Coleman Hughes is an undergraduate in Philosophy at Columbia, currently a leading voice and commentator on all issues pertaining to black people and the struggle against racism in America. To hear the number of times and the number of people he’s been cited by, you’d think he was a veteran scholar of racism and racial history in the United States. Spoiler alert — he is not. This, in and of itself is not a disqualification of course. But it does say something about the quality of global discourse when an undergraduate in philosophy skyrockets to fame and recognition on a thorny historical and social issue, and is being quoted as some kind of authority figure without much in the way of credentials — and says even more about the more experienced intellectuals quoting him.
Langston Hughes, Communist?
Langston Hughes, the poet, was a Communist, right? Socialist? If you could ask the late D.C. poet, Sterling A. Brown, he would laugh, take…