To See or Not to See: Exposing the Soft Bigotry of Colorblindness

On the heels of MLK Day in January and Black History Month in February, I wanted to allocate attention to an issue that arose in both months: the insidious insistence on colorblindness and the perverse idea that identifying racial categories, or even talking about race, is somehow racist.

In their uproar over DEI, Republicans have hung their hat on the notion that “colorblind” policies and language provide a seemingly socially acceptable cover for getting rid of pro-diversity initiatives and protections at the same time as labeling those who promote those protections as anti-American. And the truth is, many Americans buy the idea, or at least certain elements of it. To some, being “colorblind” sounds easier, and even fairer, than focusing on race. To others, it’s the perfect disguise.

But colorblindness is a big problem—one that promotes assimilation, enables racism, and has allowed conservatives to advance an agenda that promises to reverse decades of Civil Rights gains.

Let’s discuss.

What is colorblindness?

To give a general definition, colorblindness is a belief or ideology maintaining that it is better to disregard race than to acknowledge it. The idea is that we are all human, so any mention of race is potentially dehumanizing because it puts people in a box.

Colorblindness is often contrasted with multiculturalism, an ideology that encourages recognizing and celebrating ethnic and racial diversity. It is important to note that while multiculturalism is not color-blind, it is “color-neutral.” In other words, race is seen but not condemned.

On the surface, both multiculturalism and colorblindness appear to champion justice and equality, albeit in different ways. One could argue that multiculturalism promotes equality by acknowledging and celebrating otherwise invisible groups; people in those groups are recognized without being othered. The argument behind colorblindness is that it promotes equality by ignoring race altogether. After all, there can be no discrimination if we are all the same. 

But colorblindness has an insidious side that shows up in two distinct ways: 

• People and organizations touting colorblindness have the propensity to sweep racial inequality under the rug. 

• Those same “colorblind” people and organizations attempt to label DEI practitioners, affinity groups, or any identity-affirming actions or entities as racist.

I made a LinkedIn post on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day exposing the current hypocrisy of celebrating Dr. King while simultaneously working to dismantle DEI initiatives and other measures aimed at promoting racial justice. I received a number of indignant responses (almost exclusively from White males) arguing that, by creating a post emphasizing racial categories, I was the one tarnishing Dr. King’s legacy. According to their logic, talking about racial disparities required using blanket terms like “White males” or “Black people,” which they viewed as dehumanizing. Didn’t I realize that Dr. King wanted America to focus on the content of our character and not the color of our skin? In their view, DEI initiatives do just the opposite by putting people into social categories that undermine their individuality and humanity. To me, these responses were a master class in gaslighting and passive aggression.

But what happens when this sentiment extends beyond a few wayward comments on social media?

What is the problem with colorblindness?

There are at least two problems with colorblindness: 

1. It erases marginalized communities, cultures, and languages. 

2. It enables racist practices. 

Let’s begin with the first.

Colorblindness promotes assimilationism

Colorblindness is a form of assimilationism. Consider the difference between a casserole and a melting pot. In a casserole, you place different ingredients together in a dish (e.g., onions, carrots, mushrooms, beef, etc.), and when it’s cooked, you can still distinguish the individual ingredients. With a melting pot, however, you throw a bunch of diverse ingredients into a pot, turn up the heat, and quite literally fuse them together into one uniform bisque. You can no longer distinguish any of the original ingredients. The casserole is pluralist—allowing diversity to exist. The melting pot is assimilationist—removing diversity from the picture. 

Historically speaking, the impact of this assimilationism has not been limited to people of color. It’s reflected in the broader history of America, in Anglicized surnames, suppressed languages, and diminished cultural identities, even of other European groups. 

It’s important to note that assimilationism is not a two-way street. Rather, everyone must assimilate in the direction of the group that is considered to be unflawed and pure—the dominant group. In the case of America, this was the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or WASP, ideal. WASPs did not have to change a thing about their names, language, religion, culture, or identity. Change was imposed—tacitly or explicitly—only on those who were not part of the dominant group. We see plenty of changes imposed on people to this day.

At times this pressure to assimilate has risen to the level of blatant oppression and cruelty. One example of this is the Native American boarding schools across the country where Native American children were often abducted from their parents, forbidden from speaking their native languages, stripped of their identities, beaten, abused, and even murdered. The same thing happened to Indigenous children in Canada.

