March 5, 2024 - 8:00pm
With The End of Race Politics, Coleman Hughes has arrived as one of the most acute observers of the Western condition. Commentary on the book has focused on its critique of identity politics and advocacy of colour blindness, yet has overlooked its true significance.
Indeed, Hughes has mounted a full-scale assault on contemporary progressivism’s founding myth of white guilt and black pain, the fount of our moral order. He attacks the hallowed idea that white people carry blood guilt for the crimes of their ancestors while black people bear a hereditary trauma inherited from slave ancestors. “I myself am the descendant of slaves,” he writes. Noting that the practice was the norm in human history, he adds: “If it were true that people inherited the trauma experienced by their distant ancestors […] virtually all people would be suffering from it.”
Hughes debunks the notion that black people, due to their lived experience, have superior moral, spiritual or existential insight than whites. For him they are not powerless victims, just people like anyone else.
Our misplaced “black good, white bad” morality tale leads white liberals to patronise, infantilise and walk on eggshells around black people. The pre-civil rights era fixation on race has merely flipped its valence from negative to positive. What Hughes terms “neoracism” has seamlessly taken over from the old-fashioned variety, fuelling cancel culture and polarisation while obstructing black progress. A conspiracy theorist would argue that whites hit upon these ideas to trap black people in a mental prison designed to cripple their self efficacy — truly “systemic racism”.
This might come as news to the Church of England, which is mooting a £1 billion fund to address the legacy of slavery. According to Right Rev. Rosemarie Mallett, chair of its working group, slavery’s effects are “measurable and apparent in everything from pregnancy and childbirth outcomes to life chances at birth, physical and mental health, education, employment, income, property, and the criminal justice system”.
Google’s Gemini AI, which has been accused of being “woke” for seeking to depict history as more racially diverse than it really was, presents another case in point, in which elite symbolic squabbles suck money and attention away from actually fixing racial inequality. Hughes decries this obsession with the politics of past wrongs, which disempowers black people, conceals actual causes and divides various groups.
Whether they admit it or not, the worldview of many modern progressives is anchored by sacred romantic myths about black people, alongside the castigation of whites. Writer Shelby Steele located the arrival of this outlook quite precisely, to the mid-Sixties. Witness the Left-liberal Susan Sontag who in 1966, having had little say about race, suddenly gushed in Partisan Review:
“The white race is the cancer of human history […] Only a minority of white Americans, mostly educated and affluent [are committed to racial equality] […] This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future […] ‘the Negro’ is fast becoming the American theatre’s leading mask of virtue […] for sheer pain and victimage, the Negro is far ahead of any other contender.”
Hughes, like the academic Remi Adekoya, observes that this sensibility gives black people great cultural power. It also endows white liberals with vicarious authority: by associating themselves with black grievance narratives, they acquire a weapon to guilt-trip the rest of society and assert the moral superiority of their political tribe.
One shortcoming is the book’s treatment of the anti-racism taboo — the idea that there should be extreme social penalties for expressions of racism. Hughes wants to see the norm extended to protect whites and others. Fair enough. But a different perspective, which informs my new book Taboo, is that encouraging an unbounded moral disgust reflex creates the very sacredness that underpins neoracism, cancel culture and the religion of anti-racism.
Might it not be better to retain an anti-prejudice norm, but transform it into a more rational, proportional rule like that against class or religious prejudice? Decentring race also means building up minority pride and resistance to slights, in line with Hughes’s project of strengthening the black subject.
Hopefully this book can steer us away from the politics of therapeutic revenge, and toward a productive fact-led approach to inequality.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor at the University of Buckingham, and author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities. He is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange.
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SubscribeOne can only wonder what those uber (materially) wealthy manipulative predators have got in store for us now that their divisive and nasty race, climate, trans, covid, and various other narratives are all imploding (and their whole aliens thing, quite literally, didn’t take off); and more and more people are now, one by one, slowly recovering their senses, helped by books and articles like this. Little doubt that few of predator class are sleeping well at night (did they ever?), but one’s thing for sure is that they will fight dirty and to the bitter end.
Maybe it’s hopium but I have to believe that the common human decency shared by the vast majority of us on this planet will nonetheless ultimately shine through and all of this, one day, will seem like some horrible bad hallucination. Did they really say and do those things, and did people really believe them, the incredulous grandkids will ask. They did indeed, and it could happen again, so don’t you let down your guard for one minute, we’ll reply. (Either that or we’ll silently hang our heads in complicit shame.)
And always forgive those who hurt you, for they know not what they do.
The words of Frederick Douglas where he answers the question as to what whites are to do with blacks remains valid today. “Everybody has asked the question. . .”What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!…let us alone”.
Coleman Hughs similarly rejects the patronage of whites and their fellow race grifters.
We will prosper together by disregarding the incidental accidents of skin colour and ethnicity. We are all mankind. We do not need to be divided by “race”, sex, hight, age and all the various differences that might advantage or disadvantage us in life. We are not just a category to be manipulated by the tyranny of social engineers.
We Whites may choose to leave the Blacks alone, Bray, but will they leave us alone? Unlikely as, regardless of what Coleman Hughe says, the more extreme black activists would like to hold us accountable for their every under-achievement.
That last paragraph of yours, by the way, reads like a bit of Justin Welby sermonising. Are you by any chance C of E? Do you really believe that ethnicity is an accident to be disregarded? Social engineers will never see themselves as tyrannical. Rather like Christian missionaries, they see themselves as changing society for the better – bringing light, truth and education to the small-minded and bigoted masses.
I think people are waking up to the grift. Hispanics and blacks are jumping ship from the Democrats. Working class people of all colours and creeds have figured out the Dems only cater to upper middle class, university educated voters. Trump will almost certainly win a greater share of the minority vote than any Republican in 30 years.
Finally some common sense.
The real racists these days are indeed the “anti-racists”.
Matter + Anti-matter = Annihilation
Racism + Anti-racism = Annihilation
Identity politics is what you get when middle class leftists get rich and no longer want to talk about money.
“A conspiracy theorist would argue that whites hit upon these ideas to trap black people in a mental prison designed to cripple their self efficacy — truly “systemic racism”.”
I came up with that one a while back myself. It occurred to me that intersectional politics has the odd characteristic whereby straight white men over 21 are the only social group left possessing no political defence against being held fully accountable for their words and actions.
What did the architects of intersectional ideology suppose would happen once this came into contact with market forces?
Coleman Hughes has long been a voice of sanity in the US. It is good that he is getting the recognition he deserves. He does a podcast you can find on youtube called Conversations with Coleman. Here is a good one with Munira Mirza which covers a number of UK issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuvkFKrNNBI
Article seemed less about Coleman, who is v impressive, and more about the Author’s book. Appreciate the Editor decides the headline but would have preferred more on what Coleman said too.
Judging just from this review, one weakness of the book might be that it seems to treat race separately from other aspects of what we would now call “wokeness” but which predates the current use of the term.
Most of these oppressor/oppressed narratives have very similar structures. For example, highly privileged women currently see themselves oppressed because other women are, or because women were in the past.
We need to explain that commonality.
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay are the best on the wider woke issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynical_Theories
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody