Advocating for a society that is free from racial division, not defined by color

In his new book, “The Virtue of Color-Blindness,” Andre Archie, an associate professor of ancient Greek philosophy at Colorado State University, argues that “social justice” groups are dragging us back to segregation, and making race relations worse, not better. In this excerpt, he notes how the battle for civil rights in the US was one of unity, not exclusion:

The fight to insist that the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — that all were created equal — includes all Americans, regardless of race, was difficult and bloody, but just and right.

In the 1850s, the Frederick Douglass wing of the abolitionist movement made the case for a color-blind reading of America’s founding documents — a position enshrined by the Civil War amendments and the Civil Rights movement.

Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream” speech are powerful indictments of segregation precisely because they appeal to the same Founding American documents and Western philosophical texts once used, wrongly, to promote racism.

But that centuries-long struggle for equal opportunity has been undermined in recent times by leftist ideologies that claim “color blindness” is racism. 

Anti-color-blind advocates like Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates promote Critical Race Theory (CRT), antiracism, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). They believe that the best way to navigate cultural differences in the United States is to openly discuss and highlight racial and ethnic differences. 

Highlighting differences of race, they argue, makes explicit the structural nature of white economic and social power, and how it is perpetuated at the expense of black Americans and other people of color.

The motivation behind this thinking is a type of alienation with roots in hatred of the familiar. 

Color-blind principles are based on a rich, historical struggle to rise above the natural but base human tendency to be selfish, parochial and tribal. Humans naturally sort themselves into groups by excluding and marginalizing others.

The perverse and obscene instances in history, such as American slavery and the Holocaust, show that such exclusiveness never leads to anything good. 

Anti-color-blind pedagogy caters to our base natural tendencies, and it does so in the same manner as all racial racialist ideologies.

The virtue of color blindness is at the heart of the American identity. We cannot remain a country without it.