Author and Critical Race Theory critic Coleman Hughes told Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro more details of his viral exchange on race with leftist Sunny Hostin on ABC’s “The View” in March.
During the most recent episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special,” Hughes and The Daily Wire host discussed Hostin’s attempt to target Hughes in a “knockdown blow” after he was invited to join “The View” hosts to discuss his book, “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.” Hostin, who routinely slams conservatives and defends Democrats, accused Hughes of being a “charlatan” and “pawn” for those on the Right.
“Sunny Hostin declared that you were a charlatan and apparently a Republican operative, which seems kind of shocking since my understanding is that you have not voted Republican in any presidential election thus far,” Shapiro said. “Why don’t you take us through what actually that experience was like in person?”
Hughes, host of “Conversations with Coleman,” told Shapiro that he was excited for the opportunity to appear on “The View” and reach a different audience, but added that before he went on the show, a producer warned him that Hostin would go after him.
“So I was excited to go on. And one of their producers warned me that Sunny Hostin was going to come after me rather hard and I didn’t know who she was,” he said. “So I had no expectations. I just had, you know, the typical level of anxiety going into a major TV appearance. And what happened is that I had a pretty normal exchange with [Whoopi] Goldberg. We disagreed respectfully. But Sunny Hostin, you know, she claimed to have read my book twice, which was clearly not true, because she had no idea what was in the book, obviously.”
During the exchange on “The View,” Hughes explained that his book points out that Martin Luther King Jr. argued for addressing socioeconomic inequality according to class, not race.
“As you are a student of Dr. King, I not only am a student of Dr. King; I know his daughter, Bernice,” Hostin replied, adding, “I think the [book’s] premise is fundamentally flawed.”
Hostin said that years after his “I Have a Dream” speech, King argued for “doing something special for the negro,” which Hostin claimed meant that he supported racial reparations.
“So your argument for color-blindness, I think, is something that the Right has co-opted and so many in the black community, if I’m being honest with you, because I want to be, believe that you are being used as a pawn by the Right and that you’re a charlatan of sorts,” she added.
Hughes quickly refuted her claim, however, saying that King’s comment on “doing something special for the negro” was in the context of King arguing for addressing socioeconomic inequalities through “a broad class-based policy.”
Hughes told Shapiro that Hostin had “an agenda to come after me from a particular angle that she didn’t realize wasn’t going to land.”
“She thought this was going to be some kind of knockdown blow to say that I’ve been co-opted by the Right as if there’s Koch brothers’ money being funneled into my bank account to get me to say what I’m saying.”
“Whereas the truth is that I just believe what I’m saying, and I’ve done a lot of research on this topic,” he said.
Hughes explained that he believes the exchange went viral because “so often on daytime television, on cable news, you see performative energy meeting performative energy.”
“It’s basically all theater,” he added. “And you rarely see someone come with a kind of performative canned attack, but the other person just responds and kind of calmly with facts. And that’s what I did there, and I think that was so jarring to people that the moment went viral.”
