Ep 156: Coleman Hughes Takes on America's Most Contentious Debate: the Legacy of Slavery

22:17Coleman Hughes:King said was the opposite of their philosophy. If you actually go back and read it, right? in his in his book why we can't wait he says we should have class-based policy not race-based policy fundamentally over and over he said what matters about a person is not their racial identity but their individual values over and over again he said this yeah so they have a big problem because dr king still is basically a secular saint in our society as as he should be in a lot of ways. If we're going to have one, he's a very good one to have. But they have to manipulate what he says. So basically what happens, and I've written columns about this, every single Martin Luther King day, there's a trick that's played.

23:00Coleman Hughes:There's like 10 of the same exact article that get written at all the usual suspects. And they're basically copy paste of each other. And every one of them says this, Martin Luther King was really radical. You're like, oh, that's interesting. Hmm. That makes you think, oh, he'd probably support Black Lives Matter and all these things. And then you double click on like what they mean by radical. You ask for the receipts and all the evidence is he was against the Vietnam War before it was cool, which is true. And he was like pro-universal healthcare, Bernie Sanders type economics policies, which I don't agree with.

23:34Coleman Hughes:But there's nothing in there about like racial essentialism, anything to do with race at all. It's just economics and, and his anti-war philosophy. And he wasn't trying, he was trying to lift us all up together. He wasn't trying to tear, tear us apart or just like these guys. So, so it's, it's kind of a bait and switch there where it's like, actually, no, there's no evidence he, and in fact, in his final book, he, the whole second chapter is a critique of the black power movement, which was the BLM of its stay. Really? He actually did a critique of them. Yeah. It's the entire second chapter of his final book.

24:06Coleman Hughes:and he in that chapter he he says one of his critiques of black power is that they should change their name to power for poor people because it should not be focused on race it should be focused on class i love it yeah clarence jones is still alive i had him on the show he's in his 90s he was like he's really smart lawyer yeah we talked about some of these things i didn't realize that at all though one one worry i have actually i'm curious what you think they had uh so caesar chavez was another almost not the level of dr king but very admired in our society but and And they recently tore him down because of some things that came out that he'd done personally.

24:40And the real reason they tore him down, as far as we could tell, is he was a leftist activist that they had his name everywhere. But he was very against legal immigration and very against legal immigrants, which is obviously very problematic for the modern left. And so they so they were kind of I feel like they were looking for an excuse. And then when they found some horrible things he'd done in his personal life, they just took his name right away off everything. And I hope this doesn't help to Dr. King, because clearly his personal life wasn't perfect. Obviously, he did have some complicated things.

25:03like hopefully he's more protected from the things that they did to take down teaser chavez i don't

25:08Coleman Hughes:know i don't know he might be more protected because he's more uh he's he's more beloved by by more people i don't know but he is we know he cheated quite a bit on his wife some of the allegations that have been made through the rumor mill and the fbi spying on him and all that stuff are probably worse than cheating allegations of sexual assault perhaps probably impossible to litigate at this point in time. And I think the values you stood for were so powerfully uniting that hopefully we don't take them down, but I'm worried that the actress will. I mean, the, the, the irony of these things is almost, I mean, so many of the men that are admired from history have these kinds of foibles and the ones we choose to take down are, are a function of which values we want to promote today.

25:54Coleman Hughes:So on the left, you see, I mean, Marx had so many things in his personal life. Such a bad guy. Yeah. He was a terrible guy with his friends, with women, with money, with racism, with the N word, with antisemitism. Foucault, let's not even get into Foucault. It's a weird child stuff. Yeah. Right. So he's a terrible guy. These guys are eminently cancel, cancelable and never canceled. Because he's the far left's in charge of the canceling. So like, let's not, let's not play that game. No, that's totally fair. Well, Well, going back to the kind of modern movements, I think one really big one that you got involved commenting a lot on was the 1619 Project.

26:32The New York Times launched this, I think it was in 2019. Yeah. Right. And can you remind our audience, what were the tenets of the 1619 Project? How did it fit into all of this?

26:40Coleman Hughes:Yeah, the 1619 Project was an effort to tell a version of American history that put racism and white supremacy at the center of the American story as the protagonist of the American movie, if you will, as opposed to a chapter that everyone should study, right? How did they do this? One thing they said is symbolically 1619 was the founding of the nation, not 1776. And what they meant by that was simply that America was a slavocracy when it started, not a democracy. We should view white supremacy as the central uniting theme throughout American history down to the present. Within that, there were a lot of specific claims.

