We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshenski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website as well. So excited to be joined by
Coleman Hughes today. He's the author of the new book The End of Race
Politics, Arguments for a Color Blind America. That book is out on February
sixth. He's also the host of the popular podcast Conversations with Coleman, and
he writes over at Substack at Coleman Hughes dot substack dot com. You're busy
man, Coleman, thanks for coming on Federalist Radio Hour. Very happy to
be here. Thanks for having me. Of course, I follow your work
really closely. I'm so much I'm such a fan of so much of what
you write, and I was hoping maybe we could start just with some of
the personal stuff that you write about in the End of Race Politics, sort
of about your experience at Columbia University in the Ivy league picking up on some
pessimism that was surprising, and maybe it wasn't surprising to you, but maybe
seemed out of touch or just you know, kind of unexpected. Can you
talk to us a little bit about that experience. Absolutely so. I enrolled
at Columbia University in twenty sixteen, and anyone who is familiar with the culture
of IVY Leagues, certainly in the past ten years at least, if not
longer, will know that these are some of the least racist places on planet
Earth. In other words, if I were to assess my likelihood of,
say, being called the N word, in a million different locations on planet,
just sampling the level of racism around the world, I would find Columbia's
campus, Harvard's campus, Princeton's campus to rank at the absolute lowest level of
that kind of old school racism. So it was a surprise when I got
to school, and this is even coming from growing up in a liberal location.
It was a surprise to see that almost every other day in the campus
newspaper, other black kids on campus were claiming to experience white supremacy every single
day on campus. This was shocking to me because it seemed to me that
This was one of the least racist zip codes one could possibly be. It,
So I became curious, why is it that in one of the least
racist places you could be a hyper progressive university campus where a white person is
more likely to be almost sheepish and apologetic deferent to you as a black person
than to be racist to you. Why is it that in such a place
I heard the greatest pessimism that I've ever heard about racism and why supremacy,
Almost more pessimistic than my own grandparents, who were born and lived in segregation.
Yeah, it's so interesting and one of the big questions I have for
you. Because so I was born in nineteen eighty three, and I remember
when I was in college, this is when the Trayvon Martin killing happened,
and I just, for whatever reason, I always look back on this,
I had a pit in my stomach. And throughout the news coverage, you
know, this went on for ever and then kind of bled into the Ferguson
protests and everything since then, it just felt really scary. On some sort
of intangible level, it just felt like something had changed just in the media.
Watching the media coverage happen, I wanted to ask you, Coleman,
if there's a time that you pinpoint this change, this shift from what used
to be a mainstream kind of color blind approach that you argue we should get
back to to the mainstream suddenly pushing almost this cultural Marxist approach to race.
Was there a time that we can pinpoint that shift, or is there maybe
no way to actually say it started right now or it started at this point
ab or C. Well, I think you actually nailed the point in time
that it switched, namely the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George
Zimmerman, the acquittal of George Zimmerman the next year in twenty thirteen, which
launched the Black Lives Matter movement, though that movement remained kind of small and
marginal until Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson in twenty fourteen, at which point
it became a national news story, and it kind of incubated and grew slowly
until it exploded in twenty twenty with the death of George Floyd. So basically
the question is what happened around twenty thirteen that race and racism and all the
associated issues with the police went from pretty marginal in the American news cycle and
American consciousness to central My thesis in the book is that what happened is essentially
technology changed. If you and I are old enough to remember a time before,
really before smartphones and before social media, when the way that you would
get your news was basically the six o'clock news if you watched it, or
the newspaper once a day. And at that time, if there was an
altercation between a police a cop and a citizen that went south in any number
of ways, probably it wasn't filmed. Remember the huge thing about Rodney King
was that it was filmed as a fluke freak accident. Some guy happened to
have a video camera and saw it out his window. But what happens now
is now everyone has a camera, Everyone has a high depth camera that they
can turn on within five seconds. Everyone can now post that to social media
and it can be algorithmically boosted so that it's seen by millions in a single
day. That's a fundamental seed change in the way information spreads. And right
around twenty thirteen is the time when a critical mass of people had that technology,
that is to say, smartphones plus social media. So it's not that
there was some spike in racism. In fact, every indicator of racism had
been going down since the nineties, including police caners. So it's not that
the actual problem got worse, it's that our ability to see these viral incidents,
some of which really were murders and horrible acts, and others of which
were totally justified police shootings, our ability to see them suddenly changed in a
way that we weren't prepared for. So really it's the technology that caused the
b l M movement, and then because of the because of the b LM
