https://unherd.com/newsroom/coleman-hughes-tears-apart-neoracism-in-new-book/
With The End of Race Politics, Coleman Hughes has arrived as a leading intellectual, one of the most acute observers of the western condition. Just 28, sporting a high-profile podcast and numerous influential articles, he’s come a long way from the pensive Columbia undergraduate I took to lunch in 2018. Commentary on the book has focused on its critique of identity politics and advocacy of colourblindness, but has overlooked its true signficance.
To wit, 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 pours cold water on the hallowed idea that whites carry blood guilt for the crimes of their ancestors while blacks bear a hereditary trauma inherited from slave ancestors. Hughes debunks the notion that black people, due to their lived experience, have superior moral, spiritual or existential insight than whites. They are not powerless victims, just people like anyone else.
The book gores seven cherished myths including that disparities equal discrimination, discriminating against whites today can compensate for the anti-black prejudice of yesteryear, or that white people can’t understand racism.
Our misplaced ‘blacks good, whites bad’ morality tale leads white liberals to patronise, infantilise and walk on eggshells around, black people. The pre-Civil Rights fixation on race has merely flipped its valence from negative to positive. What Hughes terms ‘neoracism’ has seamlessly taken over from old-fashioned variety, fueling cancel culture and polarization while obstructing black progress. A conspiracy theorist would argue that whites hit upon these ideas to trap blacks in a mental prison designed to self-cripple their self efficacy – truly ‘systemic racism.’
Whether they explicitly admit it or not, these sacred romantic myths anchor the worldview of most modern liberals. Shelby Steele located the arrival of this outlook quite precisely, to the mid-60s. 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 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.
With the rise of the smartphone, social media and clickbait journalism in the 2010s, the emotional fervour of this creed reached fever pitch. Drawing on Zach Goldberg’s work, the book shows how left-leaning Americans came to believe the nonsense that their country was drenched in systemic racism and white supremacy while innocent young blacks lived in danger of being shot by police. After George Floyd was killed, numerous progressives, unlike poor blacks, supported defunding the police, resulting in a surge of violence that claimed thousands of black lives and blighted their neighbourhoods and businesses. The effects could last a lifetime.
Neoracism benefits comfortable African-Americans, disproportionately of middle-class immigrant, rather than American slave, ancestry. Hence the focus on quotas for black adults in elite institutions rather than on boosting outcomes in pre-school or grade school where policy interventions really make a difference.
Neoracism explains why progressive educators push critical race theory instead of insisting on high standards, discipline and structured methods. It accounts for why so much energy goes into righting the wrongs of history by perpetuating victimhood myths, viz. that black slaves were seized by whites rather than sold by Africans, or that blacks are too fragile for free speech due to their tramautic past. Instead of building resilience, strength and the habits of success to close gaps, neoracists seek to ‘transform victimhood into a chronic condition,’ entrenching failure. For perspective, Hughes asks us to imagine visiting a therapist about a personal trauma and being told to constantly wallow in it while feeling powerless to do anything about it.
My one small quibble is with the book’s treatment of the anti-racism taboo. Hughes wants to see this 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? De-centring race also means building up minority pride and resistance to slights, in line with Hughes’ project of strengthening the black subject.
This is a brilliant book that could change western civilization.