On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an iconic speech. Sixty years ago to the day, this preacher and activist told us he had a dream. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, MLK said that "I have a dream deeply rooted in the American dream...I have a dream that my four little 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." This speech symbolized the idea of a post-racial America, one in which race did not ultimately determine what kind of person one ended up being.
I would wager that if MLK gave that speech today, the woke crowd would have called MLK a race-baiter, a Right-winged nut job, an Uncle Tom, or worse. Color-blindness was once considered a progressive viewpoint (progressive in the literal sense, not the regressive ideology permeating on the Left today).
The first call for a colorblind society came in 1865 from the President of the Anti-Slavery Society, Wendell Phillips. He ended up being nicknamed "Abolition's golden trumpet," not to mention an advocate for Native Americans. According to George Lewis Ruffin, who was the first African-American judge in the United States, Phillips was "wholly colorblind and free from prejudice." Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, opined "that the Constitution is colorblind is our dedicated belief." Colorblindness was also the first argument that the NAACP made in their appellate brief of the Brown v. Board of Education case. These are far from being racist moments in history. On the contrary, they paved the way for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
It takes a fair amount of historic amnesia to argue that colorblindness is racist or the work of the Far Right. Until recently, it would have been considered the ideal to aspire towards, the one in which we could put the ideals of the Declaration of Independence fully into practice. The shift against colorblindness is more indicative of how the political Left has changed than anything (more on that later). For those on the woke Left, the idea of color blindness is racist, denies the lived experience of other people, and acts as a form of gaslighting. To succinctly quote an argument from Psychology Today that encapsulates this line of thinking, "Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives."
This is not to say that there has never been racism in this country or that race does not have the potential to be a factor in one's story because both would be false. Conversely, to say that race is the primary or sole factor that determines one's life is equally false. This leads to another issue, which is that a major problem with the arguments against colorblindness is a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept:
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.
This principle is not about "I don't see color," but rather that I do not assume that everyone has the same personality, values, or life story simply because they have a similar or identical skin color. To quote Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch from the recent affirmative action case:
The category of 'Black or African American' covers everyone from a descendant of enslaved persons who grew up poor in the rural South, to a first-generation child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants, to a Black-identifying applicant with multiracial ancestry whose family lives in a a typical American suburb.
I view people as individuals as complex people in which race can be one of many factors that account for the tapestry of their life story. Racial minorities can have a diversity of experiences, opinions, and values, which is why it does not make sense to paint any racial group, regardless of skin color, with such broad strokes. When I say "I do not see color," I do not mean that I have a deficiency with my eyesight or that I am oblivious to history or what happens in society. Colorblindness means that I do not believe that the color of one's skin has any bearing on one's merit or character.
One of the definitions of racism in Oxford Dictionary is "the belief that some races are better than others, or a general belief about a group based only on their race (own emphasis added)." This definition is lost on much of the political Left in the United States. If you look at an individual and make assumptions about them solely or primarily on the color of their skin, is that not racism?
As I brought up three years ago, the woke Left has a habit of making such broad generalizations about white people and the nonexistent notion of "white culture" that those generalizations end up being racist. Under this anti-racist mindset, they do not take issue with it because white people are "supposedly" the oppressors and it is thus permissible because "they are not the minority."
Racism is about determining the worth of a person based on their skin color. Colorblindness is about saying that race does not factor into one's character, values, or moral rectitude. If you do not want to be racist, then colorblindness is precisely what you should be aiming for.
The doublespeak comes in when saying that "striving to treat people without regard to race" is racism, yet obsessing over race like the anti-racism crowd does is not racist, even though it very much is. As we have seen with research on diversity training, focusing on race does not mitigate racism, but often reinforces and strengthens it. That makes sense considering that your thoughts shape your reality, or in this case, focusing on race is only going to make you live in a race-obsessed world in which almost everything is racist. If you think the previous sentence was hyperbolic, you can read my piece from last May. It goes over why disparity does not automatically mean racism, but it covers a list of things individuals on the woke Left have called racist, including exercise, homework, white babies, cycling, politeness, and logic.
Anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi believes that the only solution to racial discrimination is more discrimination, which implies that much of the woke Left is more interested in perpetuating racism than it is mitigating it. As Dennis Prager brings up, "the Left's insistence that color is important is one of the most racist and anti-human doctrines of our time. It was precisely when America was most racist that people's color was deemed most important. Why would we want to return to that time?" Why, indeed?
Let's jump back to the recent Supreme Court affirmative action case. If there were such a strong correlation between race and socioeconomic status, the political Left would not have gotten so upset over the recent affirmative action ruling from the Supreme Court. Why? Because college admissions offices could have simply used socioeconomic status and be done with it. Speaking for someone who conducts education policy work as part of his job, I can tell you that the correlation isn't so strong. Deep down, the political Left knows it. It is why the affirmative action ruling was upsetting: because admissions offices cannot de jure perpetuate race and identity politics in the college admissions process. The cynic in me would argue that such a perpetuation serves to keep the woke Left in power to make sure they control the cultural narrative and foment a racial divisiveness in this country.
I do not want to live in that society in which people are divided by race, religion, sexual orientation, or other factors. A goal in my interpersonal relations is that race does not play a factor on whether I spend time with that person. Above all else, I view them as human beings with their own experiences rather than part of a collective.
That colorblindness plays a role in my personal life and I would like for it to play a role in greater society. We might not live in a meritocracy and we might not ever reach a strictly perfect meritocracy. Nevertheless, I believe that striving for meritocracy and a colorblind society is how we get over obsessing over race. I pointed out the importance of meritocracy after the recent Supreme Court affirmative action case. However, to end today's entry, I will quote former Manhattan Institute fellow Coleman Hughes, who happens to be black:
"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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