movement and the enormous emotions that that unleashed on both sides of the political aisle,
that's what really touched off the the trend of you know, DEI in
in corporate in corporate America having to sign DEI loyalty pledges to get hired as
a professor at certain schools, and all of these other you know, the
controversy over teaching quote unquote crt n K through twelve as all of these other
things were downstream consequences of the emotions that the BLM movement unleashed, which was
it self caused by technology. Okay, so I'm so glad you brought that
up, because it was what I was very eager to ask you about from
the book. I mean, one of the lenses where I think on this
podcast we're very clearly the most important lens to look at American politics and culture
and internationally too, of course, is technology. It is the lens that
you need to apply in order to understand this. And Jonathan Hite, Gene
Twenji, a lot of them will say right on twenty twelve, twenty thirteen,
as you pointed out, is that's the time of critical mass. So
colemin I wanted to ask also the means of communication are changing, the vehicles
are changing, and also it's doing something to us. It's almost gamifying politics.
It's almost gamifying race in a new way. You know Twitter at the
time, it's very different than what X is now, but it was still
You're doing this with Facebook and Instagram, likes, tweets, and the incentives
just changed completely in the way that we're communicating. Is that for younger generations,
is that also that has to be part of what's made them look at
race relations in a country that historically has more people of different races, ethnicities
and backgrounds living together more peacefully than ever before in human history within geographic areas.
That has to be part of why that pessimism started to surge too.
I would argue it's more than part of why my senses, it's almost all
of why. If you look at the gallop and the pew poles from twenty
twelve and twenty thirteen, you see actually a majority of white and black Americans
saying that race relations are good. Right around twenty thirteen, that begins to
take a nose divee And there's no other explanation than the you know, the
BLM movement and the essentially the series of martyrs that were presented as a part
of that movement that we all saw on Facebook and via our phones. There's
no other explanation actually makes sense. Right. It wasn't Barack Obama's fault.
He had already presided over four years of quite good race relations. Actually,
it wasn't Trump's fault because the trend started before Trump, and it certainly wasn't
a reflection of an actual increase in white racism or in police killings. Both
of those are empirical questions, both aren't true when you look at the data.
The only actual theory that makes sense of it is that suddenly we had
phones in our hands, we had cameras, we had social media, and
this changed the kind of information that reached our eyeballs. It promoted deferentially information
and videos that were divisive that tapped into our kind of deep tribal circuitry around
historical grievances, racism, and so forth. And it let that information in
those videos spread very quickly without any fact checking or ability to place context around
them. And that's really what happened. I don't want to put words in
Rufo's mouth, because I'm sure he agrees with a lot of what you said,
but I'm curious also for your take on the theory. And I know
you write about this in the book that essentially radicals had been installed in academia,
and increasingly, as we sent more people through academia, we were filtering
through these radical worldviews. It was kind of happening under our noses. They
went out into the working world with these radical, post color blind, anti
color blind takes on race relations that were often rooted and outright Marxism and communism,
and we woke up one day in twenty twenty, looked around and saw
that there had been this institutional takeover. But that's sort of different also than
social media blurring the empirical facts. There's something about the ground kind of being
seated by these radical ideologies in a way that people, you know, when
they were shown blurred versions of the truth, Maybe it flips a light switch
on. I don't know. I'm curious Coleman for what you think the interaction
between those two theories is. Yeah, I think you're exactly right that it's
seated the ground. The ideas of the ideology of critical race theory, which
has been around since the nineteen seventies, the ideology of intersectionality, which hasn't
been around since the late eighties early nineties, Kimberly Crenshaw being in some way
the mother of both of those ideologies. Those have been around for decades,
and they've percolated and incubated mostly in higher education, in turned PhD programs,
corners of law schools, and so forth. They've been around for decades,
but they've been marginal for decades, so they created a kind of backdrop,
but they still needed a spark, and the spark that really drove the decline
in race relations since twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. The spark was the technology
and the videos. That's really what it was. Yeah, that makes a
lot of sense. And then on another point you made, I'm also curious
what you think about whether this legitimate anti black and anti white racism. In
the year since twenty twelve twenty thirteen, do you think in the last decade
those sentiments, that there actually has been an increase in legitimate anti black,
anti anti white racism. I mean, I think pretty clearly anti white racism
has surged, and if you look at Robin d. Angelo and Ibernix Kenny
being massive best selling authors and getting their works kind of installed in school districts
around the country. But is that Are we seeing a rise in real racism
or is it sort of rhetoric from the elites. Has it trickled into legitimate
sentiments among average Americans. It's a good question, very hard thing to measure.
