Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

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? 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.

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.

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.

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.

This is going to be the anchoring quote for our— I think for our show

today. He said, I've always found race boring.

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. 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. 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. Leaders,

the rules of the game, the rules of the racial ideological

game are going to be different in the 21st century.

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.

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. 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?

I think it's a great line.

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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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

post— what's his name— post-LAPD

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. 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.

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? 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. 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? 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? 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. 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.

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. 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?

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. 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.

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. No, I was right the first time. And Sunny Hostin, who

is what some of us would call in the Black community—

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. 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. 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.

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. 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,

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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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? 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.

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? 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. 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,

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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? 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. 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?

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.

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

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

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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,

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? 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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—

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Yeah, it's,

it's, it's fascinating because

the public-private distinction is a good

benchmark for measuring

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.

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. 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. 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,

pardon me a second, text message telling.

Me Zoom. Okay, go ahead. Yeah. Um.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

And I got back via Uber.

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. 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.

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. 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. The conversations

I had about slavery yesterday and the day before were fascinating. But most of the

conversations that I

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. 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. And.

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. 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?

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. 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.

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? 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.

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. 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. 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. 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—

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. 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.

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.

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. But your behind is in Starbucks

right now. So I don't want to hear it. Okay.

Is there a benefit?

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.

Yes, because at the end of the day,

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. So Nigeria,

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? 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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? 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.

And just how of powerful those warriors. Were, uh.

Deeply impacts how, um,

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. 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,

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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—

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.

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. 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. 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. That's

chapter 3 of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a

Colorblind America.

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. 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.

Such as loving terrorists.

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. After

laying out those receipts to Rolo, what do we do

as we approach our 250th birthday in America this

July? What do we do about these elite institutions? How do.

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. 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? 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. Here's a really

weird experience. Want to hear something good about Marxists?

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. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. That's what I

mean by Democrat. Okay. That's what any Democrat, small

d, is going to object. That's what I mean.

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.

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. 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. 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. If in contrast, okay,

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. 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. 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. 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. 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:

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—

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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,

uh, you know, I got to make rent. So I appreciate

the fact that you wrote this non-replicable

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? 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.

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.

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.

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? 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. I know, I know the

famous Nixon. Like, there's a famous Camacho.

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,

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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? 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.

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?

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.

No, I think it's great. Thank you. No,

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. 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.

And with that, well,

we're out.