The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes w/Dorollo Nixon & Jesan Sorrells

0:00 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 179. Now, traditionally, we would open up with a quote from our book or an excerpt from our book, but because our book that we are covering is so new, instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to summarize the introduction from this book, and then I'll give you the author and the title along with some of my own thoughts before we welcome our guests to the show today. The book that I'm going— that we're going to discuss, that we're going to break down, begins with an introduction that begins with the title, Why Write About Race?

0:51 And in this introduction, the author makes an assertion talking about his background, his racial background, his ethnic background, and how his ethnic and racial background guided him in particular to a conference when he was in his early teenage years, where an ideology was espoused that was absorbed by conference attendees And this ideology focused around the victimhood, in his opinion anyway, of race. He always thought that his race was a neutral fact, irrelevant to his deeper qualities as a human being.

1:35 As a matter of fact, he frames, uh, race in general throughout the book as something that is not necessarily intrinsically interesting. But may present an ideological construct that other people can pour their ideas, their thoughts, and their particular unconstrained visions into. The author then proceeds to go through his introduction and talk about how he went to Columbia University. And at Columbia University, he was asked during orientation week to divide himself Well, the class was asked to divide itself by race and discuss how we either participated in or suffered from, quote unquote, systemic oppression.

2:25 This huddling, this orientation act, led to more confusion. And ultimately, during the course of his work and the course of his studies as an undergrad at Columbia University, led to him beginning down the path that led him to rejecting ideologies that he has talked about in the book that we are covering today. And so we are going to talk about, just in time for Black History Month in America, today on the show, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. By Coleman Hughes.

3:13 Now, when we think about race and when we think about ideologies around race, there is no area more ripe and more sharp for conflict and disagreement. Matter of fact, I'm going to bring up a conversation that DiRollo and I had a couple of years ago about Malcolm X, where I raised some points that I think Coleman Hughes I think Coleman Hughes's arguments represent the, uh, the clearing at the end of the path on some of those arguments, and they represent a new way forward into the 21st century. Coleman offered up and opened up his introduction with this quote, and I love this.

3:51 This is going to be the anchoring quote for our— I think for our show today. He said, I've always found race boring.

4:00 As do I, Coleman. But myself and my guests today, we are also part of the tail end of a generation that benefited from the efforts of folks who came before us. And those acts, as beneficial as they were, can sometimes act as an anchor, at least in my life. I don't know about my guest's life, but can sometimes act as a psychological sociological, or even cultural anchor that prevent us from moving forward in all the ways that the author of our book today, Mr. Hughes, who is a generation younger than both of us, has decided to completely cut himself off from and reject.

4:44 This vision that is put forth by those who insist that colorblindness is not a thing is one of a relentlessly unsafe, illegal, and immoral social order. And unfortunately, it allows people with all the resentment and venom of classical racists to chase clout in a way that would make David Duke himself blush. I don't hate the players though, and neither does my guest today. I just want to know what the rules of the game are. And Coleman does an excellent job in laying out what those rules are from the perspective of somebody a generation younger.

5:27 To quote from one of my favorite movies, Tommy Lee Jones in the opening of No Country for Old Men, I don't want to push my ships forward and go out to meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, Okay, I'll be a part of your world. Close quote. Today on the show, we're going to explore the rules of the game. We're going to talk about how the rules of the game were and what they were in the 20th century. And now that we are now 26 years into the 21st century, the rules of the game have to change, even though the players playing the game haven't yet caught up to the fact that the rules have shifted.

6:19 Leaders, the rules of the game, the rules of the racial ideological game are going to be different in the 21st century.

6:31 And now back for this season and to explore ideas of colorblindness and its discontents, such as it were, is our co-host today, fresh off of a trip to federal court though not for the reasons that you would think. Good friend of the show and my continuing guest both this month and in July, Derulo Nixon Jr., Esquire. How you doing today, Derulo? How's it going? Excellent. Doing very well today, Hasan. Thank you very much. All right. An analog man in a digital world. amen. Um. You got it. And there's all those vinyl people who can relate.

7:12 Axiomatically. The recording is better, it's more faithful to the sound. We're more faithful to ourselves with or without crazy tech. It has a higher level of audio fidelity, I believe, is the term for which you are looking. Um, but we are going to travel into the dulcet sounds, the dulcet commentary of Coleman Hughes. So before I jump into chapter 1 of this dynamic book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. Chapter 1 is called Race, Antiracism, and Neoracism. So before I summarize that chapter, I kind of summarize the introduction, and I opened up with Coleman Hughes's line, which opens up his chapter, opens up his introduction, I'm sorry, to his book.

8:00 And I love this line. When I opened it up, I was like, oh, this is the first thing. I've always found race boring. What do you think of that? I kind of laid out some things that I think, but what do you think of this, D'Rolo?

8:15 I think it's a great line.

8:19 Um, I don't find race boring, I find race perplexing. And so it's interesting because I wonder, okay, behind it, is there going to be ennui? Why are you all not past this thing? Why is this still a concern? Whereas my approach and the critique that my approach is based on just comes from a different direction.

8:47 Once you recognize, and this is getting slightly ahead of myself, but in my opinion, once you recognize that biologically speaking, race is a construct, meaning it doesn't exist biologically, it exists sociologically, not biologically. To me, that's an important point of divergence. Because once I know that at the end of the day, like clothing, someone is putting it on you, and you can take them off. Okay, so race isn't reality, then? No, it's not biological reality. Sociological reality, sure. But sociological realities change.

9:23 Sociologically— sociological realities are always in flux. Right. It's like the population of, say, Detroit. Just track Detroit from its founding as a fort, if I'm not mistaken, by the French in the 17th century, if I'm not mistaken. Just track its population from that point forward.

9:51 It's not— well, in the same city. Yeah. Different people, different city, different dynamic. Maybe the same spirit. Don't know. Certain things will remain. I know that better from New York City. Right. Where there's a commercial spirit about New York City that comes from the Dutch and remains there and drives how that particular part of America works. But the makeup of the city obviously has changed over centuries. Right. And so what are the ties that bind, you know? But here in the context of dealing with one of the most pernicious ideas that exists.

10:26 Right. And that Americans have to deal with. It's interesting, his stance where it's like, oh, this is— I find this boring. Oh, okay, right. Let's see where this goes. Well, and he finds it boring specifically, as I sort of went through that introduction, um, because of the nature of how he was raised, um, the ways in which his parents positioned race for him or didn't or chose not to, um, the way some would say, uh, and I'm sure I'm going to get comments on this when I clip this and put this, you know, on YouTube Shorts and everybody yells at me, um, for being naive, But, um, but, um, the ways in which he was educated through the modern term of privilege, quote unquote, um, and then having and being able to, uh, go be, be— they would say be economically shielded from the conditions of race.

11:17 And I find all of those excuses, quite frankly, to be 20th century, uh, shibboleths that don't really apply when we're talking about Mr. Hughes, who's a 29-year-old man, which means his formative years all occurred after 9/11.

11:38 His formative education occurred in light of— and we're going to talk about a lot of this today— the smartphone revolution, um, post-Cold War America, um, post, um

11:55 post— what's his name— post-LAPD

12:00 rioting America. Go ahead, say it again. Rodney King. Yeah, post-Rodney King. Right, exactly. All of his formative experiences occurred after all of that. It's a fundamentally different set of assumptions he approaches race with, which to your point, are sociological assumptions that track to or then inform his sociological understanding of race. What's interesting me is that the people that he is writing his ideological, for lack of a better term, screed against, which is what this book is, these people will not hear him because it benefits them.

12:42 And he's going to talk about this in his first chapter, first 3 chapters. It benefits them to basically shut their I ears. can.

12:51 Understand. Maybe because I don't think it's boring. Or maybe, and it may be similar with him, I don't know. I don't know the conversations. I mean, I read that, you know, his mother died, and that he, there was disruption in his life because of when she died when he was a teenager. You know, I sympathize. And so I don't, I don't know what conversations he has with his father, with father and mother's siblings, right, grandparents on these issues. I've had I have decades worth of experience arguing on these issues with, you know, older Black parentals, right?

13:30 And parental types. And so I did air quotes for y'all who are listening, older Black, quote, parentals, close quote, you know, people like that, my folks' generation, my— not so much with my grandparents. And I mean, I knew one set only, really, but knew them well, they knew me well. But suffice to say, I've had decades worth— decades plural— worth of conversations on, you know, these issues and how they affect things. And just, you know, but yeah, but it's so— I find it interesting because I think at bottom you can dig through— so not our generation, the one before us— that you can dig through some of this.

14:11 And I don't think it's merely either they're burying their heads in the sand because they want to preserve their narrative without the interference of fact, okay, or truth. Um, nor is it merely, well, this has political utility, this is political capital, which it obviously is. Um, I'll put it in the most blunt fashion I can, and, you know, somebody eventually will take me to task for it. But why does the Reverend Al Sharpton matter today? Right, because he can trade on this notion. Now, does he have a history of, you know, community advocacy going back decades?

14:54 Yes, I recognize that. But the point I'm trying to make is that his relevance to me is not based on the effectiveness of his advocacy. It's because he came from an era and in a movement where There was a reality that they were fighting, right? They fought successfully, right? The country moved on, but they didn't. And as I think inevitably, they were confronted with truth. There's an eye towards, yeah, but here's my power base. Yeah, but I got to keep them engaged. And what better way than victimization to keep people engaged?

15:33 It's better than success, because success, everybody scatters. They go all over the place, like, engaged in whatever their pet projects are. When they believe themselves to be perpetual victims— dash— caste— dash— they can always be mobilized, always, to show up, protest, show up, riot, show up, whatever, right? And so, uh, yeah, I, I don't find it boring. I find it, uh, frustrating and perplexing. Um, and yet, you know, that to me, there's another— there's another side, okay? There's a biological side.

16:13 I'll probably get into it more later, but the biological side I find absolutely fascinating. And it's just— it was never presented that way when I was growing up, right? Right. Ethnicity was never presented. Race was presented, period, you know, and not ethnicity. Right. Yeah. And there's a— I'm glad you brought up that distinction with the difference between race and ethnicity. I think we forget that. I think I know we forget that in our overall cultural schema. But also, to your point, The individuals who cross that thin line from being, as you framed it for Mr. Sharpton, uh, community advocates, uh, and then they cross that thin line into what I have termed on this show in past episodes, and we've talked about Al Sharpton or even in private conversations we've had, and I'm going to go ahead and go public with this, um, you know, I look at someone like that as a grifter and a race hustler.

