Based in the ideas of the Enlightenment, evolving into an ideology (that the concept of race was a man-made concept) in the fight against slavery, the adaptation of colour blindness as a belief was supposed to ensure that everyone was treated equally because they were a human being, perfectly expressed by Martin Luther King on the 28th August 1963. Thus the prism of race is removed as a barrier, and we would come closer to the idea of one world harmony.
Nowadays, such thinking is often derided by so called leftists for a variety of reasons (failing to address structural racism, ignoring lived experiences by people of colour and for naïve, overtly utopian thinking). While the latter criticism does hold water to a degree, the others are based in identity politics which stoke and inflame racial tensions directly and indirectly (not a big surprise considering such thinking emerged as a response to the Enlightenment). Whereas people of differing creeds and colours fought side by side in the struggle for equality, identity politics poisoned the well, fragmented the left and led it into being dependent on funding from uncaring governments.
As Mukhtar Dar (a senior member of the Asian Youth Movement) succinctly put it in 2010:
The AYM’s symbolic black secular clenched fist split open into a submissive ethnic hand with its divided religious fingers holding up the begging bowl for the race relations crumbs.
After nearly five decades of this divisiveness, there does seem to be a growing recognition that identity politics has done deep damage to race relations and so people are starting to look back to the notion of colour blindness.
Step forward CNN analyst, jazz musician/rapper and podcaster Coleman Hughes.
Having recently gone viral after his appearance on American talk show 'The View' (as well as an attempt by TED to suppress his TED Talk), Hughes has been making the case for colour blind thinking for many years now and has ruffled the feathers of those invested in identity politics due to it being their livelihood.
This book is, alongside Kenan Malik’s Not So Black and White a rallying cry for those alienated by society’s descent into hyper racial thinking but who still believe that a better world is possible.
Beginning with a potted history which has led to him taking pen to paper, Hughes discusses how his race wasn’t an issue until he went to a private school and was offered the chance to attend a conference for people of colour. From there onwards, particularly in university, it became obvious to Hughes that the overt focus on race and anti-racism led to many an innocuous incident being labelled ‘racist’ by campus authorities and other white students.
He sets out his simple view of such people early on:
Citing the defunding of police departments (leading to soaring crime rates and city councils being sued by residents), stimulus packages from Congress aimed only at non-white farmers (leading to a court ruling that such actions were unconstitutional) and Covid-19 vaccinations being initially prioritised for black people (leading to more whites dying of Covid in 2022 than blacks, Hughes carefully spells out how such dumb policies cause genuine harm, undermine trust in institutions that are supposed to be non-partisan and stoke racial tension. Hence why he continually argues for the universalism of colour blindness.
Beginning with a potted history which has led to him taking pen to paper, Hughes discusses how his race wasn’t an issue until he went to a private school and was offered the chance to attend a conference for people of colour. From there onwards, particularly in university, it became obvious to Hughes that the overt focus on race and anti-racism led to many an innocuous incident being labelled ‘racist’ by campus authorities and other white students.
He sets out his simple view of such people early on:
Self-proclaimed ‘anti-racists’ are insincere in their commitment to equal outcomes for all people in society…the policies that self-proclaimed ‘anti-racists’ promote end up hurting the very people they claim they’re trying to help.
Citing the defunding of police departments (leading to soaring crime rates and city councils being sued by residents), stimulus packages from Congress aimed only at non-white farmers (leading to a court ruling that such actions were unconstitutional) and Covid-19 vaccinations being initially prioritised for black people (leading to more whites dying of Covid in 2022 than blacks, Hughes carefully spells out how such dumb policies cause genuine harm, undermine trust in institutions that are supposed to be non-partisan and stoke racial tension. Hence why he continually argues for the universalism of colour blindness.
One of the book’s many highlights is when Hughes takes an axe to recent depictions of MLK and how we, as a society, supposedly fetishised his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to use the idea of colour blindness to evade the problems of ‘structural racism’ and ‘white supremacy’:
Every Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there are a predictable series of articles claiming that Dr. King was really a ‘radical’ – especially towards the end of his life. The subtext of these articles is that if Dr. King were alive today he would support the policies and the rhetoric advanced by today’s neoracist radicals – people like (Ibram X). Kendi and (Robin) DiAngelo. King’s legacy, they argue, has been sanitized, co-opted, and weaponized by conservatives and moderates. This argument relies on a bait and switch. The areas in which Dr. King could rightly be called a ‘radical’ were two-fold: economics and foreign policy. He favored policies like universal healthcare and guaranteed federal employment, and he strongly opposed the Vietnam War––positions that were considered radical in the 1960s.
Whatever you think of those positions, neither of them pertain to the topics on which he is alleged by modern commentators to have been a ‘radical’ – namely, the importance of our common humanity and the goal of transcending race. On those topics, King never wavered.
Nor did he waver on his preference for class-based policy over race-based policy. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, he devotes a whole chapter to critiquing the Black Power movement. One of his critiques was that the Black Power movement focused on race where it should have focused on class. He even suggested changing the name ‘Black Power’ to ‘Power for Poor People’. (One wonders what he would have thought about the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’.)
This is particularly poignant as the deliberate misinterpretation of MLK’s views and the twisting of his words have left a lot of people disillusioned over how a figure for justice, equality and fairness has been weaponised for divisive purposes.
One aspect that did surprise me was the revelation that the ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education was based on “…a shoddy experiment with dolls…” that would be thrown out today based on the methodology being flawed.
We’re all familiar with Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s study where black and white kids were given a series of toy dolls and asked which ones they liked and didn’t like, with the conclusion that segregation lowered the esteem of black kids. However, according to Hughes, the actual report does not prove this but does prove that kids from segregated southern schools had higher self-esteem levels than northern kids.
So, not for the first time, the correct decision was made for the wrong reason.
Running just over 200 pages, this book should be compulsive reading for everyone. By making his case in simple and thought-provoking terms, Hughes makes a stand for a just and equal world without poisonous identity politics. It’s inspiring, infuriating and illuminating.
Let’s go back to the secular fist again.
Coleman Hughes, 2024, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. Thesis, ISBN-13: 978-0593332450
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.
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