The End of Race Politics

What would it mean to truly see beyond race? In The End of Race Politics, Coleman Hughes argues that America’s next civil rights movement must reject the pervasive obsession with racial identity and recommit to the colorblind ideals at the heart of the original one. Hughes contends that what now passes for “anti-racism” has metastasized into neoracism—an ideology that cloaks itself in the rhetoric of justice while reviving the same race-based thinking that past generations fought to abolish. To move forward, he says, the nation must return to a vision of moral equality that measures people by their character, not skin color.

Colorblindness, in Hughes’s framing, is not a call to ignore difference but to remove race as a factor in how we treat others privately and how we design public policy. Throughout the book, he explores how race-based frameworks in education, government, and culture—even when meant to fight racism—entrench division and injustice. The idea that discrimination can fix discrimination, he argues, is not progress but a dangerous illusion.

From Personal Story to National Diagnosis

Hughes opens with his own experience: a black and Hispanic child in New Jersey who barely thought about race until elite schools and progressive institutions forced him to. A lesson he learned as a teen at a “People of Color Conference” haunts the rest of the book: he was told that having his hair touched out of curiosity was a microaggression, a “microdose of the same poison” that killed Emmett Till. That reframing—of irritation as victimization—revealed how an ideology of racial essentialism could turn curiosity or normal discomfort into moral transgression. When he later saw that same worldview dominate his college experience at Columbia, Hughes realized that the so-called anti-racist revolution was deepening racial consciousness, not dissolving it.

He positions neoracism as the successor to both segregation and white supremacy, claiming the same foundation: the belief that race defines moral meaning. Authors like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, he says, have institutionalized a new racial etiquette—one that demands submission to collective guilt and racialized rules of speech. Hughes warns that this new creed, dominant across universities, corporations, and media, “brands itself anti-racist yet operates as the mirror image of what it condemns.”

Why Colorblindness Still Matters

For Hughes, colorblindness isn’t naivety or denial—it’s an ethical commitment. Like Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass before him, he sees it as the only workable principle for a multiethnic democracy. Race, Hughes reminds us, is partly social fiction and partly biological shadow. It has no fixed scientific basis, yet society uses it as though it were destiny. Policies that depend on racial classification—whether to segregate, preferentially hire, or shape education—force impossible questions: Who counts as black or Hispanic? How black? By what ancestry or perception? From the absurd pencil tests of apartheid to today’s grant applications asking for blood fractions or checkboxes, Hughes sees bureaucracy repeating moral mistakes in new forms.

He argues that if America’s historic evil was discrimination by race, many now embrace its “progressive” inversion—discrimination in favor of some races. Both rest on the same flawed logic. To heal, we must, as King put it, eliminate “the idea of race” from politics altogether. Hughes connects this not only to moral clarity but to practical justice: race-based policies fail because racial identity is a crude proxy for the problems—poverty, disadvantage, and exclusion—that policy actually seeks to solve. Income, education, and opportunity make far better measures.

The Cost of Race Obsession

Hughes traces how an age of moral victory—the Civil Rights Act of 1964—was swiftly followed by backsliding. Within years, he shows, government, corporations, and universities replaced segregation with quotas. What began as an effort to abolish racial distinctions gave way to programs that required them. The contradiction, he says, explains the rise of today’s polarized racial politics, where elite “diversity” initiatives coexist with racial resentment. America, he warns, has normalized what Justice John Marshall Harlan condemned in 1896: the idea that government should see color.

Through the book’s six main parts, Hughes dismantles the myths sustaining neoracism—from the Disparity Fallacy (assuming that unequal outcomes always prove racism) to the Myth of Undoing the Past (believing new discrimination can correct historic wrongs). He draws on logic, data, and history to show that neoracism not only misdiagnoses but worsens inequality. Racism, he notes, is not healed by condemning one tribe and sanctifying another; it’s cured when we build systems that treat every individual fairly, blind to race.

Why This Argument Matters

For readers exhausted by the new moral theater of guilt and grievance, Hughes’s case offers both critique and hope. He writes not to dismiss the reality of racism but to insist that the cure matches the disease. “We can’t fight bias by institutionalizing it,” he says. His aim is not ideological reversal but ethical consistency: the same principle for all. The dream of colorblindness isn’t about blindness at all—it’s about vision clear enough to see people as more than proxies for their race. In an America tempted to trade old hierarchies for new ones, Hughes asks us to remember why the first revolution against race politics succeeded—and what it will take to finish it.

