Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity

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0:26Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with Coleman Hughes. Coleman has a great new book out, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America. But Coleman is more than just a book author. He is a well -known blogger. He has a very famous podcast, Conversations with Coleman. He has been a star in rap music. He plays jazz music, Trombone professionally in New York City nightclubs And he's all around a public intellectual and famous person Coleman welcome Thank you so much and I have to apologize for stealing the name of your podcast for mine I figured I have a iteration so I have extra reason to do it if your name was Tyler it would be bad But in fact, it's totally fine Now, before we get to your book, I have just some random questions for you.

1:19What have you learned from JJ Johnson? What is most interesting about JJ Johnson is that he was an extreme perfectionist. What people don't realize about JJ, at least people that aren't deep kind of sores, is that most of his solos on his records were prepared to an extent that is not true of his other contemporaries like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, etc. Most of their solos were truly improvised. Like if you go to the alternate takes on those records, it's a different solo. If you go to JJ's alternate takes, it's almost the same solo. And I think that rather than be a bug that was a feature of his success, because if you consider the challenges required to make the trombone into a bebop instrument, which nobody thought was possible before J .J.

2:10Johnson did it. It's kind of a kept 22 because the level of perfectionism you would have had to have in order to be the first successful bebop trombone player would also preclude you from being a truly improvisatory musician, which is generally characteristic of jazz musicians. Are most of your trombone solos prepared? No, but in a way, I benefit, this is why you can't compare modern players to players of the past, I benefit enormously from having studying and learned all of many of JJ Johnson's solos. So there were things he had to invent that are now second nature to most trombonus, which make it easier to improvise in that style than it would have been for him.

2:54Physically, what's the hardest thing about playing the trombone? It's actually not the slide. The slide, in my view, that's what attracted me to the trombone, the fact that you push and pull rather than pressing buttons or valves, and that's what makes it distinct. But the slide motion is not actually the trickiest thing about it. The trickiest thing about it is the same thing that's tricky about every other brass instrument, which is the ambassure. That's what separates great trumpet players from poor trumpet players. In my view, the finger technique is not nearly the hardest part. It's always the small muscles of the mouth and coordinating those to play the instrument effectively.

3:32And how was it you ended up playing Trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band? I participated in the Charles Mingus High School Jazz Festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition. And they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. And I sat in with the band and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey. and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights. And I was probably 16 or 17 at this point. So I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now kind of my mentors, people like Kuhumba, Frank Lacey, who was a fantastic drum -bone player played with Art Blaky and DeAngelo and so forth.

4:22And then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning. And why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is to me, but how would you articulate what it is for you? I would wholeheartedly agree that it's special even within jazz. The way I would describe it is there are certain jazz musicians that seem to have created their own autonomous island within the landscape of jazz, whereas most of the great jazz musicians sort of resided in the same country. certain people were like often Taiwan on like a on their own island. I would put Mingus in that category. I would put someone like monk in that category or net Coleman people like that.

5:04Mingus' music is my favorite of all of those because it's it sounds like Duke Ellington. If Duke Ellington had had an acid trip and composed things that were broadly in his idiom but just everything was changed a bit. That's how I would describe Mingus. And where should a podcast listener or start if they don't know Mingus. I think you should start with Mingus, uh -uh, because it's the album that would most broadly appeal to someone who didn't know, and you know, any Mingus. I would also very much recommend watching his interviews as his personality as part of the experience of listening to him.

5:42And then my favorite Mingus is probably Black Saint in the center lady is, I think, a masterpiece. piece and the lesser known Mingus piece that is a beauty and was part of his multi, his several hour long composition called epitaph, which I think he never finished. But it's a song called Pinky Don't Come Back From The Moon Looking For Love, man. And it's a beautiful 10 minute or so, just gorgeous piece. And he had a penchant for giving really long names and funny names. So he has another one for instance called, it's a counter factor the song, all the things you are. And Contra fact meaning same chords, different melody.

6:25And he called it, all the things you could be if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother. So he had these very funny titles. I'm a lifelong Mingus fan and blessed to play in the band. If I want to be charmed by Puerto Rican music, where should I start? Oh, you should definitely start with Hechtel -Avo. I would say Hechtel -Avo's music. It's incredible. It's incredible to dance to, it stands the test of time. A lot of it is thematically dark, actually. Many of his most famous songs, I mean, so for instance, the other me swed it there is an extremely sad song about how his mother died and then his father died and he had a tragic life.

7:08But you would never know that because it sounds so happy and it makes you want to dance. And it's also probably the best example of how trombones can be used because most of that music was performed with Willie Colone, who's arguably the greatest Latin trombone player, and they would essentially, you know, they could sustain the whole harmony of the band if they wanted to without a piano or a guitar, simply by having two trombones playing triple forte, and that's another thing I really love about that music. is Billy Joel at all any good.