27:22Coleman Hughes:The most controversial, and because it was false and poorly researched, was the idea that the 13 colonies rebelled against Britain in order to preserve slavery. The idea they were afraid that Britain was about to take their slaves or about to emancipate their slaves in short order. And they got together and said, okay, we can't stand for this. We've got to form our own country to protect slavery.

27:49Coleman Hughes:It's I mean, the funny part is they got this historian, one of the historians that got to sort of check the project before it went out because they weren't historians that wrote it. They were journalists. They got this historian, Leslie Harris, who is a very respected historian and happens to be a black woman as well. Hey, like, look at this before we vet it. And she raised a huge red flag. She says, hold on, hold on, hold on. This is totally not true. Right? And they were like, okay, cool. Ignored her, released it as is anyway. And then she came out later and said, I was hired by the 1619 Project to fact check.

28:22Coleman Hughes:I told them this was wrong and they just ignored me. It's crazy. Right. So besides that, I mean, the idea was in Nicole Hannah-Jones's flagship essay was also that black Americans essentially fought alone in order to secure our civil rights. that was that's the exact wording yeah that we we fought back alone erasing the contribution of a every every union soldier that died in the civil war the the whites that flooded the south in the aftermath of of the civil war to secure uh rights for former slaves massive movement all all the the the predominantly jewish but also white lawyers that co-founded the naacp and all the other civil rights organizations where you had really a lot of over-indexing of Jewish involvement in that cause.

29:15Coleman Hughes:You had white civil rights activists that were literally killed in Alabama and other places during the civil rights movement. I had friends whose parents were allies of the civil rights movement who were white, who grew up with like crosses burning on their lawns, right? And stuff. It's crazy to leave them Yeah, it's crazy. And there's really no reason for it other than a pure and unapologetic disdain for white people and a desire to exclude them from the circle of moral righteousness, which in my view is one of the most dangerous paths we could go down as a country is to say some groups of people are just inherently good and some groups of people are inherently bad.

30:00Coleman Hughes:Whichever way that is done, we all know that the white supremacist version of that is dangerous and terrible. But the opposite version that puts people of color in a position of moral superiority, I think a lot of people on the left mistake that for some deep moral wisdom, when in fact, it's just pure identitarian bullying couched in the language and the veneer of moral wisdom. Yeah, no, that's dangerous stuff. Let's go to a few more hot button legacy issues for how you would think about this yourself and how you might teach this for our audience as well. One of the ones I always get in trouble on is family structure stuff, right?

30:39So there's a very famous Senator Moynihan report. This is the Democrat doing the report in the 1960s when they're working on the Great Society type legislation, trying to help everyone. And he warns that there's 25 % of black births are out of wedlock at that point. And at that point, it was about 5 % of white mothers were having kids out of wedlock. I believe today it's about 70 % in the black community. It's over 30 % for whites now. And this is, and like the data is very clear. This is very bad overall on average. It doesn't mean any one of them is not a great person doing the right thing, but on average, this is terrible for our society.

31:11How should we be thinking about this and why has it gone to over 70 %?

31:14Coleman Hughes:So you're asking a question that is very difficult to answer. There's a lot of research on it. I don't think there's a settled answer. So you're right. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1965, he gets asked to do some research that was never meant to be released. It was supposed to be an internal memo for the Department of Labor so that LBJ could study it and, you know, sort of come up with some of his big federal interventions around poverty. And this is also occurring at the height of the civil rights movement. The height of the civil rights movement when like finally enough powerful people in society have gotten behind the idea that black people have got to be allowed to vote, sit wherever you want on a bus, go to go into any restaurant, go to a public park.

32:01Coleman Hughes:And there's this like intense, come on podcasts. Yeah. Podcasts were segregated back then. Um, but like there was this intense celebration around, like, finally we have hit upon the solution to America's centuries long race problem. And then Moynihan comes in right at the height of that. And he basically says, hold on guys, if you aren't seeing this other problem that's happening in the black community right now, um, none of this other stuff in a way is going to matter. Like he supported all that as a Democrat, but he was like, we're, we're, we're totally not even looking at this massive problem that is brewing, which is even though black people can vote and go anywhere you want, how is that, how much status and income is that going to buy you as a black person if increasingly children are born into single parent homes with no father around in whole communities where there are no fathers present.