Coleman Hughes begins his exploration of race by asking a deceptively simple question: What is race, really? For most of us, race seems obvious—it’s the color of skin, the ancestry on our family tree, or a set of shared features. But Hughes argues that race is neither a natural biological fact nor a mere social illusion. It’s a hybrid concept: a social construct inspired by a natural phenomenon, much like how months are inspired by lunar cycles but don’t actually track them precisely.

Race as a Hybrid Construct

Human populations formed genetic clusters as groups migrated from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, becoming somewhat distinct through adaptation and isolation. These differences left visible traces—skin color, facial features, and slight genetic variations. But the clusters overlap too much to form clear boundaries. As Hughes explains, if you tried to draw lines between races using genetics, those lines would always cut through areas of overlap. Race, like a calendar month, is a man-made category loosely based on natural cues.

This understanding underlines Hughes’s point: the races we recognize—“Black,” “White,” “Asian,” “Hispanic”—are not scientifically fixed but politically created. Government bureaucrats, not biologists, have decided what counts as a race for purposes of the census, affirmative action, and funding. Often, these categories reflect historical prejudice more than reality.

How Bureaucracy Reinvented Biology

Hughes documents absurd examples showing how arbitrary racial classification becomes when used to distribute benefits. The U.S. Small Business Administration once denied a Spanish-born woman’s minority status for not looking Hispanic enough—while approving a Sephardic Jew on the basis of ancestral Spanish roots. A Hmong student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was rejected for a fellowship for being “overrepresented” in STEM, though her group was one of the most underrepresented by income and education. These stories, Hughes says, reveal the injustice built into policies that use race as their metric of fairness.

When the government decides who counts as disadvantaged, it must draw bright lines where reality offers none. The result is irrational: a person’s eligibility for funding or opportunity might hinge on whether a grandparent was born in Spain or Portugal, or whether a college administrator interprets “brown” a certain way. Hughes sees this as an unavoidable problem, not a fixable one. Once public policy makes racial classification central, arbitrariness infects everything.

Better Proxies for Justice

So what’s the alternative? Hughes insists that social policy should target what we actually mean when we talk about disadvantage—material poverty, lack of education, and social isolation. Income, not identity, is a more accurate measure. He notes that one in five Black Americans today are first- or second-generation immigrants with no ancestral connection to American slavery. A race-based reparations or admissions system treats them the same as descendants of slaves, demonstrating how racial generalizations flatten experience and obscure need.

He points out that even civil rights icons like NAACP attorney Robert L. Carter understood this decades ago: if race is irrelevant to human worth, it cannot be the basis for law. Hughes argues that just as we limit government power to censor speech because legislators can’t be trusted to do so wisely, we must limit its power to grant or withhold rights by race. History makes clear, he writes, that whenever government is allowed to discriminate racially—whether against slaves, immigrants, or “privileged” groups—it eventually misuses that power.

A Return to Principle

To Hughes, this argument is more than empirical—it is moral. If fairness requires that we treat people as individuals, race-based policy becomes not merely clumsy but unethical. We can acknowledge inequality without building new systems of classification. When politicians claim they can implement only the “good” kinds of racial discrimination, Hughes calls it “dangerous wishful thinking.” The wiser path, he concludes, is to take that power away entirely—to build a society in which justice never hinges on boxes checked or bloodlines traced.

To understand Hughes’s concept of neoracism, imagine replacing the biology of 1950s racism with sociology, and you have its modern mutation. Neoracism, he suggests, disguises itself as moral progress but operates by the same logic that once justified segregation: it defines people by race and insists that race determines moral worth. Where old racists said white superiority was natural, neoracists now claim moral superiority for people of color and permanent guilt for whites.

How Neoracists Think

Hughes outlines how neoracist ideology spreads through expressive moral inversion. Robin DiAngelo asserts that to be “less white” is to be “less racially oppressive,” implying that whiteness equates to arrogance, ignorance, and coldness. Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates portrays “white freedom” as selfish, violent, and predatory. Such language, Hughes argues, mirrors the stereotypes of the old Jim Crow era—only with the moral polarity flipped.

He also points out that neoracists rely on contradictions: while declaring that race is a social construct, they enforce rigid rules about who can do or say what based on racial lineage. A white woman cannot cook Mexican food; a white student must not critique a Black author. Hughes compares this to an atheist following every verse of the Bible—proof that neoracists don’t act as if race were constructed; they behave as if it were sacred.

The Return of Race Supremacy

One of the book’s most provocative claims is that neoracism and white supremacy share the same DNA. Both divide the human family into moral castes. White supremacists once treated people of color as inferior; neoracists now treat whiteness as inherently corrupt. Both assert that individuals should be judged by group traits. In this sense, Hughes writes, “They are two species of the same genus.”

