What Is Colorblindness?

Back in 1994, Lani Guinier noted an interesting paradox regarding the ideology of "colorblindness":

In contemporary discourse, colorblindness has come to mean that mere recognition of race, except to condemn intentional racial discrimination, is dangerous. Yet because of the recognition and support our political system gives to other, non-racial groups, colorblindness, although ostensibly race-neutral, singles out race for special treatment.

Lani Guinier, The Supreme Court, 1993 Term: (E)racing Democracy: The Voting Rights Cases, 108 Harv. L. Rev. 109 at 123, n. 104 (1994).

Sometime before that, Neil Gotanda noted that in order to "not consider race", you have to recognize it (else how would you know what to avoid?).* Colorblindness is at least a little bit of a misnomer, then -- we have to see race in order than decide not to consider it.

This is a maneuver we make as a matter of course with regards to all manner of identity orientation. We notice, and decide to consider, gender when assigning bathrooms. We notice, and decide not to consider, religion when assigning public school teachers. As Guinier notes though, by creating a unified rule for the race category, we are treated it different -- specially -- compared to other identity groups. We are consciously deciding to treat the category "race" in a specified manner.

There might be excellent reasons for doing this. We might believe that conscious consideration is so dangerous that it rarely will result in more good than harm. But this sort of calculation is still, at root, color conscious -- deflating any theoretical (as opposed to pragmatic) reasons to maintain a fictive "colorblind" polity. Colorblindness, in other words, is just a particular subdivision of a color conscious outlook. Recognition of that fact allows us to have the debate between color blindness and its alternatives on fair ground, without slanting the playing field by unrealistically placing colorblindness as somehow beyond the realm of race-based decision making.

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* Neil Gotanda, A Critique of "Our Constitution is Color-Blind", 44 Stan. L. Rev. 1, 6 (1991).