33:04Coleman Hughes:We've never seen a version of society sort of work with that structure. And we have no idea what's going on. No one's talking about it. We don't know how to solve it. And that's why his report was called The Black Family, the case for national action, right? He was saying, I don't know how to solve this, but we all have to stop celebrating about civil rights. Cool that we did that, but we've all got to get on this new problem right now or else it's going to get way worse. And he was completely right. 61 years ago and we didn't get on it. Yeah. And he was at 25 % at that point. Now we're at 66 % roughly of single parent homes in the black community.

33:42Coleman Hughes:So yeah, the question is like, what happened? I mean, there's one theory is like deindustrialization. A lot of black men used to work in factories in that day and factories got shipped overseas, automated, and therefore there were fewer marriageable men. It probably doesn't have 0 % to do with it, but the idea that unemployment would lead to a bunch of single parent homes, you would expect to see that in other economic downturns throughout history, right? In the Great Depression, for instance, you don't see that. Yeah, it seems like a cultural issue to some degree, right? I mean, there's really successful black men who also don't get married and have tons of kids.

34:22So it's a culture thing, right?

34:23Coleman Hughes:So George Akerlof's, I think, thesis is the most interesting to me and worth exploring, which is in the 90s, Akerlof, the economist, writes a paper called Shotgun Marriage, The Decline of Shotgun Marriage. And he argues that prior to, say, like 1965, 1970, all of America lived in a culture of shotgun marriage, whites and blacks, which is true. The out of wedlock birth rate was like effectively zero. It was probably 5%. There was a lot more shame for it, right? Yeah. There was a lot of shame for it. So he argues like what changed around 1970? What changed is you had birth control pill widely available and abortion.

35:05Coleman Hughes:Now, how does that change like the game theory of mating, coupling, and marriage? It changes it in the following sense. prior to those innovations women had the capability of demanding commitment in exchange for sex meaning that if you know you're a young man you're 20 years old you're meeting a woman at the bar at the dance floor whatever there's an expectation that if you get her pregnant you will marry her yeah and your parents will enforce that and her parents will enforce that and you'll simply obey yeah right and every man understood that that's the culture and women were capable women were cape had enough negotiating power that they could demand that successfully because it's not like the man could just go to a different woman that different woman would have the same exact terms you're not going to get better terms than that in 1950 right yeah but after birth control and and an abortion some women can avail avail those cell themselves of that technology and they can start having sex uh casual sex they can start having casual sex and they won't get pregnant.

36:05Coleman Hughes:So they don't have to demand those same terms, which means that they can get access to that male attention and commitment and not commitment rather, but that male affection without having to demand marriage of this man. That changes the whole market. That changes the whole market because now other women can't compete unless they meet that same price as it were, right? And it's weird to think of the dating market in that way, But it's actually, it does work that way. So Akerlof argues once those things come on board, you get this slow diffusion of totally new market terms where, you know, people expected birth control and the pill to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, but it actually had the opposite effect because it destroyed the shotgun marriage norm.

36:48Yeah.

36:49Coleman Hughes:Amazing. And that hit Black communities harder earlier um not exactly sure why that's kind of maybe under theorized they were already more that way and then so yeah it was already the right thing that was happening right it's definitely it's definitely unfortunate i mean is there anything to do about this uh it's it's really hard to know because once once that a cultural norm like that goes away it's super hard to reinvent in the absence of extremely strict religion. Yeah, that's definitely a challenge. One other thing that comes up a lot, I get this in my replies sometimes randomly on X, is that our national wealth is the result of slavery, that America's wealth overall is tied to slavery, that because of slavery is why white people are richer or black people are poorer.

37:40I mean, obviously there must be something from 150 years ago where black people would be poor, and then therefore they wouldn't be quite as rich today. But how should we think about our national wealth tied to slavery overall? Like in Soviet ties to reparations? Like, how do you think about this issue?

37:51Coleman Hughes:There's a whole school called the new history of capitalism that was popularized like 10 years ago. And the way they argued was basically they would look at how terrible slavery was, um, hit you with a bunch of mostly true facts about how bad it was for slaves. And then pepper in statistics, like at one point, half of American exports in the early 19th century were of slave picked cotton. It's like, whoa, half of American exports. That sounds huge. Right. And then would jump from that kind of, after that mood had been set, would say things like America's national wealth is derived from slavery.

