By Coleman Hughes
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
In a few months, the Supreme Court will strike down or
reaffirm race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The anticipation
surrounding the Court’s decision—in two separate cases pitting Students for
Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina—has reignited
the long-running national debate over color-blindness.
The question is: Should universities be permitted to
discriminate on the basis of race? Should they be permitted to “see
race”?
Not seeing race is the surest way, these days, to signal
that you aren’t on the right side of this divide. Indeed, the term
“color-blind” has become anathema to rightthink, and if you live in elite institutions—universities,
corporate America, the mainstream media—the quickest way to demonstrate that
you just don’t get it is to say, “I don’t see color” or “I was taught to treat
everyone the same.”
Once considered a progressive attitude, color-blindness
is now seen as backwards—a cheap surrender in the face of racism, at best; or a
cover for deeply held racist beliefs, at worst.
But color-blindness is neither racist nor backwards.
Properly understood, it is the belief that we should strive to treat people
without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.
Though it has roots in the Enlightenment, the color-blind
principle was really developed during the fight against slavery and refined
during the fight against segregation. It was not until after the
Civil Rights Movement achieved its greatest victories that color-blindness was
abandoned by progressives, embraced by conservatives, and memory-holed by
activist-scholars.
These activist-scholars have written a false history of
color-blindness meant to delegitimize it. According to this story,
color-blindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist
activism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was, instead, an idea concocted
after the Civil Rights Movement by reactionaries who needed a way to oppose
progressive policies without sounding racist.
Kimberlé Crenshaw has criticized the
“color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the
neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a Black
Studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, writes in Seeing Race Again:
Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, which he co-edited with
Crenshaw, that color-blindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness
protection program” associated with “indigenous dispossession, colonial
conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.”
Although this public-relations campaign has been
remarkably successful, it bears no relation to the truth.
The earliest mentions of color-blindness I am aware of
come from Wendell Phillips, the President of the American Anti-Slavery Society
and the man nicknamed “abolition’s golden trumpet.” In 1865, Phillips called for
the creation of “a government color-blind,” by which he meant the total
elimination of all laws that mentioned race. (Phillips was white, but it’s hard
to see how his advocacy of color-blindness could have been a Trojan Horse for
white supremacy, as today’s anti-racist might frame things. Black contemporaries
such as George Lewis Ruffin, America’s first black judge, described Phillips as
“wholly color-blind and free from race prejudice.”)
In the decades that followed, the idea of color-blindness
propelled the fight against Jim Crow. Exhibit A: The 1896 Supreme Court
case Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the
Court—outrageously—ruled 7 to 1 that “separate-but-equal” was constitutional.
The lone dissent in Plessy, the lone flicker of hope, which was
written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, features the immortal sentence: “Our
constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its
citizens.”
Decades later, when NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall was
battling segregation in the courts, an
aide recalled that he considered the Plessy dissent
his “bible” and would read aloud from it when he needed inspiration. “Our
constitution is color-blind,” his favorite sentence, became the “basic creed”
of the NAACP.
Among the main goals of the Civil Rights Movement was the
elimination of laws and policies that used the category of race in any way. In
fact, that was the first demand made by the original
March On Washington movement of the 1940s (which successfully
pressured Franklin Roosevelt to integrate the defense industry). It was
also the first argument made by the NAACP in their Brown vs.
Board appellate
brief. To paint color-blindness as a reactionary or racist idea—rather than
a key goal of the Civil Rights Movement—requires ignoring the historical
record.
Yet this is precisely what today’s most celebrated public
intellectuals have done.
Ibram X. Kendi, MacArthur Genius and bestselling author
of How to be an Anti-Racist, argues that “the most threatening
racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate
but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.”
Critics of color-blindness argue it lacks teeth in the
fight against racism. If we are blind to race, they say, how can we see racism?
Robin DiAngelo, in her hugely successful 2018 book White Fragility,
sums up the color-blind strategy like this: “pretend that we don’t see race,
and racism will end.” But this argument is no more than a cheap language trick.
It’s true that we all see race. We can’t help it. What’s more, race can influence
how we’re treated and how we treat others. In that sense, no one is truly
color-blind.
But to interpret “color-blind” so literally is to
misunderstand it—perhaps intentionally.
“Color-blind” is an expression like “warm-hearted”: it
uses a physical metaphor to encapsulate an abstract idea. To describe a person
as warm-hearted is not to say something about the temperature of that person’s
heart, but about the kindness of his or her spirit. Similarly, to advocate for
color-blindness is not to pretend you don’t notice color. It is to endorse a
principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our
public policy and our private lives.
Embracing color-blindness would mean an end to policies
like race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
But wouldn’t gutting these policies have terrible
consequences for people of color?
The question need not be posed hypothetically. California
actually did ban affirmative action in its state-funded colleges in 1996. And
this ban did
not hurt students of color. It didn’t reduce college enrollment for
black and Hispanic students; it simply re-shuffled them throughout both
the University of
California and Cal State systems.
Many of them did end up at less prestigious schools, but those schools better
matched their incoming academic credentials. That is a tradeoff I’m comfortable
with. There’s no reason to expect that a nationwide pivot away from race-based
affirmative action would be any different.
What’s more, eliminating race-based policies does not
mean eliminating all policies aimed at reducing the gap between the haves and
the have-nots. It simply means that such policies should be executed on the
basis of class, not race. Not only is class a better proxy for true
disadvantage, but class-based policies also avoid the core problem with
race-based ones: to discriminate in favor of some races, you
must discriminate against others. This discrimination creates
an endless cycle of racial grievance and resentment in every direction.
Income-based policies—such as progressive taxation, earned-income tax credit,
and need-based financial aid—tend to be more popular and less controversial
than race-based policies, in part, because they do not penalize anyone for
immutable, biological traits.
Pivoting toward color-blindness would not only mean
getting rid of bad policies. It would also mean embracing good ones. Take
traffic cameras. A traffic cop’s decision-making could be contaminated by
racial bias. But a camera that catches you speeding or running a red light
cannot. You might, therefore, expect that everyone interested in reducing
racism would support traffic cameras.
Yet progressives have criticized such
cameras on the grounds that they don’t yield equal ticketing rates by race—that
is, they don’t yield racial equality of outcome. This is where the principle of
color-blindness cuts through the confusion like a knife. True anti-racism means
creating color-blind processes—processes where racial bias literally cannot
enter—even if they do not yield results that mirror the Census.
Though it’s a rather boutique example, blind orchestra
auditions are another policy we should preserve. This example resonates with me
not only because I’m a professional musician, but because it serves as a
metaphor for the society we should want to create. Auditioning musicians behind
a veil guarantees that racial and gender bias cannot contaminate the decision-making.
Yet they have come under criticism by
progressives who adopt a paint-by-numbers approach to racial justice: top
orchestras, they say, must be 13 percent black because America is 13 percent
black—even if we must discriminate against musicians of other races to achieve
that outcome.
How is it that progressives abandoned color-blindness?
In the early 1960s, there was an elite consensus that
color-blindness was the goal of race politics. Then the race riots of the late
1960s led politicians and corporations to perform an about-face. They began
implementing race-based policies as a hasty and pragmatic response to the
riots—much like governments and corporations did in response to the riots of
2020. Today, you can scarcely find a professor in an elite institution who
would defend color-blindness.
This is a grave mistake. Color-blindness is the best
principle with which to govern a multiracial democracy. It is the best way to
lower the temperature of racial conflict in the long run. It is the best way to
fight the kind of racism that really matters. And it is the best way to orient
your own attitude toward this nefarious concept we call race. We abandon
color-blindness at our own peril.
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