17:20 I think that crossing that thin line— there's a thin line, as Bubs would say on The Wire, between heaven and here, right? And it is— it's that thin line. And it's the crossing of that line, I think, that Coleman's generation saw in multiple ways or was protected from, and now has no cultural It has no cultural glue on, on him. And by the way, Coleman's 29. Oh, sorry, go ahead. He's, you know, there's no common frame of reference and there's no experiential common frame of reference either. Right.

18:01 And you and I, and you and I both have sons who are under the age of 10. I think that those sons are going to have even less of a common reference than even Coleman does. And that gets to something else that we're going to talk about today, which is We brought up in the episode on Malcolm X, what are Americans going to— what about Americans? What do Black Americans do when they've actually won legally all of the things they asked for? The deeper question, of course, is what are you going to do when you've won, let's say, 60 to 80% of all of these sociological and cultural things you've asked for?

18:45 What do you do? This is the compelling question that my challenge to all those neo— the neo-racists and the anti-racists out there. Here's my challenge to you, just like I would put the challenge to Malcolm X and the revolutionaries, uh, two generations back. What are you going to build with your win? And if you don't have a vision constrained or otherwise, as Thomas Sowell might frame it, then I don't know what to do with you. We can't unite in common cause if you don't have a vision. And that is where I have a problem.

19:27 I have a problem with there being a lack of vision. And I think that Hughes's book, what attracted me to Hughes's book was ultimately the other day, in Chapter 6, which we'll talk about this towards the end of our podcast today, he frames the beginning of a vision. And that's amazing. That's what we need today.

19:50 So speaking of Hughes's book, let's jump right in. So in Chapter 1 of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Hughes makes a few points here, and I want to summarize these. Again, we're not reading directly from the book. I encourage you to go pick it up.. It is on Amazon. This book was published in 2024, so it is only a couple of years old. Actually, if you're interested, you can go Google or go look on YouTube where all these things happen. Coleman Hughes's discussion on the View of this book where Whoopi Goldberg, who's 3 generations— no, 2 generations older than him, 3 generations older than him, actually.

20:31 No, I was right the first time. And Sunny Hostin, who is what some of us would call in the Black community—

20:41 well, she's not fully Black. Let's just frame it that way if we're going to frame it in terms of drops of Negro blood, which, by the way, he does get into this in the book. Both Sonny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg, I believe, in the clip when he went on The View upon the publication of this book, tried to jump on him about colorblindness. And he roundly trounced them because he's a podcaster. And so he's used to having arguments with people in real time, rather than having a studio audience and someone there to yell cut and reset.

21:16 Anyway, go search that, go search that clip out if you, if you want. My man Coleman lit some people up. So Um, in Chapter 1 of this book, he talks about race, anti-racism, and neoracism. And, um, he talks about— to, to Derulo's point, he begins with the conversation about his mother. Um, and he says, for most of my life, I saw my mother as neither Black nor white. Her Puerto Rican father was darker skinned than me, and her Puerto Rican mother was as light-skinned as any white American I knew. Nor did I view her as quote-unquote Hispanic, a word she hated due to its association with Spanish conquest, or even Latina, though she would have certainly checked that box on a census.

21:59 This is where we start the opening with an acknowledgment of where he came from. Then we go into a conversation about what is race. And he defines the word race, including the concept of race, the arbitrariness of race, which is where we get into the one-drop rule. Why not one-eighth? Why not one-fourth? Why not one-half? Why not one-sixteenth? He also goes into the racial categories of other, to Darello's point earlier, ethnos or ethnic groups in the United States, including Asians and Hispanics, for whom we do not nearly get as verklempt as we do for folks who have more melanin in their skin.

22:40 And he positions an idea, and it is an idea in the introduction that drives the rest of his narrative. He positions this idea by saying that we often use race as a proxy for other things we care about. For example, when lawmakers discuss policies aimed at helping the disadvantaged, they'll use race as a proxy for disadvantage. They use those expressions like Blacks and Hispanics and other disadvantaged groups to refer to people their policies are aimed at helping. But whether we are talking about current disadvantages, what is sometimes called— as I used the word previously, privilege— or historical disadvantages, racial identity is a bad proxy.

23:21 And then he makes the argument that I've been making at least since 2004 against all of this nonsense, that it's really hard. I'm going to paraphrase his argument. It's really hard to convince poor white people that they have privilege. That doesn't work. And by the way, by the way,

23:43 our good friend and former President Barack Obama knew that it didn't work. And so in his reelection in 2011, 2012, he told the entire Democratic Party, and I quote, you can go find this on the internet, we are going to abandon the white working class male vote. We don't need it. And from 2012 to now, And I anticipate the next couple of election cycles, the Democratic Party, which is the container of disadvantaged folks, uh, will continue to have trouble bringing its folks together.

24:27 Finally, the end of the chapter, he talks about anti-racism and he talks about again, Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. He talks about the colorblind principle and defines what that is. And by the way, the colorblind principle, he defines it. He says, um, we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives. That's how Coleman Hughes defines colorblindness. No matter how you may define colorblindness or how society may define colorblindness.

25:02 He's positioning colorblindness as a different way of engaging, a different rule in the game for the 21st century. He makes a couple of other points in the introduction, and then I'll let DiRollo go. He makes a couple of other points in the introduction. He says that the ideas of the purported anti-racists in our culture don't pass the quote-unquote smell test. They are clearly proxies for something else. He says the arbitrariness of race as a construct, biological, social, economic, or otherwise, acts as a cover to smother in other ideas that are at the bottom.

25:37 And this is what I believe, part of an unconstrained vision of society, the same kind of unconstrained vision that keeps returning to popularity from Rousseau to Marx to Pol Pot to even your friend and mine, uh, the Joker, Patrick Bateman, also known as Gavin Newsom. The last white man in the Democratic Party with any power. And no, Tom Steyer, you don't count.

26:04 I don't care if you're a billionaire, it doesn't matter. American society, of course, is the only one on earth that has even come close to achieving the human task of erasing ethnic divisions. And it didn't get close by expanding the franchise without demanding that each person to whom you're— each group to whom the franchise is expanded accepts some constraints on reality. And colorblindness is one of those constraints that I think we are going to have to accept moving forward in the 21st century.

26:34 It is a simple request from Coleman Hughes, but I do not think it is easy. So to roll up, Hughes defines colorblindness, as I already said, as the principle that we should treat people without regard to race, both in public policy and in our private lives. Here's the core question, and I'll let you go. Can we get there from here? Let me— it's not even a pivot or a dodge, it's a feint, right? And then I can counter, should we get there? Okay, um, publicly speaking, I have no problem with that. I believe that's what our laws have called for since the 19th century, since the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, right?

27:20 And so those have been on the books for 150 years. Wonderful. So the country, meaning the government, is supposed to— and that's a dangerous— I think it's called a solipsism, so I apologize. The government is supposed to do that already. The government is supposed to treat American citizens without regard to race, ethnicity, biological sex, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And most of the time does, right? Did not most of the time 150 years ago, but most of the time does now. Great. That's wonderful.

27:52 To me, that is akin to my assertion that the US government to the citizenry should only speak English. Okay. It is meant in part to be unifying. It is a reflection also of our historic— the historic roots of the United States. In an English colonial experience along the eastern seaboard and not any of the other colonial experiences that were going on as a route. They went on. Yes. Do they have— are there populations who are part of the United States today that had their rebirth of freedom in the Western world from these others?

28:30 No, had their rebirth, but it wasn't in freedom because that wasn't happening, which is one of the reasons why they're part of the U.S. today and I believe and advocate are better in the U.S. today than they would have would have been if they were still part of— pick another country that either exists today or doesn't exist anymore but was over there. So, um, to me, they're, they're the same. Okay, you speak this language and we don't care what you look like. Here are the rights you have and we will enforce them.

28:59 Wonderful. It's with regard to private conduct where I have a sticking point, and I say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait Remember, I can look through— so assume race is, um,

29:16 the artificial food coloring you put in a glass of water. So when we're colorblind, we're looking through the water in the glass at something else, right? And to me, there's something else, there's something else that's good, is ethnicity. And so, um, I revel in ethnic distinctions, just like I revel in linguistic distinctions, you know, and I enjoy just subtle nuances in terms of what otherwise might just be slight skin shade or hue differences, how wide your nose is, how this, whatever. But just is part of something bigger that is beautiful and that enriches life.

30:05 And so, you know, I think it's easier to understand with examples. So let's start with today and work backwards. So today I went to one of my favorite coffee places in Arizona, okay? Press Coffee. They're an amazing local roastery. They have, I think, 29 locations. No, they're not paying me to say this. They don't have plans to expand outside of Arizona, which I think is a shame because their product is wonderful. Okay, um, and I'm there and it's the same baristas I see almost every day that I go, uh, and they're wonderful.

30:39 Um, and, uh, I'm waiting for my morning coffee drink that I get, and then there's this man there and he's in a conversation with two other people. Um, this man is white. One of the two other people is an East India Indian woman. Okay, I live in Arizona, so if you say an Indian woman, it actually here, unlike everywhere except Alaska and perhaps Hawaii, actually has— it has like real— the likelihood of you meeting an indigenous person is much higher. And so I'm stressing that, you know, she and certainly her— she maybe, but her folks 100% are from the subcontinent.

31:14 Okay. Anyway, so we— and then I don't even remember the third person. He was male. I can't remember what he was. But what I'm trying to emphasize is this man is here and they're having this conversation while getting their coffee. And I watched this man's behavior with the coffee.

31:34 Thank you. I'm going to go back and keep podcasting. So I watched this man's behavior with the coffee, okay? And he was the only man in the joint who knew how to drink coffee. He got an espresso. He stood the whole time and drank it, set it back down in the saucer and walked out. I literally— I chased this man down and I thanked him for knowing how to drink coffee. And what did I do? I asked him where he was from. Lo and behold, where is this man from? Italia, where espresso was invented. So he knew how to drink it.

