Coleman Hughes: commitment

Transcript context

…Yes. This is what worries me a bit. If I went to, say, Ireland and Africa, and then when I’m in Ireland, I feel a bit better there because, “Oh, I’m in Ireland. That’s a place with white people,” I definitely would feel bad if I had that opinion — and I don’t, in fact. Actually, if anything, I’m the kind of — prefer to embrace that which is, in some ways, distant from me along those margins. But it would be wrong, right, if I said, “Oh, well, I’m in Ireland. I’m white. That’s the white people’s place. I can feel a little better about that than being in Ethiopia.” Then there, again, I would underscore the distinction between race and culture. I don’t think anyone should feel bad about the inevitable fact that we have more cultural attachments to the things that we know and the places we’re from and the foods we grew up with and the music we grew up with. That’s all inevitable. I even don’t begrudge someone saying, “Look, I’m Jewish. I would frankly prefer to live in a Jewish community. I would prefer to marry a Jewish person,” and so forth. All of those kinds of feelings, I would argue, are inevitable, and you shouldn’t fight within yourself. However, I think there should be a strong firewall between saying all of those things and saying the state ought to treat my group special because of this, that, or another reason. Like I said, that might be too hard a distinction for some people to draw. It’s not a hard one for me to draw. Maybe I falsely assume it’s realistic to advocate other people draw it, but that seems to me a sensible place to draw the line, given we have to draw it somewhere between “everyone’s a rational individual with no attachments whatsoever” and “any and all expressions of racial and group pride are OK.” I agree fully when it comes to the state, but in terms of separating race and culture, they seem quite intertwined to me. A lot of people’s cultures talk about their race. It can be in quite unpleasant ways in many cases, as we both know. So is there really that firewall there?…

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