What I can say is, certainly, I don't think there's any way
that you decrease racism by making people think about race far more often. I
think this is one of the big misconceptions among progressive anti racists. They all
say that we never talk about race, and we need to talk about race
much much more. We need to view everything in our lives through the lens
of race. You need to be examining the racial makeup of your friend group.
You need to be assessing people's opinions. Oh, okay, he's a
white guy that said that, and that's why he said it. Is a
black guy that said that, et cetera. Encouraging people and even children to
think this way. I don't see how it could possibly reduce the sum total
of racism in society. And if it does anything, it probably amplifies it.
Now of course, that you can't measure people's thoughts directly. What you
can look at our policies, and if you're if we're going to look at
anti white policies, they have certainly become more numerous and more mainstream in the
past ten years. I mean, if we could take a time machine back
to ten years ago and tell you know, Barack Obama or anyone or any
default Democrat that in the year twenty twenty, there's going to be a global
pandemic of the kind we haven't seen since the Spanish flu. And rather than
hand out aid to failing restaurants on the basis of need, or financial aid,
financial need rather will hand it out on the basis of race, and
that there will be serious proposals in some places implemented to hand out vaccines and
covid anti virals preferentially on the basis of race. People would have told you
there's no way such a thing could never happen in America, and yet it
did. That's a really chilling hypothetic one. It just kind of underscores how
sad all of this is. And that kind of brings me to another thing
that I wanted to ask you about, Coleman. Are there things the right
as it's pivoting to address some of what happened, and, by the way,
some of what happened under the watch of Republican leadership or bi parties in
leadership for decades, as the right just kind of pivots to address some of
this more and more through the Republican Party, the conservative movement, conservative media.
Are there things that stand out in your mind that the right is getting
wrong, that the right could maybe do better, or that maybe are endemic
to the right's approach to combating the leftist sort of anti color blind ideology.
Well, this is an evolving story, but just today I saw Charlie kirk
is preparing some kind of takedown of Martin Luther King. Yeah, so the
behind the curtain here, we're pre taping this on MLK day. So that's
in Coleman you have in the book you addressed this, but yeah, this
is a great example. Yeah. So just to set this up, there's
been this trend on the left for you know, certainly the past ten years,
maybe longer, where every Martin Luther King Day there's a series of articles
that are practically copy pasted from one another that all make the same argument that
Martin Luther King was really a rat. They say he was really radical,
and conservatives and moderates like to pretend that he wasn't a radical. They like
to sanitize and co op and whitewash his legacy in order to sort of claim
his mantle. And the implied argument here is that if MLK were alive today,
he would support people like Ibram Kendy and Tanahase Coates and Robin DiAngelo and
he would and BLM and he would, he would really he'd really identify with
that approach to talking and thinking about race rather than say to someone like me
or to people that strive for a colorblind society. This argument is totally specious
and relies on a bait and switch because the areas in which MLK was a
quote radical were not about race. He was radical in his day on the
Vietnam War and on socioeconomic issues. For example, he was pro universal healthcare,
guaranteed federal employment, guaranteed full employment rather soort Bernie Sanders type policies.
