Can 'colorblindness' lead to equality in America?

Coleman Hughes traces his ancestry back to enslaved people forced to work at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate. His grandfather was born into segregated America.

It's because of that deep family history that Hughes says, contrary to what many believe, racism in America is not the evil it once was.

We were now constantly seeing videos of things going wrong in the world with no journalistic context surrounding them," Hughes says. "And it also directly led to the general perception that racism was on the rise and a huge issue."

And the solution, Hughes says, is to strive for a color-blind society.

"What I mean by color blindness is that you try your best to treat people without regard to race. Both in your personal life, which is the less controversial half, but also in public policy, which is the more controversial half."

Today, On Point: Can 'colorblindness' lead to equality in America?

Coleman Hughes, author of "The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America." Host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman. CNN analyst and contributor to The Free Press.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Coleman Hughes traces his ancestry back to an enslaved man who was forced to work on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation. His grandfather was a highly educated Black man who was told not to apply for a management job because white colleagues would resent working for him.

Hughes' father is Black. His mother was Puerto Rican who hailed from the South Bronx in New York. Does all that give you a pretty good understanding of who Coleman Hughes is? Hughes himself would say, with absolute certainty, no. Telling you the story about the color of his skin tells you next to nothing about who he is, Hughes would say.

In fact, I believe he'd say that by beginning today's show with a racial description, we've fallen hard into what he calls the pernicious intellectual trap that claims race is the most salient fact about any American. In fact, Coleman Hughes would go farther. He says there are influential public intellectuals who've written and advocated persuasively for social and racial justice in America.

Hughes has no bone to pick with that. But he says the anti-racist efforts championed by folks like Professor Ibram X. Kendi or author Robin DiAngelo, they aren't truly anti-racist at all. He calls it neo-racism. Coleman Hughes says the belief that places racial difference as the master narrative of American life betrays what he believes is a core American value, the pursuit of a colorblind democracy.

And he lays out that thinking in his new book titled "The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America." Coleman Hughes, welcome to On Point.

COLEMAN HUGHES: Hi, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: I would actually appreciate it if you would start with a little bit more about yourself, if we could. It's similar to how you start the book.

Can you tell us the story about what happened to you when you first moved from the public schools of your hometown in Montclair, New Jersey to a private school?

HUGHES: Yeah, so it was sixth grade when I moved from public school to private school and at the public school I had gone to in my town, it was commonplace to have an afro.

My town was something like 30% African American at that time. So not only did many kids have afros, the kids who couldn't have afros were very used to seeing kids with afros. So there was nothing notable about it. But when I went to a private school where I was, I believe, one of four Black kids in the entering class, the non-Black kids there, I don't think we're used to seeing anyone with an afro.

So it was a novelty to them. So what began as an understandable and hardly noticeable curiosity from some of the students, grew into this seemingly constant and ubiquitous and irresistible urge to touch my afro. Often ruining whatever preparation, I had done that day to get it looking good.

So initially, it didn't bother me, but over time it just built up and built up to the point where I cried hot tears to my parents. And just, I wanted any way of making the constant touching of my afro, of getting it to stop. And so eventually I think I told my parents and my parents talked to the principal. And I don't know exactly how the situation resolved but I know that by the next year I had replaced the afro with an unassuming fade.

CHAKRABARTI: Coleman, I know that many people hearing this right now are probably recoiling in disgust at the thought of you being exoticized like, like that, right? And it seems, on the face of it. If not conscious, an unconscious act of racism by your fellow white students.

HUGHES: Yeah, I'm uncomfortable calling it that for the following reason.

I think that they had the best of intentions, actually. They were curious, and it was, there was never a bullying spirit to it. And I had no problem making friends with them and hanging out with them in every other context. To call it racism implies that there was some kind of, some sense in which they thought I was lesser or some sense in which they were trying to other me.

But actually, I fit in quite well and had a great time socially at the school. It was really just this curiosity of them thinking it was fine to just touch somebody else's hair.

CHAKRABARTI: You didn't write in the book that you shared that same curiosity about their hair, right? You didn't feel the urge to tousle the white classmate's hair.