32:09 That's an ethnic distinction with meaning. It led to a certain behavior and even just as an observer enriched my life. Mm-hmm. Next example. I was in Houston, Texas over the last couple of days. Houston, which is a swamp, is one of the most diverse places I've ever been in my life. It didn't matter where I went. It was diverse. What does diverse mean? Usually diverse means, oh, there's actually Black people here. Then sometimes diverse means there's actually Black people here who aren't only in subservient roles.

32:47 That's another connotation of diverse. That's not what I mean, okay? Let's go back to my coffee line this morning because then I'm going to show you what diverse really means, okay? What I see there are two Latinos and everybody else is white. They're male and female. Oh, is that diverse? No idea. Let me show you what it would, would have been like in Houston, okay? You have these Latinos Latinos, excuse me. Every third person is Black, okay? And there's like 3 Asians, different types of Asians, okay?

33:17 And then the remaining people are white. So you look at 10 people and you're like, wow, um, there's no way to categorize these people other than biological sex, and more than 4 of you can fall in one category. Literally like that. And it was stunning to see. Okay, and it was obviously very pleasant, stunning to see. Here's the example I bring up. I'm flying back and the man next to me, um, in his athletic gear with his construction helmet, okay, uh, to me look white, not white as Wonder Bread, but white, okay, has a beard, okay, fine, large like he works construction, okay, fine.

33:58 And so we start talking. You know that man used to coach basketball in the inner city. The inner city— what does that connotation mean? It means Black people, poor and dangerous. That's what it means. That's where this man used to coach. Oh, that's where this man's father still coaches championship teams. And he shows me a YouTube clip with the news thing about his dad, and they're interviewing his 6-foot-8 dad talking about, you know, just stuff. Now, what does it have to do with race and ethnicity?

34:32 Well, this guy is Cuban. Oh, okay. So we start talking. This guy, he's a Cuban American. His father is a Cuban American. Now, his father, unlike the son, looks about as white as Wonder Bread and he's 6'8". Okay. Anyway, but Cuban American. So now we have— oh, there's this— I'm going to resist a trope. That has to do with food. But basically, there is this positive cultural element that is unique to them that I now then get to engage with. And it was coming back the other way because we could talk about— and it talked about growing up, college, different experiences.

35:10 We talked about racism. It was great. Okay. Very good convo. Okay. And remember, I'm flying out of the Deep South, right, on the way back to the arid mountains, southwest deserts where I live. Um, next example: I'm at a bar the night before, okay, in Houston, okay? Uh, El

35:34 Tiempo Cantina, that's what it's called, okay? Uh, and don't worry,

35:42 I'm going to speak in English. There you go. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm at the bar, okay? And there's this Black woman on one side, and there's this white man on the other. And I talked to both, and I had deep conversations with both, okay? And we could talk about different things, right? Well, obviously we could talk about the same experience. We could talk about different things also. And so, um, I happen to have— because it's me, and I know you will relate— I brought a book to dinner.

36:16 By myself on a business trip. I brought a book to dinner. The book is sitting on the bar. The book was about freedom colonies. I didn't know what that was. A freedom colony was an unincorporated Black town based on agriculture in the Jim Crow South that was entirely self-supporting, like Amish. And I study them. And like Mormons. And I study them. Okay. They were independent Black communities who basically said, y'all are doing whatever. We're just going to be here, own land, produce what we need, be independent from y'all, no government support, and we're good.

36:53 All 5 fingers, we're good. Thumbs up. There were hundreds of them. This book was about them and specifically in the context of Texas. Fascinating book. Well, this white man sitting next to me, he named one of the colonies. He's young, he's not even 35. Names one of the colonies, and we start talking about this stuff. And it was fascinating because, I mean, if you had asked me before I talked to him, do you think this man is going to have any idea about this? Frankly, I would have said no. I mean, I didn't know.

37:27 My father happened to grow up in a community like that, kind of like that in North Carolina. So why would I expect this man to know? Well, Here's one of the dangers that comes along with this whole notion of race and what it's supposed to mean. We're supposed to assume he's white, therefore ignorant, therefore doesn't know about any of this stuff. This is a man from the South. He knew what this was. He's not even 35. He knew what this was. And we're talking about it. Great combo. Talking about other things, talking about Southern culture, talking about How racism is experienced differently in the South, differently experienced differently by Blacks in the South versus by Blacks in the North.

38:12 We talked about this at a bar at dinner two nights ago. It's great. Okay, great. That's my kind of combo like this. I love that kind of stuff. Okay. Meanwhile, woman sitting on my right to whom I spoke to twice as long and spoke to first. Okay. She runs a medical practice in like two hospitals that are there. Okay, we had a great convo talking about all the stuff, talking about family, talking about these little like cultural things. That was a shared experience of a shared ethnicity, and that was happening with she and I and not happening with this dude.

38:47 Okay, um, and I, I found it, you know, very enriching, very meaningful. And so back to what Mr. Hughes said, The sticking point for me is in our personal lives, right? Because I don't believe that a private citizen needs to approach his or her relationships with, as it were, glasses that render him or her colorblind. Okay? And certainly if it's colorblind and values-neutral, like, no. Colorblindness itself is a value. That's one thing. But to me, it's still like water in a glass. It's, it's, it's a transparency that allows you to see the content of the character because that should be the driver.

39:36 Okay. If I want to hang out with you and is— this it's weird because this is 1A and 1B. If I want to hang out with you, here's the character I want and I'm not connecting with you because of how you look. I do happen to be connecting with you in one of several languages I speak, and that's relevant always. Okay, if I can't talk to you, it's really hard to hang out. But I can talk to you, the rest of the distinctions don't really matter. Okay, at the same time, that's 1A. And so at the same time, there's 1B.

40:07 There can be specific engagement with specific people because of these distinctives, and that in and of itself can be meaningful. Okay, I'm gonna tell a funny one. When we got here to Arizona, okay, so as Hasan knows, right, we used to live in the top end of Appalachia, right? Uh, you can use two words, sometimes inflammatory, to describe the culture surrounding us: redneck. Okay, now I love those guys. These guys are great. Women are great. Okay, um,

40:39 we were able to engage with and enjoy and see some of the cultural patterns that happen among people who, um, certainly self-identify that way, uh, and, uh, other people would throw them in that box. But there's a lot of self-identification with that label that works, that I find to be legitimate, you know. Anyway, so we come here and we meet this couple. Our kids go to preschool together, okay? They got a bunch of kids, we have a bunch of kids, okay, fine. Well, they invited us to a party for some of their kids, okay?

41:13 This is during COVID but this is Arizona, so nobody's masked. We're there loving it, okay? Love being free. One of the reasons we moved during COVID out of oppressed New York State. Anyway, so we're at this party, and dude, I've never seen some of these things, and I attributed to that culture in a good way, okay? I literally— we go and, you know, your normal party interaction, whatever, nothing untoward. And then they have this slingshot, okay? I'm not even making this up. I can see it right now.

41:52 They had a slingshot, um, and the, the bucket part of the slingshot, uh, is large enough to fit a kid in, okay? They were launching kids. Oh well, yeah, we're catching the kids and this was totally normal to them. And they were like— and I was just like, wow, this is amazing, you know. I was stoked that they were doing that, that they were comfortable doing that. Now I didn't want to do that and my kids didn't want to do that, you know. I asked Ro, he's like, I ain't doing that. Yep, that's okay, they're free to do that.

42:28 I don't want to get in their way. This is how they want to have fun. Awesome. It was a highly enjoyable party. Okay. But I remembered that. I remember saying that I love this. I love that they will do this, you know. And so I don't want to cast a vision for an America where people in their personal lives are literally trying to avoid or downplay these distinctions that help make us who we are, these distinctions that help make our groups who our groups are, distinct from other groups. And I don't believe it's necessary with all those distinctives to— I still think even with all those distinctives, a unifying vision of what America is can still be cast.

43:16 There's some tension. It's not oppositional. It's not even friction. It's just like a counterweight. Right? So there are those who would argue— and this is why I let you go on this for a little bit, because I wanted to get the whole thing out there. Um, thank you. What you're talking— you're welcome. What you're talking about is freedom of association as guaranteed to us by the United States Constitution. And freedom of association at a, at a, at a legislative level, there are those who would push back on you has been abrogated by the presence of, to your point, um, the 14th Amendment, and then following on from that, um, the Civil Rights Acts, uh, both in the 1960s and the 1970s.

44:05 And freedom of association has been abrogated by the Common Law Act of Title IX. And then all of these acts— and even Hughes argues this in parts of his book— all of these acts these legislative acts erode the ability, uh.

44:27 For. What you are describing to happen in a culture, particularly when corporations, particularly large corporations, get involved in— like they did post-BLM, post-2020—

44:43 get involved in cultural shaming. And seeking to culturally norm people. Case in point, I'm maybe at a football party, right? Not the Super Bowl, let's just say a football party, right? I'm at a football party with a variety of friends that I have freely associated with, and in the end zone of the product that I'm consuming is a sign that says, "End racism." Who exactly is that targeted towards? Now, the answer to that question, we know. We know precisely who that is targeted towards. It is targeted to the aforementioned rednecks with the children in the bucket who were catching them at the birthday party that you went to.

45:25 That's who it's targeted towards. The message is also targeted towards, to your point about victimhood in an earlier segment, it is targeted as a method of making me feel good that something is happening about racism from this massive corporation. And actually it's a nonprofit, folks, known as the NFL, right? And while I think most people, to their credit, the people who make $30,000 to $50,000 a year in this country and are the vast majority of people, I think most people ignore all of that and they just go and live their lives.

46:03 It, it glides right past them. But where it shows up, and I think this is where Coleman is getting to, and I think he's got something here that we have to acknowledge. Where it impacts them in their private lives is when they go out in private association with these corporations via their money. And now these corporations aren't holding up their end of the deal and are lecturing to them about what they need to think about or how they need to behave or who they need to associate with in their private lives.

46:34 I don't need a lecture from LeBron James about race. I need LeBron James to shut up and dribble, shoot the rock, work on that, LeBron. I don't want to hear about what you can think about race until you can go to China and talk about race when you're putting on an exhibition or talk about the communist government in China. And you would never dare to do that in China. If you were putting on an exhibition in Saudi Arabia, you would never dare to speak out against Islam. Because in those societies and cultures, they don't have, yes, freedom of speech and you know it, but also there's a venality of greed underneath this.

