Who said the words “Black supremacy would be equally evil as white supremacy”? No, not Tucker Carlson or Ann Coulter. It was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
This perspective is consonant with King’s famous line about being judged by one’s character and not by one’s skin color. Treating all people with equal dignity and respect without regard to their race is a universalist declaration consistent with humanist values. Because that is an ideal way for society to operate. When we treat each other as individuals, as people whose personal character matters more than their race, we can build a strong, cohesive society together.
Color blindness used to be the aspiration of nearly everyone who supported the civil rights movement. It stood in stark contrast to the Black Panther and Nation of Islam approach to Black empowerment that was more segregationist, Black supremacist, and anti-White.
But today’s followers of the identitarian Left are now the handmaidens of neoracism. They have shifted the idealized social order from what King hoped for the future to something more reflective of the philosophy of Stokely Charmichael and Malcom X. And they call anyone who won’t go along with this substitution a racist.
For the identitarian Left, this is truly a Humpty Dumpty moment, when words mean what they say they mean. If you are not racially discriminatory toward White people, according to Ibram X. Kendi, a godparent of the identarian Left, you are racist. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”1 Yet preferring one race over another, Kendi’s explicit playbook, is the very definition of racism. Reverse racism is still racism, as King well understood and called out.
Image credit: National Archives
If this were just a matter of semantics, it wouldn’t matter all that much. But what is at stake here is the entire humanist project, our commitment to Enlightenment values and to a just society. You don’t bring a diversity of people together by dividing them by skin color or making skin color an essential qualification or disqualification for life’s rewards. You bring them together by making racial distinctions as irrelevant as humanly possible—which is what color blindness means. It does not mean we are blind to skin color. It means we do our best to treat people equally without regard to it.
That is why one of the key Affirmations of Humanism states: “We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.”
Note the term divisive parochial loyalties, which is what the identitarian Left is amping up. All their efforts to promote postmodern racial essentialism—Critical Race Theory dogmatism; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) loyalty oaths; and racially segregated graduation ceremonies at colleges—are not helping either society at large or the future prospects for racial minorities. Instead, they are merely stoking racial divisions and driving a wedge between good people everywhere.
Most White people in the United States these days are not racists. I say “these days,” in 2024. You can point backward to a different reality. There are still racists of course, but in general we have excised that demon as we have sloughed off other old prejudices, such as that women shouldn’t work outside the home or that LGBTQ people shouldn’t legally marry each other. We have made stunning progress shifting all those attitudes within my lifetime—a cause for unbridled celebration especially among humanists, many of whom were at the forefront of these civil rights struggles.
There are still inequalities, and we should continue to work on those. How to do that best and most effectively, however, is not to double-down on the enfeebling notion that every Black person is a victim of a systemically racist society and under those circumstances their lot is to be oppressed and downtrodden. Especially because reality says differently. We have a current Black vice president, secretary of defense, ambassador to the United Nations, chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, and two U.S. Supreme Court justices. As these examples and thousands like them demonstrate, in today’s America people can largely succeed irrespective of their race.
If skin color were the determining factor of success in life (i.e., educational and economic achievement), then it would be hard to explain the remarkable success of some Black groups, such as Nigerian Americans.2 At least 61 percent of Nigerians in the United States hold a college degree, compared to 32 percent of Americans generally. For Nigerian immigrant families, skin color has not been a barrier to professional and economic success.
Coleman Hughes makes a compelling case for a far more empowering, motivating, and fair approach to how race should be viewed in social policy in his important new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. His thesis is that aspiring to a colorblind society where race is made as irrelevant as possible is not only good for societal peace and cohesiveness, but it is demonstrably good for Black Americans. It is far better than the identitarian Left’s prescription of exhaustively injecting race consciousness into every crevice of our lives.
One interesting poll Hughes cites is a 2013 Gallup survey asking Blacks in the United States the following question: “On the average, blacks have worse jobs, income, and housing than whites. Do you think this is mostly due to discrimination against Blacks, or is it mostly due to something else?” Fully 60 percent of blacks answered “something else,” meaning a solid majority did not think racism was the primary cause of disparities in life outcomes, contrary to the identitarian Left’s insistence.
Hughes also has a response to those who say we have to discriminate against White people as a way to balance the historical scales. He says bluntly it is false to assume “that the way to combat injustice is with more injustice.” Hughes points out that the “law of retaliation” of pitting one group against another in an “eye for an eye” perpetual loop “leads to interminable hatred generation after generation.”
One of the more startling statistics to come out of the affirmative action case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court last year was this: At Harvard University, the academic performance of applicants was divided into ten levels from the best to the worst. Black applicants in the fourth to the bottom decile were more likely to get admitted than Asian American students in the top decile.
Such stark reverse discrimination of the Kendi variety is certain to stoke racial and ethnic resentments. And even Black Americans reject that kind of intervention. A Gallup poll from Fall 2023 found that nearly seven in ten Americans thought the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling curtailing affirmative action in college admissions was “mostly a good thing,” including 52 percent of Black Americans. Why? Because to people of goodwill, admitting people to elite universities based largely on one’s race puts an unfortunate asterisk on the academic career of those admitted through an unfair process. It harms the very people it purports to help.
Hughes is right that the prescription for further Black progress is to recommit to the principles of Martin Luther King Jr. and the leaders of the civil rights movement. He says we need to pull the masquerade mask off the so-called anti-racists and call them what they are: racists by another name. Hughes calls for class-based social policies and not race-based ones as the best way to address lingering economic inequality.
Humanism stands up for this color blindness in its list of principles and values. We had it right all along.
Notes
1. Pamela Paul, “’Antiracism’ Was Never the Right Answer.” The New York Times, October 5, 2023. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/opinion/ibram-x-kendi-racism.html.
2. Ebenezer Obadare, “The Nigerian Conundrum.” Council on Foreign Relations, June 14, 2023. Available online at https://www.cfr.org/blog/nigerian-conundrum.
Who said the words “Black supremacy would be equally evil as white supremacy”? No, not Tucker Carlson or Ann Coulter. It was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This perspective is consonant with King’s famous line about being judged by one’s character and not by one’s skin color. Treating all people with equal dignity and respect …