7:46That's a good question. You know, I love piano man. I think it's an incredible song. I can't really speak to that much. Billy Joel being gray outside of the few hits, but piano man, I think, is a correctly rated song. I've been thinking about him a lot lately because he has a men's talent, but I don't like most of it. And that raises interesting questions. But when I hear it on the radio. I don't dislike it. I sort of want to dislike it more than I actually do. So which aspect bothers you? Is it in what sense doesn't matter that he's not talented if you like it most of the time? It feels dumbed down.

8:25I grew up in New Jersey as you did. It appeals to a particular culture that I feel I ought to be rejecting a bit more than perhaps I do. I don't know if I'm allowed to say this given the topic of your book, but in some ways it's too white for me. I mean, rhythmically, it can be flaccid, but like if I hear moving out and you know, hard attack, I enjoy that. Am I wrong? So is it that it was so influential that it's become banal for me? For me, yeah. I heard of that all the time growing up probably in a way you'd be out. How did it strike you when you were growing up? The exact same way. Oh, interesting.

9:04Yeah. So I mean, I was wondering if it's just that it was so influential. It influenced everything else and now sounds banal in retrospect, but it sounded banal at the time. And I think purposely so, but it's interesting when I listen to satellite radio, sometimes Billy Joel is on as a disc jockey. He's an A plus quality teacher about music, how he explains things. And I have great respect for that. Yep. I don't think there's much correlation between being able to explain it well and being able to do it well is one thing I've noticed of of musicians. Now, you were a philosophy major at Columbia.

9:39That's now a while back. But what is it you liked most about continental philosophy? The truth is I didn't resonate with much of any continental philosophy. It struck me as not respecting what I value and writing, which is brevity and clarity. And so I might like to read someone who really gets Nietzsche explained what Nietzsche was trying to say, but reading Nietzsche itself was not a very fun experience for me. And so I gravitated strongly towards analytic philosophy. The expositors are often worse, right? You think, oh, they're going to clarify Nietzsche, but you get something longer and more convoluted.

10:21The ones that are really... The ones that are hyper obsessed tend to be very unclear. What would you change in American high schools if you had a magic wand? That's a good question. I mean, so there is research suggesting that longer school days are a good thing. I mean, you know, Roland Fryer's experiments in Texas where he randomly select schools and extends a school day. Among other things, gets good results. On the other hand, there just are a lot of kids that don't resonate with the structure and skill set of high school or public school in, in, in schooling in general and, and they're, their talents lie elsewhere.

11:05I mean, I, I, I know countless musicians that may have even been diagnosed as quote unquote ADHD in school, but the realities they had no trouble focusing in general and certainly had no trouble, trouble focusing on practicing their instrument for five hours at a time, but had no interest in school as it was structured. So I'd be curious what can be done to make school more tolerable for those kinds of kids. We'll get back to miscellaneous questions. But now let's get to your book. Again, the end of race politics arguments for a colorblind America. How would you give us your bottom line message in the book?

11:43I don't usually do this, but how would you explain it? Yeah, I would basically explain it by saying the idea of colorblindness, by which I mean trying to treat people without regard to race and having colorblind, race neutral public policy. That's become a dirty word and a dirty concept in particular on the left in the past couple decades and really in the past decade. So this book is an attempt to rescue colorblindness from the jaws of disdain and argue that it It is the best overall philosophy by which to view the idea of race that we want to raise our children. Even if it's a watered down version of MLK, we ought to raise our children on that message and we ought to get race out of public policy and wherever possible, wherever plausible, use socioeconomics where we want to deal with issues of disadvantage.

12:39If I understand you correctly, you're also suggesting in our private lives we should be colorblind. Yes, broadly, yeah. Or we should try to be. We should try to be. This is where I might not agree with you. So I find if I look at media, I look at social media, I see a dispute, I think 100 % of the time I agree with Coleman pretty much on these race -related matters. In private lives, I'm less sure. So let me ask you a question. Could jazz music have been created in a colorblind America? Could it have been created in the colorblind America? In what sense do you mean that question? It seems there's a lot of cultural creativity.

13:25I mean, one issue is it may have required some hardship, but that's not my point. It requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it, that the people making it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities, and to them it's not color blind. Interesting. So my my counter argument to that would be in so far as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time in the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in St. New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially, interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc.

14:15So yeah, I'd argue that ethos of jazz was more colorblind in my sense than the American average at the time. But maybe there's some portfolio effect here. So yes, Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as I'm sure you know. And that works marvelously well. And it's just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this. But can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is pulling from something deep in his being and his soul about his racial experience, his upbringing, the people he's known, and that that's where a lot of the expression in the music comes from.

