Colourblind test: the word that must be uncancelled

Last year, Australians rejected a referendum to establish an Indigenous voice by a margin of 20 percentage points. The referendum came four months after a similar decision in the United States: the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

Without overstating the similarity between Australia and the United States, both the referendum and the Supreme Court decision brought to light an ideological fault line that has existed in both countries for at least a half century: colourblindness or race-consciousness?

As I discuss in my book, The End of Race Politics, not seeing race is the surest way, these days, to signal that you are on the wrong side of this divide. Indeed, the term “colourblind” has become anathema in many circles, and if you live in elite institutions – universities, corporations, the mainstream media – the quickest way to demonstrate you just don’t get it is to say, “I don’t see colour” or “I was taught to treat everyone the same”.

Once considered a progressive attitude, colourblindness 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 colourblindness 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 colourblind 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 colourblindness was abandoned by progressives, embraced by conservatives, and memory-holed by activist-scholars.

These activist-scholars have written a false history of colourblindness meant to delegitimise it. According to this story, colourblindness 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, for instance, has criticised the “colourblind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neo-conservative ‘think tanks’ during the ’70s”.

Although this public relations campaign has been remarkably successful, it bears no relation to the truth. The earliest mentions of colourblindness 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 colourblind”, by which he meant the total elimination of all laws that mentioned race.

In the decades that followed, the idea of colourblindness propelled the fight against Jim Crow. Exhibit A: the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v Ferguson, in which the court – outrageously – ruled 7-1 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 colourblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens.”

Decades later, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s 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 colourblind”, his favourite 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 defence industry). It was also the first argument made by the NAACP in its Brown v Board appellate brief.

To paint colourblindness 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 best-selling 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”. In Australia, opponents of the voice referendum were often labelled racist, even as they articulated a belief of equal treatment under the law.

Critics of colourblindness 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 colourblind 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 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 colourblind.

But to interpret “colourblind” so literally is to misunderstand it – perhaps intentionally.

“Colourblind” 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 colourblindness is not to pretend you don’t notice colour. It is to endorse a principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our public policy and our private lives.

In the American context, that meant rejecting policies such as race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In Australia, that meant, among other things, voting no on the voice referendum.

Colourblindness 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 colourblindness at our own peril.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/end-race-politics-lets-get-serious-about-embracing-colourblindness/news-story/d32a8ae6cc2985f57e5c7e076d6cd9c1

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