Isn't there something, this is why people call it what they do, which you write about in the book. Later on, they call it a microaggression, that there's just something truly othering about wanting to touch a Black person's hair.

HUGHES: I think that there's something about that is inherent to being a minority in a country.

Many of the white kids at that time would literally never have met a person with hair that went up in an afro, right? It's something they have only seen from movies and television. Whereas none of us Black kids were, for the first time, encountering someone with European style hair. So it just wasn't, and had we been, frankly, when I've gone to places like Japan, I've gone to, I've traveled the world with an afro, they're just as curious.

And again, it's not because they don't like me. In fact, sometimes it's because they like me a lot. But there is such a thing as benign curiosity. And I want to allow space for that when analyzing the motives of these kids. So this is why I think this story that you open the book with is so interesting.

Because I used that word microaggression just then very purposefully. Personally, I've always struggled with it because behind it there's the presumption of conscious aggression, right? But that's not necessarily a term, as you write in the book, that you had been familiar with until a little bit later.

HUGHES: That's right. I was not familiar with it at the time I was going through that experience. But about four years later, I went to something called the People of Color Conference, which was an annual conference where private school students from all around the country, that year I believe it was in Houston, would come together and do some workshops around different ideas.

And the ideas that we learned in that two- or three-day workshop were, I later learned, essentially called intersectionality and critical race theory. I was learning about ideas like internalized oppression, white privilege, and so forth. And this was 2012, before those concepts were widely on the lips of people publicly.

And it was there I learned the term microaggression and learned, I was told that I should reinterpret my afro fiasco as a microaggression on the continuum with all of the racist events that someone like my grandfather and even more distant ancestors would have experienced in this country, as opposed to what I had viewed it as up to that time, which was an annoying middle school experience.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But, so tell me more about that. Is it not possible that at that conference, see, many people view America and the issue of race and racism in America as so all-encompassing that perhaps it wasn't that the conference was misleading you. And telling you a victim when you weren't, or calling you a victim when you weren't, but maybe it was just opening your eyes.

It's like swimming in toxic water for your whole life and not knowing it because you've been swimming in that water for your whole life, until someone points out to you, "Look, that water is toxic."

HUGHES: Yes. So I don't think that. I don't think that for the following reason. What I went through with the afro in middle school was not a symptom of my classmates' racism.

And so to reframe it that way actually would lead me to have a mentality and a sense of otherness that's actually not warranted by my classmates' intentions. And there's something very pernicious about that. When you reframe an experience in a way that makes it more negative. And makes you feel that you're in a hostile, a more hostile environment than in fact you are.

That's a very dangerous thing to do, because then you're putting yourself in essentially a fight or flight situation simply by how you're framing your surroundings. And these framing effects are very powerful.

CHAKRABARTI: So tell me more about that, because you also called being at that conference a suffocating experience, and it's a feeling that you said was repeated when you later went on to Columbia University.

What did you mean by that?

HUGHES: Yeah, so what I meant was that the conference, the good part of the conference, was that you had kids there from all across the country. From places where being gay was not accepted, and you had kids coming out of the closet at that conference for the first time ever, which was the beautiful half of the conference.

But the less beautiful half was the fact that there was a suffocating atmosphere such that you were not supposed to question anything being taught. It was very much like being at church rather than at school, where you are not expected to ask questions about whether God exists and whether the Bible is, you know, whether there are contradictions in the Bible and so forth, you're just supposed to sit there and listen and agree.

And that was the aspect of it which I thought was unhealthy. Because I believe in dialogue, I believe in questioning, I believe in skepticism and so forth.

CHAKRABARTI: And then what happened at Columbia?

HUGHES: So when I got to Columbia, let me back up. When I went to the People of Color Conference, I viewed that as a kind of strange and interesting departure from my normal default liberalism.

The default liberalism I was aware of was that you don't judge people by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, and that's the North Star of how everyone should be thinking about race. The POC conference was a departure from that, where my racial identity and anyone's nonwhite racial identity was viewed as a kind of magic within you.

