Notes — Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity

Notes on Coleman Hughes in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/coleman-hughes/), 1 May 2024.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? Coleman Hughes — jazz trombonist, podcaster, and author of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America — defends Colorblindness: the position that public policy, and, more controversially, private life too, should treat people without regard to race. After miscellaneous questions on jazz craft and culture, the conversation’s spine is Cowen’s sustained challenge to the private-life claim — testing it against jazz’s cultural origins, against categories like autism and sex, and against Cowen’s own Irish-American affinities — before turning to Black political realignment and the gender politics of hip-hop.

Q2 — How is it argued? Hughes argues from a stated first principle — race is a comparatively thin, culturally contingent category, unlike sex or autism, which are stable — and builds a ‘firewall’ distinction between race (which should be politically neutral) and culture (which may legitimately be particular and non-neutral). Cowen’s method is adversarial and concrete: rather than contesting the principle abstractly, he supplies specific counter-cases (Teddy Wilson’s playing for Benny Goodman, his own feeling about Ireland versus Scotland, autism-blindness) and asks Hughes to locate exactly where the firewall holds and where it might not.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? The central distinction — race as thin/contingent versus culture as thick/legitimate, and versus autism or sex as stable — is asserted and illustrated with examples rather than empirically demonstrated in this conversation; the book presumably carries the fuller argument. [?] Hughes’s claim that Black Americans’ rightward drift under Trump predates 2020 and is not chiefly about racial animus rests on several candidate explanations (immigration rhetoric, seemingly pro-Black first-term policy, Biden’s weakness, social conservatism within the Black Democratic base) that Hughes himself says he is ‘not actually sure’ about, offered as plausible rather than settled. The claim that Black Americans are the most socially conservative wing of the Democratic coalition is stated without a cited source. [?source]

Q4 — What of it? The episode’s throughline is a sustained attempt to keep race and culture analytically separate while allowing that, in practice, they may ‘bleed into each other’. Hughes’s own biography — biracial upbringing, a touring career inside a self-consciously multiracial jazz world, and candid discomfort at unearned validation from white conservative fans — supplies both supporting evidence and the strongest internal complication of his own thesis. The wiki’s first treatment of Colorblindness as an explicit political-philosophy position and of The End of Race Politics.

Glossary

Colorblindness — Hughes’s term for treating people, in public policy and (he argues) in private life, without regard to race; the central thesis of his book. [§ The core argument: rescuing colorblindness from disrepute]

The race/culture firewall — Hughes’s distinction between race (a thin, largely socially constructed category that should be politically neutral) and culture (a thick, particular inheritance to which people may legitimately feel non-neutral attachment), which he argues can and should be kept separate from state policy. [§ Could jazz have existed in a colorblind America? The race/culture firewall]

The stakes/information quadrant — Hughes’s heuristic for when race is a defensible proxy: only in the high-stakes, low-information corner case (his example: seconds to identify a bomb threat); in the ordinary run of life, additional information quickly erases race’s value as a proxy. [§ When race is (and isn’t) a useful proxy: autism, gender, and the stakes/information quadrant]

Key claims by section

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

J.J. Johnson’s bebop trombone solos were mostly prepared, not improvised, unlike contemporaries such as Charlie Parker; Hughes reads this as the necessary cost of inventing bebop trombone technique from nothing.
The hardest physical element of trombone (and brass instruments generally) is embouchure, not slide technique.
Hughes began playing professionally at sixteen or seventeen with the Charles Mingus Big Band after a high-school jazz-festival audition, commuting from New Jersey.

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

Recommended Mingus entry points: Mingus Ah Um, Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and ‘Pinky Don’t Come Back from the Moon Looking for Love, Man’ from the unfinished Epitaph suite.
Héctor Lavoe and trombonist Willie Colón are recommended starting points for Puerto Rican music; Colón’s two-trombone arrangements could carry a band’s full harmony without piano or guitar.
Hughes studied analytic rather than continental philosophy at Columbia, finding continental writing (and its expositors) unclear relative to what he values in prose.

The core argument [§ The core argument: rescuing colorblindness from disrepute]

Colorblindness has become ‘a dirty word… in particular on the Left’ over the past decade; Hughes’s book attempts to rescue it as the best overall philosophy for approaching race.
The programme: raise children on a version of MLK’s message, remove race from public policy, and substitute socioeconomic status for race as the basis for addressing disadvantage.
Hughes extends the claim to private life, not only public policy — the point at which Cowen registers disagreement.

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

Cowen’s challenge: jazz required cultural identity and racial experience to motivate its creation, seemingly in tension with colorblindness.
Hughes’s response: early jazz culture was itself racially integrated ahead of its time; race (thin, shared with e.g. Ethiopians) and culture (thick, specifically African American) are distinct, and cultural attachment is compatible with political colorblindness provided a firewall separates it from demands on the state.
Tested against Cowen’s own Irish-American affinity for Ireland over Scotland: such feelings need not be a moral problem so long as they do not bias analysis or become demands for differential treatment.

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

Hughes rejects ‘autism-blindness’ and ‘gender-blindness’ as sensible norms, because those categories mark real, temporally stable differences that would be obtuse to ignore.
Race, unlike autism or sex, is a poor and culturally contingent proxy that loses value as soon as more information is available.
Race is defensible as a heuristic only in the narrow high-stakes, low-information corner case; ordinary social situations supply enough information to make it useless.

Lookism, ageism, and being pegged as young [§ Lookism, ageism, and being pegged as young]

Hughes treats lookism as a real injustice but a comparatively unbudgeable one, unlike racial attitudes, which he thinks have shifted substantially over fifty to a hundred years.
He credits his own ‘nonthreatening’ look — also noted by Noam Dworman — with his having been accused of shoplifting only once despite years in and around Harlem.
Being called ‘young’ into his twenties is not, in his view, racially coded; the more consequential pattern, he argues, is Black children (e.g. Tamir Rice) being perceived as older than they are.

Black political realignment and hip-hop [§ Black political realignment and the mores of hip-hop]

Candidate explanations for Black voters’ drift toward Trump, predating 2020: his harshest rhetoric targeted immigrants rather than Black Americans; seemingly pro-Black first-term policy (First Step Act, automatic HBCU funding); Biden’s weakness as a candidate; social conservatism within the Black Democratic base.
Black Americans are, per Hughes, the most socially conservative wing of the Democratic coalition, holding conservative views without the party switch a white voter with the same views would typically make.
Misogynistic hip-hop lyrics draw more tolerance, including from some feminists, when the artist is Black than when a comparable white artist says the same thing; Drake’s popularity is attributed partly to breaking that norm from within the same lineage that produced it.