And he was against the Vietnam War before that was mainstream. So I can
just see now even Ibram x Kenny has posted today on Twitter talking about Mlka's
position on the war. The reason this is abate and switch is because those
topics, whatever you think of them, have nothing to do with the idea
of race, of common humanity, and of striving for a colorblind society.
And on those issues which are the ones he's alleged to be a radical about,
he actually never wavered on those and inter Section Olivia Coleman, Yeah,
exactly, and he never wavered on preferring class based policy to race based policy.
In fact, in his final book, which is his so called radical
phase, he devotes an entire chapter to critiquing the black power movement, which
was like the BLM of his day, and he in fact, he criticizes
them for focusing on race instead of class, and he even suggests that they
change their name from Black Power to Power for Poor People. So that's the
way the left gets this wrong. The right wing response, it seems,
and like I said, this is an evolving story, but from someone like
Charlie Kirk is essentially to agree with the left wing analysis of King and then
reject King as a result. This is equally wrongheaded. I think Martin Luther
King was one of the wisest and deepest moral thinkers and leaders that the country
has ever seen, and his example in philosophy certainly still provides the path forward
whether you're on the right or the left. It seems to me it's so
easy even for people with good intentions to fall into this trap that I think
has defined dorm room leftism liberty and for a really long time, which is
that if you learn an inconvenient fact. So for example, in this case,
Charlie Kirk has talked about the tapes that exist. Jay Edgar Hoover had
wire tapped Martin Luther King for a long time to discover and blackmail him over
adultery, clearly what looks like alcoholism, all of that. People learn about
his plagiarism, his flirtation with Marxism and all those things, and reflexively then
say the entire narrative is wrong. And the reason I'm asking this, Coleman,
is because I think this is also where social media and technology in general
is gamifying the discourse and is making almost impossible for us to have common heroes
like a Martin Luther King anymore. It's almost like, you learn these inconvenient
facts, then every single thing I know about Martin Luther King is wrong.
He's a bad guy start to finish. It's just like what they do with
Thomas Jefferson. Oh, you learned Thomas Jefferson had six hundred slaves, and
everything Thomas Jefferson did is now poisoned because it's true. There's a really inconvenient
fact that exists out there. It's just it's facile, and it seems like
it's making this impossible to share things as a country anymore. Yeah. I
think I'm always one that can separate the art from the artist, and certainly
separate the message from the messenger. And when it comes to doctor King or
Jefferson or you know any literal founding father or you know analogous leader. I
think it's important to understand that these were flawed people, and that doesn't necessarily
invalidate their message. I'm curious if if people on the right who want to
do that to King would would hold their own heroes to the same standards.
Right, Yes, And the answer obviously is no. In most cases,
well no, And I think it's because, again, social media is so
reflexive that you are the incentives to rack up likes and retweets for a really
hard and non nuanced stance. And this is another question I was going to
ask you, Coleman, just like on this broader debate that a lot of
people are having about whether the tide is turning. You know, lots of
eulogies have been written for Cancel Cancel culture, and people really feel feel like
things are changing. And you exist in the space on substack and with a
popular podcast where people are really embracing nuance and rejecting that reflexive sort of tip
for tat that's incentivized on social media. Just in your own experiences as somebody
who works in this space, do you feel like the tide is turning.
Do you feel like these new sort of alternative platforms that have popped up,
you know, whether it's substack or podcasting platforms, are like really really really
helping us get out of this era, or are we maybe hopelessly divided.
I think cancel culture and wokeness peaked probably in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one.
But to say that it's declined from a peak is not quite as hopeful
sentiment as it might sound, because really it was increasing steadily since twenty thirteen
and then had a massive spike around twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. So
they say that it's a little bit under its massive spike, it's high point
that doesn't necessarily make me sleep great at night, So that's how I would
view it. I think we're still in this situation where the goal of color
blindness is frowned upon by progressives and still the people on the right and among
Republicans and moderates who do claim color blindness as a goal. We have failed
to persuade a crucial contingent on this left and center left. So this is
still a rather big problem for the country going forward, and it's one that
is vulnerable to a huge flare up at any time. Yeah, that's another
thing I'm curious for your take on, is we were talking about seeding the
ground. At the same time, we've seen black support for Donald Trump,
for example, jump more than we really have seen black support for any Republican
candidate, and that also has coincided with a decline in support for Joe Biden
at almost historic levels, at least in recent history. At the same time,
though, to the point you just made, there has been the seating
of the ground. There has been a generation now that's exposure to racial politics
is on social media and completely distorted with completely distorted narratives. Is it all
just kind of a big puzzle at this point? You know, we don't.
