Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity

Writer, podcaster, and jazz trombonist Coleman Hughes defends Colorblindness — the argument, from his book The End of Race Politics, that public policy and private life alike should treat people without regard to race — against Tyler Cowen’s repeated pressure-testing, then ranges across jazz apprenticeship, Black political realignment, and the mores of hip-hop.

Key ideas

1. Colorblindness, redefined, is Hughes’s central argument. He wants to ‘rescue color blindness from the jaws of disdain’ — treating people without regard to race in public policy, and, more controversially even for a sympathetic Cowen, in private life too — arguing it is the best overall philosophy for a healthy relationship to race, a watered-down version of Martin Luther King’s message that ought to replace race-based policy with socioeconomic remedies for disadvantage.
2. A firewall separates race from culture. Hughes concedes deep cultural attachment — to jazz, to Puerto Rican food and music, to a particular heritage — is inevitable and not something to feel guilty about; what he resists is converting that private attachment into a demand that the state treat a racial group differently. Race, in his account, is a thin, largely socially constructed category; culture is thick and legitimately particular.
3. Race is a permissible proxy only in a narrow corner case. Hughes proposes a stakes-and-information quadrant: race becomes a defensible heuristic only when stakes are high and information is minimal (his example: seconds to identify a bomb threat). In the ordinary run of life — meeting people, working alongside them, learning who they are — additional information swiftly makes race useless as a proxy, unlike more stable categories such as autism or sex.
4. Black Americans’ drift toward Trump predates 2020 and is not, in Hughes’s account, mainly about racial animus. He attributes it to Trump’s harshest rhetoric having targeted immigrants rather than Black Americans specifically, to seemingly pro-Black first-term policies (the First Step Act, automatic HBCU funding) that a Democrat could not have passed without being accused of identity politics, to Biden’s weakness as a candidate, and to a pre-existing seam of social conservatism within the Black Democratic coalition.
5. Personal biography supplies both evidence for and complication of the thesis. A biracial upbringing with two ‘clearly different’ but happily married parents, a touring career as a professional jazz trombonist in a self-consciously multiracial world, and a candid discomfort at being embraced by white conservative fans who arrived at his views ‘reflexively’ rather than through the psychological wrestling Hughes says the position cost him.

Content

Jazz apprenticeship: J.J. Johnson, the Mingus Big Band, and craft

Hughes opens on trombone craft. J.J. Johnson, the musician who made the trombone a viable bebop instrument, was in Hughes’s telling an ‘extreme perfectionist’ whose solos — unlike the truly improvised playing of contemporaries such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie — were mostly prepared in advance; alternate takes of a Johnson solo are nearly identical, where alternate takes from his improvising peers differ substantially. Hughes reads this not as a flaw but as the necessary condition of Johnson’s achievement: inventing bebop trombone technique from nothing demanded a level of preparation that would have precluded true spontaneous improvisation. Hughes himself benefits from having studied Johnson’s solos, since techniques Johnson had to invent are now inherited technique for working trombonists. Physically, he says, the hardest part of the instrument is not the slide but the embouchure — the small muscles of the mouth shared by every brass instrument — which separates strong players from weak ones regardless of instrument. Hughes’s own professional start came at sixteen or seventeen, sitting in with the Charles Mingus Big Band after a high-school jazz festival audition; the bandleader, knowing Hughes lived nearby in New Jersey, invited him to play Monday nights, commuting in by NJ Transit and playing alongside mentors including trombonist Ku-umba Frank Lacy. Hughes places Mingus, along with Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, among jazz musicians who built their own ‘autonomous island’ within the genre — Mingus’s music, to Hughes, sounds like ‘Duke Ellington if Duke Ellington had an acid trip’.

Cultural digressions: Puerto Rican music, Billy Joel, and continental philosophy

Asked where a newcomer should start with Mingus, Hughes recommends Mingus Ah Um for accessibility, Black Saint and the Sinner Lady as a masterpiece, and a lesser-known piece from the unfinished Epitaph suite, ‘Pinky Don’t Come Back from the Moon Looking for Love, Man’ — noting Mingus’s fondness for absurdly long, funny titles. On Puerto Rican music, Hughes points to Héctor Lavoe, whose danceable songs often mask genuinely tragic lyrics (his mother’s and father’s deaths), and to trombonist Willie Colón, whose two-trombone arrangements could carry a band’s full harmony without piano or guitar. Cowen raises Billy Joel — talented but, to Cowen’s ear, ‘dumbed down’ and ‘too white’, a judgement he half-regrets holding. Hughes probes whether the discomfort is really about overexposure turning influence into banality rather than a judgement about Joel’s talent as such; Cowen agrees the songs sounded banal to him even at the time. On his own education, Hughes — a philosophy major at Columbia — says he never resonated with continental philosophy, finding it disrespectful of the brevity and clarity he values in writing, and gravitated instead to analytic philosophy; he and Cowen agree that expositors of dense continental writers are often themselves worse than the originals.