He illustrates this through examples: New York Magazine’s video “So What Are White People Superior At?” gleefully lists “violence” and “lack of empathy.” At Harvard, students during an affirmative action debate shouted “There is!” when a lawyer jokingly claimed that perhaps Black and Latino applicants were “more personally appealing.” In studies Hughes cites, college students agree with Hitler’s words about Jews—if “white” replaces “Jewish.” For him, these incidents show how moral righteousness can quickly become cruelty disguised as justice.

From Anti-Racism to Moral Theater

The practical danger of neoracism, Hughes warns, is not only hypocrisy but power. Its logic is now built into institutional life—from HR seminars to publishing boards to school curricula. Books and TV shows that feature colorblindness are denounced as racist; authors and comedians apologize not for bigotry but for insufficient race consciousness. Hughes notes that this ideology’s rise parallels all the hallmarks of a moral panic: censorship, punishment, and orthodoxy masquerading as virtue.

Ultimately, Hughes treats neoracism as an ideology that exploits good intentions. People want to end injustice but are offered a counterfeit: instead of human equality, they are given racial hierarchy reversed. Instead of reconciliation, they are trained for eternal conflict. True anti-racism, he concludes, must reject this new tribalism in all its forms and recommit to the principle that changed the world once before—colorblind equality.

Hughes’s historical excavation in chapters 2 and 3 aims to correct what he calls “the false history of colorblindness.” Many modern academics, he writes, claim that colorblind ideals were conservative inventions. In fact, they were born among abolitionists and civil rights radicals. Hughes traces this lineage from Wendell Phillips in the 1840s to Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, revealing a through-line of thinkers who saw colorblindness as the only moral response to racism.

From Abolition to the Fourteenth Amendment

Wendell Phillips, the “golden trumpet” of abolition, proposed a constitutional amendment that would create “a government color-blind.” His goal was not just to end slavery but to bar all future state action based on race. Phillips’s version of what became the Fourteenth Amendment would have outlawed segregation before it existed. But political compromise watered it down, leaving only a promise of “equal protection.” That half-measure, Hughes notes, allowed “separate but equal” to flourish decades later.

From the Courtroom to the March

Justice John Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson—“Our Constitution is color-blind”—became the creed of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP. When Marshall argued in Brown v. Board of Education that the state must not use race “as a factor in affording opportunity,” he was reviving Harlan’s principle. Yet even Brown, Hughes notes, reached its decision on weaker grounds—psychological research about dolls rather than the constitutional ban on racial distinctions. This substitution, Hughes argues, betrayed the moral clarity of colorblindness for the ambiguity of social science.

By the 1960s, civil rights icons A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin continued this legacy, demanding “the abrogation of every law which makes a distinction based on color.” The 1964 Civil Rights Act capped their efforts. Ironically, the ink was barely dry when new policies reintroduced racial preferences in hiring and education, often under the same politicians who promised to end them.

When Progress Betrays Itself

Hughes labels this reversal “the betrayal of colorblindness.” After riots in the late 1960s, politicians fearful of unrest enacted explicit racial quotas—the “Philadelphia Plan,” affirmative action, and minority set-asides. What began as a universal promise ended as a system of selective bias. To Hughes, this shows how easily moral cause turns to moral confusion when principle gives way to politics.

He further rebuts neoracist historians who call reverse racism a myth. The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, from King to Randolph, rejected both white and Black supremacy as “equally evil.” True progress, Hughes writes, was built not on guilt or retribution but on the conviction of common humanity: what Douglass called “the one race which exists.” When universities now label that phrase a “microaggression,” Hughes sees proof of how thoroughly progress has been forgotten.

For Hughes, reclaiming this forgotten history is crucial. It reminds us that colorblindness is not denial—it’s discipline. It is the moral technology that dismantled slavery and segregation, and it remains America’s best hope against the ideologies that would rebuild them in another form.

Hughes devotes his third major section to diagnosing how neoracism gained institutional power. It isn’t just a fringe idea in activist circles, he warns; it now shapes policy across media, government, and education. From newsrooms to city halls, racial double standards have become normalized—and the harms are visible across all communities.

Government and Racial Engineering

In 2021, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan offered billions in pandemic aid—except white farmers were excluded. Similarly, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund promised support first to minority- and women-owned restaurants. When courts ruled these programs unconstitutional, the backlash focused not on the policy but on the white plaintiffs who objected. Such examples, Hughes says, prove how moral inversion has made racial discrimination fashionable again, provided its targets are white.

