Coleman Hughes

Mindfulness and Mapping The Language of Race issues (Ep. 117)

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Intro

In this episode, Zach (@auxoro) talks with Coleman Hughes (@coleman_hughes), an American writer and opinion columnist on issues related to race and racism. Zach and Coleman discuss what it’s like being a musician and a writer, the value of mediation, how to talk about controversial things, and much more.

Key Takeaways


Making Music and Writing

  • Sometimes it’s hard to discern what is love and what is a brain reaction.

  • (3:50) “When you first start seeing someone… you’re just in a situation sometimes where you want to know how you’re feeling about someone and it’s actually difficult to parse what is just momentary passion and what’s lasting.”- Coleman

  • (4:51) “What we call emotions can also be understood at the chemical level. It doesn’t mean they’re not real.”- Coleman

  • (5:42) “You don’t want to be blinded by what is, at some level, that gray area between lust and love.”- Coleman

  • Making music takes time and so does writing

  • There is a separation between music and politics

  • (10:30) “My sense is that most people who have devoted their whole lives to creating music just are legitimately less interested or are not interested enough, in these questions to try to write at length about them or speak at length about them, or they don’t feel confident that they know enough about it to really give a take. Just like most political commentators who have music on the side as a hobby aren’t confident enough to put their music out there. It’s reciprocal in that sense.”- Coleman

  • Writing non-fiction is different than writing music, but the two don’t affect each other

  • (12:23) “They are different pursuits, ultimately. When I’m making music, I pay more attention to my brute intuitions. When you’re making a beat you just have to go off of your own experience, what feels good to you at that particular moment, and you shouldn’t question, too much, your feelings. That’s how good music is made, in my opinion.”- Coleman

  • (13:20) “If you’re writing non-fiction, political analysis, you can’t just have an intuition and a gut reaction and just follow it. You have to examine and reexamine and question and make arguments that actually feel wrong to you at first, but upon reflection are right.”- Coleman

  • It is possible to pursue politics and music at the same time

  • (14:43) “Ultimately, I think, the only limit is my own imagination and my own capacity to absorb criticism from people who are unsympathetic to me as a person, who don’t understand either one or the other of those two pursuits.”- Coleman

  • (13:20) “If you’re writing non-fiction, political analysis, you can’t just have an intuition and a gut reaction and just follow it. You have to examine and reexamine and question and make arguments that actually feel wrong to you at first, but upon reflection are right.”- Coleman

  • Criticism is part of life and how you handle it determines how it affects you 

  • (17:50) “I think ultimately there’s often a choice or a tradeoff between love and fear. You love something and you want to create in some area but you’re afraid. I think I’ve rarely regretted choosing love over fear, I’ve mostly regretted the opposite. So, go for it. Try something and if it doesn’t work out, that’s okay.”- Coleman

  • (18:31) “We are in a very literal sense, wired by evolution to care what people think more than almost any other desire we have.  But, it is also possible to simply live with the idea that some people won’t like your product and won’t enjoy what you’re doing and accept that, and learn to accept that that’s one of the realities of life that’s going to be unpleasant and just live with that unpleasantness, without trying to get rid of it and without letting the prospect of more of that kind of unpleasantness prevent you from doing what you’re going to do.”- Coleman

  • Two people can have totally different feelings about the same thing 

  • Concentration is a muscle that can be worked on 

  • (29:19) “When I do have to do things I’m not interested in, in my better moments, I have to focus on focusing and it’s almost always rewarding when I am able to focus on focusing, rather than just waiting for the moment to pass.”- Coleman

  • (30:00) “By paying attention to what’s going on, by paying attention to your senses, you can have fun sitting by yourself in a room and just kind of being there.” – Zach


Meditation Practices

  • You don’t have to have a specific routine

  • Using an app can like Waking Up or 10% Happier

  • Meditation can be really helpful for anxiety and panic attacks 

  • (44:59) “I really do encourage people to, especially people who struggle with any kind of anxiety, to experiment with these things and have a serious daily meditation practice be one of the many experiments.”- Coleman

  • Meditation can also cause really pleasant feelings and experiences

  • When experimenting with things to feel happier, consider if the good outweighs the bad

  • Being self-aware can help you determine if something is helpful or actually harming you

  • (58:40) “There’s no substitute for self-awareness in these kinds of conversations.”- Coleman

  • Most substances can be harmful or helpful and shouldn’t be firmly put into one category

  • (59:47) “It just seems really bizarre to me that people have hard and fast generic rules for most of the typical substances that people are using.”- Coleman

  • Music can also be used to change your mood

  • (1:02:50) “Everything we do is for the purpose of changing our consciousness in some way.”- Coleman


Talking About Controversial Things

  • Different people will make different assumptions about you based on their understanding of you 

  • When you write about controversial things it can come across that way even if you don’t intend to be controversial

  • (1:06:55) “When you live in a particular society, that has a particular set of taboos, it’s hard to create the distance from which you can view the taboos of your time as ultimately arbitrary.”- Coleman

  • (1:07:34) “It just seems like in a lot of areas we lack the language to talk about things.”- Zach

  • Not having the language to talk about things, such a race, makes certain conversations difficult to have

  • (1:08:08) “It’s hard for a white person to talk about the struggles of middle-class whiteness without seeming like you’re disregarding black people or some other race.”- Zach

  • (1:11:01) “We really don’t know how to talk about the fact that murder is the number one cause of death for young black men, and it’s not the number one cause of death for any other race of young men.”- Coleman

  • Crime is a deeper issue than most people realize

  • (1:12:28) “Crime has a cost that is really massive and underreported. If you own property in a high crime community, as many black people do, the value of that property is almost directly tied to the crime rate, but inversely. As the crime rate goes down, your property value will go up.”- Coleman

  • White people sometimes hesitate to talk about things because they are afraid of being perceived as racist

  • (1:17:10) “If I start talking about this, or if I do this, even though I know it’s preserving human life, whether it’s my own or someone else’s, how racist am I going to seem when I do this?”- Zach

  • (1:17:25) “From each person’s rational self-interest, I can understand why you would want to do almost everything in your power not to seem racist in the year 2020, especially at a time when we’ve defined racist so widely as to encapsulate a whole set of behaviors that wouldn’t have been seen as racist by even the civil rights era leaders.”- Coleman

  • Comedy is one way to talk about topics that otherwise aren’t thought about

  • (1:25:00) “Comedy is ruthless, and it doesn’t care what color skin you have or who you vote for. If you’re doing something that deserves to be made fun of, good comedians will tear you apart for it.”- Zach


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