47:15 We're about where the funding for a lot of these places is coming from. And that venality combined with the corporate messaging is what I believe Coleman and his entire generation are perceiving. Because to your point about fragmentation earlier, they don't see the differentiations in mass organizations and institutions. They just put the government and Walmart and the NBA and LeBron and you and me at a certain class level and education level all in one bucket. And they just say, this is the thing.

47:50 Don't lecture me. And I think that's part of the new rules of the 21st century. And I think when people are talking about— when he's talking about public policy and in our private lives, I also hooked on the private lives part for exactly the reasons you hooked onto it at first. And then I thought, I think he's getting at something deeper here. I think he's getting at the knock-on effects of the Civil Rights Act. I think he's getting at the knock-on effects of, um, Title IX. I think he's getting at the knock-on effects of the 14th Amendment around this area of free association.

48:25 Because if we got rid of the Civil Rights Act, Tomorrow, it isn't as if these corporations are going to go and somehow hire a bunch of white men. That's not going to happen. They're going to continue to claim in their policies that they do not discriminate against anyone. As a matter of fact, they're going to double down on specifically picking diversity hires, and they are going to label those folks that they hire as diversity hires. And then they're going to put them in the cubicle next to me.

48:59 And that impacts my private association with that person because my private association at a certain— my association at a certain point stops being public when I have to do work that the private organization is paying me to do. So that's the only pushback I would put there. And I think Coleman would agree with that. And I think most of the folks that are under the under 30s, hell, I'll go into the under 35s, see this nuance, but I don't know that they know how to describe it. They don't know how to they don't know how to articulate what they're seeing.

49:28 Yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating because

49:34 the public-private distinction is a good benchmark for measuring

49:42 just what we're trying to achieve, right? And I just don't think it— I don't even think the goals are the same. Yeah. Nor that they need to be, you know, Like, right. I forget how. Yeah, people have said to me, and well-meaning people and people who meant what they said, and where I will attest to their integrity in trying to do or in doing what they said, I'm colorblind. I don't— they say I'm colorblind. I don't see race. Okay.

50:15 Okay. Do you see ethnicity? Okay, do you see that this person is Chinese and this person is Indian, East India Indian? Or do you just see two people? I don't see two people. I see people, see their origins. I mean, I'll give you another example from Houston. I'm on the bus. I took the public bus in Houston and I only had to give— I only had to give $5. I only had to give $5. Okay. One person panicked. I only had to give $5. Okay, the bus driver is a brown-skinned man with a long beard, mostly white, some gray, a little bit of some darker color, but it's basically dark gray, light gray, and white.

51:00 Okay, no mustache, and his hair, I mean, it's probably a few inches long. Okay, balding. And so I look at him and it's like, okay, obviously he's Muslim with the no mustache. All right, so he's probably from Pakistan or Bangladesh. And And I looked at him and I said, okay, he's a little light, so I guessed Pakistan. So I said to him, apropos of nothing, I looked at him and I said, hi sir, Rawalpindi? And he says, no, I'm from Bangladesh. And I'm like, that was my next guess, Dhaka. And he said, you know, it was the same country before 1971.

51:34 In other words, when he was born, it was the same country, so I was right. Now I can see this man's origins, you know, it's, it's like, it's beautiful, it's like a gift. But to me, that's part of— there's meaning in that, and there's part of the exchange. And so this man now understands that I understand where he's coming from, you know, and that means something. Our engagement is enriched by that, you know. And so, um,

52:03 pardon me a second, text message telling.

52:09 Me Zoom. Okay, go ahead. Yeah. Um.

52:15 Okay, so, so we're, we're in this spot, right? And I agree, like, there's, there's some things we have to wrestle with in this idea, this term colorblindness. And Coleman describes in the second chapter of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, um, the real history of colorblindness. And so he does the deep dive into the 14th Amendment, He covers about— he covers Plessy v. Ferguson and how that led into the civil rights movement. He also talks about, particularly in Plessy v.

52:49 Ferguson, he mentions the lone dissenting opinion being written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. It contains what is probably the most famous reference to colorblindness in American law. And DiRollo will know this as a lawyer. Quote, Our Constitution is colorblind. And by the way, this was in 1896. 1896. Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.

53:27 Close quote. Now, the— he does talk about how Harlan's arguments did not carry the day. We had separate but equal provisions, which of course then led to the civil rights movement. It led to the creation of the NAACP by W.E.B. Du Bois. By the way, we've talked about that on this podcast before. You should go back and listen to our episode on the Souls of Black Folk, as well as Up from Slavery, where I made the assertion that Black culture and Black people in America have long divided along two different tracks.

54:04 The W.E.B. Du Bois track, of which Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and probably a little bit of Coleman Hughes, although I'm going to give him some more grace on this, are on one track. And the other track features Booker T. Washington, which was a track that was first laid by Frederick Douglass. And so from Frederick Douglass, you go into Booker T. Washington, and from Booker T. Washington, you get to guys like, well, like, quite frankly, like me and DeRolo, who have to work for a living. And that fundamental distinction of class, of having to work for a living rather than making money off of ideas, or off of grifting off of ideas, or hustling ideas, is something that creates a profound split in Black America, or did create a profound split in Black American culture in the 20th century.

55:01 And I think that split is going to be resolved, or is in the process of being resolved, very quietly and underground in the 21st century. And Coleman Hughes is, um, is on board with that. Then he finally talks about in the chapter closes out with this idea of reverse racism and how the advocates of this, of the idea that colorblindness was, quote, a cynical invention of white conservatives, close quote, or a Trojan horse for white supremacy, close quote. He makes the point, Hughes does, that they are using these efforts to tarnish colorblindness as invalid.

55:45 And as a matter of fact, he says that appeals to common humanity that came through folks like civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin at the moment when civil rights were achieved were immediately abandoned by the same folks who had previously championed those ideas. By the way, he quotes from Dr. King several quotes. He closes out this chapter several things from Dr. Several quotes from Dr. King, including, um, in an effort to achieve freedom in America— in an effort to achieve freedom in America, Asia, and Africa, we must not try to leap from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, thus subverting justice.

56:31 We must seek democracy and not, not the substitution of one tyranny for another. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man. We must not become victimized with a philosophy of Black supremacy. Or this quote, also from Dr. King, properly speaking, and I like this one for a whole series of reasons, properly speaking, races do not marry, individuals marry. And another quote from Dr. King, as I stand here out here and look upon the thousands of Negro faces and the thousands of white faces intermingled like the waters of a river, I see only one face.

57:09 The Face of the Future. Hughes, of course, points out that the neo-racists would ride on the coattails of Dr. King and Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver without actually reading the quotes or pursuing the, uh, the dream that those quotes lay out. Now look, I think the reason we can't have nice things in this country is because we can't actually get our arms around colorblindness in the way— in the, in the nuanced way that DiRollo even described it in examples from his travels in Houston and from his going to the coffee shop in Phoenix and from even being on the bus, which, by the way, many of you don't realize this, being on the bus is a sign that Mr. Nixon has decided to walk among the proletariat, at least for a moment.

58:03 I got on this bus and, man, it's, it's weird. It's just It's like it, it, you have to know your city because you can get on buses in cities and it's a normal transactional transportation experience. And then there's the reality that is most of the country, which is if you were on a bus, you got a problem. And so there I was on the bus. Hey, you know, I could have Ubered, but it's me. So I didn't want to. I took that bus once.

58:38 And I got back via Uber.

58:44 Let not your class privilege show. So the question becomes, according to Hughes, and this is the tee-up question for going into our next session here, according to Hughes, Scholars of the civil rights movement have dismissed the idea of colorblindness as a quote-unquote "trojan horse for white supremacy." Why would such people do this? Why? If you look at how they frame the notion, fear is pregnant in, in the expression. Okay. And so it seems to me a fear-based response. Right. And the fear, I think, operates in two directions.

59:28 It's a fear that this oppression that we were dealing with eons ago, or we were actually dealing with eons ago, would return unless the fusion of Blackhood and victimization stays together. And, you know, that itself is a contentious notion. And I believe that that itself is a lie. And so they don't see it that way. They see it as reality, but it is fundamental to their reality. They must continue to have, um, not just a framework for Blacks being victims and white people being oppressors, but everybody else has to have that framework too.

1:00:11 And so it's a threat— fear— threat to their worldview, to their power structure, to their political base, to you name it. To their identity, right? This notion that, hey, now you are free. You know what's really fascinating? Really fascinating and deep. Um, if you read the Torah, which I know you do, you can see that God built in time during the Exodus, meaning post-Egypt, post-Red Sea, he built in time for the people, the children of Israel, the sons of Israel, to learn to be free. He built in time for that, recognizing that you have social and personal and other patterns that are coming out of slavery, and you have to learn new ways of thinking and doing.

1:01:03 And it's necessary before you can enter into and conquer Canaan. It's really fascinating because it's just like, um, I don't know if I would pick up on that if I weren't African-American. I don't know. You know, but I pick up on it. I'm like, oh, that's interesting because I'm one of those people. I'm tired of hearing people talk about— I'm tired of hearing African Americans talk about slavery. I'm tired of hearing it. And I mean, I was last talking about slavery yesterday. Okay. I'm tired of hearing African American people talk about slavery.

1:01:32 The conversations I had about slavery yesterday and the day before were fascinating. But most of the conversations that I

1:01:40 overhear people engaging in are Um, what, what did Hugh say? Boring, misleading. Okay, rather than referencing a reality and then making a point today that has— where there's a, a relevant tie, a relevant connection. Okay, because normally I just see it as something identitarian that I reject, where somebody is saying, oh, well, when— like the expression, well, quote, 'When we were slaves,' and it's like, close quote, and it's like, you were never a slave. You were never— your father wasn't a. Slave, his father wasn't a slave, his father wasn't a slave.

1:02:22 The next guy may have been, but none of all those other people were. Moreover, if that other guy, if he got freed, that means he didn't end as a slave. No, right? And it's just— well, there's also this massive idea of generational trauma which I also push back on. Hughes kind of touches a little bit on— he glides along the edges of this, but he's young. Yeah. And with other folks who are a little bit older, who, who are sort of more familiar with the science of epigenetics, you know, they'll say, oh, well, there's racial trauma, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, there is the genetics.

1:03:04 And.

