Written by Bo Winegard.
I am haunted by the fear that progressives more clearly understand race than mainstream conservatives. By this, I do not mean that they accurately grasp the nature of race differences or correctly diagnose the causes of race disparities. Rather, I mean that they comprehend the power, the importance, and the inevitability of race. And thus while conservatives have attempted to alleviate racial tensions by promoting colorblindness, progressives have eagerly exploited racial politics.
Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics, confirms and deepens my fear. Lucid and engaging but rarely straying from Reaganite orthodoxies, it could serve as a philosophical manifesto about race for mainstream conservatism. Therefore, its failure to wrestle with the difficult and perhaps insuperable problem of race differences while promoting a superficially appealing but ultimately doomed vision of colorblindness is illustrative of more than a flawed book. It is illustrative of a flawed political movement.
Because the ideal of colorblindness is pervasive among conservatives and centrists, and even among many liberals, my criticism of it and of The End of Race Politics will undoubtedly rankle many readers. Certainly, I take no great joy in it. Ten years ago, with minor quibbles, I would have praised the optimism of the colorblind ideology. Now, I consider it a pernicious will-o’-the-wisp, alluring but implausible and therefore dangerous. Like other seductive ideologies, it cloaks with virtue its falsehoods and improbabilities. It doesn’t debate or persuade. It converts or it condemns.
In the twentieth century, conservatives, embracing their role as hardheaded realists, correctly resisted and ridiculed communism, perhaps the most seductive and venomous ideology ever conceived by man. But today, they embrace colorblindness and its inevitable consequences, e.g., rapid demographic change, widespread racial progressivism, and the demonization of anyone who resists. After all, in a colorblind world, drawing attention to racial differences or to the deleterious effects of demographic change is not just wrong, it is heresy. We may see race, and we may see that the racial composition of the West is changing, but we cannot discuss it. At least, not without an armory of euphemisms.
My hope in this piece, a critical review of The End of Race Politics, is to convince conservatives to reconsider their position.