And so I noted that as an odd exception from what I had been taught growing up and didn't expect to see it again. Three years later, I enroll at Columbia University and as part of our orientation, we do this exercise where we go to each corner of the room according to race. Black kids in one corner, white kids in another, Hispanics in another, Asians in another.

And it was this kind of ethos that reintroduced what I had seen from the People of Color Conference.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Coleman, I definitely want to get to your critique of the quote-unquote, anti-racist movement and your vision for a colorblind America, but to stick with the Columbia University experience for just a second, because I think it provides an important fulcrum that will help us understand better or turn us into a better understanding of your hopes for this country. You write in the book that when you went through that icebreaking exercise in your first days at Columbia, that you were asked, during orientation you were asked to divide your yourselves.

The students were, up by race. So there's Black kids in one corner, white kids in the other corner, I guess Latino kids in another corner, and Asian kids in another corner, I'm not quite sure how people who identify themselves as all of the above would, what they would do. But, and you were told to discuss how you, each group had either participated in, suffered from, or experienced systemic oppression. And you said, "Whatever the intent of this icebreaking exercise, the effect was that I felt acutely aware of my Blackness."

Now, there are many people who care deeply about fighting racism in this country, who would say then the exercise was successful, because that's exactly the point. To get people to think about race more, and how it informs and has an impact on their lives or impacts others.

HUGHES: Yeah, I think I want to sharply distinguish between two things.

If you want to start a conversation about racism, about legitimate examples of racism, that's an appropriate conversation to have in many contexts. And I give examples in my book. But too many times when people say they want to talk about race, what they really want to talk about are these abstract and racial essentialist notions, like Blackness and whiteness.

I don't know what these words mean. When we say my Blackness, are we simply talking about the superficial fact that I have dark skin? Okay, I understand what that means. But if we're talking about something deeper, something about my essence, something that would separate me from a white person, or from a person of a different race, that's the concept of race that I reject we need to be talking about.

And too often that is, in these kinds of settings, what people want to discuss. So let me just ask you then about the racism question. And racism in America. Have you, do you feel like you've ever been a victim of racism?

HUGHES: Yeah, there are definitely some isolated incidents in my life where I've been subject to racist bias.

CHAKRABARTI: And what about the idea that racism is so pervasive in this country that there's still sort of systems or systemic racism, that if not overtly, are still woven into various institutions of this country and whether you know it or not, it's having an impact on you as a Black man?

HUGHES: Yeah one thing I should add is I don't expect racism to ever fully die, any more than I expect murder to ever fully go away.

This is a human scourge that will be with us in one or another degree until the end of time. But, the truth is that racism has declined precipitously in the past 50 years of American history, by every metric that you could want to measure. And the perception that it's widespread and everywhere has been caused not by reality, not by its actual increase, but by the change in the way that we've consumed information, starting around 2013. With camera enabled smartphones and social media, which have led to a widespread moral panic, which says racism is on the rise, and white supremacy is widespread. When in fact, all of those scourges have continued to plummet in the past 10 years as they have in the past 50.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, this is a really interesting part of your book, Coleman, because I think insofar as my reading goes, you're the first person to link Smartphones and social media to the perception of a rise in the evil of racism. So I want you to hold that thought, because we will definitely come back to it.

But in order to understand more about your hope for a colorblind America, which we will define. I want to talk about your criticism, first, of some of the leading lights of the quote-unquote, anti-racist movement in modern America, right? There's a couple of names that you have a particular disdain for.

One of them is Robin DiAngelo, who's a very, best-selling author of a book called White Guilt that can be summarized as, white people by virtue of their race and racism in America, whether they know it or not, are inherently racist, unless they are acting consciously to fight racism.

Okay, that's a very rough summary of her book. And then there's also Professor Ibram X. Kendi, and he's the author of a lot of really influential books, including Stamped from the Beginning, the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, How to Be an Anti-Racist, and How to Raise an Anti-Racist, amongst others.

What's your beef with this line of thinking?