There's these unknowable segments of the public that are just in different camps,
like what is the future and as we know it now, as we can
see it now, of where things are maybe shifting, just with Black Americans
as they consider some of these hugely important questions. One thing to say is
that you know, there's been a massive seed change in the way people consume
information from say the nineteen nineties to today. Back then, a lot of
people still watched the same channels, and there were fewer channels and fewer ways
to get information, So it was, you know, it was easier if
you just met a random person on street. The likelihood that you two are
absorbing the same information was much higher. Nowadays, with Instagram, TikTok,
YouTube shorts, everyone having a personalized algorithm, it becomes very difficult to find
common ground with a typical stranger. Everyone kind of has their own unique diet
of information, and people are siloed, and there are just many more silos,
so it is difficult to kind of see outside your bubble in a way
that it didn't used to be. And so yeah, it's sort of difficult
to understand a trend like why is why is? Why is Trump getting so
much support relative to most Republicans among black men in particular, of black people
in general. I remember when the first indictments started coming out on Trump,
especially the multiple indictments, I had a kind of I wouldn't call it a
prediction that would be giving myself to credit, but a suspicion that the fact
he was under so many indictments would make him seem like more sympathetic, more
of a martyr and that might increase his support in the black community, which
I think naturally roots for the perceived underdog. In many ways, I think
Trump has been billed as the picture of a white supremacist power structure, the
kind of the white man keeping us down, and that image is hard to
sustain when he's under several federal and state indictments. It's like, if he's
in charge, why can't he even seem to keep himself out of the courtroom.
So when that image gets punctured, I think it might be the case
that some black people are more able to sort of look at Trump charitably and
lend support to him. That that's my only theory. My only other theory
is that when Trump shuts up and doesn't talk very much, he becomes more
likable, because yeah, and Trump has just been much quieter over the past
three years. So in a way, people I think a lot of people
are seeing Biden Biden's obvious problems with age, and they're not hearing as much
from Trump, which means they're not hearing as much upsetting and you know,
idiotic and mean stuff from Trump, and he becomes more attractive by default.
That's the sort of flip side of the social media coin. And we were
just talking about this a little bit, that the gatekeepers are still very powerful,
and yet they have never had less power than they do right now.
And I'm talking to media and academia that you know, if you're a kid
who's learning about let's say you got the sixty to nineteen project curriculum in your
school district, you also have YouTube, Wikipedia, the entire Internet at your
disposal to sort of blow up those narratives and to either look for more information
that supports it or the information that rebuts it. And you know, someone
like you, you're able to publish your podcasts, your sub stack and to
sort of question the official narrative. And I guess call me My question for
you is does that make you optimistic? Does that make you? You know?
For example, when the Jacob Blake thing happened in Kenosha and the riots,
you know, the mainstream position on that was absolutely wrong. There was
false information being spread about that, A distorted picture, literally a distorted picture
of that was mega viral, was treated as gospel by the corporate press and
sort of the mainstream popular culture. But people had evidence or had access to
the full video, they just sort of needed to be prompted to look for
it, and they need to be prompted to follow voices like your own.
So does that make you hopeful ultimately that because you know, the flip side
of the coin is really powerful too, the truth wins out. I don't
know if it makes me hopeful. I'm certainly grateful to live in a free
society with a free press and basically no top down censorship except of sort of
state secrets that are often understandably kept secret. But the truth is that the
the legacy media, especially on the issue of race, possibly more than any
other, has been totally derelict in its duty to inform the public about the
facts as they stand. And you could you can look at Jacob Blake,
you could look at George Floyd as another example. You could look at Michael
Brown. You can even look at certain aspects of Trayvon Mare in his death.
