Color Blindness / Race Neutrality
Critical Race Theory Against Color Blind Justice
This is part of the Culture War Encyclopedia. Updated Aug 9, 2023.
CONTENTS
Definition & Description
Public Opinion on Color Blindness / Race Neutrality
Color Blindness / Race Neutrality in the Culture War
Color Blindness / Race Neutrality in Critical Race Theory
Commentary From the Editor
Color-Blindness / Race Neutrality
Definition & Description
The adjective color-blind, according to the Britannica Dictionary means
treating people of different skin colors equally : not affected by racial prejudice
Race neutral a synonymous term.
Justice - if it is justice - is blind. Being blind, justice is also color blind of course. This means that justice is race neutral. The law should be applied objectively, without favoritism, without prejudice, privilege or bias.
Years ago, one might have seen a sign in a store window that read, “Help Wanted - whites only”. This would be the opposite of color blind / race neutral. Affirmative action is an other example of something that is opposite of color blind / race neutral. The first example is characterized as racist. The second is characterized as race conscious by crits. See the sections on Race Consciousness & Racial Separatism in CRT in the Culture War Encyclopedia for more on that.
Not all agree with color blindness / race neutrality. Neo-Nazis, critical race theory and the KKK, for example, would be in favor of laws that are race conscious rather than race neutral / color blind.
Public Opinion on Color Blindness / Race Neutrality
For some perspective, know that the Pew Research Center reports that
most Americans (73%) say colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions. Just 7% say race should be a major factor in college admissions, while 19% say it should be a minor factor.
Color Blindness / Race Neutrality in the Culture War
It seems fair to characterize the 2 basic opposing arguments regarding color blindness thusly:
One side argues for equal opportunity, for race neutral laws and policies. With such laws and policies, opportunities are equally available for all. What you achieve depends on your efforts. Therefore, they argue, color blind / race neutral laws and policies are just.
The other side argues against race neutral / color blind laws and policies and for equal outcome. Unequal outcome is unfair, they argue, and race neutral / color blind laws and policies can not solve this. We can observe unequal results. Therefore there must be bias in the system. Race neutral / color blind laws hide this bias, they argue.
For example, in A Critique of “Our Constitution is Color-Blind”1 Neil Gotanda writes,2 “Color-blindness strikes down Jim Crow segregation but offers no vision for attacking less overt forms of racial subordination.” Therefore, color-blindness is wrong and that what is needed is race conscious (color-focused) measures to create equal outcome.3
Having read these arguments from many sources for quite some years, I have yet to see the anti-color-blind side display any serious interest in uprooting what they say is the problem: hidden bias. Their argument and attention always, as far as I have yet seen, focuses on convincing people that we must skew the system to favor people of certain skin colors to counter the lack of equal outcome.
Color Blindness / Race Neutrality in Critical Race Theory
In Critical Theory - the Key Concepts (2015) Dino Franco Felluga writes,4
A legal notion of equality that is “color-blind,” purporting to provide the same opportunities to everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on, only addresses “the most blatant forms of discrimination, such as mortgage redlining or the refusal to hire a black Ph.D. rather than a white high school dropout, that do stand out and attract our attention” (7). According to CRT, the liberal doctrine of “color-blind” equality (e.g., the principle of meritocracy, which is used to reject affirmative-action rules) in fact serves to legitimate all the other forms of oppression and marginalization that constitute the daily experience of subaltern racial, gender, and sexual identity groups from having to address the real, everyday injustices or even systemic mechanisms (e.g., standardized tests, police profiling, legal precedence) that deny subaltern groups power, status, respect, and wealth. One way CRT scholars seek to reveal daily, common forms of racism is through “legal storytelling,” the recounting of personal anecdotes that illustrate the inherent racism of our society and culture, or through alternative histories that retell the history of civil rights legislation from the less triumphalist and always suspicious perspective of subaltern identities as in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1999) or Derrick A. Bell Jr.’s recounting of the real (and secret) governmental impetus behind Brown v. Board of Education.
In Critical Race Theory - an Introduction (2017), crits Delgado and Stefancic write that color blindness is the
belief that one should treat all persons equally, without regard to their race.
Yet, as we’ll see, Delgado and Stefancic, critical race theorists in general and proponents of affirmative action and other such policies, programs and laws claim to be against color blindness. As we’ll see, they oppose color blindness from one direction but not from the other. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic write,5
Color blindness can be admirable, as when a governmental decision maker refuses to give in to local prejudices. But it can be perverse, for example, when it stands in the way of taking account of difference in order to help people in need. An extreme version of color blindness, seen in certain Supreme Court opinions today, holds that it is wrong for the law to take any note of race, even to remedy a historical wrong.
Critical race theorists (or “crits,” as they are sometimes called) hold that color blindness of the latter forms will allow us to redress only extremely egregious racial harms, ones that everyone would notice and condemn. But if racism is embedded in our thought processes and social structures as deeply as many crits believe, then the “ordinary business” of society - the routines, practices, and institutions that we rely on to do the world’s work - will keep minorities in subordinate positions. Only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery.
Ibram X. Kendi wrote in How to Be an Antiracist,6
There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.
He also wrote,7
The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a “race-neutral” one. The construct of race neutrality feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is “reverse discrimination.”