38:31Coleman Hughes:And that sort of, if you read it all in sequence, it all kind of makes emotional sense. Then when you go back and unpack it, you say, well, hold on. Were America's exports the reason we became rich? Half of what? American exports peaked at 6 % in the 19th century. So it was half of 6%, meaning 3%. 3 % of our economy was due to slave pit cotton. Now, that's not nothing. Is that the basis of our national wealth? And then furthermore, you asked the counterfactual question, well, where would the American economy have gone if we hadn't have slavery, if we didn't have slavery, right? You look at the fact that Egypt had slavery and slave-picked cotton at the same time we did.

39:17Coleman Hughes:India had cotton that was picked even more cheaply than slave-picked cotton in America. Neither one of those countries became wealthy the way America did in the 19th and early 20th centuries. What's going on there? And then you step back once again and you say, well, if we're going to talk about national wealth, we should probably first build a model of what makes nations wealthy to begin with. We should probably ask economists who have been studying the subject for hundreds of years, why are some countries rich and other countries poor? And what economists have found is that the countries which are rich, they have these very important wealth-friendly institutions like property rights, individual property rights, without which there's really no incentive to build wealth.

40:03Coleman Hughes:They have legal systems that are predictable and not corrupt. Because if your money can just get stolen randomly, again, not much of an incentive to build wealth. So once you have all of these institutions, you need entrepreneurs to innovate, basically, right? You need labor plus capital plus innovation. That's the solo growth model. So if you look at... Now you asked the question, knowing how growth works in the abstract, what did slavery do to all of those variables in America? Well, did it make our country more stable? Well, actually, no. It caused a civil war that was a massive loss of wealth in the South.

40:45Coleman Hughes:Even before that, the threat of slave insurrections was a major deterrent to people investing in things like railroads in the South. So they demanded higher interest rates. Was it the reason we had those growth-friendly institutions to begin with? Well, no, that had to do with the fact that we were an offshoot of Britain, which is where all of those growth-friendly institutions really cemented and the growth miracles began. And so, and then you get to the question, well, did slavery make us grow faster? Was it somehow more efficient than free labor. And there you've got some very interesting research, which says it wasn't.

41:23Coleman Hughes:So for instance, there's a great paper which compared the value of land on either side of the Ohio River. The reason that's a great natural experiment is because the land is the same, but slavery was legal in Kentucky and illegal in Ohio. So you can look at the output of that land in the 1850s. And what do you find? You find, A, on the Ohio side, on the free side, there are just more people, right? There are more laborers. There's the land is being utilized much more. More of the land is improved and ready to be fielded. So slavery is clearly like, in this case, probably like economically better for that slave owner who runs all those slaves.

42:06He himself is doing better. but then like the land itself is not being used nearly as well as if you have a bunch of free people.

42:12Coleman Hughes:That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I mean, the analogy to think of is like a drug Lord or something like the drug Lord gets incredibly rich, but there's whole swaths of Mexico that are underproducing economically as a result. No one else can invest there. And so what it really, what really happened is slavery caused such a stigma and it was such a repellent of free labor that people did not want to work. People didn't want to move into lands where slavery was legal for many reasons, either because they didn't want to work next to slaves because it was a status thing. And Frederick Douglass talked about that because then you're doing slaves work.

42:45Coleman Hughes:He's one of my favorite guys. Yeah. Or it's because they had moral opposition to slavery, right? So all of the land was being literally half underutilized on the slave side as opposed to the free side. It was not good for the economy. And then the other thing you can look at is just like the natural experiments of mass emancipation events, right? United States had had a mass emancipation in 1865. Russia had a slower mass emancipation between 1863 and around 1900. Brazil had a, had a mass emancipation of slaves in the 1880s. In every single one of those cases, the economy grew faster after slaves were freed than it was growing during slavery.

43:27You're going to give free people the incentive to build for themselves. They're going create a lot more than if they're slaves.

43:31Coleman Hughes:Yeah. Yeah. So, so national wealth is clearly not tied to it. It's clearly part of the whole 1619 kind of fake kind of framework to try to say it is, but yeah, but it's unfortunate because a lot of people at our schools seem to be brought up with this nowadays. It's like, it makes our, makes your society a lot more divided than it should be. It taints our wealth with the moral sin of slavery. Yeah. Which has nothing to do with how I made my wealth as far as I know. I don't know. It's like, it seems pretty disconnected, but no, it's, it's interesting. uh so looking ahead uh we're entering the age of ai right now there's a lot you know the world's changing really quickly a lot of what young people believe is going to be influenced by what their models believe and what they're using like how worried are you about woke ai like should we be teaching students to be more critical thinkers of some of this stuff and some of the stuff that's just wrong and we've gone over going to be enshrined as truth in some of these frameworks like what should we be thinking about this so i i think about it in comparative terms meaning comparing AI to the alternatives that young people would be getting information from, it seems to me the AIs are consistently fairer, less political, and less biased than the alternative sources of information.