Every single one of these down the line, you find a narrative that
was very quickly seized upon biased against the police, that when further facts emerged,
those facts just were not very well publicized or they were spun. And
so really what happened is that most journalists and anchors and people in the media
were either supporters of BDLM and so biased in their coverage, or they wanted
to report it objectively, but they existed in an environment where a single misstep
or a single even correct take can get you called a racist, so many
of them just kind of kept their mouth shut about certain facts and lived to
write another day. I mean, how many people still don't know that the
knee on the neck hold or the knee on the shoulder blade hold that Derek
Chauvin had George Floyden was not his signature move or not some unique sign of
his cruelty, but was literally the trained hold called the maximum restraint technique that
every single Minneapolis cop was trained to do when a subject was resisting and in
need of EMS. Many people don't know that. Whose fault is that it's
not really censored in the sense that it would be censored in China or Russia.
It's out there. It's just that journalists don't want to report that.
So this is basically what's happened. That does not give me hope, because
it's hard to see how that changes without a big sea change among elite the
culture of elite media. But yes, I'm quite happy I live in a
free and open society in general, and that I you know, you can't
be in prison for your views. Yeah. No, I share your broad
pessimism ultimately on these questions. But you know, this is as we're sort
of rounding out the conversation when you're writing about your experience at Columbia, there's
such a heavy looming sense of class and this entire conversation basically when we're talking
about academia, elite media. You know, it makes me think of when
white evangelicals, for example, have representation in corporate media. It's David French,
like, he lives in Tennessee, but in like one of the wealthiest
pockets outside of Nashville in the entire country, And so you get, even
when representation is allowed in the media, you get someone who's still really following
the elite line in terms of their argumentation. And I know that that's a
problem in the black community. I just want to talk about your experience as
somebody who is is successful but heterotox and I imagine Coleman, you get smeared
all of the time, and I wonder to what extent you think class plays
a role in that disconnect between the narrative and the truth. Yeah, class
plays a huge role in it. I'm, you know, as elite as
any of the elites that I may want to criticize. But I try to
do well. I try. I try to understand that on me and almost
and most people I know are elites, and the bubble of elite thinking is
not the same as as the country at large. And you can just see
so many egregious examples of this. So I'll give two examples. I'm half
Hispanic, half Black. When I got to Columbia and I started noticing people
use this term latin X. Now, I spent quite bit of time with
my Puerto Rican family growing up. I spoke quite a bit of Spanish as
a kid, a lot of family members that only speak Spanish, and so
I had an intuitive sense of just the hilariousness of this term. It's terrible,
It makes no sense given the phonetics of the Spanish language, and no
actual Hispanic person would want to use it. And yet I was being told
on Columbia's campus that this term is somehow the one that the Hispanic community is
asking to be called. So I knew that was ridiculous. I had no
data to back it up at the time, I only had experiences. And
then Pew did a poll finding that I think four percent of the Spanish community
in America liked that term. The other ninety six percent either did not like
it or had never heard of it. That's the bubble. And yet this
is a word that came out of Elizabeth Warren's mouth, who was running for
presidents of the entire country, not a four percent of it. Another example,
at the height of twenty twenty, the defund the Police Movement and the
BLM movement when BLM had the most support it ever has had as a result
of the death of George Floyd Gallup. I believe did a poll asking Black
Americans a simple question, do you want more police in your neighborhood the same
amount or less? Eighty one percent answered that they either wanted the same amount
or more, and that broke down as I believe sixty percent wanting the same
presence and about twenty percent wanting more. That left only twenty percent of Black
Americans, only one in five sharing the position of Black Lives Matter that police
presence should be diminished. If you were someone in the elite journalism world,
paying attention to the elite conversation, that fact would have been flabbergasting, completely
shocking to you that only one in five Americans, Black Americans shared BLM's position
on police presence, because far more than one in five elite black Americans,
the ones you see on TV, the ones in my world, far more
than one in five of those, practically all of those shared BLM's position.
Yeah, the disconnect is incredible. Those numbers are still incredible to think about.
