The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

The more I have studied disparities in multicultural societies, the more I have found the language of “overrepresentation” and “underrepresentation” to be fundamentally misleading. These words assume that there is something normal or “to be expected” about seeing different ethnic groups represented at precisely their share of the total population in every domain, statistic, and occupation, when in fact nothing is more normal than for different subcultures to specialize in particular sectors and occupations and experience very different group-wide statistics as a result. The vast majority of such disparities are not plausibly explained by bigotry, systemic racism, or unfairness but by demographic and cultural differences between the groups in question at a particular time.

But how could self-proclaimed “anti-racists” and their supporters be as confused as I’ve made them out to be? And why do so many people continue to be fooled by the “anti-racist” label? The answer: theirs is the latest brand of bigotry to gain social approval in America, and that social approval acts as a buffer that insulates their views from scrutiny.

We cringe when we hear old recordings of people describe Asians as “yellow” and Native Americans as “red,” then we proceed to talk about “black,” “brown,” and “white” people with a straight face—as if the generations past were simpletons with respect to racial classification, but we are far superior.

Neoracists believe that we must indoctrinate children to cure them of racism. I say that children are racially innocent by nature, and we should protect that racial innocence for as long as possible.

By [college], many skills, attitudes, and habits have already been formed. We can have a much bigger impact on people at younger ages. Efforts to achieve true equity should focus instead on high-quality kindergarten and pre-K, high-quality weekend learning programs, high-quality charter schools, and high-quality after-school tutoring.

Another example of neoracist influence in K–12 public education comes from New York City. In 2018, the NYC Department of Education earmarked $23 million for mandatory “anti-bias” training for the city’s teachers over the course of four years. Leading this charge was chancellor of schools Richard Carranza, whose philosophy has less to do with eliminating actual racism than with eliminating so-called white supremacy culture in schools. In a presentation to top administrators, Carranza called for an end to all aspects of white supremacy, including “a sense of urgency,” “worship of the written word,” “perfectionism,” “individualism,” and “objectivity.” Instead of these false values, he argued that teachers should prioritize non-white values like “the ability to relate to others.” The idea that perfectionism, objectivity, and good grammar belong to white people and shouldn’t be taught to blacks and Hispanics is exactly the kind of idea that leaders of the civil rights movement fought against. There is nothing anti-racist about this idea. It is, at its core, racist.

Why, then, did people's perception of race relations take a nosedive after 2013? The answer is that smartphones and social media changed the speed limit of information—which in turn gave a massive competitive advantage to ideas, information, narratives, and arguments that tap into division, tribalism, and grievances. Neoracism was among the ideologies able to take advantage of this seismic change. Ultimately, this change resulted in an informational diet that is less tethered to reality, not more.

The common humanity and anti-racism of the civil rights movement had strong ties to Christianity. And Christianity promoted the value of interracial harmony: unity in Christ. But the appeal of Christianity has since waned—especially among liberal white Americans and young black Americans, and the resulting vacuum has given neoracism—a far more racially divisive ideology—a place to settle.

When black people are on the short end of a black-white health disparity, it automatically gets attributed to systemic racism. But when white people are on the short end of a black-white health disparity, few even notice the disparity and label it as such, much less attribute it to racism. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to die of chronic lower respiratory disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, liver disease, and eight different types of cancer. The same thinking that automatically attributes the racial disparity in COVID-19 deaths to systemic racism against blacks could be applied equally to argue the existence of systemic racism against whites with respect to all of those diseases. A fitting end for the saga of racialized COVID medicine: By late 2022, the racial profile of COVID-19 victims had switched. More whites were dying of it than blacks. Did systemic racism change its direction?

What’s so insidious about the new form of racism that’s emerged in American society—what I call “neoracism”—is that it invokes the names of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick

The majority of effort channeled toward achieving racial equity hasn't been applied to the part of life that has the biggest influence on people's skills and mindsets: namely birth to eighteen years of age.

As the legal historian Richard Epstein memorably put it, the “ink was scarcely dry on the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which forbade the government as well as employers from taking race into account for any reason, when policies of racial discrimination began proliferating throughout the public and private sectors. In the historical blink of an eye, colorblindness transformed from an idea whose time had finally come into a symptom of moral backwardness—from a noble principle responsible for beating slavery and Jim Crow into a marker of evil. In the half century since the victories of the civil rights movement, some of America’s most celebrated scholars have been hard at work writing a false history of colorblindness. In their view, colorblindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but was instead an idea created by white racists, conservatives, and reactionaries. Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, has criticized the “color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a black-studies professor at the University of California, writes that colorblindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness protection program” associated with “Indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.” According to these scholars, there is no contradiction to reconcile: colorblindness had nothing to do with abolition or the civil rights movement to begin with; colorblindness has instead always been a Trojan horse for white supremacy.