Color blindness (race)

Racial color blindness (also called race blindness) is a sociological term for the disregard of racial characteristics when selecting which individuals will participate in some activity or receive some service. In practice, color-blind operations use no racial data or profiling and make no classifications, categorizations, or distinctions based upon race. An example of this would be a college processing admissions without regard to or knowledge of the racial characteristics of applicants.

Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva discusses four central frames that guide color blind ideology. These include the frame of abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism and minimization of racism. Proponents of "color-blind" practices believe that treating people equally inherently leads to a more equal society and/or that racism and race privilege no longer exercise the power they once did, rendering policies such as race-based affirmative action obsolete. As described by Chief Justice John Roberts, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Opponents of "color-blind" practices believe that racism and white privilege remain defining features of American society and that "color-blindness" simply allows whites to ignore the disadvantages of the non-white population. In Social Inequality and Social Stratification in US Society, Christopher Doob says that white people believe they live in a world in which "racial privilege no longer exists, but their behavior supports racialized structures and practices."

The goal of the 1960s landmark civil rights legislation was to remove racial discrimination and so establish a race-blind standard. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s central hope was that people would someday be judged by "the content of their character" rather than "the color of their skin". Whether color-blind policies provide the best means of achieving racial equality remains controversial.

The American Civil Rights Institute, led by founder Ward Connerly, has promoted and won a series of ballot initiatives that prohibit state government institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in the areas of public employment, public contracting, and public education. Such initiatives have been passed in California (California Proposition 209 (1996)), Washington (1998 - I-200), and Michigan (the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative - MCRI, or Proposal 2, 2006). California's initiative was co-authored by academics Tom Wood and Glynn Custred in the mid-1990s and was taken up by Connerly after he was appointed in 1994 by Governor Pete Wilson to the University of California Board of Regents.

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