When Colorblind Medicine Became “Racist”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some agencies proposed prioritizing vaccines or treatments based on race to remedy inequality. In New York, guidelines gave automatic eligibility to nonwhite patients but required whites to show additional risk factors. Hughes argues this approach literally valued lives differently by skin color—the very definition of racism. Such policies, he writes, would have struck down more elders of every race, including Black ones. They replaced mere bias with bureaucratized inequity.

Race Politics in the Classroom

Higher education, Hughes observes, has become neoracism’s most reliable sanctuary. Yale hosted a psychiatrist who spoke gleefully about “killing white people in my fantasies.” Colleges across the country now host racially segregated dorms, graduation ceremonies, and “safe spaces.” These gestures, sold as empowerment, revive segregation under progressive branding. Similarly, Texas A&M’s race-specific hiring funds and Minneapolis’s race-first teacher layoffs show how systemic discrimination can now operate in anti-racist packaging.

Cultural Power and Media Myths

In media, Hughes spotlights selective outrage. The 2016 police killing of Tony Timpa—a white man suffocated by officers—barely registered in national coverage. Compare this to the outcry after George Floyd’s death, he says, and you see not justice but racial favoritism. Hughes demonstrates that bias in the stories we tell distorts our perception of reality: people assume more than a thousand unarmed Black men are killed each year, when the true number is closer to a dozen. He links these distortions to moral narratives like the 1619 Project, which falsely claimed America’s Revolution was fought to protect slavery.

This cultural imbalance—where mocking “whiteness” is satire but defending colorblindness is taboo—reveals who holds moral authority today. Hughes concedes that overt white supremacy has withered, but he fears a new tribal orthodoxy is taking its place, sanctifying prejudice if it’s painted in progressive colors. “Racism didn’t vanish,” he writes, “it changed direction.”

If neoracism needed a fuel source, Hughes argues, social media and smartphones provided the spark. Looking at Gallup data, he notes a stunning shift: from 2001 to 2013, most Americans—Black and white—believed race relations were good. Then, around 2013, perceptions collapsed. Nothing about policy, policing, or actual racism explains the drop as neatly as the sudden combination of high-speed mobile tech and viral video.

How Technology Amplified Division

Hughes compares pre- and post-2013 America to a highway where the speed limit was raised from 75 to 200 miles per hour. Outrage and tribal content—stories involving racial conflict, suffering, or accusation—are psychological sports cars: they spread faster than facts. He illustrates this with Ferguson (2014): the myth that Michael Brown was shot with his hands up went viral, while the Department of Justice’s evidence showing he had attacked the officer barely crawled. The result wasn’t reform, Hughes notes, but polarization: a nation set on fire by an emotionally satisfying lie.

When Awareness Becomes Obsession

As social media made every incident of racial injustice visible, it also distorted scale. For example, in surveys, over half of “very liberal” respondents believed police killed over 1,000 unarmed Black men in 2019—when the real number was 12. Misinformation feeds moral fervor. Online, people who rarely encounter racism are rewarded for describing everything as systemic racism, while contrarian nuance is attacked as denial. Reality becomes irrelevant to social prestige.

Hughes points out a paradox: constant racial talk, intended to reduce bias, actually exacerbates it. Just as talking endlessly about baseball doesn’t calm the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry, focusing obsessively on race increases racial consciousness. Social media ensures that no one can forget race even for a day, creating chronic grievance in both directions. The prescription of “talking about race” becomes the disease itself.

A Culture of Misperception

In one striking finding, Hughes cites data showing that Black Americans who use social media report more experiences of racism than those who don’t, regardless of personal circumstances. The digital environment rewards identifying as a victim and punishes the idea that race might not define one’s life. Issues like police reform—where targeted action could save lives—get lost in a sea of performative outrage. The result: racial pessimism grows even as actual racism declines.

Hughes’s conclusion is counterintuitive yet hopeful: to heal racial division, we must talk about race less, not more. He cites actor Morgan Freeman’s advice to end Black History Month—because “Black history is American history.” For Hughes, that’s not denial but maturity: to stop fixating on categories so we can get back to living together as people, not as avatars of grievance.

Central to Hughes’s dismantling of neoracism is his taxonomy of falsehoods—the myths that make its worldview seem plausible. He identifies seven recurring ones: the Disparity Fallacy, the Myth of Undoing the Past, the Myth of No Progress, the Myth of Inherited Trauma, the Myth of Superior Knowledge, the Racial Ad Hominem, and the Myth of Black Weakness. Together, these depict how good motives and bad logic combine to sustain racial tribalism.