HUGHES: My beef with the general line of thinking is that what I call neo-racism, this new kind of anti-racism, rather than agree with the ethos of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, which says that race is only skin deep and that ultimately, we are one human family that is not divided in any meaningful or important way by skin color.

It says instead that race is deeply meaningful, deeply important, indelible. And that we should all be meditating on the deep importance and meaning of our racial identities and inscribe racial discrimination in public policy, essentially for all time. That's my general beef. Now, if you want to get specific to Kendi and DiAngelo, they are different and should be talked about differently.

In DiAngelo's case and her book is White Fragility.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, sorry. I misspoke. Thank you. Thank you for that correction.

HUGHES: DiAngelo is quite focused on the psychology, the inner psychology of race. And the effect of her thesis is to really divide and to lead to a very kind of unhealthy and unequal relationship between whites and Blacks, in my view.

So I'll give you one example from her book. She argues that white women should not cry around Black people. And the reason that she gives for this is apparently Black people are triggered by the sight of white women's tears. Because of all the times in history, such as Emmett Till, most famously, when false accusations of rape were used to get Black men and boys lynched.

Now, I don't know exactly who she's hanging out with, but I can guarantee you that the vast majority of well-adjusted and psychologically healthy Black people do not think about lynching when they see a white woman crying. That's just not an association that really happens. But she's encouraging white people to take this kind of posture towards Black Americans. Which almost treats them as children to be tiptoed around. And I don't think that's a psychologically healthy basis for a relationship between equals.

CHAKRABARTI: And then onto, it's hard to summarize the considerable writings of both of these people. We'll do our best, because then on to Professor Kendi. Especially in his book [How To Be An] Anti-racist, I believe, he lays out a very clear thesis about, it's not good enough, due to American history, and particularly the history of slavery, Jim Crow, et cetera, that it's not good enough to just say everyone is equal now in America. He prescribes a very active and affirmative list of things to do to remedy current racism and rectify past wrongs. You quote him in the book, you quote his writing as saying, "The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.

The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

Now, I believe he's using that word provocatively. But what he's really saying there is like it's programs to help repair the genuine harms of the past. Call it discrimination, or not, but it's an affirmative, sort of a rectifying set of policies there.

Why do you call that neo-racism?

HUGHES: Yes, so I call that neo-racism not for the same reasons I call DiAngelo neo-racist. Kendi is not really focused on anyone's inner psychology. He's simply focused on policy and the effects of race of policy on outcomes. So Kendi's thesis is that what we need to get to, by almost any means necessary, is a society in which because Black people are 13% of the American population, Black people therefore make up 13% of every domain you could possibly really imagine, every domain of importance, whether that be wealth, incarceration, income, 13% of doctors, 13% of lawyers, on and on, down the list.

Now, the problem with this is that it's actually just not ... in a multicultural society where you have different cultures, different histories, different geographical distributions, different demographics. You're not going to see identical outcomes unless you have a monoculture. And so that can't be the metric that by which we define success or else we are, we're never going to get there.

And we are going to racially discriminate. On the illusory path to get there. So my alternative, which I think is much, much better, is exactly what Martin Luther King wrote in his book, Why We Can't Wait, where he acknowledges, absolutely we have to address the legacy of slavery. Absolutely, we ought to care about racial inequality, but the way we ought to address that is with a broad based, anti-poverty, class-based policy, which by definition will disproportionately help Blacks and Hispanics. Because Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be poor, but it will be done on the basis of socioeconomic class, not on the basis of race.

And it won't define statistically equal outcomes as its metric of success.

CHAKRABARTI: But Coleman, I just want to push a little bit more. Because I think the language that you use in the book here is quite direct and eye opening. You select passages from Kendi's writing, from DiAngelo's writing, from anti-racist thinking overall.

And again, you call it neo-racism because it is putting race as the defining feature of American life. But you go further. You call, basically, from my interpretation of your book, you call those efforts essentially also anti-white. That the neo racism is that it's choosing, one form of subjugation, in terms of the subjugation historically of Black people in this country, and trading it for another because of a power dichotomy that anti-racists subscribe to.

