The female panelists on ABC’s “The View” berated Coleman Hughes, a black CNN contributor, as a “charlatan” last week when Hughes joined the program to promote his new book arguing for a “colorblind America.” Hughes now says the co-host who launched the attack, Sunny Hostin, has remained unapologetic.
Hughes’ book, The End of Race Politics, makes the case against race-based policies as a means to end American racism.
“My overall argument is that class, socioeconomics is the better proxy for disadvantage,” Hughes said, adding:
We all want to help the disadvantaged, and the question is, ‘How do we identify them?’ Right? The default right now in a lot of areas of policy is to use, you know, black and Hispanic identity as a proxy for disadvantage, and my argument is that you actually get a better picture of who needs help by looking at socioeconomics and income that picks out people in a more accurate way.
Hughes was met with spontaneous applause from the live audience after he briefly summarized his book. But Hostin then shut him down, interrupting the clapping to claim his argument was “fundamentally flawed.”
“And I read your book twice because I wanted to give it a chance,” Hostin said, claiming race-based initiatives were necessary because “you see the huge disparity between white households and black households.”
Hughes responded by invoking Martin Luther King Jr., arguing that focusing on class-based action will “disproportionately target blacks and Hispanics because they’re disproportionately poor.”
Hostin fired back by touting her relationship with King’s daughter, Bernice, and claimed again that Hughes’ “premise is fundamentally flawed”:
You claim that colorblindness was the goal of the civil rights movement based upon Dr. King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech — you know, content of character versus the color of skin. Bernice, Dr. King’s daughter, points out that four years after giving that speech, actually, Dr. King also said this: ‘A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for Negroes.’
Hostin went on to call Hughes a “charlatan” and “pawn by the right,” attributing her name-calling to unnamed people in “the black community.”
“You’ve said that you’re a conservative,” Hostin added.
“No,” Hughes politely corrected and went back to responding to her point about the book before returning to Hostin’s attacks.
“I don’t think I’ve been co-opted by anyone. I’ve only voted twice, both for Democrats,” Hughes said. “I’m an independent, I would vote for a Republican, probably a non-Trump Republican if they were compelling.”
“There’s no evidence I’ve been co-opted by anyone,” Hughes added. “I have an independent podcast. I work for CNN as an analyst. I write for The Free Press. I’m independent in all of these endeavors, and no one is paying me to say what I’m saying. I’m saying it because I feel it.”
Hughes spoke with independent Substack journalist Matt Taibbi about the exchange for a post published Wednesday.
“Did [Hostin] apologize?” Taibbi asked.
“No,” Hughes said.
Hughes also reflected on his ABC guest appearance on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, where the host called “The View” a “rabies-infested henhouse.”
“I wasn’t expecting necessarily for her to kind of try to ambush me in that way and attack my character in that way,” Hughes said. “I responded to it in the moment as I do, and I didn’t expect it to go as viral as it did, but I think it arguably went more viral than anything I’ve ever done before.”
