less advantage that's actually an argument for basing it on socioeconomics rather than race thank you so much nicholas hi um i have a question that's a little bit more focused on culture than it is on policy and um it is what is your response to the argument that colorblindness um uh creates a kind of um false satisfaction that um you know we look at the laws and statutes and we see that there there are no laws made on the basis of race and so that gives us the ability to kind of wash our hands and say okay we now we live in a colorblind society there's nothing more we need to do um what what do you say to the idea that colorblindness kind of um as a cultural idea um it encumbers further progress yes so colorblindness is is an aspirational ethic it's like it's like talking about a peaceful society everyone wants to live in a peaceful society even though we know you know 15 or 16 000 people get murdered in this country every year um we don't have a peaceful society we probably understand intuitively that we're never going to get to a perfectly peaceful society nevertheless the notion of peace and safety acts as a north star that helps us go in the right direction when we're at a crossroads that's what colorblindness is the truth is that racism will never go away completely ever like murder um there has never been a society in human history which had different races which did not have racism it seems like some some level of bigotry and racial bias is is allowed for by human nature to an extent that means even if we perfect the way we educate children there are going to be some racists when they become adults some of them are going to turn out to be to be racist just like some people turn out to be murderers and um and so to believe in colorblindness is not to believe that we're already there yet um that we've made all the progress that we need to with regard to race it's just an ongoing commitment to venture towards this north star of a society in which your race increasingly does not determine how you think uh where you're where you end up who you can and can't associate with where you can and can't live and feel comfortable and um that grounds itself in the ethic that skin color is meaningless that that we are all the same under the skin and that that's what matters uh both in how we treat people and in our in our public policy so that's what i would say with that okay devon please and then dennis weibold and then michael hartney devin you have to unmute yourself devin devin unmute yourself rookie sorry about that um thank thank you coleman for your for your talk i just wanted to uh ask a question that you addressed a little bit in your talk but give you a chance to say more if you'd like it's you you place a lot of emphasis obviously on the difference between the the new outlook of critical race theory and the the original civil rights movement as exemplified by mlk and my question is how you would account for the transition why why the original ideals have lost their lost their standing and and i mean you gave part of an answer well critical race theory came out of the law schools and so forth but the striking thing to me is that it's gotten so much public traction now that it didn't just remain an esoteric uh academic theory but now has become a sufficiently powerful idea that people's that that the opposing view has become unacceptable in some circles so how would you explain what happened to the original principle so that it got replaced was it that a disappointment that the hopes that the civil rights movement stirred up did not come to fruition that were their passions that that the you know like a passion for retribution and and that the original ideal did not satisfy or what what explanation would you give about why we've seen such a massive transformation so one thing i would say is that the the question may be posed a little backwards in other words maybe it's not the question is not so much why did the colorblind values of the civil rights movement uh go away so quickly and give rise to this much more racialized and tribalized ethic of black power and today black lives matter and so on maybe the question is given that most groups of people are much more inclined to ethnicity-based politics to begin with how is it that something like the civil rights movement was ever popular to begin with in other words universal ethics ethics that apply to everyone and that really abstract away from your identity towards a higher goal are inherently a little bit less popular with people because then the more natural way of existing in the world is to embed yourself in your tribe to believe your tribe for arbitrary reasons is better than all the others and to just essentially treat your race like sports fans treat their sports team in some sense you you may know that it's arbitrary and if you were born in san francisco you'd be a 49ers fan or whatever but i was born here i'm a giants fan the giants are better and and um and screw everybody else and i actually i feel and it's just to to shamelessly allow yourself to feel tribalism is very comes very naturally to us it's much more unnatural to say what martin luther king said and and to go for uh something uh that transcends identity so that's that's one thing i would say another thing i would say is that yes i think um it's been acknowledged by a lot of people across the spectrum that the too much in in some ways people value the civil rights movement for the wrong reasons they put hopes in it that it couldn't possibly have satisfied they thought that it was going to um get rid of black intergenerational poverty and it didn't um black under achievement didn't do that um it did it allowed black people the dignity to go into a restaurant and order something like a human being and not be refused service and that as i said is a very important psychological and and um uh you know identity affirming pride affirming um thing but it's not a panacea and i do think they're the the to the extent that it was viewed as a panacea and many you know larger inequalities racial inequalities in society persisted um people felt that well what we need is something much stronger much more muscular that'll really do the trick of course they were wrong about that too all right um dennis and then cole please thank you and uh thank you coleman for your talk um before much else uh martin luther king jr was a christian um so what do you think the role uh has been of communities of faith