1:03:06 To your point about the Book of Exodus, how many, uh, generations had to die in the wilderness before the Jewish people could go into the Promised Land? How many generations had to go? One. The, the one that came out and then rejected, you know, God offering them the Promised Land on a platter, you know. And effectively, it wasn't on a platter. But it was on a platter. It wasn't on a platter because they had to fight all these people. It was on a platter because God was with them and he said, I'm going to give you victory.

1:03:41 Okay, absolutely. You have to play basketball against LeBron, but I'm going to give you victory. Okay, let's play right now. Let's play right now. Let's play right now. Let's record it because this is gonna be great. I haven't dunked in how many years? In like 15 years I haven't dunked because now I'm old, my knees don't work. I'm gonna dunk on LeBron. This is gonna be great. And instead, no, no, no, they're going to step all over us. We're like grasshoppers in theirs. How do you know? Wait, wait, what?

1:04:10 So this is, so this is, so this is where, this is where I go. And I wanted to ask you a question about genealogy because you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier. And I don't think most of us here know about your deep love of genealogy and all of that. Love this stuff. You have a— now I'm going to draw, I'm going to draw a line right between myself and DiRollo here because there's a line of differentiation on with us, between us on this. DeRolo is absolutely 100% fascinated by genealogy.

1:04:36 He's fascinated by tracing, you know, where his folks come from and, and where his folks, all parts of his family came from and where they do, what do they do and how do they integrate. Matter of fact, I was just walking down the street today and I saw a plaque on the side of a building in the town that I'm in that said that where the, the person who put the put the building up was a lawyer and the lawyer's last name was Nixon. And I thought, knowing that we were going to have this conversation today, was I like, I wonder if DeRolo knows who that person is.

1:05:09 And I bet you DeRolo knows somehow, could figure out if I gave the name, and I'm not going to do that right now, but could trace the name because that's how deep he is. And he's laughing now, but he's true that this is how deeply, truly he's into genealogy. He is reaching out to people in other countries who have never met him before saying, hey, you're my 243rd cousin. What are you doing there? Okay, this is the kind of guy that DeRolo is. I want to draw a very clear, like, frame for folks here, right?

1:05:36 Yep. But seventh— but yes, seventh cousin. Yes, seventh cousin. Okay. All right. And by the way, I've met, I've met a couple of, of DeRolo's cousins. I've also met some other folks in, in DeRolo's family and his cousins. They were first cousins. First cousins. And there's, there's a difference between a first cousin and seventh cousin. Is there ever? Yes. Yep. But such is it. Work anyway. Now that's the role of full disclosure.

1:06:02 I fundamentally, at this point in my life, lack an interest in genealogy because I got enough problems right now. And none of those folks are helping me solve any of these problems right now. Matter of fact, all of them are dead and they can't help me. They don't speak into my current existence. A, because they're not here, but also B, I don't engage in ancestor worship, and C— and I'm not saying that DeRollo does either, I'm not framing that in that kind of way, I want to be very clear on that, I'm not casting aspersions on DeRollo's love of genealogy.

1:06:32 Um, but the third reason is the people in my family who have explored genealogy have done so because their identity was not— and this is going to sound proud, and I really I don't want it to come off that way, but that's what this is going to sound like. Their identity was not as solid as my identity is in where I place my identity, which is in, by the way, the power and salvation of Jesus Christ. If I put my identity there, that's the rock on which I build. That's the cornerstone. That's, that's the thing all the way down at the bottom.

1:07:11 And so anyone who comes along can never take away that identity from me. But increasingly, in a world of biological manipulation, class struggle, algorithmic manipulation, uh, economic strife, even the things I went through in COVID, those other things can be taken away from me, up to and including the markers of identity that this society claims are important. And frames somewhat through this, the study of genealogy. And I'm not saying, again, want I to be very clear, DeRollo's not doing this. This is what I see on my end.

1:07:51 And so I refuse to play the game. That's my conclusion. Now, in 20 years, maybe I won't refuse. Maybe in 20 years I'll have a change of heart and then I will go seek out DeRollo because I have a resource here and he will tell me what to do and he will tell me how to go do the deep dive and then I will go find the things. I'm saying all that to frame this question for you. As a purveyor of genealogy, I have now set you up as the expert on this show of how to do this. As a, as a purveyor of genealogy—

1:08:27 yeah, you and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he's going to come along, he's going to open up like, you know, an envelope for me. He's gonna be like, do you know that your relatives were like slaveholders of some other slaves? I mean, like, yeah, that doesn't really surprise me actually. Uh, we're fetal capitalists. That would not shock me. This is America. This is America, man. Yeah, it wasn't a monolith. It wasn't a monolith. And most of the time it was small, and most of the time it would have been intimate before it would have been commercial, period.

1:08:55 But nobody ever talks about that. Nobody ever talks about that. They don't want to have that conversation about slavery. No, no. Well, that's fascinating, right? That's a fascinating one. And genealogy to a certain degree allows you in a sort of, to your point earlier about Coleman Hughes's assertion around color, around race, it's a faint genealogy. I see it as a faint that allows you to sort of get in there and do other things. So my question is, my follow-up question is this.

1:09:31 Not should. I don't like shoulds and oughts on this show, although I do use them a lot. I don't really like them. I don't like shoulds and oughts. Um, ought— my point out my Immanuel Kant here. Um.

1:09:44 Is it a good idea? Let's frame that. Or, uh, I'll use myself as a proxy. For Black folks such as myself who may approach genealogy with the perspective of, I am disinterested in that, that doesn't have any meaning right now, or, or, or, or may approach genealogy from the perspective of it has all of the meaning in the world for my identity and everything must be placed on that. To your point about the phrase, when we were slaves, come on, you missed 5 generations of people in your family. Maybe to your point, maybe 7th, I'll go back 5, I'll grant you 5, maybe 5 generations ago, maybe that was a thing.

1:10:21 But your behind is in Starbucks right now. So I don't want to hear it. Okay.

1:10:27 Is there a benefit?

1:10:31 Is there something we need to be exploring in genealogy that might help us get past these identitarian struggles and help us as African Americans, as Black Americans, come to more of a deeper understanding of colorblindness? Is there something in genealogy that can help us? Um.

1:10:54 Yes, because at the end of the day,

1:11:00 um, well-founded genealogical research, okay, will yield the documentary and now what is even more powerful, biological evidence to show connections between certain individuals. Okay, um, and because I believe in data, and it's funny saying that as somebody who's analog, it's just you change the form of the data and it's easier for me to get behind it. But anyway, I digress. Because I believe in data and data and the ability to use data to shine a light on something we've missed, to change a perspective, and then we're now looking along something instead of at it, and then we have more insights because I believe in all those things.

1:11:41 I would say the answer is yes. It— what it reminds me of, and I will use the journey as a really— as I can use the journey as a metaphor for several things. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, right? Otherwise known as Malcolm X. Uh, actually technically at that point formally known as Malcolm X, right? Um, because he had this set of Arabic, melodic Arabic names, right? And titles. He did the Hajj, so he's El-Hajj, right? But anyway, um, when he traveled to Africa and then to go to Mecca in, uh, in Arabia, right, in Saudi Arabia, Um, it was paradigm-shattering for him because he came out of a biracial, monocultural, bi-religious context, right, uh, that was racist.

1:12:33 And he left it and encountered people and had experiences that showed him that his racism was wrong. From a data perspective, it showed him that the data inputs he had been getting were faulty, that it did not compute that he was hanging out Muslims who were white as Wonder Bread and Black as coal, and they were all brothers. And if you know anyone like, I believe his name is DuMonte Washington, the Reverend DuMonte Washington, he's a big Black Israel partisan type. I like him a lot. And he talks about, he would critique that and would show, well, this is what was going on underneath.

1:13:15 Here's the unspoken class structure within Islam and all this. And he's correct. Like that stuff is there. I'm not trying to, to discount that. It's just for al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz, it was paradigm-shattering to encounter people who didn't look like him who treated him like a brother. Okay, now this is something that happens to us, you and I, every day. Happens to our kids every day. But that did not happen to him every day in 1964, uh, certainly not where he was, okay, doing what he was doing.

1:13:46 So then he goes to Africa, goes to, you know, Mecca, and then he has these experiences and it's like, wow, you know, changes paradigm. And so he returned a different person. Okay, now, um, do I think that his experiencing this, um, unity of brotherhood of people who don't look alike helped him then return to America and not make meaningful distinctions in his behavior towards others? Yes, I do. Um, but I also believe that similarly, if he had stopped, say, in Nigeria on the way back, or, uh, Kogo, Togo, or Benin— well, let's leave it to English-speaking places because he— I don't think he spoke anything but English.

1:14:32 So Nigeria,

1:14:36 um, Ghana— Ghana at the time was already independent. Okay, if he'd gone to Ghana Okay. Do I think that he then could have learned about some cultural roots that he has that would have furthered that engagement? Yes. I don't think learning more about your culture will make you withdraw from learning about other cultures or withdraw from cultural engagement with other types of people. You know, I just think it adds levels of richness that bring more to the table. I went to— so How many nights ago?

1:15:06 Last night, night before, night before. So 3 nights ago now, was it a different place? Okay, having dinner, Super Bowl's on, um, client call. So I mean, I got to upcharge, which was good because I had to do work during the Super Bowl. But anyway, um, woman next to me, we're talking, you know, and the first thing we could bond over were kids. Uh, 4, she has 6. Super excited, you know, and funny because she says she has 6 and she goes like this, like high five, like give me a high I was 1,000% on board with that.

1:15:38 It's totally like same spirit. I'm on board. Okay. If you had asked me what this woman's ethnicity was and we were in Chicago, I wouldn't have known what I would have answered. We are in Philadelphia. I don't know what I would have answered. We were in New York. I might have given the same answer generally as an ethnic group, Hispanic. Okay. But because we're in the Southwest and even though Houston is almost South by Southwest, right? Um, I still might have gotten that right, okay? But, uh, turns out woman's husband is Nigerian, okay?

1:16:10 So then we're talking about that and talking about food she makes because she's— he's Nigerian, she's female, she's doing the cooking, okay? Cultural reality, people. Then she's— but so she's making all these foods, literally foods from her husband's culture, just all this food. And we're showing each other photos, all that stuff, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, she recommended one restaurant, and then the following day I went with my client to that restaurant for lunch. Okay, why do I bring this up? It's called Chop and Block.

