Does Being Colorblind Divide the Colors Rather Than Unite Them?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the racial policies of America’s various governments lately. [The photo has little to do with the topic [though, as a sometime literary and film critic, I know I could make something up]; it's a shot of balconies on an apartment building in Chicago.) My thinking became more concentrated on this matter -- I’ve always generally kept up with issues of race and society -- because of a thought-provoking essay I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education some months back by Ian F. Haney López, a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at California-Berkeley. López believes that what he calls “colorblind theory” is strengthening racism as much as preserving or fostering racial inequalities in this country. Colorblind theory is the idea that America’s laws should take NO account of race in setting policies, making laws, or adjudicating legal conflicts. Colorblind theory, lately, has become a set of principles that many courts have started acting upon and various political scientists and legal theorists have defended. For example, some US Supreme Court justices have has been using colorblind theory in cases the court has heard concerning affirmative action. How do we get rid of racism and racial inequalities? legislators, bureaucrats, and judges ask themselves. Stop making decisions in terms of race, has become a more common answer.

López argues, however, that the preservation of “white dominance” is the true, hidden goal of colorblind thinking:

Contemporary colorblindness is a set of understandings -— buttressed by law and the courts, and reinforcing racial patterns of white dominance -— that define how people comprehend, rationalize, and act on race. As applied, however much some people genuinely believe that the best way to get beyond racism is to get beyond race, colorblindness continues to retard racial progress. It does so for a simple reason: It focuses on the surface, on the bare fact of racial classification, rather than looking down into the nature of social practices. It gets racism and racial remediation exactly backward, and insulates new forms of race baiting.

Whew! That’s a strong and challenging view, which caught me by surprise when I first read about it more deeply. I have been pondering such criticisms of colorblind theory and will probably have to ponder them longer before I make up my mind about how to regard it. In general, I would like to see racial issues addressed as practical matters. The ideal of a non-racial society, if it’s even possible, and the principles of anti-racism are not up for discussion with me (though I take it as crucially necessary for a pluralist always to listen to anyone about anything, even about the craziest or cruelest ideas out there [which will have to remain a subject for another excogitation]). What I would like our policy-makers to ask is, How do we best lessen the racial inequalities in our society and how do we best get more and more and yet more people to pay no regard to race? The goals, for me, are not at issue. The goals are less racial inequality and less racism. The issue, for me, it whether it is best to adopt policies that take account of race or to have policies based on colorblind theory, as some learned legal scholars and judges are now doing? For me, that’s a practical question. What will work best? Because I take this approach, I am not prejudiced against attacks on colorblind theory, nor am I in favor of ending colorblind thinking in policy and legal decisions. I long for a colorblind society and a colorblind personal life. How we get there is the issue.

I have sympathies with colorblind theorists, with the notion that the way to get race finally out of the picture is to take it out completely out of the picture right now. But López argues, effectively, counter-intuitively, that this simply leads to racism, perhaps not more of it right away, but to its persistence at current levels. For this reason, López wants to keep race, wherever pertinent, in every decision of law or policy:

To actually move toward a racially egalitarian society, however, requires that we forthrightly respond to racial inequality today. The alternative is the continuation of colorblind white dominance. As Justice Harry Blackmun enjoined in defending affirmative action in Bakke: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

I have not read a more forceful attack on colorblind policies than López’s (though I am almost certain more are out there in cyberspace). I will be thinking more about this criticism of colorblind theory. I want only what’s best, overall. Whatever can put an end to racism and racial inequality quicker is better. (Whatever theory is used to set policy and make law, racism and racial inequalities will surely be hard to defeat, sort or long term.) The problem is that addressing the cause of certain kinds of social inequalities that racism has brought about might do little to correct the social inequalities that racism has so sturdily built up and maintains.

My cousin Bob Orton and I once discussed these issues at length some years back. I have hopes that he’ll weigh in on this latest turn in the debate.