Assimilation can also be employed in other insidious ways. Take Brazil, for instance. Brazil has had a large African population for centuries. In fact, Brazil currently has the largest population of people of African descent of any country in the world apart from Nigeria. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a eugenics campaign in the country that aimed to “whiten” its population. Because the African population was so large, there was no way that Brazil, unlike Argentina (which has a large population of European immigrants and people of European descent), could ever be a White country. Still, leaders encouraged widespread miscegenation in an effort to make Brazil “whiter” and dilute the country’s deep African roots. (Historian Carl Degler’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Neither Black Nor White thoroughly explores this topic.) Brazil’s not alone. Even today in America, some politicians talk about ethnic and cultural diversity in the language of “poisoning the blood” of the country.

In short, colorblindness can involve a quest for “purity” and uniformity in a way that preserves the power and position of the dominant group. This quest is a core component of fascism, as Madeleine Albright explains in her brilliant book Fascism: A Warning. Fascism, in turn, is the antithesis of inclusion and antiracism. Many of the efforts that we’re seeing in 2024 reflect fascist tendencies that have been used in many places around the world for over a century.

Colorblindness actually promotes and enables racism

We have known for a long time that colorblindness actually exacerbates racism. In a classic experiment conducted in 2004, social psychologists Jennifer Richeson and Richard Nussbaum randomly assigned White participants to conditions in which half of the participants were exposed to messages advocating for a colorblind approach to reducing interethnic tension. The other half were exposed to a message containing a multicultural approach. The researchers then measured participants’ racial attitudes, both implicitly and explicitly. Results showed that exposure to the colorblind message led to an increase in racial bias on both implicit and explicit measures of racial prejudice against Black people. 

Of course, colorblindness psychologically impacts people of color as well. In another study, Victoria Plaut, Kecia Thomas, and Matthew Goren found that BIPOC employees surrounded by White coworkers who reflected colorblind attitudes exhibited lower employee engagement compared with BIPOC employees surrounded by White people who endorsed multiculturalism. Simply put, when well-intentioned White people say things like “I don’t see color, I just see people,” or “We are all the same,” or “Why do we have to have separate affinity groups? Why can’t we just have one group?” it is harmful to people of color. It is an affront to our identity and it lowers our sense of belonging. 

Despite the negative psychological impacts of colorblindness, the ideology holds great appeal among White people, for at least two reasons. First, it offers comfort. Not having to talk about race certainly makes White people’s lives easier. The same cannot be said of people of color. Second, the colorblind approach allows all the dirt associated with actual racial inequality to be conveniently swept under the rug, which enables White supremacy to persist.

As quoted in a recent New York Times article, Civil Rights icon Charles V. Hamilton once said, “It must be clear by now that any society which has been color-conscious all its life to the detriment of a particular group cannot simply become colorblind and expect that group to compete on equal terms.” 

But I would argue that creating unequal or unfair terms—which preserve White privilege—is precisely the point of colorblind policies. The artifice behind the approach is that it allows inequality in a way that doesn’t make White people feel uncomfortable or guilty about it. It's no coincidence that the White people who most strongly endorse colorblindness tend to be those with the least cultural competence. Clinging to colorblindness means they never have to put their foot in their mouth again. It also means that they can safely and unapologetically shun any effort to develop knowledge about another group’s history, culture, or way of life. The result is a two-fer for White people (i.e., no uncomfortable conversations about race while maintaining hierarchical privilege) and a double whammy against people of color (i.e., persistent discrimination and no safe way to talk about it).

Adding insult to injury, people of color are often accused of racism when discussing real discrimination and disparities that face our communities. The notion that mentioning race makes you racist can be seen in the trope of “All Lives Matter,” in “BLM” being labeled as a “terrorist” organization, and in Black History or “critical race theory” being labeled as “indoctrination” rather than education. The latest iteration of this hostility has been the all-out attack on DEI and much of the landmark Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.

Project 2025: A new era of institutionalized colorblindness 

The legislative efforts to obliterate race that we’ve seen recently—such as the attacks on teaching about race in schools and the formal dismantling of race-conscious admissions in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill—aren’t the end of it. There is more on the horizon. Conservatives have developed a wide-ranging strategy to reverse racial diversity initiatives across the government and private sector that go back as far as the Civil Rights Era. They call this plan Project 2025.

Spearheaded by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is intended to pick up where the Trump administration left off after banning diversity training in federal agencies and contractors. It includes plans to abolish a Labor Department program that enforces compliance with anti-discrimination laws among federal contractors; erase corporate liability for policies that disparately impact employees of protected classes, including race and ethnicity; and stop the collection of employment data on race and ethnicity.

According to Jonathan Berry, who worked in the Trump administration and wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Labor Department and other government agencies, “The Biden administration is abusing the law in ways that tend to flatten the human person into identity politics categories.”

“The goal here is to move toward colorblindness,” he says, “and to recognize that we need to have laws and policies that treat people like full human beings not reducible to categories, especially when it comes to race.”