14:53And that is most decidedly not colorblind, even Even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson. Yeah, and maybe I'd argue it may not be culture blind though it probably is color blind. In the sense that black Americans don't just represent a race. That's what a black American would have in common. That's what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia is that we're broadly of the same quote unquote race. We are not at all of the same culture. And so to the extent that there is something called African American culture, which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip hop.

15:36Yeah, then I'm perfectly willing to you can see that that's a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture. But then here's my worry a bit. You're going to have people privately putting out cultural visions in the public sphere through music, television, novels, a thousand ways, and those will inevitably be somewhat political once they're cultural visions. So these other visions will be out there and a lot of them you're going to disagree with. So it might be fine to say it would be better if we were all much more colorblind,

16:19but out there, do you not have to in some sense counter them by not being so colorblind yourself and say, well, here's a better way to think about the black or African American or Ethiopian or whatever identity. Yeah, I think that's right. I think they're compatible in the sense that you can sort of push for the soft version of something and the harder version of something if not at literally the same time than by turns. What I've sort of been arguing for is a kind of firewall between the cultural versions you're talking about and the political aspects. But I think you're right that in practice, they may bleed into each other.

17:01They might correlate very highly, right? Maybe I, Coleman Hughes, have no problem separating the fact that I grew up with black and Puerto Rican music and have a special attachment to it. Also I have a special attachment to Puerto Rican food, for instance. I have no problem separating that aspect of me from a demand that the state treat me and my racial group differently, or a political program based on race broadly. But it might be the case that for many people, those are just kind of one in the same or they draw on the same impulse. Now, I'm Irish American and sometimes I go to Ireland and other times I go to Scotland and I enjoy them both.

17:42I don't really think intrinsically one is sort of better or worse than the other, but I would admit that I honestly feel somewhat better about being in Ireland. For some weird arbitrary reason, I think I'm Irish American, this to me is just a bit more interesting. And it's probably me fooling myself, but some parts of it even feel a little bit more familiar than Scotland would. And I fully admit that my placebo or my own self -dolution. Should I feel bad about thinking that way? No, I don't think you should feel bad about thinking that way. And I think that I know much more about Puerto Rico than I would if I weren't one half Puerto Rican.

18:24I know much more about it than I know about the Dominican Republic, say. However, I would ask you a question. I would turn it around. I would ask you, if you were to write an MR post about some issue in Irish or Scottish politics, do you think you would analyze them differently or do you think you would put that little feeling to the side? I think I would know more about Ireland. It would be different. I don't think I would consciously be biased, but I don't think I could quite do it neutrally either. And I'm pretty distant from Ireland, like no relatives there. I've only been a few times. I'm not like an Irish American, you know, sending money to the IRA and drinking in a stereotypical Irish American pub.

19:07There's not really much in my life that would be in the last period. Yeah, but this is what worries me a bit. So if I went to say Ireland and Africa and then when I'm in Ireland, I feel a bit better there because, oh, I'm in Ireland. That's a place with white people, I definitely would feel bad if I had that opinion. And I don't. In fact, I actually, if anything, I'm the kind of prefer to embrace that, which is in some ways distant from me along those margins. But it would be wrong, right? If I said, oh, well, I'm in Ireland, you know, I'm white, that's the white people's place. I can feel a little better about that than being in Ethiopia.

19:49Yeah, then there again, I would underscore the distinction between race and culture. I don't think anyone should feel bad about the inevitable fact that we have more cultural attachments to the things that we know and the places we're from and the foods we grew up with and the music we grew up with. That's all inevitable. And I even don't begrudge someone saying, look, I'm Jewish. I would frankly prefer to live in a Jewish community. I would prefer to marry a Jewish person and so forth. But all of those kinds of feelings, I would argue, are inevitable and you shouldn't fight within yourself. However, I think there should be a strong firewall between saying all of those things and saying, you know, the state ought to treat my group special because of this or another reason.

20:43And like I said, that might be a too hard a distinction for some people to draw. It's not a hard one for me to draw. And so maybe I falsely assume. It's realistic to advocate other people draw it, but that seems to me a sensible place to draw the line given we have to draw it somewhere between Everyone's irrational individual with no attachments whatsoever and any and all expressions of racial and group pride are okay I agree fully when it comes to the state But in terms of separating race and culture they seem quite intertwined to me and a lot of people's cultures talk about their race. It can be in quite unpleasant ways in many cases as we both know.

21:24So is there really that firewall there? I would argue race and culture are fairly distinct. The fact that in America right now, arguably the most bitter kind of differences between two different white cultures, right? I think was it David French who wrote the piece about the Great White Culture War, something like that, a few years back, where you have sort of white Americans of a blue culture and white Americans of a red culture, some who grew up with 50 guns thinking it's normal and some who literally couldn't tell you the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, looking at each other and feeling really all of the sociological kind of feelings of tribal hatred towards one another, but are totally of the same race.