and either distorting what he said originally um you know or perhaps you know illustrating some of the same principles that he based his equality arguments on yeah well i i can't say i'm too familiar with um modern faith communities i i was not raised in one but you're absolutely right that martin luther king was a christian and that his his colorblind ethnic ethic was inseparable at least from his perspective um with his christianity he would often say in christ there is neither jew nor gentile or was it neither greek nor jew someone here will know that better than i do um and and you know although you can you can perfectly well arrive at that ethic without christianity the historical fact is that he and the civil rights movement and black americans in general arrived at that very much coincidence through christianity um there's also something to be said for the decline of christianity in the more secular parts of america uh leading to a vacuum to be filled by this new ideology that in some in some interesting ways resembles christianity and in other ways doesn't in one way it resembles christianity through the notion of the similarity of original sin and white guilt they both say you're sort of born with this defect that you have to constantly fight your whole life but you'll never actually get away from one original sin and the other racism but they're different in the sense that christianity is a universal ethic um that locates um you know the the inherent dignity of the individual regardless of where that individual comes from it's not a it's not a religion that at all endorses tribalism whereas you know social justice intersectionality it um it it emphasizes and reifies divisions divisions are are the point um that's what i would say to that call please um so given the the pew polls and the results of prop 16 that indicate uh most americans don't really support critical race theory or race race consciousness why do you think uh bid tech companies like uh facebook you mentioned or reddit or uber why do you think they support uh race consciousness and have been implementing policies on there uh on their end to support it yeah it's a good question i think this goes to a larger uh division between elites and the general public um well the truth is everyone is in their own social bubble nobody is just effortlessly in touch with the opinions of the of the nation at large especially in the nation this large where you know different parts of the country you have completely different characters and completely different cultures it's very difficult to just intuitively know what the people want uh much easier to know what the people around you want and if you're in one of these spaces if you're in corporate america most people you know are in corporate america if you're in college most people you know are in college so you intuitively grasp what the morality the moral sensibilities of the people around you and you don't necessarily grasp the moral sensibilities of the public moreover you don't necessarily have a strong incentive to um uh to to step out of your bubble um if you have no social incentive if you pay no price in other words for being out of touch then you have no reason to fight the natural tendency to be out of touch [Music] so that's what i would say i bear to please thank you so my question is whether there is a difference between color blindness and the classical liberal states neutrality towards many things including race in principle yes what i'm articulating is identical to classical the classical liberal uh view of race and i've um i've thought of of of sort of saying it that way passed but yes what i'm speaking of is is the it is the classical liberal tradition and how to think of the the importance of race to our species and that classical liberal tradition has been historically the primary enemy of slavery and jim crow there's a great book called race and liberty it's actually just a an anthology of writings by anti-racist activists anti-slavery activists going back to the 1700s uh of of writers most of whom [Music] are black who are fighting slavery and jim crow in precisely these terms in the classical liberal colorblind tradition um that is often left out especially in african-american studies curriculums but more generally today in um in our education about history so people get the impression that the people who represent the tradition of fighting slavery and racism are the race conscious anti-racists which is not actually true um i have a question that was texted to me how do you evaluate the trump phenomenon in its um uh productiveness or unproductiveness to deal with the foolishness of critical race theory has it been helpful or utterly counterproductive um so i i agree with much of what trump has said about critical race theory and i'm i'm thinking i'm thinking only of his comments on it from sometime in the past two months um i think he he certainly has the the right stance on it he was not um he certainly didn't go into enough detail but you know he's not i can spend 20 minutes talking about it you know for a politician it has to be sound bites so in general i agree with his instincts on it on the other hand i worry that any idea that trump touches becomes soiled by contact with him because you know in many people's minds he will go down as as one of the worst presidents in history and without getting into without getting into whether that's true um i think it's safe to say that uh he is one of he he's my least favorite president of my lifetime um and i very much see why he has inspired so much criticism and and and therefore you know tactically it's it's it's inconvenient for the the um criticism of crt to be associated with you know the president that you know told us not to wear masks during a pandemic and and many other silly things that he's done that said his opinion on crt was right and i i give credit where credit is due um thank you coleman so but with that um um prudent summary of uh the trump phenomenon uh i want to thank you very much for coming to us what you've done is to show us what a thoughtful person is thank you very much it was my pleasure to be here and thank you so much for the thoughtful questions

Channel: Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard

Views: 50,220

Rating: 4.8748298 out of 5

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Id: 5_hRr5J9UUc

Length: 89min 6sec (5346 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020