Hughes’ Views

Has "wokeness" peaked in society?

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Back from his sojourn in the Land of Lincoln, Jonah invites Coleman Hughes–host of the Conversations with Coleman podcast–onto the Remnant for a lively discussion of race and religion (everyone’s favorite topics). What’s the relationship between authenticity and identity? Is it possible to completely root out racism in American society? And what danger does audience capture pose to responsible journalism?

Show Notes:

– Coleman’s webpage

– Conversations with Coleman

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  1. A Fine Friend

    I wish there have been some acknowledgment in the conversation about reparations that slavery *itself* violated the rules of fairness, the rules about equitable contracting and the market exchange of labor for wages. Slavery and Jim Crow *themselves* violated every free-market, liberal norm of treating individuals as individuals instead of as members of groups.

    To say, yes, I know that we subjugated Black people based on their group membership for many generations, legally stealing their work, and buying and selling them like animals, and then we continued subjugating them for many more generations through a sharecropping system that routinely underpaid and overcharged them and had the deliberate goal of replicating slavery as closely as possible. I know we did all that. We didn’t treat them as individuals, but instead as group members of a subjugated caste.

    But now, now that it’s time to make things right, we’re all individuals here. And we couldn’t *possibly* try to restore some of what we took based on group membership - even though we subjugated them based on group membership - we couldn’t do that, because that would be wrong.

    At least acknowledging why that is unsatisfactory – even if it’s the best that we can do – would go a long way to make me feel like this was a more honest conversation.

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  2. Xander.Kastan

    Jonah, great interview overall. My comment is rather tangential to the main discussion in response to one of your side comments. Christians (for example) who say they agree with everything Jesus said can come at that from one of two directions: They look at what they believe Jesus said and assume it must be flawlessly correct. Alternatively they can interpret him and/or dismiss some quotes in order to make him only say things that they believe are worthy of the perfect man he must have been. These aren't completely mutually exclusive -- they can be doing some of one and some of the other, not consciously, of course. I don't see that as substantively different from what people do to other heroes raised to sainthood such as Martin Luther King or Ghandi. The main difference is that it's a lot easier to know what someone said and thought when that someone lived within the last couple of centuries and the documentation is so much greater in amount and quality than someone who lived in the ancient world. For example, if Jesus actually told his followers to forsake their families, how much emphasis did he put on that and how literally did he mean it? And is that good or respectable advice? I don't think it's right to say those are not fair or interesting questions, just because Jesus is religiously revered. (I acknowledge there are contexts where it would be impolite to raise questions of this sort, but the particular object of adoration is not really relevant to that either.)

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  3. Payette

    Excellent discussion.

    I agree that wokeism is getting less hair-on-fire press, but it is clearly still alive and well as required DEI pledges. You might consider interviewing Dr. Stanley Goldfarb who addresses this in medical schools, practices, Medicare reimbursement, hospitals.

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    Ben Connelly

    This was a fantastic episode. I’ll have to check out Coleman’s podcast.

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    The Stray Goose

    Mr. Goldberg. I enjoyed this episode especially much (mucher? especially more? - hell, whatever).

    Please fix the audio issues. The 'tape' skips back and forth several times. This has happened before. It fouls an otherwise exceptional podcast.

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    Mesulkanen

    Looking forward to the day when a guy like Hughes gets his due on the big MSM stage.

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    Mesulkanen

    Great conversation. It’s frustrating that this type of talk is, frankly, heretical in the MSM. Wouldn’t it be great to have during this month of African-American appreciation a round table discussion on, say, a CNN special. But we don’t have the ability to do so. Instead we get the ritualistic blabber from the bullies like Michael Eric Dyson. So tired of the war of aggression that the those guys get to wage against the most progressive society with no counterpoint. Jonah push on this at CNN, please.

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    Ted Gale

    Glad to see you had Mr. Hughes on . . . I first heard him in a conversation with John McWhorter some time ago . . . thought "this is a guy worth keeping an eye on." . . .

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    Theirnscott

    I've only listened to about half of this podcast. I will definitely finish it because the conversation so far has been extremely interesting. I'd never heard of Mr. Hughes before today. I will be researching him and his past writings. Thanks for introducing him to us.

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    Rdbarris

    Both Jonah and Coleman dance around a thought that I have recently had on the reparations debate: what is the correct counterfactual to determine the "damage" that current Black Americans have suffered?

    Isn't the correct counterfactual the lives they would have if their ancestors had not been forcibly brought to America? In other words, what would be their circumstances if they were still in Africa. If this is the correct counterfactual, then, as a group, the current generation of Black Americans have unquestionably benefited from the forced transfer of their ancestors and no reparations are due.

    (The advocates of reparations implicitly acknowledge this issue when they claim that current white Americans have benefited from the wealth and capital accumulation which was partially the result - although they vastly overstate the degree - of slavery. But, as Coleman points out, this general point about benefiting from the accumulated capital and higher productivity of the US economy is equally true for Black Americans who therefore have a higher standard of living than they would have if their familial line had stayed in Africa.)

    At one point, Jonah says that this argument is "fraught." But why? It appears to be a perfectly reasonable argument and certainly stronger, in my opinion, than Coleman's argument against the "social scientism" of the reparations claims.

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      Ted Gale

      I would also push back on the assertion that slavery was the "engine" that drove the economic success of the United States . . . there is an observation in Toqueville (quoted in the first episode of Ken Burns' series on the Civil War) that contrasted the dynamism of the North with the relative torpor of the South.

      I would want to do some more digging, but I am wiling to entertain the hypothesis that a South (and, by extension, an America) without slavery would have been, over the long haul, better off . . .

      [After all, one of the great advantages the Union had during the Civil War was its vastly superior industrial capacity]

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      1. Randall Briggs

        Frederick Law Olmsted and Harvey Wish, in The Slave States (1955), made some of the same observations that Toqueville did.

        White Southerners believed that cotton exports drove the U.S. economy. The Civil War proved otherwise. The South's economy collapsed while the North's economy boomed.

        This is a wonderful podcast.

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        Rdbarris

        Of course. The belief that that cotton/slavery was the main driver of the US antebellum economy is completely false - as demonstrated, as you pointed out, by the vast economic advantages enjoyed by the North in the Civil War.

        National Review has just done a good discussion of this issue in a review of the absurd 1619 Project: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/the-1619-projects-confusion-on-capitalism/

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        CynthiaW

        Thomas Sowell has comprehensively analyzed the contention that slavery is a driver of economic development in any society.

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          Ted Gale

          I think I have heard him talk about that in an interview -- although I did not have him specifically in mind when I wrote earlier this morning, I am sure that his words were among the seeds for my musing . . . [Time to hit the books. Fortunately, there is little I prefer these days--it is almost always an adventure.]

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