1:16:41 Okay, amazing food. I had some stuff called buka. It's Nigerian. It was awesome. Okay, it was— oh, it was amazing. Anyway, um, here's what's weird, okay? My mother— that my favorite dish my mother made Growing up for me is a form of that. Hmm. Largest block of my mother's DNA from that same country. Is that an accident? I don't know, but I find that profoundly fascinating. Okay. And I didn't think about that till right now. I thought about, oh, it's the same. But now it's like, think about it with that added layer of the, the, the, the, the DNA input.

1:17:23 It's like, oh, Okay, got it. Anyway, um, in that restaurant there were all these different types of people, all these different types of people. So you find out more of who you are, bring yourself to the table. It's easier to be colorblind. It's easier, I think, to be colorblind at the same time enjoy the cultural richness that's around you. Okay, like, ah, it's just, it doesn't have to be like this. It doesn't have to be When I think about I'm going into a fight and I look and here's my buddy who's a Viking descendant, okay, yeah, I want him in the fight.

1:18:01 That doesn't have to be in tension with— I look over here and here's this brother from South Africa and it's like he's Zulu.

1:18:10 You can talk to the British about fighting Zulus. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you talk to the British about fighting Ashanti. And just like you can talk to Italians about having to fight, uh, Abyssinians, beating them, right? Right. It's just they don't have to be in tension. I don't have to choose one over the other. I can have both. But if I don't know about those last three, I can't have both. Then all I have is the Viking, right? There's nothing wrong with the Viking. I mean, horrible, marauding, raping, okay, but in terms of like an image of a warrior perfectly fine.

1:18:44 There's other— and they, they all come together. And it's like, what about, you know, the Terracotta Warrior? You know, what about the horseback, you know, Mongol that they tried to keep out of— Tatar, a Mongol they tried to keep out of, you know, out of the Qin, right, out of China, right, who then built the biggest land empire like ever. Come on. Well, and you— and we run into this kind of dynamic on the show when we talk with our, our regular— our more regular guest host Tom Libby, um, who also has, um, Native American in his background, right?

1:19:14 And so when we talk about Native American experience, one of the pieces that he brings to the table is a deep understanding of, to your point, warrior cultures. So actually last year we were talking about warfare and war-making. We talked a lot about it, and we'll be doing the same thing this year. We're gonna cover the book Empire of the Summer Moon by, I believe it's S.C. Gwynn. Gwynn, I believe I'm saying that correctly. And yeah, he's great. He's a Texan. He's great. Yeah. Great. And, and the level of understanding that the settlers here coming from, from the East, right, and of course, coming from the, from the, the American South post-Civil War, the level of understanding they had about what they were dealing with, with the Comanche.

1:20:02 And just how of powerful those warriors. Were, uh.

1:20:08 Deeply impacts how, um,

1:20:12 Native American tribal peoples think of their relationship, uh, to, uh, to quite frankly what they'd be— and they view all of us as usurpers regardless of how we divide ourselves up, uh, they view all of us as usurpers. So there's some interesting dynamics here. And we covered this a little bit with also the book that I got. This is many years ago, you might want to go check out that episode. I think it was episode number 15. It was one of the first ones that I explored with Carola, where we— yeah, where we talked about the Black Indian slave narratives.

1:20:46 Yeah. So, you know, look, the genealogy is interesting. And not interesting. It's fascinating. Not fascinating. It is a there's a dynamic— there we go— that occurs at an intellectual level for me, um, when I think about how, uh,

1:21:07 how, how in America the, the thing that it elides for a lot of us is, is this thing of class. And so Hughes does bring this up in the book and talks about this in chapter 3. So let me sort of push on. Through because we want to— that's pretty early. How many chapters is in the book? This is a 6-chapter book. It's a short book. So it's the middle of the book. Okay. Middle of the book. Yeah. And we're gonna skip over 4 and 5. We're gonna go right to chapter 6, where he starts talking about solutions, because we are solution-oriented.

1:21:38 And leaders who are listening to this show have to be going, what is the point of this? Where are you going? Well, let me take you somewhere. Or they're just fascinated. They could just be fascinated on the journey. There's no point, no direction. But hey, you know, it's like a big summer party. What the heck is the That's the point, right? Just go and enjoy yourself. No, you're not supposed to accomplish anything except have fun. Great. Or county fair, whatever.

1:22:03 Hughes talks about in chapter 3, elite neo-racist institutions, and he opens up with this idea. He says the neo-racist in-group, which he identifies neo-racist as the people who are promoting anti-racism as a function of how America should view or should be opposed to the white supremacy of colorblindness. He says the neo-racist in-group comprises many people in elite American institutions, such as colleges and universities, the mainstream media, and government. They've used the cultural power of these institutions to disseminate neo-racist ideology.

1:22:39 And then he has— and then he proved— he shows, as the Gen Zers might say, he shows the receipts. From tweets that people have tweeted. Yeah, I do know some things about Gen Z, um, from the tweets that folks have, have tweeted all the way to New York Times articles and headlines that have been written over the last 10 years, um, to the ways in which the government has, um, passed stimulus packages. As a matter of fact, he brings up in a damning paragraph at the beginning of Chapter 3 this idea here In March 2021, Congress passed a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan.

1:23:19 Section 1005 of the plan included $4 billion of aid for farmers with debt, but not just any farmers, only non-white farmers. Farmers with debt were to receive $0 of aid. Some of these white farmers faced foreclosure during the pandemic recession. They reasonably expected that if their government was going to distribute aid to farmers, it would do so according to who needed it most. They were understandably angry to learn that the government was distributing it instead according to skin color. Some of them sued the government, and the court ruled in their favor— or a court ruled in their favor.

1:23:54 Distributing aid according to race, it said, was unconstitutional. However, the New York Times coverage— the New York Times coverage of this episode didn't blame Congress or the Biden administration for passing a bill that was both racist and unconstitutional. Instead, it spun the story in a way that blamed the indebted white farmers, portraying them as angry conservatives who have ruined a noble government program and left Black farmers in the lurch. Close quote. By the way, he shows more receipts in the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, in the—

1:24:32 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the COVID vaccine and to whom it was to be given. And to whom it was to be held back from. Neoracism in education from Yale University's Child Study Center, and of course, university administrators that have allowed talks to be delivered with the titles such as The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind. Racial segregation on campus, in particular, um, the presence of segregated dorms, study programs, clubs, and even graduation ceremonies.

1:25:12 Uh, can you imagine the riot, man, if there was the psychopathic problem of the ghetto Black male? Can you imagine? The country would burn down. He shows the receipts. He delivers it in page after page in chapter 3. And his, his point is from K through 12 education all the way to who gets shot by, who gets shot by cops. You would think that if you pay attention to the mainstream purveyors of culture that only Black men such as myself and DeRolo are ever in danger of being shot by cops in a, in a, in a pullover.

1:25:51 However, he lists in a random year he picked, 2015, at least 9 situations across the country where Black men— I'm not sure, not Black men, where white men were shot either crossing the street, uh, fumbling with, um, their pockets, later found to be unarmed, robbing some places and then being shot, or where, where cops served warrants on doors they weren't supposed to go to, which happened to have white men behind them, and those white men were shot. In 2015, he pulls at least 9 examples of these from publicly available records.

1:26:32 And then he closes, of course, with the infamous 1619 Project and, as he puts it, woke washing in Hollywood films. And his last paragraph in Chapter 3 is this— you'll like this— neoracism was once fringe ideology believed by a few radical academics and activists, a belief system without any real currency in wider society. I hope the previous chapter has convinced you that this is no longer the case. Neoracism now infects most of our major institutions, government, education, media, and more. The question remains, and we're going to talk about this a little bit later, how did neoracism go from a fringe belief system into the mainstream.

1:27:17 That's chapter 3 of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.

1:27:25 We are approaching— and by the way, full disclosure, DiRollo graduated from Cornell University. I don't think you would mind me telling that. Just like Mr. Hughes graduated— publicly available information. Just like Mr. Hughes graduated from Columbia University, both of which are identified by folks like myself who graduated from state-level institutions as elite institutions. I did not get into Cornell, but I also did not apply to try. I was like, you may not have tried. Cornell, right, right, right.

1:28:03 And I did fine at my state-level institution. I am not complaining, nor am I resentful. I'm not quite sure I would have done better with a Cornell degree or even a Columbia one. And by the way, I've worked with people on the backend of Columbia. They're great people, but there's some challenges in the institution of Columbia University. Oh yeah. Such as it works. Without a doubt.

1:28:27 Such as loving terrorists.

1:28:31 Let's not bring that one up. Well, I mean, queering the Intifada, right? I mean, I don't even know what that means. I've mentioned that before on this show. If you get to the point where you're saying that as a student, you have clearly overpaid for something that you clearly do not understand. You've overpaid. You do not press go. Do not collect more than— don't collect anything. Don't collect a dollar. Go back to the beginning and start again. You've clearly missed something. Anyway, question.

1:29:04 After laying out those receipts to Rolo, what do we do

1:29:11 as we approach our 250th birthday in America this July? What do we do about these elite institutions? How do.

1:29:21 We excise, to paraphrase from Elon Musk, the woke mind virus that seems to be infecting these elite institutions? Because this is that split, more representative of that split that I was talking about, the W.E.B. Du Bois versus Booker T. Washington. I don't know average either white or Black or Native American or Asian or whoever you want to pick group of people on average who are talking about these issues as consistently as we see elites in our media, in our academies, in our governmental institutions, and quite frankly, um, in our K through 12 and college education systems talking about them and trying to redress grievances.

1:30:04 The regular people living regular lives, doing regular jobs in places outside of those four pillars, they're not consumed with this trash. Why, for the life of me, I'm going to deliver it to you. Why are the elites consumed with this garbage? And you have direct— you, and I'm asking because you have direct, you've had direct contact. You've gone to school with these people. You've seen them up close.— maybe in some cases you've worked with them— why are they captured by these, by these what Rob Henderson would call luxury beliefs fundamentally?

1:30:37 Because they live in an ivory tower, right? Because they're comfortable and cushy in a world of their own making that reinforces their genius, where their genius is honored, and where the invalidity and inefficacy of what they are evoking um, in whatever form of— and in whatever medium, okay, is not apparent. Whereas if you just start on the ground, okay, this is gonna— I'm gonna make a really weird comment in about 15 seconds, so get ready. Uh, when you start on the ground, you won't even get up to them because it's entirely impractical.