HUGHES: Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned many policies in the book, including even some that prioritized emergency COVID aid on the basis of race, and in each case to the disadvantage of either white people in general or white men, often to the disadvantage of Asians, as well, in certain cases, we could talk about affirmative action, but the policies prescribed by someone like Kendi invariably racially discriminate against either whites, Asians, or both.

And I could pull my punches and say that's not really racist policy. That's not really the kind of racist policy that we think of when we talk about Jim Crow. And I acknowledge there's certainly a difference, but I do think that this word, racial discrimination and racist policy, should apply to cases that racially discriminate, that choose whether or not you get something based on the color of your skin.

That's what the word used to mean. I'm trying to rescue that definition and have it apply ethical clarity to policies that racially discriminate.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

HUGHES: Whatever their intent.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm really glad that you clarified that, because that was a question I had in reading the book. Because in terms of racialized laws in the past, again, Jim Crow being the most, the set of Jim Crow laws being the standout amongst them all.

The reason why I would say that King and others were profoundly focused on achieving a colorblind society is that those laws at that time were designed to withdraw the full spectrum of rights of citizenship from a certain group of people. That's what made them racist. And so therefore, the solution to that was a colorblind society.

Eliminating every law that prevented a person, no matter the color of their skin, from enjoying the entire fruits of being an American. Whereas now, what you're identifying as racist. Let's talk about affirmative action, even though it's moot now, because of the Supreme Court, but laws designed to enhance people's ability to access the fruits of being a citizen.

Why are those necessarily racist?

HUGHES: I think this is a trick of language, right? When you have a limited number of spots, and you say, okay, we're going to lift up one race. That just does come at the disadvantage of another race. And people play language games here by saying it's not a zero-sum game, but it just is a zero-sum game, right?

There's no way to racially discriminate in favor without racially discriminating against, when you have a limited number of spots. And so that's the predicament. And that's what I cannot obey this philosophy, which says it's racially discriminatory when it happens to my group, but it's something else when it happens to a different group.

I don't think that's consistent. I don't think it's rigorous and I don't think it's a good a good blueprint for a healthy multiracial society in the long run.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Coleman, I actually just want to step back in history a little bit, because a lot of what you write about in your book regarding your hope and view of a colorblind America comes from your reading of the great civil rights leaders of this country, right?

Everyone from A. Randolph Phillips to, of course, Dr. King and, that famous line from King's speech about not being judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. It's one of the iconic ideas in American oratory history. We reached out to, doing our research, we found that there's lots of different interpretations of what King meant by that.

But first, let's listen to that moment from his I Have a Dream speech in 1963.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. (APPLAUSE)

CHAKRABARTI: Dr. Kira Banks is a psychology professor at St. Louis University, where she researches Black American experiences with discrimination and mental health.

And she said on her podcast, Raising Equity, that despite some rhetorical turns of phrase, she believes the substance of King's advocacy was very much race conscious.

KIRA BANKS: I hear people invoke Dr. King in saying we shouldn't talk about race. We shouldn't see race. We should just treat each other as individuals, as King wanted.

He said he wanted people to be treated fairly. He didn't say we should ignore their skin color and their race.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's King's Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, Taylor Branch, who agrees. On PBS in 2013, Branch spoke about Dr. King's approach to race conscious advocacy and policymaking.

TAYLOR BRANCH: The bus boycott, the sit ins, the freedom rides, getting the right to vote if you're not a citizen you're not even up to the table where you can start dealing with these issues.

To me, Martin Luther King saw race as the gateway. If you can deal with race and the fundamental denial of common humanity through race, then it opens up possibilities.

CHAKRABARTI: Coleman, respond to that. Here we have two very knowledgeable scholars saying it's not as simple as just not judging people by the color of their skin.

HUGHES: No great thinker could be reduced to any one quote. I'll acknowledge that caveat. But I will not agree that the general thrust of Martin Luther King's advocacy and writing and essays was very much in line with that quote. In my book, I list 10 or 12 different quotes where he is constantly talking about the fact that race is only skin deep. And common humanity, oneness in Christ, that when we ask if someone is the partner in the fight for racial justice, we will not ask what their race is, but we will ask what their beliefs are, that the fundamental thing about man is not his skin or his hair color. But the quality of his soul. These are other quotes.

