In his new book The End of Race Politics, Coleman Hughes takes aim at the spread of diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology in the U.S. government. Instead of DEI that discriminates on the basis of race, he argues, we should adopt colorblindness as a national policy.
What is colorblindness? Hughes defines it this way: “We should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.”
One reason to adopt colorblindness as a national policy is that the government cannot be trusted with such a weighty power as picking and choosing which skin colors to favor and which ones to disadvantage.
The government’s race-based classifications are completely arbitrary. Hughes notes that the current five racial categories (black, Hispanic, white, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American/Alaska Native) were developed by the Carter administration and are enormously inconsistent. For example, Pakistanis are considered to be Asian. But Afghans right next door are considered to be white.
The arbitrariness with which these lines were drawn isn’t fixable; it’s baked into the cake. Race is a social construct and is at least somewhat fuzzy, so racial categorization means the government will inevitably rely on crude measures to try to decide who fits into which bucket.
For example, Hughes tells the story of a woman who applied to the Small Business Administration to have her business qualified as Hispanic-owned, which would make it eligible for special financing programs such as SBA loans. She grew up in a bilingual family; her grandparents were born in Spain, and she served as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking customers. But the SBA denied her application. Why? Among other reasons, because she had blue eyes and blonde hair and her name didn’t sound Spanish. Her actual background and ethnicity were less important to the government than subjective measures; she didn’t look the way the SBA official thought that Hispanics “should” look.
There’s an even bigger problem: History shows that governments can’t be trusted with the power to discriminate. Slavery was the law of the land for 89 years (1776-1865), and Jim Crow for another 100 (1865-1965). For most of our nation’s history, the U.S. government wielded its power to place a boot on the neck of people of a specific skin color.
A mere six years ago, then-president Donald Trump was reported as referring to Haiti and African nations as “s***hole countries” from which we shouldn’t want more immigrants. Is this really the government that social justice warriors want to endow with the power to make more decisions on the basis of race?
This point should be especially salient for proponents of DEI. Ibram X. Kendi, one of the most popular advocates of DEI in the United States, proposed the creation of a new Department of Anti-Racism with totalitarian powers to police Americans’ speech and actions.
But in How to Be An Antiracist, Kendi said that the United States has “stage four” racism (comparable to stage four cancer). He says racism and white supremacy have “spread to nearly every part of the body politic.” If the United States is as irredeemably racist as he claims, who does he imagine will end up staffing his new Department of Anti-Racism? Where will he find the saints necessary to discriminate in the “right” way rather than use their enormous powers to discriminate the “wrong” way?
Hughes notes that the civil rights movement and the abolitionist movement fought for the idea that our government should be colorblind. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips said in a speech in 1867, “When once the nation is absolutely, irrevocably pledged to the principle that there shall be no recognition of race by the United States or by State law, then the work of the great anti-slavery movement which commenced in 1831, is accomplished.”
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One of Thurgood Marshall’s favorite quotes was from the dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson: “Our Constitution is color-blind.” Another NAACP lawyer wrote of that phrase that “it became our basic creed.”
These civil rights activists were onto something. Ultimately, there is only one race, the human race. The only proper role of government is to protect the equal rights of all its citizens. It should not be in the business of slicing and dicing us into arbitrary camps that it has the power to favor or disfavor.
Julian Adorney is a writer for the Foundation for Economic Education, a member of the Braver Angels media team, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization.