Why I’ve Grown Skeptical Of Colorblindness
With racial animosity rising on the right, abolishing race is not the answer. But nor is embracing the identitarian left.
Following years of censorious race consciousness at elite institutions and among cultural gatekeepers, many principled American liberals have come to a general consensus on how to think and talk about race. In short: with deep skepticism.
In his incisive book The End of Race Politics, for example, the writer Coleman Hughes argues that race consciousness—a keen awareness of the salience of race, and a corresponding impetus to recognize it personally and politically—takes away from a more fundamental human identity. “Race is not an essential part of our identities,” Hughes writes, “[It] has nothing to do with who we are, deep down.” The podcaster Kmele Foster, meanwhile, no longer “identifies as black,” saying during a PBS interview, “I’m a human being, I’m an American, I’m a father, a brother, a husband, I’m all sorts of great things, but I don’t see any particular value in investing something in that particular label.”
Skepticism about race consciousness is certainly not unfounded. Its excess over the past few years has spawned stereotypes of minority fragility, led to reactive firings, justified segregation under the guise of diversity, and even rationalized outright dangerous policy proposals. It dismisses the assimilatory aspirations of many minorities and ignores how rigid racial categories cannot encompass the complexity of human identity. As I’ve written in Persuasion, I too worry about a reflexive, excessive race consciousness that keeps us from exploring the more constructive treatment race gets in other societies or the rather ambiguous attitudes that many minorities have toward ethnoracial identity labels.
Yet over the past couple of years, two sets of developments have complicated my views. They’ve made me reconsider both my critiques of race consciousness and what the most pressing threat to a better discourse on race today is.
The first development has been the adoption of a thoroughgoing colorblindness among critics of race consciousness. Hughes, for example, is especially pessimistic about any sort of racial identification and treats it as categorically bound to divide. “We overcome divisions among people not by emphasizing differences but by emphasizing similarities, and race concepts, by their very nature, emphasize differences,” he writes. To avoid this division, we should “strive to ensure that our personal relationships don’t get infected with toxic race thinking of any sort.”
I agree that these are real risks of excessive race consciousness, but I also worry that this assessment is too pessimistic. Colorblindness can downplay or even outright ignore something essential about the process of identity formation and human flourishing, something that the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the dialogical character” of human life.
In his 1991 book The Ethics of Authenticity, Taylor observes that identity formation never occurs individually. Rather, we acquire “rich human languages of expression,” meaning not just literal words but ways of understanding the world, through our interactions with others. This cuts against the idea of a detached individual simply reasoning his or her own way to ideals. Rather, the formation of our ideals always depends on our engagement with others—and that includes how we form our identities. “No one acquires the languages needed for self-definition on their own,” Taylor writes.
The most strident proponents of colorblindness don’t fully appreciate this process of identity formation. They downplay how collective identities have often helped people form a rich sense of who people are and what they believe about the world. That’s been the case with collective identities like ancestry, nationality, religion, and—though difficult to treat in the abstract and important not to romanticize given the painful history of racism—even with race. To take one example, it’s hard to disentangle the philosophy of abolition or “the blues” musical tradition from the experiences of black people in America. My own native Mexico intertwined a notion of mestizaje or “mixed-race” with a national identity. Though there’s certainly a risk that some might put too much stock on these identities or use them antagonistically, it’s also undeniable that they have helped create a deep sense of solidarity between people.
Advocates of colorblindness are right to worry about the dangers of overemphasizing race. But what they miss is considering the possibility that insofar as some notion of race—not our rigid present one, to be sure, but some notion—can be a conduit of the dialogical character of human nature, insofar as it can be a point of connection through which some people relate to each other, it has the potential to be a unifying part of social life.
The second development that has complicated my views on race is a shift in what I take to be the biggest obstacle to productive conversations. When I think back on the character of these conversations in, say, 2020, I’m reminded of a time of illiberal progressive excess: cancellations, censoriousness, and a convoluted lexicon dictating how to speak about identity. To make matters worse, as Musa Al-Gharbi has shown in his recent book, the “symbolic capitalists” at the helm of this progressive excess often ignored both the actual attitudes and material conditions of the minorities they purportedly sought to represent.
But something has changed since then. In particular, presenting oneself as “anti-woke” garnered considerable cachet, becoming even a sort of vanguardist signal in a short period of time. This would be most welcome had it solely been pushing back against the illiberal aspects of wokeness. But that’s not what’s happened, especially on the Trumpian right or in some “heterodox” corners.