That Black supremacy would be equally evil as white supremacy. He said multiple times. There's quote after quote. Not simply the content of our character quote. And it was a central part of his philosophy. And whenever he made specific recommendations about policy, he did not make race conscious recommendations.

Anyone can go back and read his book, Why We Can't Wait, where he comes up with what he called the Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, which was his grand proposal for policy to address disadvantage in America on the basis of class, not on the basis of race. I think there is the truth about who has tried to co-opt his legacy is that the race conscious anti-racists of today have tried to bend his writing and saying to make it more in line with what they believe.

CHAKRABARTI: Your criticism is that race conscious anti-racism now, it has, you say it's moved away from the fundamental appreciation of common humanity.

That you say the civil rights movement was based on. Is that a fair assessment?

HUGHES: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, and so by centering race rather than common humanity, that's where you make the argument that anti-racism is the neo-racism.

HUGHES: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. What I find so interesting about that is you even point out that not only Dr. King, but other people like Roy Wilkins, who was the executive director of the NAACP, Bayard Rustin, the giant in the American civil rights movement. I mentioned A. Randolph Phillips, who organized the March on Washington, that all of these leaders, both in the '50s, '60s, and even in the '70s when some of the affirmative action programs began in the federal government, that they warned against what they called Black supremacy.

HUGHES: Oh certainly. When the Black power movement came about in the late '60s, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King all made very clear that the philosophy of Black Power, which was the Black Lives Matter of its day, though, you don't want to make too much of a historical equation there, but in its rhetoric and its general feeling of race consciousness and Black pride and chest thumping racial pride and so forth.

They made very clear that was not the proper way to think and speak about race. And that in fact, in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Dr. King spends all of chapter two critiquing the Black Power Movement and in fact recommends that they change their name to Power for Poor People.

His critique was that they focused on race rather than what they ought to focus on, at this point, which was class.

CHAKRABARTI: For example, one of the King quotes that you mention in the book comes from Dr. King's 1957 speech called Give Us the Ballot, which he gave in Washington, D.C. And I'm going to just read a little excerpt of it because in it he says, quote, "We talk a great deal about our rights, and rightly we proudly proclaim that three fourths of the people of the world are colored." And then he says, "All of these things are in line with the unfolding work of providence, but we must be sure that we accept them in the right spirit. We must not seek to use our emerging freedom and our growing power to do the same thing to the white minority that has been done to us for so many centuries.

Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man."

That's an interesting part of the speech, which I don't think is often highlighted. Why do you think that is?

HUGHES: Yeah. Dr. King was a very deep thinker and a great leader, and so he could foresee a potential future in which his movement was successful enough that, such that Black people had enough power to abuse power. That was a very difficult thing to envision in 1957, but it requires a great intellect to ward off even small probability events. And he had an extraordinary humility about him even in a position of disadvantage, knowing that it is incumbent on someone fighting for justice to understand how far is too far. To understand what is your line. One of my problems with the neo racist philosophy is that it has no internal limiting principle.

Someone like Ibram Kendi has never, in anything he's written, that I can see, articulated what would be too far. So for example, what would stop in Kendi's philosophy, what would stop someone from supporting giving Black people two votes instead of one? You could make all the same arguments he makes for every other policy, right?

Black people were denied the vote for hundreds of years, and that directly led to all kinds of terrible policies and a lack of power. Why not repay that by giving Black people two votes? There's nothing in his philosophy which says, here's the reason we can't do that. It's too far. Martin Luther King was very clear about not only how much change he wanted to see, but what kinds of change he did not want to see past that point.

And I think neo-racism struggles to limit itself.

CHAKRABARTI: In terms of the historical figures that you point to, Clarence Mitchell, who's the chief lobbyist at the NAACP, you say that when in the '70s, early '70s, when the plans came out of the federal government for accelerating Black access to academia, to jobs, et cetera which was then called the quote-unquote Philadelphia plan.