That is how racist power can call affirmative action policies that succeed in reducing racial inequities “race conscious” and standardized tests that produce racial inequities “race neutral.” That is how they can blame the behavior of entire racial groups for the inequities between different racial groups and still say their ideas are “not racist.” But there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.
It is curious that Ibram X. Kendi writes in that last paragraph as if the term race consciousness comes from white racists or “racist power” because, as we see in the section on race consciousness in the Culture War Encyclopedia, this is a term and concept coming from crits (critical race theorists) themselves. One might say that Kendi is a crit. However, his book shows him to be (or at the time to have been) only semi-literate in critical race theory (or at all).
The opposite of color blindness is color consciousness. A term for color consciousness in critical race theory is race consciousness which is not only against color blindness but also against racial integration. An other terms for this (outside of critical race theory) would include racial separatism and racial segregation.
Kendi, for one, assures us that he supports racial separatism not racial segregation. The first is antiracist and the second is racist, he explains, and so they are not the same. For more on that point, see the section Racial Separatism is Anti-Racism? in Race Consciousness & Racial Separatism in Critical Race Theory - Seeing Through Race-Tinted Lenses in the Culture War Encyclopedia.
In A Critique of “Our Constitution is Color-Blind” (originally printed in Stanford Law Review (1991-1992) and reprinted in Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement) the author Neil Gotanda writes,8
This article examines the ideological content of the claim that “our Constitution is color-blind”[1] and argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of color-blind constitutionalism - a collection of legal themes functioning as a racial ideology - fosters white racial domination. Through aspects of color-blind constitutionalism can be traced to pre-Civil War debates, the modern concept developed after the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and it matured in 1955, in Brown v. Board of Education. A color-blind interpretation of the Constitution legitimates and thereby maintains social, economic, and political advantages that whites hold over other Americans. . . .
One may notice that this not the only angle from which critical race theorists attack the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In Race Consciousness & Racial Separatism in CRT we saw criticisms of that decision because it implimented racial desegregation which critical race theory seeks to re-establish.
In his conclusion, Gotanda writes9
Whatever the validity in 1896 of Justice Harlan’s comment in Plessy - that “our Constitution is . . . color-blind” - the concept is inadequate to deal with today’s racially stratified, culturally divided nation. The court must either develop new perspectives on race and culture, or run the risk of losing legitimacy and relevance in a crucial arena of social concern.
This is quoted from, again, what is considered to be one of the formative essays of the CRT movement.10
Commentary From the Editor
Some people are racially biased. Some of those people are in positions in institutions wherein they are able to make racially biased hiring and promotion decisions without showing any obvious proof that their decision was based on racial bias. In this way, racial bias continues undetected and unabated to some degree in some situations to some extent.
Through statistical analysis, behavioral patterns of racial biases can be demonstrated. Of course, sometimes they are in courts of law and the perpetrators are punished. It can be shown, for example, that a certain person in a certain company is about 77% likely to hire a white person over a black person even when their resume’s show equal merit. 77% is well above random chance and enough to fulfill the burden of proof.
It is not enough, some might argue, because unequal outcome persists. So then, we are faced with at least 2 choices here;
Root out the source of imbalance.
Add counter weights to redress the imbalance.
The underlying imbalance is subject to change. It may increase. It may fade away. It may go through cycles. The overlying counter weight, then, can not bring things into balance or keep them there. Therefore, to achieve balance, it is the underlying imbalance that must be remedied.
Discrimination to remedy discrimination is like an eye for an eye policy. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, of course. We want blind justice, not blindness. Rather than a tooth for a tooth, eye for an eye kind of world, let’s have blind justice and peace.
Also see:
Critical Race Theory (coming soon)
Critical Theory (coming soon)
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Race Consciousness & Racial Separatism in Critical Race Theory
Racial Realism (coming soon)
in the Culture War Encyclopedia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Delgado, Richard & Jean Stefancic, preface by Angela Harris - Critical Race Theory - an Introduction (3rd edition; copyright 2017, New York University Press, published by New York University Press)
Felluga, Dino Franco - Critical Theory - the Key Concepts (2015, Routledge)
Kendi, Ibram X. - How to be an Antiracist - copyright 2019 Ibram X. Kendi; copyright 2019 New York Times - Random House
∴ Liberty ∴ Strength ∴ Honor ∴ Justice ∴ Truth ∴ Love ∴
FOOTNOTES
Originally printed in Stanford Law Review 44-1 (1991-1992), reprinted in Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement (copyright 1995, the New Press) pages 257-275
Page 269 in Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement (copyright 1995, the New Press) pages 257-275
Page 27 in Critical Race theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic
Pages 62-63 in Critical Theory - the Key Concepts by Dino Franco Felluga
Page 27 in Critical Race Theory - an Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
Page 18 in How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Page 20 in Critical Race Theory - an Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
Page 257 in A Critique of “Our Constitution is Color-Blind” by Neil Gotanda, originally printed in Stanford Law Review 44-1 (1991-1992), reprinted in Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement (copyright 1995, the New Press) pages 257-275
Page 274 Gotanda, Neil - A Critique of “Our Constitution is Color-Blind” originally printed in Stanford Law Review 44-1 (1991-1992), reprinted in Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement (copyright 1995, the New Press) pages 257-275