The End of Race Politics

Starred review from January 15, 2024
A Black writer and social critic questions America's fixation on questions of race. "I am what you would call half-black, half-Hispanic," Hughes writes, considering just what such terms mean; Barack Obama, he observes, was of mixed African and European ancestry, but he was considered Black. "But why?" he asks. "The answer, it seems, is that American culture still observes the old 'one-drop-rule'--whereby anyone with one drop of 'black blood' is considered fully black." Our present set of racial categories is impossibly arbitrary, Hughes argues, noting the case of a young woman who, though from a historically impoverished community, was denied entry to Harvard because she was Asian, a category considered to be overrepresented at the school. Harvard has a Black population of about 14%, not far from the share of the general population, but that specific cohort is not "descended from American slaves but from post-1965 African or Caribbean immigrants." All of these factors flow into what Hughes calls "neoracism," against which he argues for colorblindness that bypasses the social constructs of racial categorization. Recognizing inequities, the author advocates not for general reparations but for specific restitution for those still alive who were directly harmed by Jim Crow segregation; this works around "the neoracist pretense of undoing past wrongs [that] reflects a desire for something like what Thomas Sowell calls 'cosmic justice.'" Hughes' citing Sowell might cause some critics to brand him a conservative, but the author's politics are refreshingly hard to pin down. He rejects white supremacy and disputes ethnic generalizations while vigorously opposing affirmative action, which "provide[s] institutions like Harvard with a pretense of social concern" that frees them from actually having to do anything about social injustice. Contrarian and pointedly provocative, with arguments worth discussion on campus and beyond.

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