44:40Coleman Hughes:So to be clear, I'm not saying there are no biases. I think on balance, there are some liberal biases and chat GPT say, but they're not that bad compared to the teacher at your public or private school, the professor at your college, a random Reddit thread, YouTube videos produced by liberal think tanks, whatever it is, the common knowledge you grew up with in your family, folklore and folk myths. LLMs do a lot better than that whole set. And so my view is to the extent more and more people get their info from LLMs, that would be probably, probably a net good. No, that's fair. Well, we got to keep them accountable with competition, but that's a good point.

45:26Definitely. Definitely.

45:26Coleman Hughes:The competition is very important. The fact that Grokipedia is a great intervention because Wikipedia is going wonky and their efforts to influence it and that therefore influences the LLMs because they're trained on Wikipedia. Yeah. Wikipedia is really bad. It's just been conquered by who seems to be crazy people to me. So stepping back a little bit, how do we get back to racial progress in America? Should we be talking about race less? We still have to talk about it more because of what's going on. Like, how do we acknowledge the mistakes of the past, but then like unite and move forward in a positive way?

45:56Is there a chance we could do this? Yeah.

45:58Coleman Hughes:So I think there's three steps to it. One has been partly achieved, and that is to get race wherever possible out of the law, to get racial discrimination out of the law. And that's been one of the elements of the Trump administration I've supported, as well as the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action that is imperfectly enforced, but still nonetheless a really good signal. We should have roughly colorblind government to the extent that we can. Yeah, because if it's not colorblind, it creates more racism response, right? Yeah, 100%. It just creates an endless cycle of legitimate racial grievances from different groups, right?

46:35Coleman Hughes:And that's the most dangerous situation is several groups that think they are victims for different valid reasons. Right. We don't want to make Asians victims. We don't want to make black victims. No one should be a victim of the government. Yeah. So that's one step. you know step two and a reason i'm always optimistic is because children tend to be naturally colorblind unless they are actively programmed uh another way and i know parents uh parents observe this which is that like your your your child will genuinely almost not even notice the race of a different person yeah or will notice it just in the most innocent and meaningless way Like literally that has, that person has dark skin or that person looks different and it has no deeper meaning to me than that.

47:22Coleman Hughes:It's just like interesting. There's variation in humans and that's it. I have six little kids. That's true. Yeah. And so each new generation is an opportunity to get it right. And what I think we need to, how we need to be educating our kids is, is, is to understand that first their default setting is probably good. And all they need is a little bit of extra reinforcement on treating people, treating people kindly, no matter what they look like. A little bit of Martin Luther King. I have a dream content of character as the norm, right? On Martin Luther King Day at school. And that's it. They don't need anti-racist baby by Ibram Kendi.

48:02Coleman Hughes:They don't need white fragility for kids. Yeah. And unfortunately, there is a whole class of people that have been educated at like teaching colleges and pretty highly progressive institutions that believe kids need to be actively inculcated to think about race more often, which is not true. Sounds like a religion. It's like it's against their original sin. That's crazy. Yeah. And so that's like the cultural intervention that needs to happen. And then the third thing is, ultimately, I think when the economy is doing well and when people feel they have good prospects and good schools, that just that lowers tension inherently.

48:46Coleman Hughes:So we've got to figure out how experiments in charter and public schools can improve lives for poor people, regardless of race. And disproportionately, that would help black people and Hispanics, but not on that basis. And the fundamentals of the American economy have to be sound, low unemployment and yearly growth. And all of that stuff helps. Awesome. Well, I'm very optimistic on the economy, so hopefully you can culturally fix this. What makes you optimistic on the future, Coleman? I think the fundamentals of America are still sound. There's a massive negativity bias in the media. So you always have to correct for that.

49:24Coleman Hughes:When it seems like you're living in the worst of times, it's possible you're living in the best of times. So that's what makes me optimistic. Awesome. Thanks for joining. All right.