Color-Blind or Color-Conscious?
The distorted use of MLK’s goal for a colorblind America undergirds the opposition to Critical Race Theory
Stella Song, the grandmother of two students, addresses fellow protesters concerned about the teaching of what they say is critical race theory during a Tuesday, May 11, 2021, rally outside the Los Alamitos Unified School District office. (File photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
This article was first published on Medium on November 16, 2021
The goal that Blacks should be treated without regard to race or color was central to the early civil rights movement. In the landmark Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall argued to the U.S. Supreme Court that the “Constitution is color blind” and that a colorblind approach was necessary to “obtain full and complete integration…without regard to race or color.” A decade later, the Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King called for a colorblind America in his “I Have A Dream” speech, hoping that his children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Marshall and King used the legal framework of colorblindness to seek a reversal of the explicitly racially discriminatory laws that denied Blacks full rights of American citizenship, disadvantaged them economically, and blocked equal opportunities to succeed. To Marshall and MLK, laws themselves could not be colorblind if they produced racially unequal results. In fact, they recognized that race-neutral approaches were not going to help build a society of equality and equal opportunity. Race-conscious policies were going to be required to undo the vast legacy of legal racial discrimination and economic oppression of Blacks in America. While they wanted Blacks to be treated fairly by the law and social norms, they were not looking to erase their Blackness.
But as the civil rights movement advanced, the concept was co-opted by racial conservatives looking to make sense of a world without the ability to protect their racial privilege through explicitly racial preferential laws. Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act white opponents had to abandon explicitly racial defenses of segregation and white supremacy. In their place, race-neutral colorblind reasoning emerged. Racial conservatives soon learned that they could make the same arguments against color-conscious remedies to past inequalities to protect their racial advantage, arguing that these actions “infringed upon their personal liberties” and in fact, “discriminated” against them. As Theodore R. Johnson wrote in the Atlantic, “It wasn’t long before those groups that were once making color-conscious arguments in support of racial segregation began using the principles of color-blind constitutionalism to assert that racially progressive policies were discriminating against whites.”
The concept of colorblindness was especially popularized by conservative judicial activists in the 1970s and 1980s as civil rights cases moved through the courts. By the time President Ronald Reagan took office, the conservative use of the concept of colorblindness had won, and became a powerful tool to maintain America’s existing racial hierarchy.
Race-conscious policies designed to remedy the economic harms of past policies such as affirmative action in college admissions and employment hiring, school desegregation efforts, and government contracting quotas were attacked as “reverse racism”. Instead, racial conservatives argued, there should be no explicitly racial accommodations for previously denied populations. “In its application today,” Johnson summarized, “color-blind means protecting white Americans from the discrimination that some conservatives perceive results from attempts to remediate historic wrongs.”
However, that is not how many white parents understand the concept. Dr. Megan Underhill, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina Asheville, focuses her research on how white parents teach their kids about race. Even though most of the white parents she spoke with wanted to raise non-racist children, their approach was to avoid any discussion of race, racism, and racial inequality, including their own status as white people. As Underhill wrote in the Washington Post, “If racial discussions do occur they are characterized by a colorblind rhetoric.” This includes teaching their children that people may “look different” but that “everyone is the same.” “While these kinds of statements appear laudatory because they advance a racially egalitarian message,” Underhill wrote, they ignore the “enduring systems of stratification that privilege whites and disadvantage people of color.”
Now the concept has become a popular talking point with conservative think tanks and parents at school board meetings who are opposed to their children being taught Critical Race Theory, a once obscure academic tool, but that now refers to any effort to examine America’s history with race.
At public meetings, parents plead with school board members to stop teaching CRT because it’s “discrimination against whites”, “there’s only one race — the human race!”, and that it is against Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision for America.
It’s time for a history lesson.
The concept of colorblindness was first raised in the milestone legal case of Plessy v Ferguson (1896). In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–1 that segregation in public accommodations was constitutional, establishing the doctrine of “separate but equal” and sanctioning 50 years of legal Jim Crow segregation across the country. One justice, Justice John Marshall Harlan, famously dissented, stating in part that “in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind.”
Harlan’s dissent is often cited as his support for equality of the races. Phillip A. Hutchinson argues differently in his unpublished doctoral thesis The Political Economy of Colorblindness: Neoliberalism and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality in the United States. Harlan’s point wasn’t an antiracist stance that the races deserved equality. Rather, Harlan’s point was that white people didn’t need the law to protect their privileged status in society. In his mind, those of the white race were clearly superior to Blacks. Keeping laws and the Constitution “color-blind” would continue to preserve a racial hierarchy that kept white supremacy in place, not facilitate the equalization of the races. Thus, the version of colorblindness that Harlan laid out in his dissent, would be “an ideal reproducer of racial inequality” as Hutchinson put it.
That is the core problem with the concept of colorblindness. It is being used as a shield against recognizing race as a factor in why our society looks the way it does. It ignores — indeed, even attempts to hide — the vast history of America’s policies and practices that supported white people’s access to resources while it denied those same resources to Blacks. Colorblindness fails to recognize past conditions, and by doing so, allows those advantages to continue. (This is especially the case in the wealth-building areas of housing and homeownership and education.)
Another problem with colorblindness is that it ignores the systemic and institutional racism that results in disparate impacts of certain seemingly race-neutral policies on majority Black communities. This leads to blaming individuals and community “culture” for negative outcomes rather than the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, exclusionary zoning, redlining, etc. As the founder of “No Left Turn in Education”, one of the conservative-funded parent organizations fighting CRT, put it: the problem with the Black community is not systemic racism, but instead “the collapse of the nuclear family and the high percentage of black children who are born to single mothers” and their local public school.
Last summer, in the wake of the racial justice protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, more white Americans began to better understand how systemic and historic inequalities have held back Black Americans from access to economic stability and security and created the gaps in education, health care, wealth, and housing stability, just to name a few. Calls increased for race-conscious approaches to systems change that would create more equitable outcomes. Companies, financial institutions, schools, etc, all ramped up their efforts to do what they could do to end racial disparities.
This very framing of the problem — that America’s present-day racial inequalities are a result of deliberate political and policy choices — goes against the prevailing conservative perspective that those inequalities are a result of differences in effort and ability. Thus, the conservative ecosphere needed a response that refuted the case that inequalities are in response to unequal laws and policies. As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic, they sought a way to defend “the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.”
So the conservative’s uproar over CRT isn’t just a boogeyman to activate their base and provide an alternative understanding of what all witnessed last year, as many liberals would like to believe. It goes to the longstanding debate between conservatives and liberals on what America is and should be. Conservatives believe we are all individuals responsible for our own situation in life, and that government should just stay out of it; liberals believe that the system of laws and policies impact individuals and community outcomes, and thus, if the government’s laws and policies created unequal outcomes, then government can change them to get better, more equitable ones.
Conservatives seem to have successfully pivoted the conversation from the need for racial equity in schools and to teach our children our nation’s history (the good, the bad, and the ugly), to a conversation about the need to protect our children, based on the false notion that race-less colorblind education is better. I am willing to believe that some parents who are defending race-less colorblind education are doing so as a way to “convey a distaste for racial practices and attitudes that were common in the past,” as sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield puts it. But the failure to acknowledge race and the different experiences that Blacks and whites have in this country, allows people — white people — to ignore continued racial inequities.
As Underhill writes, “If racial equality is to be achieved, it will require white recognition that racism continues and white support of policies and initiatives designed to redress past and present racial inequalities.”
