The Bastardization of Colorblindness
Greetings from lovely, snowy, and brick cold New York City. I'm in my third timezone this week and definitely feeling the effects. I hope you and yours are healthy and well and wish you a Happy New Year!
There was no newsletter last week because I was in New Orleans, having one of the most stressful experiences of my life watching the Sugar Bowl. Pre-game po’ boys were had and mid-game teeth were gnashed. Washington dominated Texas the entire game but somehow nearly Coug’d it. However, good triumphed over evil and a bunch of people in burnt orange went back down I-10 extremely unhappy. The Dawgs will play in the National Championship against Michigan on Monday evening: May Purple Reign.
Last week we saw the successful takedown of the President of Harvard University, a woman named Claudine Gay, after a coordinated smear campaign by conservative activists. As a laymen, I have zero interest in litigating the accusations of plagiarism that were made against her. This witch hunt was about plagiarism the way the movie Heat is about urban planning and traffic management.
Nor do I feel like talking about the perpetrators of the smear campaign. The ring leader is a serial offender. They laid out their plans beforehand, as they tend to do. Establishment media amplified it, as they’ve done with prior similarly coordinated moral panics. You can see the literal gameplan below.
Instead, what I want to do here is to inoculate you from the conservative meme of colorblindness.
One of the great tricks of modern politics is the ability of right-wing activists to co-opt words from the Black culture and academia and to weaponize them politically. They ripped “woke” from Black Twitter, who had inherited “stay woke” from Black Power activists in the late 60s and early 70s. Woke is now often deployed as a slur. Like, who do you think they mean when they say “wokees”?
The same activists are in the process of turning DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs radioactive through state legislation, as they did with Critical Race Theory in 2021.
The Colorblindness Trap
Colorblindness is a term, born from Reconstruction, that has been co-opted as a cudgel by the online right. Colorblindness in its original construction was the idea that Black Americans deserve due process and equal treatment under the law. These principles were codified in the 14th Amendment and protections were added via various civil rights acts passed by Congress. In class, I describe the 14th Amendment as among the most solemn promises a group of people have made to another. It was a radical notion for a society with a 240 year history of bondage and enslavement and if we’re being honest, if the amendment wasn’t already passed, it likely wouldn’t be ratified today.
For these conservative activists, “belief” in colorblindness is tied up with their notions of meritocracy. One of the lies that we are told is that for any given position there is a single most deserving person (usually a white male). When a Supreme Court appointment opens we pretend like somebody out there is the most qualified appointee. In reality there is an entire class of people who are qualified. Anyone successfully serving on one of the thirteen federal circuit courts is qualified for the SCOTUS. Additionally, the people successfully serving on the fifty state supreme courts are qualified. Hell, Earl Warren, arguably the most famous Supreme Court judge in US history wasn't even a judge when he was appointed. He served as attorney general of California, then governor of California, before he was appointed by Eisenhower.
The idea that one person out there, again, usually a white male, is the single most qualified person for a given role is a meritocratic fairy tale. The result of this fairytale is good old boy hiring within established social networks that often exclude women and people of color.
The goal of DEI programs is to acknowledge that there is a wider pool of people who are qualified and worthy and to intentionally reach into that pool. But at their core, conservative activists find this abhorrent because they believe that people-of-color lack the merit to traffic in elite spaces. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie captured the underlying belief succinctly: "The way to unlock this is to remember that these people believe it is axiomatically true that a black person in a position of authority or prestige did not get there through merit.” They credit affirmative action or DEI programs because they don’t believe that Black people belong.
So, when conservative activists say “it's time to replace diversity, equity, and inclusion with equality, merit, and colorblindness” it’s essential that you remember that America has never been colorblind.
Slavery in what we call the United States predates the US Constitution by 170 years (1619-1787). Reconstruction was not colorblind—the reconstruction amendments were race conscious efforts to shield Black Americans from state discrimination. Jim Crow wasn't colorblind—they were laws that explicitly targeted Black Americans. The 60s Civil Rights movement wasn’t colorblind—it was a push for Black legal equality and access to public accommodations. So when you see these activists talk about a “return to colorblindness” when are they talking about returning to? You can’t return to something that never existed
Some Photos from My Time Back in the States
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