The company invited a lecture by Coleman Hughes and then buried it after employees complained.
The nonsense on college campuses that is grabbing headlines deserves to be called out. But so does the nonsense at off-campus institutions that claim to support the civil deliberation of ideas but mostly provide safe spaces for progressives who have no interest in engaging viewpoints that dissent from their own.
Chris Anderson, the British entrepreneur behind the popular TED Talks—online lectures that often receive millions of views—has been embroiled in a public spat with Coleman Hughes, a podcaster and prolific essayist who writes about culture, politics and race. I first met Mr. Hughes sometime in the late 2010s when he was still an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia. Since then, his writings have been published in the Journal and the New York Times, among other outlets. He has testified before Congress and participated in academic conferences in the U.S. and Europe. And he’s only 27.
In April, Mr. Hughes was invited to give a TED talk about colorblindness—the topic of his forthcoming book. The talk’s theme, as he explained recently in a podcast interview with Glenn Loury, was that colorblindness shouldn’t be a “dirty word,” which it has become on the political left. The concept “was at the core of the antislavery movement, the core of the civil-rights movement, and was later abandoned,” Mr. Hughes said. “We should reinvestigate the wisdom of it as a principle. The idea of colorblindness is that no one ever gets penalized for their racial identity. And there’s a logic to that for governing a racially diverse society in the long run.”
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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