1:31:14 Here's a really weird experience. Want to hear something good about Marxists?

1:31:21 Uh, sure. Yeah, you're like, no, I don't— like, that doesn't exist. No. Um, sure, I dump on them all the time, so let's, let's go ahead. Level— and certainly the two original philosophers, okay, Marx and Engels, um, on some level they were confronting a practical reality. So for me, right, okay, we can move forward by confronting the practical reality and engaging in— within building new institutions and engaging in justice, not social justice, actual justice, so that the practical reality of people in America changes in the direction we want.

1:32:08 If we do that, all of this talking that these people are doing, it can start to get quieter because people can move away from that. Okay. Um, it's just like, I feel like one of the quips in response is just to act like you're at a protest, there's a protester, and it doesn't matter if you're the counter-protester or the protester, that which side you're on and what the issues are aren't relevant. But somebody is yelling something, and one of the first questions for me is, great, it's the middle of the day, why aren't you at work?

1:32:39 Oh, you don't have a job? Oh, okay. That's failing to confront a practical reality right in front of the person. Okay, get that guy a job, his life starts to change. Teach him while on his job about other things that matter, and all of a sudden this man can begin to grow, can begin to shift. And then all of a sudden, at some point, he's going to hear or see something that says, wait a minute, that's not true. I was there, you're lying. Like, I used to live and work in the Middle East, and I remember an incident my clients were involved in, in a country the US was at war in.

1:33:15 I read about it in The New York Times like a year after it happened, and I could pick out the factual errors in the actual article and not merely with information I had because it came from my clients. There was an article published in the local paper that, that happened like the next day. Okay, that was better reporting than The New York Times reporting. Okay. It was full of holes. It was terrible. And so I was there, as it were. So I remember What I heard, heard what I heard from my clients, what I read in the New York Times, that was garbage.

1:33:46 Okay. And so that, in other words, dealing with the practical realities that we're all experiencing, that people are experiencing, that's how you, that's how you make meaningful change happen. That's how you make the reality of being colorblind happen. And one individual can do it. And as long as each individual listening makes that commitment and then identifies certain objective actions, it will happen. Okay? And it may not look the same for each individual. Okay? It may even involve some choices that seem to conflict with the notion of colorblindness.

1:34:29 Okay? It may. I recognize that. But at the end of the day, if the vision you're pursuing is we're a society where we look like all different backgrounds, types of people. There are not bars, there are not congenital disabling conditions in terms of people's rights. They're not inherited privileges. Okay, inherited money, yes. Inherited privileges, no. You know, inherited money is fine. Inherited privileges aren't. Not for anyone who's a Democrat with a small d, right? And so, meaning someone who finds morally objectionable and legitimately challengeable a political structure that says you can inherit the right to tell me what to do.

1:35:10 That's what I mean by Democrat. Okay. That's what any Democrat, small d, is going to object. That's what I mean.

1:35:19 Where does power derive from and how can it be obtained without violence? Well, right. Either you can vote or you could be born in the right family. Okay. Nope. Anyway, Um, so I think focusing on the practical reality that are, you know, that is confronting Gen Z, Gen Alpha, freaking Gen Gamma, whatever, um, will help make the colorblind vision a reality. Okay, Hollywood is great. Hollywood is— and, and Hollywood is great. Hollywood is not good.

1:35:59 Hollywood is great. Hollywood is not good, okay? And so Hollywood is a great broadcaster of ideas, lots of which are pernicious, okay? But a great broadcaster, okay? But at the end of the day, it's still broadcasting. And eventually you stop scrolling, you turn off the streaming, and you have to go to work if you're most of us between 18 and 65. So that space, that's where you can have an impact. That's where you can engage with people. And as you put it, us Booker T types, right? Watch me end up eating that comment later.

1:36:38 Us Booker T types are dealing with the practical reality of what tools are in your hand and what are you going to do. I mean, I met a brother who owns a successful business here in Phoenix. We met, oh, within the first 12 months. And literally, like, he started with like a bucket and a mop and grew it into this whole business through his own initiative. There's a guy I follow, a Muslim guy I follow on— I think he's on he's Insta, on Insta or Facebook— and literally came out of prison, so no one's gonna hire him.

1:37:03 So he started with one— he, he got money and like bought a grill and then went and bought the license or whatever from like Walmart to grill the hot dogs. That's how he started. And then he branched out and they got a truck and doing trucking, and I write children's books. This man travels to other continents with talking about his children's books, and people are inviting him. It's amazing. America works. Capitalism works. And when— and colorblindness works. And so when colorblindness works, we will see that colorblindness works.

1:37:38 If in contrast, okay,

1:37:42 we decline to and shy away from and avoid and overlook the practical reality that, um, what I'm going to call the formerly proletariat, okay, uh, the plebeus, uh, no, the plebs urbana, okay, so the propertyless, skillless urban masses, okay. Now if you look at the world We've now crossed the threshold where most humans are living in an urban space. So it's highly relevant when you have propertyless, skill-less masses of people living concentrated. Okay. They are the building blocks of revolutions.

1:38:26 They are the building blocks of armies. They are the building blocks of change. And so you want hope and change? Show those people that America works. America moves in a much better direction. If in contrast, you just keep telling them that not only are they victims, but they're victims connected to this other conflict in the Middle East with— And then all of a sudden, life is one big protest and it's great. But for me, I still can't but notice it's great and y'all ain't working. Except the paid protesters, they're working, they're getting paid.

1:39:04 Yeah, but they're going home to an apartment they don't own. None of those people have to pay a mortgage. End of story. Right, right. And it's either they're cushy so they don't have to pay a mortgage and they really believe in this stuff. That's not— that's, you know, 2%, 9, or at best 98% or more. No, that's not the reality they're dealing with. Okay. Plebs, Urbana. That's what— that's what we're dealing with. And whoever gets Whoever gets a hold of them, whoever gets a hold of those people's hearts, that's who's going to steer the ship.

1:39:38 Okay. So, Zohra Mamdami, I'm looking at you. I'm looking you dead in the face right now. And, and, and whoever it is that the Democratic Party puts forward as president or candidate running as a candidate for president of the United States, I'm looking at you dead in the face. I'm also looking at every single person in a Democratic district running in the midterms in 2026. I'm looking you dead in the face. Because here's the reality that the other part of the reality that DeRollo has not yet touched on, but I'll touch on it.

1:40:14 The, the, the, the replacement for a job is not political power. The replacement for a job is not the cultural power that you think the TikTok algorithm is giving to you because you have you know, 50,000 followers, and every single time you, you put something out there, uh, you get claps or likes or whatever the hell it is they, they do on that platform, right? Uh, that's not a sign that you are doing something that is meaningful in the hierarchy of society as work is. And so this gets me to my follow-up question, which is this:

1:40:58 The protesters around illegal immigration right now, the vast majority of them around illegal immigration deportation practices, are affluent white liberal women. The acronym for them is AWFLs in some parts of the internet. That's an awful acronym. That's terrible. I did not, I did not come up with it. It, but it is there. Um, and, and my, my—

1:41:27 I wonder if the solution for most of this is to just eliminate tenure and have professors go get, to your point, regular part-time jobs. You can still teach the neoracism of 20th century white poets like T.S. Eliot in The Wastelands Or you can still teach the unfair lottery of healthcare and how it impacts racial disparities that you spent 7.5 years writing a PhD paper on that no one read and cannot be replicated either in the social sciences or the humanities and increasingly the hard sciences, but we'll leave that aside for just a second.

1:42:15 The replication crisis is unbelievable. Um, you can still be a professor based off of that. You can still appeal to the PhD board, but we will not at these elite institutions give you tenure. Instead, we will allow you to work part-time. You will have full healthcare, by the way, because that's really what you all want. So you'll have full healthcare, you'll work part-time, and you are required to go get a part-time job at And I'm going to say the name of the most horrible institution out loud so we know what we're talking about.

1:42:48 Most horribly capitalistic institution that anybody could imagine who's listening to this, Walmart. You must go work as a stocker at Walmart because what, and this is my proposal, this is my simple proposal, my simple solutions. Eliminate tenure, have every professor go and work part-time stocker at Walmart, part-time stocker at the fruit stand, part-time stocker at the bodega. Part-time Uber driver, part-time DoorDash driver. That way you interact with real people who don't care that you're exploring racial disparities in nursing.

1:43:26 They only want you to hammer a nail so the 2x4 that's holding up their house doesn't fall down. They only want you to make sure that you stock the cans on the shelf so the labels are facing out. They want you to, like I did yesterday, I had a project at my house. I went and rented a skid steer and my neighbor with a tractor came over and helped me out. And between the tractor and the skid steer and me practically shoveling for half the day, I moved about a ton and a half of dirt around my property from a recent project that just got finished.

1:44:03 And by the way, I've got a master's degree. And you can tell from the way I'm talking that I'm fairly intelligent. This, I think, is what we have to return to. We have to return to the merging of— we have to move away from what happened in the 20th century, which was the specialization at scale of professorial and academic status, and move toward at scale the deconstruction of that. So that those professors can, much like Bill Withers or Hunter S. Thompson or any artist that's worth their salt, actually Charles Portis who wrote True Grit, who actually, you know, like did real stuff with real human beings, can move closer to having those kinds of interactions.

1:44:53 That's what I would propose. That's the proposal I would put forth. You got to go work a real job. You got to go work a real job, even if it's a part-time job. You were just part-time. I don't care. Go work a real job where you're touching on real people who will never attend your elite college. They can't get in the door. They make $30,000 to $50,000 a year and they have to, to Rolo's point, practical considerations like,

1:45:16 uh, you know, I got to make rent. So I appreciate the fact that you wrote this non-replicable

1:45:24 research on this social science paper that does not matter. I appreciate that you did that. Please make sure the cans are turned with the labels facing out. And please do that. Practical. That's helpful. Yep. Yep. You know, and I know that sounds harsh. It sounds harsh because a lot of those people would push back on me. Those PhD level people would push back on me and they would say, well, we were doing all that stuff in graduate school and the PhD tenure is the reward. But the challenge is those tenure track positions have dried up because guess what?

1:45:55 What the society is demanding from elite institutions is not more elite navel-gazing. They're demanding practicality. And how is that practicality going to come unless you actually have people who know how to deliver on it? Which is why community college professors, by the way, are much better than elite college professors.

