Yascha Mounk and Coleman Hughes in Persuasion:
Coleman Hughes: I think there’s a lot of people that might agree with some points I make about the prevalence of racism, the decline of racism, but they might think, “Well, what’s the harm in exaggerating racism a little bit? I can see the harm in under-exaggerating racism, but shouldn’t we err on the side of assuming that there’s more racism and white supremacy out there so that we’re really facing the problem?” And I wanted to highlight the fact that there is a potential harm, including to black people, but people of color in general, to exaggerating racism.
My grandfather wrote a short memoir of his life. He just turned 90 last year. And in this memoir, he writes of a time in the 1950s where he was one of the few black Americans in those days to have an engineering degree from Ohio State. He grew up in segregated D.C., and he started working at General Electric in the 1950s. And at that time there were basically two paths: You could be an engineer or you could be a manager. And the manager’s path had upward mobility. But he was warned by a well-meaning white colleague that the white engineers at GE would not work for a black manager. And he took that seriously and believed it. And so he just stayed in his humble engineering spot for many years. But then, something changed. The managing spot opened up, and he had been there for a long time, and he decided to go for it. And his boss was surprised, saying “I didn’t know you had any interest in this. You never displayed any interest.” He got the job, and lo and behold, it turned out his white colleagues had no problem working for a black manager.
More here.