The Colorblind Campaign to Undo Civil Rights Progress
March 13, 2024 8:39 PM Subscribe
Colorblindness was the goal, color-consciousness the remedy. Nikole Hannah-Jones (previously) examines the historic and present-day use of colorblindness to oppose Black progress. (SLNYT)
Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.
Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.
"Undo Civil Rights Progress…?" is from the article's title.
posted by doctornemo at 9:18 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]
posted by doctornemo at 9:18 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]
U.S. Supreme Court affirmative action ban already playing out in Michigan.
Affirmative action at the University of Michigan
posted by clavdivs at 9:38 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]
Affirmative action at the University of Michigan
posted by clavdivs at 9:38 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]
The racial segregation in Seattle's schools was difficult to watch when I grew up in public school here. It was very clear and very surreal. Realizing that the adults are just, perpetuating it on the daily, unconsciously and consciously, was very strange to me as a child.
Check out "The Story of Parents Involved in Community Schools" a damning law review/editorial upon the Seattle based plaintiff (PDF) in that Supreme Court decision, by Cara Sandberg who also wrote more about the decision itself (PDF). The author is a lawyer who spent time as a high school dean in the Bronx, taught at UC Berkeley Law, and now works for the Berkeley County Council.
posted by panhopticon at 10:18 PM on March 13 [6 favorites]
Check out "The Story of Parents Involved in Community Schools" a damning law review/editorial upon the Seattle based plaintiff (PDF) in that Supreme Court decision, by Cara Sandberg who also wrote more about the decision itself (PDF). The author is a lawyer who spent time as a high school dean in the Bronx, taught at UC Berkeley Law, and now works for the Berkeley County Council.
posted by panhopticon at 10:18 PM on March 13 [6 favorites]
"The only real racism is noticing racism exists and doing something about it." - SCOTUS
posted by NotAYakk at 4:27 AM on March 14 [9 favorites]
posted by NotAYakk at 4:27 AM on March 14 [9 favorites]
FTA: “ When this country finally eliminated first slavery and then racial apartheid,…”
Let’s be clear: due to the “duly convicted…” clause of the 13 amendment, this country never eliminated slavery. And due to housing, school, healthcare, employment, policing, and a hundred other kinds of segregation and discrimination, we also have never eliminated racial apartheid.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:04 PM on March 14 [8 favorites]
Let’s be clear: due to the “duly convicted…” clause of the 13 amendment, this country never eliminated slavery. And due to housing, school, healthcare, employment, policing, and a hundred other kinds of segregation and discrimination, we also have never eliminated racial apartheid.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:04 PM on March 14 [8 favorites]
=== Poor form to be commenting without reading the FPP ===
Sigh... should I read it? I've been doing so good ignoring the NYT:
--TARLs, I quit reading, ...fool me once....
--Then they'd clickbaited me on Israel reporting, ...fool me twice....
Surly this bastion of liberal* reporting in America will get reporting on race right.... Right?
Can someone give cliffnotes?
posted by rubatan at 12:27 PM on March 14
Sigh... should I read it? I've been doing so good ignoring the NYT:
--TARLs, I quit reading, ...fool me once....
--Then they'd clickbaited me on Israel reporting, ...fool me twice....
Surly this bastion of liberal* reporting in America will get reporting on race right.... Right?
Can someone give cliffnotes?
posted by rubatan at 12:27 PM on March 14
It's worth reading. Cliff notes...
Then: At the very moment of racial slavery’s demise, we see the poison pill, the early formulation of the now-familiar arguments that helping a people who had been enslaved was somehow unfair to those who had not. The collective determination to redress the wrongs of slavery evaporated under opposition. Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872. And just 12 years after the Civil War, white supremacists and their accommodationists brought Reconstruction to a violent end.
Transition: As this nation’s racist laws began to fall during the civil rights era, conservatives started to realize that the language of colorblindness could be used to their advantage. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, savvily evoked the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to undermine civil rights. “It has been well said that the Constitution is colorblind,” he said. "And so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation." In the 1970s, Reagan began using the phrase “reverse discrimination” — what the political scientist Philip L. Fetzer called a “covert political term” that undermined racial redress programs by redefining them as anti-white.
Now: The right uses the language of colorblindness or anti-wokeness to condemn any references to racial justice. This rhetoric is a massive fraud, because it claims colorblindness toward race but is actually designed to stimulate hyper-race-consciousness among white people. That strategy has worked. Conservative groups have spent the nine months since the affirmative-action ruling launching an assault on programs designed to explicitly address racial inequality across American life. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:52 PM on March 14 [10 favorites]
Then: At the very moment of racial slavery’s demise, we see the poison pill, the early formulation of the now-familiar arguments that helping a people who had been enslaved was somehow unfair to those who had not. The collective determination to redress the wrongs of slavery evaporated under opposition. Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872. And just 12 years after the Civil War, white supremacists and their accommodationists brought Reconstruction to a violent end.
Transition: As this nation’s racist laws began to fall during the civil rights era, conservatives started to realize that the language of colorblindness could be used to their advantage. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, savvily evoked the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to undermine civil rights. “It has been well said that the Constitution is colorblind,” he said. "And so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation." In the 1970s, Reagan began using the phrase “reverse discrimination” — what the political scientist Philip L. Fetzer called a “covert political term” that undermined racial redress programs by redefining them as anti-white.
Now: The right uses the language of colorblindness or anti-wokeness to condemn any references to racial justice. This rhetoric is a massive fraud, because it claims colorblindness toward race but is actually designed to stimulate hyper-race-consciousness among white people. That strategy has worked. Conservative groups have spent the nine months since the affirmative-action ruling launching an assault on programs designed to explicitly address racial inequality across American life. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:52 PM on March 14 [10 favorites]
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posted by doctornemo at 8:39 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]