1:46:18 Yeah, I think my solution would be harsher. Um, I, I would just get the federal government out of it. I would just get the federal government out of higher ed, and then the market will decide. Um, Harvard can decide however many tenured professors it wants, or what have you, and what it wants to spend based on its endowment, you know, and donations, and that's it. And if they manage it well, which obviously they have over so many centuries, then they'll be fine. And if they don't, they'll be out of business, period.

1:46:53 And so I think it's a greater challenge for state institutions, but to me, that's where it's more fun. Harvard can take care of itself. That's why it's there.

1:47:04 And it's like, oh, they get money from the US government for this because they're smart. That's why. It's the government who's being dumb. Harvard is being smart, right? And so, and we're being dumber even than the government because we voted in. The people who are doing— we voted, right, right, exactly. And so when we vote in different people and then they say no more, the federal government is getting out of higher ed, all of a sudden there's going to be— there will be, there will be a crash, right?

1:47:35 People will say, oh, I can't afford to go to college. And all of a sudden you have tons of practically minded people who will be interested in business and because doing business things because they have bills to pay. And they won't see— because the media won't tell them— but they won't see, hey, wait a minute, I just saved you $200,000 in debt that is not tied to real estate.

1:47:59 You can't afford to go to college, great. So in other words, you're going to get a job and have no debt, right? That sounds like you're ahead. Sounds like you're ahead to me, you know. Um, but But after that happens, right, then there's going to be an oversupply problem. Too many colleges and too many positions and nothing is happening and not enough students. And all of a sudden they'll just start shuttering all over the country. Basically, I think that that vision that they are still trying to operate on hit its maximum capacity about 1970.

1:48:31 That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. And they need, they needed retrenchment since then. And I know it's true in New New York, where I was born. Um, it's— they needed retrenchment since 1970. Um, there were— when I left in 2020, there were 64 public colleges, uh, and universities in New York system, and there are 66 counties. It's either 66 and 64 or 62, um, institutions for 66 counties. Okay, it's crazy. Okay, it's way oversupply. They need to reduce it to about 7 and take their best people and put them in the 7 and then cluster the graduate stuff.

1:49:12 So in 7 locations in New York, you have undergrad, but you also have the engineering school, the med school, the dental school, the law school, whatever other school you need. That's, you know, I'm forgetting one. At least if you had 7 of those, that would be awesome, and it would cost less money. It will cost less money. You don't need all this institutional infrastructure, which really means paying people in the middle who aren't doing anything, right? Right, right. I mean, all those administrators, all those administrators that are like doing nothing.

1:49:45 Yeah. And getting, you know, amazing pensions, benefits, but they're doing nothing and they're driving up the cost. Right, right. And again, if the federal government's not in it, you can't do that anymore. The cost is going to come down because who can afford to pay that extra? Nobody. The only way it's affordable, just like similar— it's similar with modern real estate prices. The only way it's affordable is because you're really shifting the cost down the road and over 30 years because somebody else is footing the bill now on paper.

1:50:13 That's all right now. That's all, you know. Yeah. And I happen to think that's a good thing in real estate because again, it's actually attached to something that is going to appreciate. And so— and that is going to be around if guy over here defaults, right? And so that's a more solid base than investing in someone's education. That's only solid when you have a reasonable assumption that the person is going to be able to get a job that earns him or her enough money so that they can pay you back on time.

1:50:45 And when those— any of those factors fails categorically or systematically, you got a problem. And so there's your U.S. student loan debt crisis right there. Right there. Yep. Yeah. All right, one of those three problems, you know. But yeah, so colorblindness works. So if colorblindness works— we're coming up on, uh, yeah, we're coming up on the end of our time together here with Rollo. uh, We've, we've, uh, we've had a good conversation here. Get the book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.

1:51:22 He does propose a solution. I want to be very clear. I want to give credit where credit is due. He proposes a solution at the end of his book in Chapter 6, which we're not going to get to today. It's called Solving the Problem of Racism in America. And in Chapter 6, he lays out an ambitious plan which sort of walks the line between, um, what DiRollo is talking about and what I'm talking about here, sort of takes a middle ground. Um, he addresses the limits of the potential for equity and how to fight racial discrimination against minorities and even within minority groups.

1:51:59 He talks about the uncomfortable truth of affirmative action and what that actually means, particularly in university admissions, which is what DiRollo and I were talking about. And he talks about some anti-racist alternatives to affirmative action and the limits of race-based policies. He also says, in essence, kind of like that meme that you see online sometimes that says, which way, Western man? And there's a person having to go either left or right. He talks about which way, American man, in here by talking about how we have an option to go down one of two roads, either anti-racism or neo-racism or something else totally different.

1:52:43 I would conclude— we gotta wrap up here— I would conclude that in the 21st century, part of the restoration project that we're going to be going on, I think at least for the next 25 years, if I'm so blessed to see all of this and live so long, I think the thing, the path that we're going to go down over the next 25 years is going to be part of our collective? I think of the old boxer back in the day, our collective Roberto Duran, No Mas moment.

1:53:16 You know, I, I, this will be short, I promise. So when I was in George Bush International Airport in Houston yesterday, the woman waiting on me, her name tag said Camacho. And of course, I'm, you know, almost 50. So when I hear— and I'm not Hispanic, so when I hear Camacho, I of Hector Macho think Camacho. Yep. She didn't know who that was. She didn't know who Macho Camacho was. And I'm like, wow. I said, okay, I guess I'm old, you know. And she's like, oh, I gotta look it up. And I'm just like, I know President Nixon was— like, my name is Nixon.

1:53:56 I know, I know the famous Nixon. Like, there's a famous Camacho.

1:54:02 One, you know. Yeah, one. Just like there's a— there's only one— there's only one Roberto Duran. There's Duran Duran, which is not the same thing. Um,

1:54:14 Roberto. One Roberto. Being a rock star used to be something, man. There you go. Um, I think one of the things, one of the parts with that no más moment is that we are going to realize the limits of equity. I think the hangover from the 20th century is painfully being worked out right now. And part of the hangover of the 20th century destruction of— or the 21st century destruction of 20th century institutions that we thought were all solid, part of that hangover is understanding and recognizing and returning back to a more constrained vision.

1:54:52 I'm going to mention Thomas Sowell yet again on this show for the second time. Shout out to Thomas Sowell. Um, a more constrained vision of trade-offs. The world is tragic and brutal, and there are only trade-offs. There are no utopian solutions. Words, of course, mean things. And DiRollo and I are both wordsmiths. We use words, we write books, we make arguments with words. We are, we are, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins, drunk on ideas sometimes. But these ideas are focused around words and words mean things.

1:55:26 And currently, and this is what was refreshing about Coleman Hughes's book, we have lived through an era, both DiRollo and I, I approach 50, he's almost 50 himself. Our language for the last 25 years has been unserious and imprecise. I think George Orwell would probably turn inside out if he were around right now. And with our words and our language being unserious and imprecise, that reflects or is a reflection upon our general incompetence with the concepts and the ideas that lay atop realities we cannot negotiate away from, regardless of our class, our status, or even our immutable, unchangeable characteristics with which we were born.

1:56:09 By the way, that sentence right there is the sentence of a serious person. Who's actually thinking about this seriously. Here's the other thing. I think corporate shaming, government fiat, uh, and educational indoctrination cannot overcome the results of incompetence and ignorance and the inbreeding of ideas among those class structures and those class elites who want to protect their own gains at the expense of everybody else. And DEI and systemic racism and all these other things are mere cover to protect what they really want, which is status and power.

1:56:49 The last thing I think we will go through over the next 25 years is this, and I think it is the most important, and is most important for leaders. If you've made it to the end of this show so far, here's the most important thing. African Americans have decisively, legally, culturally, and even socially won in air quotes, the argument with America. And by the way, you know how we know we've won? Because people who have our exact same level of melanin and yet come from places like Ghana and Nigeria and Jamaica and Kenya and Somalia and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands come to America and they do better than those of us who have quote from Jesse Jackson during Barack Obama's campaign, slave blood, a.

1:57:43 Hell of a line. They do better. That was a hell of a line. Caught me by surprise when Jesse Jackson said that. That's a hellish line. Wow. And so if the folks who have the same level of melanin come to America and do better, or at least as well, as those who were born in America, the penultimate question for African Americans in the 21st century will be, now that you have won, what exactly are you going to do with your win? How exactly are you going to proceed forward from here with your win? And how are you going to deal with the situation when it comes about?

1:58:35 And it will in the next 25 years. And I already think we're seeing a little bit of a preview of coming attractions of this dynamic with how little we see Black Americans protesting around the illegal immigrant activities of ICE. How little we see. What are you going to do when you're just at the end of it, at the bottom of it all, at the end of all the struggle and the strife, you're just another American? And if leaders can't help, if leaders can't rise— and I think if Coleman Hughes is any indicator, I think leaders will rise from the younger generation.

1:59:18 Who will view themselves as just Americans. I think we will get an answer to that question. I think it's going to surprise all of us old guys. Mm-hmm. But I don't know what the answer will be, but I do know that's the question. What will you do with your win? Yep. What will you do when you're just another American?

1:59:43 Mm-hmm. Final thoughts, DiRollo, on this contentious topic, but one that we have to talk about. We have to talk about because if we don't, we are behaving as if we are, well, childlike in our colorblindness, or maybe childish. Maybe that's a better way of framing childish because childlike is a little bit different. Childish in our conception of colorblindness. Final thoughts on Coleman Hughes, on the end of race politics. Or even on the arguments for colorblind America. Final thoughts, Guy, you have the last word.

2:00:16 No, I think it's great. Thank you. No,

2:00:20 it's well-timed. It's an exciting convo. Thank you, all you listeners and viewers who stayed with us this whole time. Yeah, no, it excites me. I'm excited about where America can go. I'm excited. I'm not one of those who who withdraws and refrains, for example, from having children because they're, you know, worried about what's coming. I'm not. I'm excited. You know, it's a big year, the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding. And I think that there's a lot there in that that needs to be explored.

2:01:01 There's still more polemics that need to happen, more scandals that need to happen. But, you know, this, this is, this is life in America, and it's, you know, this free brawling republic is just like that. And so, you know, I'm excited. I'm excited for this guy's future. So yeah.

2:01:23 And with that, well,

2:01:27 we're out.