22:19I think that kind of underscores the difference between race and culture. Let me try another hypothetical on you. You might ask, well, should we be race blind, but should we be autism blind? So if I meet a person who is autistic or I think they're autistic, I'll make a point of speaking to that person more directly. You could say I would treat them differently. I think it's efficient, I think it's welcome, it leads to better outcomes, but I wouldn't say I'm autism blind. Now autism isn't culture, it's not race, but it is mostly genetic, right? It's a thing you were born with. Should we be autism blind or ADHD blind or whatever else blind?

23:03No, I don't think we should be autism blind. I think in so far as you know, someone has a totally different communication style. You know that they don't read facial expressions well. It makes sense to take that into account in all of your interactions and communications with them. And for instance, I don't argue that we should be gender blind because at least not in the same sense we should be, we should try to be raceline because there really just are important differences between men and women that shouldn't be ignored, right? You shouldn't treat anyone worse, but I also wouldn't necessarily treat my brother and my sister and my mother and my father the same in every possible conversation or scenario, right?

23:49So it's not about a hierarchy of treatment. It's simply non -identical treatment, right? But my point about race, I think, is that race really is whatever you think about its constructed nature, it's much more socially constructed than all of these other categories, right? Autism is just, there's no, if we have autistic people in a thousand years, they're going to have the same symptoms that they did a thousand years ago. The classic differences between men and women today are quite similar to what they were 50 years ago, and there will be differences between men and women in 100 years. But race is not really like that.

24:34What we think of as a racial difference is heavily influenced by culture. In that sense, they're intertwined, but I think it's much more fertile ground for progress to advocate that people treat those of different races without regard to their race, then to treat people with, say, different personality conditions or genders or so forth, things that are frankly less malleable to begin with. And it's most fundamental terms. If you had to present the micro -foundation for why does race get so much blindness in your view? So culture is extremely contingent. And yet there you don't want us to be culture blind.

25:18And then autism say is mostly genetic. And you don't want us to be autism blind. So the extreme contingent and the extreme non -contingent, you don't want blindness. But there's some point in the middle where blind just makes sense. Or how does the whole model operate? So I guess the model operates in the following way. If I meet two people of a different culture, I'm not going to treat them differently. In other words, let's say to dissect out the variables, I've got an Ethiopian and a black American, same race, totally different cultures, and they're both applying to work at my podcast. I'm neither going to consider their race nor their culture if they're editing my podcast, say, right?

26:02I really only care about their competence there. The sense in which you might not be culture blind is I wouldn't fault the Ethiopian guy for saying, look, I want an Ethiopian wife and I like Injira better than I like barbecue. In that sense, I allow him his non -culture blindness and I don't make him feel guilty in the sense that I don't make you feel guilty when you feel a little bit more bit of something for Ireland. But I would still insist on not treating them differently, right? Not treating them differently where the different treatment might amount to some kind of injustice. I wouldn't insist on being deliberately obtuse about the differences between people with a different mental competencies like autism or depression or God forbid schizophrenia, right?

26:52Schizophrenia blindness is just being obtuse, right? The problem is that schizophrenia is actually a perfect proxy for having a different mind. That's, definitionally, that's what it is. Whereas a person's race is not a very good proxy for having a different mind at all. And it's certainly not a good proxy the moment you have more information about them. The only situations where it might be a good proxy, if you picture a quadrant with stakes and information. So if you're in the quadrant, that's high stakes and low information, you know that there's a bomb in Times Square and you've only got two seconds and you have to decide between the guy that looks like a terrorist and looks like the race of most terrorists you know.

27:37Okay, well, I'm not going to fault you for paying attention to race in that particular corner case. In most of our life situations, we're in the other three quadrants of situations that are either low stakes, high information, low stakes, low information, or low stakes, low information. Or did I get all three? I might have messed that up, but you get the point. We're meeting friends at coffee shops, we're introducing each other and so forth. in scenarios where we can learn about each other. And the moment we have that, race falls away as a very useful proxy. As you probably know, a disproportionate share of American CEOs are quite tall.

28:14How do you feel about lookism? Yeah, lookism is another one where I would feel, it's not that I don't think it's an injustice of some kind. It's that I would feel silly spending very much time trying to budge that particular variable because I don't think it's that budgable. Not saying it's not movable at all, but I would argue that, for instance, in my view, attitudes towards racism have changed pretty dramatically in the past 50 years, in the past 100 certainly. I don't know that attitudes towards lookism have, and that leads me to believe that look is a might be something more like closer to a constant, whereas attitudes towards race are fairly influenceable by, let's say, those of us who are in the marketplace of ideas.