The Disparity Fallacy

This is the belief that unequal outcomes automatically prove racism. Hughes compares it to misreading tree rings: just because rings differ doesn’t mean the tree was poisoned. Some disparities are benign—arising from age, geography, or culture. For instance, the younger median age of Black Americans skews income comparisons; cultural values explain why 80% of world-class pianists are Chinese and why Jewish Americans dominate certain professions. Racism exists, Hughes stresses, but outcomes don’t reveal it automatically. Only process does.

The Myth of Undoing the Past

Ibram Kendi’s axiom—“the remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”—embodies the next myth. Hughes refutes it with moral clarity: injustice doesn’t cancel injustice. You can’t right the wrong of slavery or segregation by pursuing anti-white preference today; that only multiplies wrongs. Historical analogies—from China’s dynastic revenge cycles to America’s own affirmative action—show how revenge prolongs pain. True justice, he insists, comes from ending discrimination, not reversing its direction.

The Myth of Inherited Trauma

Hughes, a descendant of slaves himself, dismantles the idea that Black Americans inherit ancestral trauma biologically or psychologically. The science, he explains, doesn’t support it: epigenetics doesn’t transmit specific emotional scars. Moreover, slavery’s ubiquity means almost everyone’s ancestors were enslaved somewhere. Turning trauma into identity, he warns, turns acute pain into a chronic worldview of victimhood. Gratitude for ancestors’ resilience, not internalizing their suffering, is the healthier legacy.

The Myth of Superior Knowledge

Neoracists claim that people of color possess unique epistemic access to truth about racism, making their views incorrigible. But Hughes argues that lived experience is partial, not supreme. A white person can understand racism just as an outsider can understand illness through empathy and evidence. Using race to silence criticism—“you can’t speak because you’re white”—is an intellectual dead end. It enforces conformity instead of discovery.

The Myth of Black Weakness

Finally, Hughes decries the infantilizing assumption that Black Americans lack power or resilience. Citing examples from sports dominance to political leadership—Black mayors in major cities, Black CEOs, Supreme Court justices—he argues that “prejudice plus power” dogma ignores real complexity. Different kinds of power (political, economic, cultural) are unevenly distributed; to claim one group is uniformly powerless is itself condescending. Neoracists, he concludes, diminish the very people they claim to defend.

The final section of Hughes’s book asks the hardest question: if colorblindness is the answer, how do we live it? His plan combines moral clarity with pragmatic reform, aiming not just to expose neoracism but to replace it with something better. The goal is to end the cycle of guilt, resentment, and symbolic gestures by building systems that are genuinely just.

Reclaiming the Ideal of Colorblind Diversity

For Hughes, diversity itself isn’t bad—what matters is how it’s pursued. Racial quotas or race-based hiring corrupt meritocracy, but diverse perspectives, when achieved through neutral means, strengthen institutions. Policing, for instance, benefits when officers reflect their communities; firefighting doesn’t. The aim should be competence first, fairness always. Diversity that emerges from equal opportunity, not preference, enriches without dividing.

Blinding Systems, Not People

To counter real bias, Hughes advocates literal blind processes. Faculty can grade papers anonymously; employers can remove names from résumés. Experiments show that such methods reduce discrimination against minorities far more effectively than diversity trainings. Rather than teaching people to fixate on race, institutions should design systems that make it irrelevant to their decisions. “If you care about fighting racism,” he writes, “create blind processes wherever possible.”

He also warns that the obsession with “equity”—identical outcomes across racial groups—is both mathematically impossible and culturally destructive. Since cultures differ in values, interests, and skills, some disparities will always exist. The moral test isn’t whether results are equal but whether chances are.

Early Intervention Over Affirmative Action

Hughes’s most practical reforms target education. Instead of lowering admission bars for elite colleges, he urges raising preparation for everyone. Drawing on research by economist Roland Fryer, he highlights how early tutoring, extended school hours, and a culture of high expectations can close achievement gaps. True equity, Hughes argues, starts in pre-K, not in committee rooms at Harvard. He contrasts this with the euphemistic world of affirmative action—“a polite term for racial discrimination”—where process is hidden to preserve moral comfort.

Ending the War of All Against All

Hughes closes with a warning and a vision. If the country continues down the neoracist road, each group will weaponize grievance against another—trading oppressor and victim roles indefinitely. The alternative is rediscovering what King called “the dream”: a society secure not because groups balance grievances but because individuals trust the rules to treat them equally. That trust, Hughes believes, is the cornerstone of freedom. His final vision is an America where no one feels second-class, where fairness is reflexive, and where, at last, the battle for racial peace gives way to the project of flourishing.