Coleman Hughes Speaks in Favor of Color Blindness

Excellent discussion by Coleman Hughes.  The introduction ends at Minute 2:25.  Here's the key take-away (4:25):

"The point isn't to avoid noticing race, which is impossible. The point is to notice race and then disregard it as a reason to treat people differently and as a category on which to base public policy."

I'll conclude with a few more excerpts from the video:

Another source of confusion that I try to avoid and will avoid in this talk is the misleading word post-racial. The “post” in post-racial suggests that there are two separate eras: a racial era characterized by the presence of racism and a post-racial era characterized by its absence, and the only question is which era we are currently living in, because colorblindness in this framework would only make sense during the second racism-free era.

Many critics of colorblindness have dismissed it on the grounds that we're not there yet which is to say we have not yet eliminated racial prejudice and they're right about that. Racism still exists. Racial prejudice still exists and probably will always exist, to some extent. But they frame the issue upside down. Colorblindness is not a synonym for the absence of racism. I's an ideology created to fight racism.

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It would appear that virtually everyone has unanimously rejected color blindness as a backwards value, an old-fashioned out-of-date way of maintaining the white supremacist status quo. Yet even as it has become virtually taboo among elites colorblind policies continue to dominate in the court of public opinion especially on the issues of hiring and college admissions. In 2019, the pew research center asked people whether employers should only take a person's qualifications into account even if it results in less racial diversity and 74 percent of Americans agreed that agreed with that statement. Not only did a majority of Americans as a whole agree with this statement of colorblind hiring even at the expense of diversity, a majority of each individual racial group, whites, Blacks and Hispanics, also agreed with this message. Roughly the same percentage agreed that colleges should not consider race in admissions.

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The extent of the attacks on color blindness is sometimes surprising. For example, the best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi in his latest book, “How to be an Anti-Racist,” says “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right's unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular Americans’ drive for a race neutral one.” So yeah, to say that colorblindness is wrong-headed is one thing. To say it is worse than the alt-right is quite another. It's impossible to understand the hatred directed at colorblindness without first understanding critical race theory this was an intellectual movement that originated at Harvard Law School in the 1980s.

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[Min 41]

If you take a Martin Luther King quote and you just say it verbatim you may get cancelled if you're white, even if you're Black, frankly. The strange thing about Dr King is we all venerate him--nobody ever speaks ill of him--but also he's basically ignored. He's in this uncanny valley where he is not exactly canceled but he's also not listened to, which is a strange place to be in. It speaks to the moral authority and credibility that we feel his message has. The awkwardness of acknowledging that, the main thrust of anti-racist activism, is exactly the opposite of what he stood for. That's a very awkward thing for the anti-racist movement to acknowledge, because they would lose some moral credibility if they outright said what is true, which is that we reject Dr King's goal. That's the truth but that can't be said out loud.

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[Min 44]

I've read hundreds of pages of Martin Luther King’s speeches and writings and virtually every three or four pages there is something that if said today you would be cancelled for. That's just the truth. It’'s trivially easy to find 20 Martin Luther King quotes expressing the colorblind ethic in the simplest terms and very difficult to find any quotes of him expressing that race is a crucial aspect of your identity to dwell upon and affirm.

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Bullying Wokesters at UIC John Marshall Law School Pretend that they Don’t Understand the Difference Between Using an Offensive Word and Merely Mentioning it.

Woke bullies have reached ever new levels of intolerance and decency.  John McWhorter explains in this tweet:

You need to read the above tweet carefully. Professor Kilborn was unfairly attacked by the 250 students who signed a petition requiring many dramatic actions, including a demand that "Professor Kilborn should immediately step down as the chair of the academic affairs committee and from all other committee appointments he holds." What was Professor Kilborn's crime? As part of a law school exam, he used only the sanitized version of the offensive word, exactly this: "N*****". This is the reason he was attacked by a mob of hypersensitive students.  The following comment to McWhorter's tweet was thus spot on:

After Professor Kilborn was unfairly attacked by the students, he was left twisting in the wind by the University of Illinois - Chicago (UIC) administration, which issued the following statement:

The Law School recognizes the impact of this issue. Before winter break, Dean Dickerson apologized to the students who expressed hurt and distress over the examination question. The Law School acknowledges that the racial and gender references on the examination were deeply offensive. Faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students. Those with tenure and academic freedom should always remember their position of power in our system of legal education.

