Race Essentialism vs Color-blindness with Winston Marshall

i'm trying to i'm trying to write defense of the concept of colorblindness colorblindness is a dirty word now if you if you google colorblindness race google those two words so that you don't get articles about you know like people that can't see colors literally you know black cones and rods in their eyes um you'll get i mean at least i got in my google filter you know 10 straight articles on why colorblindness is the wrong approach to race and really the the people that advocated that decades ago were wrong-headed and naive and what we have to do now is really focus on seeing race seeing me as for instance a black person and and you as a white person and the way to a healthy equilibrium on race is to crank up the dial on our racial identities and how much we care about what race we are um and and not only that but the idea is that's the only way to sort of get to get past jim crow and slavery and racial discrimination it's like we we can't do that if we're going to ignore race that's the idea the prevailing idea now uh certainly in the elite and that also comes with a whole package of race-based laws like you know affirmative action and covid racial preferences and and all the rest you know diversity and inclusion hiring so i'm trying to write a book that just makes the full case for color blindness that we need a national reset on race where we say look horrible things have been done in the past nobody's denying that but the way to fix that is not to double and triple down on uses of race um in the other direction right that that's not the way out an eye for an eye as the saying goes makes the whole world blind so i'm trying to argue that we just need a national reset where we re commit to the principle of race is meaningless like skin color is is an absurd way to an absurd variable to form your identity around it's an absurd reason to ever feel divided from anyone else it's absolutely stupid and meaningless and all of the the quotes and sentiments that have now become cliche from martin luther king and the civil rights movement they are cliche precisely because they are so true and we risk sort of repeating those mantras and cliches to the point where we actually don't hear them anymore and don't don't use them as our guiding lights in our public policy and in our relationships with other people it's so palpable for any english person to go to america and it's always sort of been like this even before the escalation in in the in the cultural wars i guess uh from 2015 but in in america it's so people are defined by their race even if it's not uh or um it's it's talked about so much more than in britain where until recently again and certainly since george floyd uh before that race was it wasn't such a spoken about thing and and the racialization of of britain is or to see everything through the lens of race is seen so regressive and it's been quite shocking to to see us adopt those uh that what i see as a kind of american mindset do you think it's got okay it's like slightly irks me when people say that only because especially people from european countries where you've had a history where your ethnic groups and ethnic divisions have been purposely bounded by borders and slaves and colonies were kept overseas you know for where there was where in america the challenge we faced was that when slavery ended the slaves were living right next to the masters you know that was a challenge that was never faced by european countries with cut which kept their colonies hundreds or thousands of miles away and so it's it was a different challenge to begin with and it was you know the difference in the american identity is that it's not it was never supposed to be an ethnic identity whereas every every uh every european country could say pretty credibly maybe until recently that listen germany is for germans i'm sorry that's just how it's done france is for the french we're an ethnicity and a country for france is a little bit of a different case but uh you know finland is for the finns we all speak the same language we're all the same ethnicity and we're different from the swedes and we're different from the germans and that's why we have our own country we look different we talk different and and america was one of the only places to to try and have the challenge of having a non-ethnic identity from the start and it's you know it's been tough and we we haven't done a a perfect job for sure but it's it's sort of a different challenge there's an immediate thing that jumps out there particularly if you say like germany is for the germans like i'm sure you know obviously we think of how badly that went in the 20th century um but in in america it's not just the slaves of masters or even all the white different disparate ethnic groups be they italians or germans or irish or then there's the asians they're all it's a it's a nation of different ethnicities so i i totally uh understand that you had america had a completely different problem set of problems uh to start with um uh but i i'm not sure uh in in europe that i the idea of uh i mean yeah you're right i guess that ethnic groups are sort of initially by accident but even then when when when those groups when nations evolved ethnicity wasn't even necessary things that people were thinking about it was an accident was beside the point right i mean you could argue that it was it was it was masked by the construct of nations like what what is a nation in europe but um an ethnic group that's fought on a particular piece of land and fought for certain borders yeah but even in britain britain's not uh there's so many different ethnicities over the thousand years that britain has existed that that make up and it's constantly changing you know and there you know and there's been like bitter bitter wars between all of them you know as as i'm sure you know you know just bitter bitter hatreds between between the irish and and the brits and the scottish still kind of want to leave and and so that i mean in other words that's your version of our problem so are you hopeful that america can find uh or can can get to a place of color blindness do you think it's possible in a nation of so many different groups of so many different religions and uh different beliefs that they can be united under those those liberal enlightenment ideas on which it was founded so it will never fully win i i don't expect my principles to ever fully win out what i do think is possible is for us to do much better than we've been doing and for a critical mass among people with power people in the elite um who let's face it are more the ones that are going to be reading reading um a book of this sort to begin with and who who are more of the ones that are creating this problem like this this problem of woke race obsession is overwhelmingly an elite problem mostly what working class people expect when they come to america is a a facially race neutral system in which they can work their ass off that that's what people don't ex you know asian americans aren't expecting to come to a country where they're going to get asian-american benefits right they're expecting to come to a country that hopefully will not discriminate against them or hold them down and will give them a chance to come to to live the american dream and that that's been the expectation for hundreds of years in this country is i'm going to go to a place where i won't be persecuted that has a legal system in place that will treat me as an individual and i will be able to fight my way in this in this system right um but but what i would hope is that a critical mass of people in power will be able to say no to race obsession and to say yes to enlightenment ideals and procedural fairness and treating people as an individual rather than a member of their racial group and the more people do that the more we are you know steering steering our ship through this storm in a way that will allow it to survive um and and will minimize interracial inter-ethnic conflict so i know so they answer your question no we're never going to be perfect or anything close to it but i view what i'm advocating for as someone who's akin someone who's advocating for peace rather than violence right like you never actually expect to zero out the violence but at the very least you want to know that you're going in the right direction right and what i fear we've lost is that no one even talks anymore about the desire to be a colorblind nation in the in the 70s and 80s and 90s you had people like thurgood marshall you even had radicals like the black power movement in the 60s when they wrote their manifesto for the movement they said yeah eventually we would like to become colorblind but on the way there we're gonna have to do a lot of racial reckoning and seeing race right now you don't even hear that you don't even hear the first caveat where they say eventually we want to be colorblind it's only the second half which is we want to see race forever and ever so if i could even get more people to admit that eventually we want to be colorblind we want to more and more push people away from identifying strongly with a race of human beings a subcategory of human beings then i will consider it a success [Music]

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 10,811

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Id: Rf0qdokjaUA

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022