And my last question Coleman, is I know that you've been talking a
lot in this book tour I imagine is going to be you know, there's
going to feature a lot of questions about Claudine Gay and the entire sort of
question of press or oppressed dichotomy, the oppressor oppressed dichotomy on Israel and Palestine.
And you have written about how it's sort of the struggle for black equality
in the United States has been appropriated or it has been then used in South
taking South Africa as well as an example, and then sort of grafted onto
what happens in Israel and Palestine. Could you talk a little bit about how
the left, and especially the elite left, abuses that example or abuses what
happened in the United States to sort of make the let's say, simplify what's
happening in Israel Palestine. Yeah, I think a lot of people in the
West, in America in particular, also in Europe, they want to see
the issue of Israel and Palestine as the same as the issue of Western Europeans
and Africans essentially, whether that be colonialism in the case of Europeans in Africa,
or whether that be slavery and Jim Crow when it comes to to America.
Now, there are a lot of very important differences here. One is
that the goal of Palestinian the Palestinian national movement, is not the same as
the goal of the civil rights movement in America. It was not even the
same as the goal of the black radicals in America. Malcolm X never claimed
that he wanted to take over all of America and rule it as essentially a
black state. The most he ever claimed in the early sixties was that he
wanted a separate black state, maybe somewhere in the US South or somewhere else
altogether, like Liberia. In other words, his most radical claim is that
there should be a white state and a Black state. Martin Luther King,
of course, wanted to peacefully integrate the company, Sorry, the country.
Palestinians nationalists have claimed since the nineteen thirties they've rejected every single partition that would
allow for a Jewish state and an Arab state to live side by side,
and they've insisted on the idea of from the river to the sea, Palestine
shall be free. That is that the entire land of Israel would be a
Palestinian Arab state, and in that situation, the Jews would probably have to
pack up and leave or be slaughtered. That is not anywhere analogous to the
goals of the civil rights movement or even the black radicals in America. Now
that's goals. If you talk about tactics, there's nothing in the history of
the Black American struggle for freedom and equality that is akin to the tactics Palestinian
militants use, in particular hamas but also Fatah back when they were more into
terrorism. You can know, someone like normal Finkelstein likes to cite the not
Turner slave revolt as an example. Nat Turner did some horrible things kind of
hamas like in its barbarism towards civilians. The truth is that not Turner was
an absolute footnote in the history of Black Americans achieving freedom. Had not Turner
died in his crib, the Civil War would have happened just like it did.
The fight against Jim Crow would have happened just like it did. And
sohing there's nothing now in the mainstream history of Black American activism, the mainstream
history that is analogous to Hamas's use of human shields its own people as human
shields, to its indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians, any of these things.
So to compare the two things is just ludicrous, both in terms of the
goals and the tactics. And then finally, this idea that is an apartheid
state, I mean, this is you know, I would argue it's refuted
by the fact that twenty percent of Israeli citizens are themselves Arabs. You could
call them Palestinians or Israeli Arabs, whatever you want to call them. They
have the right to vote, they have all the rights that Israeli citizens have,
and actually not all of the obligations. They don't have to serve in
the army. I'm not saying that there's no racism towards them, there's no
bigotry. There's bigotry as a constant all over the world. But Israel is
not in the partheid state the way that South Africa was. It has an
occupation in the West Bank and Gaza that it has offered to end in the
past in exchange for a peaceful two state solution. The problem is that the
core of Palestinian thought still rejects that and is deeply attached to the idea of
from the River to the Sea. Yeah, it's amazing how the mainstream has
completely running with that narrative. To Coleman, thank you so much. It's
just been an absolute pleasure to talk through some of this with you, and
I really recommend your book again. It's called The End of Race Politics,
Arguments for a Collar Blind America. It's out on February sixth. Conversations with
Coleman is a podcast that you can get wherever you download your podcasts, and
you can follow Coleman's work at Coleman Hughes dot substack dot com. Thanks so
much Coleman for coming on the show. Thanks very much for having me.
Well, you've been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm
Emilgershinski, culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email
the show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at
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back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for
the fray. Right, well, you know a three