The core argument: rescuing colorblindness from disrepute

Turning to the book, Hughes states his thesis directly: colorblindness — treating people without regard to race, and building race-neutral public policy — has become ‘a dirty word and a dirty concept, in particular on the Left’, especially over the past decade. The End of Race Politics attempts to rescue the idea and argue it is the best overall philosophy for approaching race: children should be raised on a version of Martin Luther King’s message, race should be removed from public policy wherever feasible, and socioeconomic status should substitute for race as the basis for addressing disadvantage. Hughes extends the claim beyond policy into private life — people should try to be colorblind in their personal dealings too — a step Cowen immediately flags as the point of departure between them.

Could jazz have existed in a colorblind America? The race/culture firewall

Cowen presses the private-life claim with a direct challenge: could jazz — a music Hughes agrees required a sense of cultural identity and lived racial experience to motivate its creation — have emerged from a genuinely colorblind society? Hughes counters that early jazz culture in New Orleans and New York was itself racially integrated well ahead of the American mainstream, making its ethos more colorblind, in his sense, than the surrounding society. Cowen sharpens the challenge with Teddy Wilson, the Black pianist Benny Goodman hired: even if the hiring decision was colorblind, is it not true that Wilson’s musical expression drew on something inescapably racial in his own experience? Hughes’s answer draws the Colorblindness argument’s central distinction: Black Americans share a race with, say, Ethiopians, but not a culture; jazz and hip-hop are products of a specific African American culture, comparable to country music as a product of Southern culture, and cultural attachment of that kind is fully compatible with political colorblindness. What he insists on is a firewall between cultural attachment — which he calls inevitable and not something to feel guilty about — and demands that the state treat a racial group differently because of it. He concedes the firewall may be harder for others to hold than it is for him, and the exchange closes with Cowen testing the same distinction on his own Irish-American affinity for Ireland over Scotland, a feeling Hughes says need not be a moral problem so long as it does not bias analysis.

When race is (and isn’t) a useful proxy: autism, gender, and the stakes/information quadrant

Cowen tests the colorblindness thesis against other categories: should people also be ‘autism-blind’, or blind to sex? Hughes says no in both cases, because autism and sex mark real, temporally stable differences in cognition and behaviour that it would be obtuse to ignore — a person with autism will have the same communication style in a thousand years, and the sexes will still differ in a century. Race, by contrast, is a poor and heavily culturally contingent proxy for anything about a person’s mind, and its usefulness collapses the moment more information is available. Hughes offers a stakes-and-information quadrant to locate the narrow exception: race is a defensible heuristic only in the high-stakes, low-information corner — his example is having seconds to identify a bomb threat in Times Square — while the vast majority of everyday situations (meeting people at a coffee shop, working alongside colleagues) supply enough information, given time, that race adds nothing.

Lookism, ageism, and being pegged as young

Cowen turns to lookism — the disproportionate representation of tall people among American CEOs — and asks whether Hughes worries about it the way he worries about racism. Hughes says he sees it as a real injustice but a comparatively unbudgeable one, unlike racial attitudes, which he thinks have shifted substantially in fifty to a hundred years. He agrees Black Americans likely face more lookism even from people who are not otherwise racist, citing Barack Obama’s remark that he could never appear angry on television, and crediting his own ‘nonthreatening’ look — endorsed independently, he notes, by Noam Dworman — with explaining why he has been accused of shoplifting only once despite years living in and around Harlem. On ageism, Hughes rejects a racial reading of being called ‘young’ well into his twenties (it happened in the majority-Black Mingus Band too, which he attributes to general youth-worship rather than race) and argues the more consequential pattern runs the other way: Black children, such as Tamir Rice, are frequently perceived as older than they are.

Black political realignment and the mores of hip-hop

Asked why more Black voters are moving toward Trump, Hughes is cautious about the underlying cause but offers several candidates: the shift predates 2020; Trump’s most inflammatory rhetoric was aimed chiefly at immigrants rather than Black Americans, whose own views on immigration resemble white Americans’; his first-term record included policies that read as pro-Black on their face (the First Step Act’s criminal-justice reforms, automatic funding for historically Black colleges) but which a Democrat like Obama could not have enacted without being accused of playing identity politics; and Biden’s particular weakness as a candidate. Hughes notes Black Americans are, by his account, the most socially conservative wing of the Democratic coalition — holding conservative views on immigration and related issues without the party switch a white voter with the same views would typically make. On hip-hop, Cowen raises the genre’s gender politics; Hughes agrees misogynistic lyrics draw more tolerance from listeners, including some feminists, when the artist is Black than when a comparable white artist says the same thing, and suggests Drake’s outsized popularity stems partly from breaking that norm — emerging from the same Lil Wayne lineage that produced the harshest lyrics, but choosing instead to write music sympathetic to women.

See also

• Coleman Hughes — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Colorblindness — Hughes’s central argument, developed at length here
• The End of Race Politics — Hughes’s 2024 book, the occasion for this conversation