Actually Color Blindness Isn't Racist | Video Essay

welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman today I'm going to be reading a sub stack post I made entitled actually colorblindness isn't racist which I also published in the Free Press where I'm now contributing writer you can subscribe to my sub stack at Coleman hughes.substack.com here we go in a few months the Supreme Court will strike down or reaffirm race-based affirmative action in college admissions the anticipation surrounding the Court's decision in two separate cases pitting students for fair admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina has reignited the long-running national debate over color blindness the question is should universities be permitted to discriminate on the basis of race should they be permitted to see race not seeing race is the surest way these days to signal that you aren't on the right side of this divide indeed the term colorblindness has become anathema to right think if you live in Elite institutions I'm talking universities Corporate America the mainstream media the quickest way to demonstrate that you just don't get it is to say I don't see color or I was taught to treat everyone the same once considered a progressive attitude colorblindness is now seen as backwards a cheap surrender in the face of racism at best or a cover for deeply held racist beliefs at worse but colorblindness is neither racist nor backwards properly understood it's 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 colorblind 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 colorblindness was abandoned by progressives embraced by conservatives and then memory hold by activist Scholars these activist Scholars have written a false history of colorblindness meant to delegitimize it according to this story colorblindness 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 Kimberly Crenshaw has criticized for instance the colorblind view of civil rights that she alleges developed in the neoconservative think tanks during the 70s George Lipschitz a black studies professor at UC Santa Barbara writes in his book seeing race again countering colorblindness across the disciplines which he co-wrote with Crenshaw that colorblindness is part of a quote long-standing historical whiteness Protection Program associated with indigenous dispossession Colonial Conquest slavery segregation and immigrant exclusion now although this public relations campaign against colorblindness has been remarkably successful it Bears no relation to the truth the earliest mentions of colorblindness I'm aware of 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 quote a government colorblind by which he meant the total elimination of all laws that mentioned race now Phillips was white but it's hard to see how his advocacy of colorblindness could have been a trojan horse for white supremacy as today's anti-racists might frame things his black contemporaries such as George Lewis Ruffin America's first black judge described Phillips as wholly colorblind and free from race prejudice in the decades that followed the idea of colorblindness propelled the fight against Jim Crow exhibit a the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy versus Ferguson in which the court outrageously ruled seven to one that separate but equal was constitutional the lone dissent in Plessy the lone flicker of Hope was written by Justice John Marshall Harlan and it featured the immortal sentence quote our constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens decades later when NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall was battling segregation in the courts one of his aides recalled that he considered the Plessy dissent his Bible and would read aloud from it when he needed inspiration our constitution is colorblind his favorite sentence became the basic Creed of the NAACP among the main goals of the Civil Rights Movement was the elimination of all 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 defense industry it was also the first argument made by the NAACP in their Brown V board appellate brief to paint colorblindness 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 Kendy MacArthur genius and best-selling author of how to be an anti-racist argues that quote the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right's unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular Americans drive for a race neutral one critics of colorblindness argue that it lacks teeth in the fight against racism if we're blind to race they say how can we see racism Robin D'Angelo in her hugely successful 2018 book White fragility sums up the colorblind strategy like this quote pretend that we don't see race and racism will end this argument is no more than a cheap language trick it's true that 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 colorblind but to interpret the word colorblind so literally is to misunderstand it perhaps intentionally colorblind is an expression like warm-hearted it uses a physical metaphor to encapsulate an abstract idea for instance to describe a person as warm-hearted is not to say something about the temperature of their heart what about the kindness of their spirit similarly to advocate for colorblindness is not to pretend you don't notice color or race it is to endorse a principle which is that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our public policy and our private lives embracing colorblindness would mean an end to policies like race-based affirmative action and college admissions wouldn't gutting these policies have terrible consequences for people of color the question need not be posed hypothetically California actually did ban affirmative action in its state-funded colleges in 1996 and this ban did not hurt students of color it didn't reduce College enrollment for Black and Hispanic students it simply reshuffled them throughout both the University of California and Cal State systems many of them did end up at less prestigious schools than they otherwise would have but the schools they ended up at better matched their incoming academic credentials so they were more likely to be at the center rather than at the bottom of their incoming class that's a trade-off that I'm comfortable with and there's no reason to expect that a nationwide pivot away from race-based affirmative action would be any different what's more eliminating race-based policies does not mean eliminating all policies aimed at reducing the gap between the Haves and the have-nots it simply means that such policies should be executed on the basis of class not race not only is Class A Better proxy for True disadvantage but class-based policies also avoid the core problem with race-based ones which is this to discriminate in favor of some races you must by definition discriminate against others this discrimination creates an endless cycle of racial grievance and resentment in every direction income-based policies such as progressive taxation earned income tax credit need-based financial aid these tend to be more popular and less controversial than race-based policies in part because they don't penalize anyone for immutable biological traits pivoting toward colorblindness would not only mean getting rid of bad policies it would also mean embracing good ones take traffic cameras a traffic cop's decision making could be contaminated by racial bias but a camera that catches you speeding or running a red cannot you might therefore expect that everyone interested in reducing racial bias would support traffic cameras yet progressives have criticized such cameras on the grounds that they don't yield equal ticketing rates by race that is they don't yield Racial equality of outcome which is often called equity this is where the principle of colorblindness cuts through moral confusion Like a Knife true anti-racism means creating colorblind processes that's to say processes where racial bias literally cannot enter even if those processes yield results that don't mirror the census though it's a pretty Boutique example blind Orchestra auditions are another policy we should Preserve this example resonates with me not only because I'm a professional musician but because it serves as a metaphor for the society we should all want to create auditioning musicians behind a veil guarantees that racial and gender bias can't possibly contaminate the decision-making yet this has come under criticism by progressives who adopt a kind of paint by numbers approach to racial Justice top orchestras they say must be 13 black because America is 13 black even if we have to discriminate against individual musicians to achieve that outcome so how is it that progressives abandoned colorblindness in the early 1960s there was an elite consensus that colorblindness was the goal of race politics then the race riots of the late 1960s LED politicians and corporations to perform an about face they began implementing race-based policies as a hasty and pragmatic response to the riots very similar to the way governments and corporations did the same thing in response to the Riots of 2020. today you can scarcely find a professor at an elite institution who would defend colorblindness but this is a grave mistake colorblindness is the best principle with which to govern a multi-racial democracy it's the best way to lower the temperature of racial conflict in the long run and it's the best way to fight the kind of racism that really matters and it's the best way to orient your own attitude towards this nefarious concept we call Race and we abandon colorblindness at our own peril [Music]

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 81,541

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, political, society, highsociety, modernsociety, contemporary, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Coleman Hughes, talkshow, talks, ethics, intelligence, discrimination, music, colorblind, racism, MLK

Id: QJu3gGTXOVA

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 16 2023