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Race Blind, Color Blind
“The word race is itself racist,” — Ashley Montagu
For decades now, there has been a concerted effort to enshrine “color blind” into our legal system. The reason has become clear now thanks to the work of many critical race theory scholars: some white Americans want to pretend white supremacy is over and never existed at all really.
The narrative goes like this: bad actors engaged in discriminatory treatment of others based on color and now they can’t legally. The system is set up now to treat us all legally the same under the law. We are moving towards Dr. King’s wonderful world. All is well.
The problem with all of this is it was never about just color or color anyway. It was always about what Toni Morrison calls “the other.” It was about race, an ideal created to establish privilege and status for those of European descent over the “others.”
This is our racial caste system. It exists. It has always existed. The institutions of the nation were founded upon this racial caste system. The colonies, upon which the country came to be, developed their own racial caste systems. And yet, it also makes no sense at all because there is no such thing as a race, in the human sense.
