Oppression and Color-Blindness: Third Reply to Goldstein

Color-Blind Rhetoric and Contemporary Racial Oppression. As I remember the color-blind argument from William Bennett's "Race and the New Politics of Resentment," it rested on three ideas. First, there is the concept that the U. S. should be a "color-blind" society in which people are no longer viewed in terms of race, but are seen and treated as individuals. Bennett quotes King's "I Have a Dream Speech" but the general effect of Bennett's references to King is to view King's work as an essentially American effort rooted in Thomas Jefferson's claim that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence. Other than asserting that Bennett is wrong about the goal of color-blindness, mistaken in his understanding of King, and deceptive in his claims about Jefferson, I'll pass this by.

Bennett's second claim is that Americans have so much progress on race relations that "race-based" remedies to the legacy of segregation are no longer necessary or appropriate. Here Bennett is referring primarily to affirmative action programs but other issues that come within the purview of his claims about race-based programs include school busing, job discrimination laws, and policing. Arguing that we should act as though we already have a color-blind society, Bennett believes we should eliminate all remedies for all the problems created by white racism.

There is a test for the sincerity of Bennett and other advocates of color-blindness. How do they respond to incidents of white racism? If the advocates of color-blindness were sincere in believing that there should be such a high level of racial justice in the country, one would think that they would be particularly outraged by manifestations of racial oppression by white people. It's quite the opposite though. Rather than being outraged by white racism, Bennett is extremely wary of black complaining. Bennett emphasized his belief that blacks complaining of job discrimination should have to prove specific intent to discriminate rather than just establish a pattern of not hiring blacks, paying them equally with whites, or promoting them. Bennett's sympathies seem to be with the racist employers rather than black employees.

The same is the case in every sphere of contemporary racial discrimination. In her classic The Alchemy of Race and Rights, African-American legal scholar Patricia Williams documents the way that white politicians used color-blind rhetoric to justify the mob killing of young black men, police assaults on young black men, and keeping black people out of upscale stores (needs page numbers). As Williams explains, the irony of all these kinds of cases is that color-blind advocates identify blacks as a "group" who deserve these kinds of discriminatory behaviors and argue that white racism has nothing to do with these issues. I've seen the same kinds of arguments made in relation to the stop and frisk campaigns, the racial profiling of black motorists by police, and store security systems (needs links).

In all these cases, color-blind arguments are used to justify contemporary racial oppression. Instead of trying to create a "color-blind" society by opposing white racism, the main effort of the color-blind advocates is to thwart the efforts of both ordinary African-Americans and African-American advocacy groups to oppose racial oppression. What's interesting to me is the interaction between the purveyors of discrimination and white racial violence and the color-blind advocates. For Williams, the people perpetrating the discrimination and violence are bigots in the same sense that George Wallace was a bigot during the 1960's. But the justification of that bigotry is left to the advocates of color-blindness. They're the ones who generate the "intellectualized" ideas of black inferiority, use those ideas to defend what could be called the "primary" bigots, and work to prevent the enactment of any kind of remedy for racial profiling, job discrimination, and the like.

As a practical matter, the loyalties of the color-blind advocates are with the primary bigots rather than black people. In fact, given the adoption of color-blind rhetoric by primary bigots that Eduardo DeSilva demonstrates in Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, there is now a substantial overlap between the primary bigots and color-blind advocates (57ff). Ultimately, however, the color-blind advocates are more of an impediment to racial justice because their rationalizations do serve to perpetuate racial oppression than the actions of primary racist jerks. For advocates of color-blindness like William Bennett or Jeff Goldstein, defending and perpetrating racial oppression is a significant part of their lives.

Bennett's third claim is that the racial consciousness of black people is essentially the same as white supremacy. For Bennett, segregation was immoral because it was a form of "color consciousness" and African-American consciousness of themselves as a group or a race is just as immoral, and ultimately just as racist, as white racism. In this context, any African-American who criticizes racial discrimination or racial injustice is thinking about black people as a group and is therefore being racist. That's why freshmen often claim that Jesse Jackson is a racist because he complains about racism. That's also how critics of efforts to remedy racial injustice argue that affirmative action programs are unjust because they involve racial preferences.

But this argument goes deeper because it implies that black people are racist for thinking of themselves as black people at all. The cleverness of this rhetorical strategy is that it provides a theoretical basis for condemning the relatively strong group consciousness that was rooted in the resistance of black people to slavery and segregation. This is probably why clever people like Jeff G like color blind rhetoric. It turns the tables on blacks and makes them the evil racists instead.

But this is also where Bennett and the color blind activists outsmart themselves on race the same way that the right in general outsmarted itself on Iraq. That's because what the practitioners of color-blind rhetoric are doing with this third claim is providing a basis for claiming that black people are morally inferior to whites.

In other words, the advocates of color-blindness are engaging in a form of primary racism. Before desegregation, Southern racists had fairly elaborate theories of white racial superiority and black inferiority. Since desegregation, whites have largely retreated from these kinds of claims (except for works like The Bell Curve) and formulated their sense of racial superiority indirectly through the relentless stereotyping of blacks. However, the advocates of color-blindness are going back to direct expressions of white racial superiority. What makes whites superior from the color-blind view is that they believe in individualism and treat people as individuals. What makes (non-conservative) blacks inferior from the color-blind view is that they have a group racial consciousness that's just as racist as that of Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Strom Thurmond.

Color-blindness seems to mean that clever guys like Jeff G. can have it all. On the one hand, they can dissociate themselves from low-class, ignorant racial bigots as well as inflammatory writers like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. On the other hand, they can get the edge on the white liberals who support efforts to do something about racial injustice because white liberals tend to also have strong convictions about individualism. And finally, they can feel intellectually and morally superior to most black people, a position that's very congenial within a white culture of conservatism that has been historically imbued with white supremacy.

In many ways, the rhetoric of color-blindness is the most effective formulation of white supremacy yet. And that's what makes the advocates of color-blindness a particular evil in American society.

Postscript on Magic Words. I haven't read the Stanley Fish article, but one way to understand the current political disaster that's starting to engulf American conservatism is that the failure of the Bush administration in general and the Iraq War in particular has meant that conservatives have lost control over all the magic words in American political life. Words like "defense," "security," "honesty," "ethics," "competence," "intelligence," and "effectiveness" are being pushed over to the Democratic and liberal side every time George Bush, Dick Cheney, or Alberto Gonzales opens their mouths. Indeed, there may come a time when right-wingers consider "weenie boy" to be more of a compliment than anything else.