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Coleman Hughes

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Coleman Hughes in June 2019

Coleman Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host.

He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.

Quotes

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  • Many black progressives use the myth of collective, intergenerational transfers of suffering to exempt themselves from the rules of civil discourse.
  • Progressives ought not dodge the question: Why are blacks the only ethnic group routinely and openly encouraged to nurse stale grievances back to life?
  • Almost all successful examples of reparations [...] have been to the specific individuals who were harmed, not to their grand-grandchildren. My ancestors were on Thomas Jefferson's plantation; we can prove it; we have the documentation. The question from a policy perspective is, in a condition with limited resources where we are trying to fix the broken public education system, where we have health care costs that are so far gone compared to our peer countries, [...] that we can either allocate limited resources based on who needs it the most, or you can give it to someone like me because my grandparents were on Monticello. The second thing doesn't make sense, and doesn't make sense to most Americans, and it shouldn't make sense.
  • There are videos of white people, getting killed by the cops, with their hands up begging for their lives every bit as brutal and terrifying and awful as the videos we've seen. At all the Black Lives Matter protests there's this thing, they always say 'Say their name!' [...] There are so many white names. There are in fact, in absolute terms, there are more white names than there are black names. And I've spent some time looking at them and they're identical. The case is for every black person killed by the police there are usually two or three white people that died exactly the same way. Nobody says their names and nobody cares. That seems to people like the correct moral bias because we're imprinted with the symbolism of the civil rights movement, but we have to outgrow this if we're going to be a cohesive country going into the 21st century which is a very different reality than where we're coming from.
  • [About Black Lives Matter:] If not for Black Lives Matter, I'm not sure how much we'd be talking about [police reform, qualified immunity, universal body cams, military grade weapons in the police]. All these strike me as good ideas [...] and I think Black Lives Matter deserves credit for [them]. At the same time, the central premise of their movement is not true: The idea that we have a problem with racist cops killing unarmed black people. And it's a dangerous myth because it's the kind of myth that if you believe it, it makes sense to go out and riot and destroy businesses and loot and set things on fire. [...] And that's the narrative we've been sold for the past roughly seven years, let's say, and then the nation started burning. And I don't know who else to blame than the people who spread this myth.
  • [In 2018, Donald Trump passed] a bipartisan bill, that includes every progressive criminal justice reform that people on the far left have been calling for since 2007, called the First Step Act. He releases a couple of thousand inmates from federal prison, reduces sentences for a couple of thousand more. The majority of these people are black. It shifts the focus from punishment to rehabilitation. It's just everything that you wouldn't expect a sort of law-and-order politician like Trump to do. And of course he got no credit for it because it was too awkward and surprising to admit that he did something like that. But that was exactly the kind of progress that if it had come after a riot, people would have seen it as proof that riots work. But because it just came out of the blue, in the middle of Trump's first term, people just didn't even pay attention to it. My point here being that progress is happening all the time it's not that it needs riots to happen, it's that all the people that are justifying the riots are not paying attention when the progress is happening.
  • [About black people being over-represented in criminal statistics:] As any intro stat student will tell you, you've got to control for the confounding variables. Men make up more than 90 % of victims in all these cases whether you're talking about brutality, prison, shot by the cops, or otherwise. Men are of course only 50 % of the population. Just viewing that fact doesn't tell you anyting about anti-male bias per se. It's impossible to not to talk about the underlying facts of racially disparate crime: 13 % of the population commits, and suffers, 52 % of the murders. [...] Virtually all of the disparities [...], show [young black men] in particular, showing up at heavily disproportionate rates and that's a first order problem. The police are coming into contact with young black men far more often as a result. [...] I'm not saying there's no racial bias in police; I think there is. [...] But I don't want to be such a self-flattering backseat driver to the cops whose job it is to actually keep everyone safe, including black and hispanic people, the vast majority of whom do not commit crime even in the most criminal neighborhoods. Virtually every study I've looked at that controls for all of these variables finds no anti-black bias in deadly shootings. Sometimes they find anti-black biases in cops' likelyhood to put his hands on and rough up a suspect and that's very real problem, but there's really no disparity to be found when it comes to a cop's decision to pull the trigger.
  • Mainstream media outlets selects for people who make points that feel good, that preach to the choir, that don't involve any statistics because people don't what to hear numbers. Ever. They want to hear short soundbites and maybe, at most, a story. And anyone who wants to get more complex than that is going to find [themselves] relegated to non-mainstream.
  • We're living through a moral panic, one of the great moral panics of American history, about racism and white supremacy.
  • [About defunding the police and replacing it with community created police:] A lot of the problems are inherent in the job itself, no matter who you get to be the police.
  • People have long defended affirmative action by saying 'It's really just a thumb on the scale. It's used only as a tie-breaker between otherwise identical candidates.' I've always known that that's just a lie or just uninformed by the people who say it. But it does betray a sense that even defenders of the policy are a little bit unconfortable defending the reality of it; they would wish it to be more of a thumb-on-the-scale thing but it's not. And we've had research that's shown that for several decades actually. Thomas Espenshade found it was the equivalent of 450 SAT points for an Asian student relative to a black student, everything else held equal.
  • I was one of the many people shocked to the point of humor when Black Lives Matter had, as a part of its platform, the end of the nuclear family, criticizing this as a heteronormative, patriarchal system. That you can run an organization meant to solve problems for black America, look out on black America, and say "I know what the problem is: Too much marriage. That's really the problem." That you can even really entertain that thought says something about the lack of logic you're operating with.
  • The way that I think about wars in general is not just in terms of the actions of the armies, but in terms of what kind of society they're trying to build. [...] I think you can go through every single war in history, be right about who the good guys were, and find war crimes done by the good guys. A hundred percent with no exceptions. If the crux of talking about [the Israel-Gaza conflict] is to get at who is on the right side of the conflict, you're having the wrong conversation. The right conversation is what are the aims of each side, what are they trying to do, what are they trying to build.
  • [About Donald Trump:] Trump ended up governing very differently than he talked and maybe that was obvious to some people that got Trump, but it was not obvious to me who didn't get Trump in 2016. And so I'm certainly much less afraid of a Trump presidency than I was in 2016, because I understand the vast gulf between what he says and what he does. He talks in a stream of consciousness way and entertains ideas far crazier than what he would actually do. And it may be true that because he talks so crazy, I think the immune system of America reacts to him in a way that we react to no other president.
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