Neoracism, Finally on Defense - by Andrew Sullivan - 0 views
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The poignancy of Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race Politics, lies therefore in the tenacity of his faith in the spirit of 1964
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To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and private lives.”
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That’s a principle the vast majority of Americans, black and white and everything else, support. It was the core principle for Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr, and Bayard Rustin.
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Henry Highland Garnet — the first African-American to speak in Congress after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — even apologized for speaking of various different races, “when in fact there is but one race, as there was but one Adam.”
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Fast forward to 2015, when the University of California called the phrase “There is only one race, the human race” a “micro-aggression”; or 2020, when the phrase “All Lives Matter” was deemed evidence of “anti-blackness”
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The 21st Century, the brief era of color-blindness behind us, reached back to the 19th to insist that race defines us at our core, can never be overcome, and marks us all either an oppressor or a victim.
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Hughes cuts to the chase and calls these reactionaries in progressive clothing “neoracists”. They are. What else would one call them?
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They are race-obsessed. They view any human interaction as a racial power-struggle, and compound it with any number of further “intersectional” power-struggles
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They see group identity as determinative everywhere; and therefore want to intervene everywhere, to discriminate against whites and successful non-whites in favor of unsuccessful non-whites
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The old black-white paradigm to which so many are still attached has been superseded by the kaleidoscope society, in which “race” is almost always mixed, complicated, or one difference among many.
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Political power? Blacks, who are about 14 percent of population, are represented proportionally in the House — covering 29 states — and can claim the last two-term president, the current vice president, the House minority leader, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the mayors of the four most populous cities last year, and more than a fifth of SCOTUS.
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So do we do nothing? Not at all. In fact, blaming an abstraction — “white supremacy” — takes us backwards practically and analytically. Hughes advocates for color-blind processes wherever possible: blind grading in schools and colleges; or hiring policies that remove names from applications to deter racism.
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the implosion of bad ideas is not the same as the resuscitation of good ones. What Hughes has done in this book is remind us what we already knew: that racism and neoracism are two sides of the same collectivist coin, and that treating everyone regardless of race is the only feasible way forward for a multiracial America, just as it is the only morally defensible regime that can actually counter and erode racial hatred. The proof is in our past progress. But the potential for multi-racial individualism is as unknowable as it is exhilarating.