Recall, for example, the way Haitian immigrants were scapegoated in explicitly nativistic terms. At the September presidential debate, Donald Trump unraveled a string of accusations about the group, falsely declaring that “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats.” Online provocateurs like the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh—who has a sizable following—peddled the paranoia and attached it to a broader critique of legal immigration. “We do not erase the downsides of importing many thousands of Haitians every year just by importing them legally,” Walsh said. “We don’t want America to be like those places.” The same week he made those comments, Walsh released a movie arguing that wokeness is the biggest obstacle to American race relations—and it became a surprise hit.
Or alternatively, consider the controversy that occurred a few weeks ago concerning University of Pennsylvania Professor Amy Wax. Following a pattern of at best racially insensitive remarks about Mexican men and Indian women, as well as her decision to invite a known white supremacist to her class, Penn suspended Wax for a year with half pay, among other sanctions. Reasonable liberals can disagree about the appropriateness of that punishment, but they should be willing to be forthright about the callousness of her conduct. Yet for many of her defenders, Wax was merely speaking uncomfortable truths.
While the primary obstacle to a more humane way of talking about race in 2020 seemed to be the progressive left, I’m no longer sure that’s true in 2024. It instead seems to me, given recent developments in national politics and elite culture like the ones mentioned above, that a combination of old-school racism, negative polarization, and long-held resentment towards the “establishment” in academia and the media have given many “heterodox” and right-wing voices alike license to insult and demean on account of race. That development seems to me more concerning and destructive to our social fabric than the race consciousness liberals have rightly denounced.
None of which is to say that critiques of race consciousness are invalid, or that actually, something like Ibram X. Kendi’s adage that “the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination” is correct. The wrongheadedness of the identitarian left remains wrongheaded, and adopting it has negative personal and political consequences. But agreeing that we should leave illiberal wokeness behind does not require an overly pessimistic attitude toward race, or to downplay the permission structure that has spawned a callous, old-school racism in some corners of society.
The challenge—and it’s frankly one that few take up—then seems to be for liberals to recalibrate some of our key assumptions about what our discourse about race looks like today, to eschew some skepticism and replace it with curiosity. Doing so will require recognizing the good in collective identities—but not at the expense of liberal principles. It should compel us to envision a way of thinking about racial identity that’s conscious without being commandeering, that’s wary of how it can overshadow our individuality but also appreciates its unifying potential.
Luis Parrales is an associate editor for arts and culture at The Dispatch.
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If you want to make the case that racial consciousness can provide a meaningful form of identity, that's fine... but that means you have to be willing to admit that it can be so for whites as much as for mestizos or African Americans.
Are you willing to make that concession? If that's a bridge too far for you, then you might want to think about why that is, and stick with colorblindness.
Brief but important clarification:
I don't advocate for colorblindness. In fact, I've been a reliable skeptic of that aspiration.
And some more detailed thoughts (which I shared w/ Luis on X):
The unreality of witchcraft and blackness can be established in much the same way, despite many people identifying as practicing Wiccans—or millions more believing themselves *black.*
In the first case, prestidigitation isn’t real. You can sit on a wooden broomstick and whisper incantations until you’re blue in the face; it will never fly you to Paris.
In the second case, there is no essential or even technical similarity among all black people, nor any inherent difference between all black people and all white people.
The fundamental claims associated with these categories are fallacious.
People fear ghosts. They may even join affinity groups to protect one another from the incorporeal entities they believe lurk in the shadows. They may commend one another for their bravery in the face of imagined danger or erect towering monuments as a physical manifestation of their shared convictions.
But should you or I participate in—or casually endorse—their belief in poltergeists?
I do not doubt that many people forge intimate bonds based on racial fealty (and/or shared enmity). However, my considered opinion is that our collective commitment to race, as an idea, is actively harmful to individuals and society. Put another way, *the lies we tell ourselves have consequences.*
I am my son’s father, a biological man, and a citizen of the United States (among many other true things).
Am I black? Or perhaps a quadroon? Maybe an octoroon?
Most people would roll their eyes at two-thirds of those designations, yet they’ll thoughtlessly accept (or even forcefully defend) the other.
My position — rejecting race liberates individuals from reductive identities and fosters a more expansive (and honest) notion of personhood and human dignity. And I can contemplate the history/modern implications of injustices bound up with beliefs about race, without personally endorsing the same malignant falsehoods.
***
In Salem, they held witch trials. They managed to convict some people of witchcraft, and a few were punished severely. Importantly —despite the trials, convictions, and punishments— there were never any actual witches. That's not a minor detail; it's kinda the whole ballgame.