This pathetic defense of its own professor and other details regarding this incident can be found at Above the Law.  Here's an excerpt:

The petition is a call to action for “Insensitive and Racist Content” on the exam, and when I initially read the petition, my impression was that the professor had used the full slur on the exam. (And I bet a lot of other people that read — and potentially signed — the petition thought that too.) But that petition does not “summarize[]” the exam as it purports to do — it provides a direct quote. By that I mean the exam did not use the full n-word (or the b-word for that matter), opting instead for the euphemism. Which is… the exact sort of adaptation and awareness of potentially traumatic racial issues that folks have historically asked for when professors claim the right to drop the full n-word just because it’s an academic setting.

Will any lessons be learned from this incident?  We shall see . . .

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The Attention Deficit Approach to Deeply Appreciating Your World

I try a lot of things. I dabble in most of them and I do deeper dives into only some of them. My ex-wife once accused me of being ADD, and her frustration might have been a significant factor in our struggles to get along toward the end of our marriage. I didn't like being accused of "being me." If that message had been candy-coated, it might have gone down a lot better, I often think.

A couple years after the divorce, I read a book on ADD (I can't remember the title) that defined the condition as "having a low tolerance for boredom." That describes me well.  I haven't ever received a formal diagnosis of ADD, but I suspect I'm on that spectrum. I find this topic compelling because I want to understand myself better and learn some new strategies for functioning at a high level without unnecessarily (and often unintentionally) annoying others. Today I just ordered a new book on ADD called ADHD 2.0. I suspect I'll be reviewing it on this website in coming weeks.

The evidence (that I have a low tolerance for boredom) is ubiquitous. I have had a long successful career as an attorney. I am a proficient musician who actively composes music in my home studio. I write voraciously, both at this website and elsewhere. I have achieved a decent level of proficiency in photography (I especially enjoy the challenge of portrait photography). I am a co-host of a podcast for trial lawyers called "The Jury is Out." I am a dedicated parent of two wonderful daughters. My life has been an energized zig-zag and it is not slowing down. Not everyone is wired like this or wired to like this, however. My energy annoys some people who want to live slowly, mindfully, deliberately.  To be more accurate, ADD tendencies can be charming at a distance, but it's not easy for some people to share a household with someone with ADD tendencies. I'm not opposed to exploring different ways to interact with the world. For instance, I have tried meditation as an attempt to live more mindfully. I'm still trying to figure things out at the age of 64.

A friend once assured me to stop worrying about the labels. She said that I was "like Ben Franklin." That was such a tactful way of putting it! She recently posted a long quote by Kurt Vonnegut that I'd like to share.  This passage is the point of this post:

When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.

I love this passage. Life is short.  I love trying lots of things for the same reasons Vonnegut tried so many things. I consider myself a C or B rated player at almost every thing I work at, but proficiency has often not the main point for me. For instance, I've dug for dinosaur bones, but I never aspired to be a paleontologist.

I would add this: I do a lot of things simply because I like trying them.  But I also like try many new things because doing this allows me to better understand how difficult it is to do these things well. I'll never be Ansel Adams or Pat Metheny, but working at photography and music offers me a deep appreciation for the work of these people on the cutting edge.

I don't know quite how to end this post. I'll merely encourage you to go out and try lots of things and meet a lot of the awesome people with whom you share this planet. The world is a big playroom. It can also be a dangerous place, but mostly it is a vast joyful place where you can dabble and dabbling often leads to bigger things.  But if not, your dabbling will bring you vast appreciation for those who walk the high wire.

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My Cell Phone Tells me the Sky is Falling Down

The IRS is prosecuting me, my copy of MS Windows has a dangerous virus and the Social Security Administration cancelled my social security number. All of this happened over the past week. Amazing, the things you learn when you take your phone off of DND for a week. I needed to keep things "open" for awhile, but I'll be going back to DND soon, so I can focus on sending money to Nigeria so that I can get rich.

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