You say Clarence Mitchell called it a calculated attempt to break up the coalition between Negroes and labor unions, end quote. And then Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, his language is pretty unequivocal. He called the Black power movement, a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.

That is intense language, but I wanted to bring that up because of it complicates our understanding of what the goals of the Civil Rights Movement were. But, this idea of power though, which is so central to understanding, I think, even beyond race, everything in American life, economic power, social power, political power.

But when layering racial history on top of that, Coleman, you can't really, it's hard for me to see that Black Americans do not have a power that would be representative of their proportion or even just status as Americans, right? But we've had, in all of U. S. history, we've had one Black president, and he was half Black and half white, mixed race president, one Black vice president, she's half Black, half Indian.

You mentioned it earlier, that there's plenty of evidence of incarceration rates being higher amongst Black men, of a yawning wealth gap between white Americans and Black Americans on average. Now, in your book, you say, those are averages. But the truth is, Americans live their lives not on average, but on their individual experience.

That is totally true. And we can never reduce any one particular person to an average. But the averages tell us something about the effects of policy in this country. Don't they? What would be your response to someone who says, focus on individual experience and ignore the averages, you're being almost deliberately naive.

HUGHES: If we're suggesting that until we have equal outcomes across all of society, we should implement policy, public policy that racially discriminates in order to quote-unquote get there, that is the argument that I am challenging. I don't think it follows from the fact that we don't have equal outcomes, what is sometimes called equity, that we should therefore have a regime of public policy that discriminates against individuals on the basis of race.

So that's really the argument that I take issue with, for the reasons I've outlined.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Unfortunately, we're running low on time. I knew this was going to happen, because your book was such a compelling read. But in terms of creating a colorblind America, in the end of the book, you close with suggestions on what exactly that would mean and how to do it.

Briefly tell me, what would it mean to have a colorblind society, in this multiracial democracy?

HUGHES: First of all, getting to a colorblind society is a bit like getting to a peaceful society. I don't think we'll ever get there fully, but we have to know where we're going, and when we're going backwards. So I view colorblindness as a North Star to guide our path.

And the way we do that is, first, everyone in their personal life can check in with themselves to see if they are living the value of colorblindness in their own lives, with their own friends and family. In certain situations, you can blind yourself to data that might bias you, right?

Make society more and more like a blind audition. Where, you know, you actually don't give yourself the data that might bias you in any particular situation and then fight for public policy that uses class rather than race in cases where we want to lift up disadvantaged people.

And I think in particular, the Democratic Party has to remember and rescue this value of colorblindness and not make it a partisan issue. Because it's actually pretty popular among rank-and-file Democrats, at least when you ask, poll questions a certain way, should not let the Republican Party become the party of colorblindness.

So I think Democrats need to get their house in order on this issue. And in that way, we can hopefully inch by inch move towards a healthier colorblind society.

CHAKRABARTI: How do we do that while also acknowledging the profoundly racialized history of this country? To your credit, I have not heard you once say, nor is it in the book, a denial of the evils of racism, as have been met on people for centuries in the United States.

So how do we acknowledge that while also pursuing the colorblind society that you're advocating for? I think that many of the things that we have done are in the correct spirit, when it comes to acknowledging and atoning for the history of slavery and Jim Crow. We have a magnificent Smithsonian Museum in the nation's capital with an extensive exhibit on slavery in the Middle Passage.

Two of our 11 federal holidays, Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth are dedicated to different aspects of the struggle for Black freedom. Black History Month and so on and so forth. All of these kinds of things, I think, as symbolic.

CHAKRABARTI: But aren't they a little superficial though? When people want to remedy, they want to remedy the wrongs --

HUGHES: No.

CHAKRABARTI: They want to remedy what they see as the intergenerational momentum that that has held Black Americans down.

HUGHES: I would strongly contest the idea that they're superficial because each one of these things was hard fought and thought to be quite significant before it happened. And then once it's happened, it's pocketed and called superficial. So I think symbolic acknowledgments are quite important. And we can have those symbolic acknowledgments while at the same time pushing towards a public policy that is colorblind.