Coleman Hughes Gives Hosts of 'The View' an Education on Race and Individualism

'My argument is that we should try our very best to treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and our public policy.'

It’s not an exaggeration to say The View is one of the worst shows on TV—and that’s really saying something when you consider the amount of dreck on TV these days.

That said, the show recently invited Coleman Hughes on to discuss his new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. And the discussion is worth watching:

Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal, gave an exemplary performance before what was clearly a hostile panel, explaining what real anti-racism looks like.

“A lot of people equate color blindness to ‘I don’t see race,’ sort of pretending not to see race. I think that’s a big mistake. We all see race, right? And we’re all capable of being racially biased. So we should all be aware of that possibility. My argument is not for that.”

Hughes then delivers in just one sentence a simple idea that has been lost in our society.

“My argument is that we should try our very best to treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and our public policy,” Hughes says.

The line drew applause from the audience and is going viral on social media, which is great to see.

This is the essence of individualism. It’s the simple idea that people are individuals who exist independently of their “collective identity,” and they should be viewed by everyone just that way: as individuals.

This is the opposite of what is preached in universities today, where the gospel of intersectionality trains young people to see the world through the lens of their collective identity, and divides the world into two classes: oppressor and oppressed.

This is the zeitgeist that drives thought, discussions, and systems today. Indeed, View host Sunny Hostin suggests to Hughes’s face that he’s been “co-opted” by the right— simply because believes humans should treat one another as individuals!

He responded coolly and professionally.

"There's no evidence that I've been co-opted by anyone,” he tells Hostin. “I have an independent podcast, I work for CNN as an analyst, I write for The Free Press, I'm independent in all of these endeavors and no one is paying me to say what I'm saying."

Hostin apparently is not a student of philosophy. If she was, she’d realize there is nothing “right wing” about seeing individuals as equals. It’s not just an idea espoused by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, as Hughes points out; it’s a tenet of classical liberalism.

Here is how F.A. Hayek aptly put it:

The classical demand is that the state ought to treat all people equally in spite of the fact that they are very unequal. You can’t deduce from this that because people are unequal you ought to treat them unequally in order to make them equal. And that’s what social justice amounts to. It’s a demand that the state should treat people differently in order to place them in the same position. . . .To make people equal a goal of governmental policy would force government to treat people very unequally indeed.

I haven’t read Hughes’s book yet, but I might have to get it. My hunch is he’s going to be an intellectual heavyweight for some time.