This is coded language that is used in sinister ways to advance the Heritage Foundation’s anti-equality agenda. Russ Vought, another former Trump administration official who is now the president of a different conservative think tank, The Center for Renewing America, says dismantling DEI initiatives and laws “gets to the very nature of what it means to be American [...] we are all human beings made in the image of God and we should be equal in the eyes of the law. And our law cannot be treating us differently based on our skin color.” He actually refers to anti-discrimination and pro–racial diversity efforts as “state-sanctioned racism”— referring, of course, to “racism” against White people, not people of color.

Freud would have had a field day with this line of argumentation: it’s denial and projection at its best. Conservatives’ goal is not to make people “equal in the eyes of the law” or get rid of any form of racism. Their goal is not to treat people better than they’re currently being treated. The goal is to further empower the White, male hegemony by silencing women and people of color who use category-based data to point out systemic inequalities in the current system. They want to put forward an idea of “race neutrality” that, in reality, doesn’t exist and only serves to bury disparities and make organizations and agencies unaccountable for discrimination.

The president of the National Urban League, Marc Morial, with whom I’ve personally had deep, spirited discussions in the past, described it well: “They’re advocating for the return of White privilege [...] for policies that were used during a segregated America.” In fact, the conservative agenda and initiatives on Project 2025’s to-do list mirror those developed in preparation for Ronald Reagan’s presidency. They want—or rather, intend—to go back in time.

The argument to switch race with poverty

There are also some Black people who, surprisingly or not, agree with dismantling DEI and enacting “colorblind” policies. In The End of Racism: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Black writer and podcast host Coleman Hughes argues that there are people who are “raceless” (multiracial people, for example), and that income is a much better barometer of privilege than race. 

However, I don’t think Hughes understands, or perhaps accepts, the concept of caste. As expertly laid out in Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, one element of “caste” is that it’s inescapable. In other words, if you’re Black, no amount of money can erase the stigma of your Blackness. In fact, wealth may actually expose you to more racism because you are more likely to occupy spaces where you “shouldn’t be.” This argument is elaborated in Ellis Cose’s book The Rage of a Privileged Class, as well as in Koritha Mitchell’s research on “know-your-place aggression” and elsewhere. 

It’s worth mentioning that Hughes is 28 years old. When I was 28, my worldview was certainly different than it is now. He may have a different view of the world in a few decades…Or maybe he’s correct, and in time I will become wiser to the world’s realities. But for now, I will argue that as long as race matters to White people—and it does and always has—then there is no real path to authentic colorblindness.

Why even “colorblind” White people definitely see color

We all see color. The system demands it. We have all seen posters of 99 red apples and 1 green apple.

Where does your attention inevitably go? To the green apple. 

The social system we have in place often creates such a poster in real life—and it affects individual perception. The majority becomes the “norm”—a norm not just of how things are, but also of the way that things “should” be. 

For instance, if 9 out of 10 executive leaders in an organization are male, and one is a woman, then she will be noticed. The same is true if 9 out of 10 leaders are White, and the tenth is a person of color. For that odd person out, the experience is noticeably more difficult because they’re seen as “abnormal” (i.e., contrary to the norm) and must constantly fight against stereotypes and assumptions about who they are and whether they belong in the position. Even the strongest proponents of colorblindness realize the scrutiny and hostility that underrepresented people face. Their solution? Pretend there are no differences. That strategy may work for the 90% but not for the person who is constantly perceived and treated differently.

If a Black woman gets hired at this same hypothetical company, her day-to-day experience is much harder because she’s not the prototypical employee that the company is used to. Worse, because the majority is deemed the “norm,” minority hires and promotions are often seen as illegitimate. Leaders from non-dominant social groups are often asked (by members of the dominant group), “What are you doing here?” The implication? I see that you’re different, and you don’t belong here. It’s a threat—one that simultaneously costs people of color opportunity and safety and puts pressure on them to over-perform so that the dominant group will deem them “worthy” of their position.

For any White person to say (or think) “you don’t belong here,” they have to see the factors that make up belonging to begin with. And in the case of White-majority institutions and systems, the predominant factor they see immediately is race.

Colorblindness is not a solution to inequality

Colorblindness doesn’t work. It merely gives license for biases to exist in a context of denial and minimization. Other countries have tried it, and learned that it does not work. For decades, the French government did not allow questions about race on school, government, or employment applications. This didn’t get rid of discrimination; it just meant they no longer had data on the discrimination that was occurring. Such a lack of data and monitoring allowed discrimination to thrive. France has now revised this policy. 

It is important for all of us to be free to be our authentic selves while also enjoying the freedom of equal opportunity. This is only possible if we navigate the workplace and society with our eyes wide open, unafraid of the truth and confident in our ability to produce the change that we wish to see. See, we must—and that means seeing race.