Until the philosophy which holds one race
Superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war.
—Bob Marley, “War”
In his compelling new treatise on race, The Virtue of Color-Blindness, Andre Archie laments that no one has made the “conservative case for the virtue of American color-blind principles in a manner that addresses our present turmoil.” In fact, he “cannot think of any contemporary author on the Left or Right who doesn’t think the color-blind approach is at least outdated and probably naive.”
The good news for Mr. Archie and for the rest of America is that a national embrace of color-blindness is an idea whose time may have finally come—and from unexpected, credible sources. Three independently minded authors who do not fall neatly into left or right ideological boxes have written books as to why America must finally abandon its obsession with race and thereby escape from the division, fear, and bitterness spurred by hyper color-consciousness.
Joining Archie are Coleman Hughes, who has composed The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, and Winkfield (Wink) Twyman Jr. and Jennifer Richmond, a black man and his white female colleague who share their years-long epistolary exchange in Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America.
Ironically, in this essay reviewing books that extol the benefits of downplaying the significance of race, it is nevertheless relevant that Messieurs Archie, Hughes, and Twyman Jr. are all black men. In full disclosure, as a fellow man of a darker hue, I must confess my sympathy for their arguments. Indeed, it is instructive that each of us black men (and Bob Marley posthumously!) yearns for a world in which our identity should not be reduced entirely nor primarily to the singular characteristic of skin color.
In their books, all three authors carefully explain the vantage point or personal experience that shaped their racial worldview. Twyman Jr. proudly declares that he is a second cousin, seven times removed, of our nation’s first president, George Washington. Despite being born and raised in the segregated south, Twyman Jr. bears no resentment but instead has reverence for this Founding Father. Indeed, Twyman Jr. writes about how he wanted to hang a portrait of General Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge, but his daughter “erupted in outrage” at the very suggestion that a slaveholder could adorn a wall in their home.
Hughes in turn relates his four years at Columbia University, expressing incredulity at some of the most privileged black college students claiming to experience racism every day at the hands of guilt-ridden white students bending over backward to pledge allyship to their black brethren. “It felt as if I were dropped into a simulation where the Real Racism dial was set close to zero, but the Concern About Racism dial was set to ten.”
Archie, who grew up “lacking a consistent biological father,” credits his study of ancient Greek philosophy for his ability to see through the pernicious racial pedagogies spreading throughout American society in the guise of multiculturalism, the Black Lives Matter movement, and critical race theory. Referencing Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, Archie correctly critiques these divisive approaches that “wrongly ignore hundreds of years of ethical and religious traditions that reject assigning moral worth to an individual’s ascriptive qualities.”
As an example of how these ideologies superficially assign “moral worth,” consider even the presentation of the word black. In 2020, during the racial reckoning surrounding George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests, major news outlets such as the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal adopted new editorial standards, like lemmings, to capitalize the b in black, while leaving the w in white lowercase. Columbia Journalism Review stated that “it is a kind of orthographic injustice to lowercase the B: to do so is to perpetuate the iniquity of an institution [slavery] that uprooted people from the most ethnically diverse place on the planet, systematically obliterating any and all distinctions regarding ethnicity and culture.” The idea that a capitalized B in black alongside a lowercase w in white is somehow supposed to make up for the legacy of slavery is just one example of hollow virtue signaling.
Archie, Hughes, and Twyman Jr. are having none of this manufactured racial apologia, nor the useless overcorrection, as a means to achieve a perverse form of “equity.” Not one of the three books uses the convention to capitalize the b inblack. (In solidarity, I have asked the editor at Religion and Liberty to go against their editorial guide and instead leave the first letters in the words black and white in this review lowercase. That is equality.)
One would think that seeking no racial preference would be considered admirable. But no good deed goes unpunished.Each of the authors has had to pay a price for demanding equal treatment. Hughes’ vision of color-blindness entails“the idea that we should treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in our public policy.” But that didn’t stop Hughes from being called a “coon” and worse, all for testifying before Congress and opposing payment of reparations to black descendants of slaves to make up for gaps in wealth between black and white families.
What makes actualizing the concept of color-blindness so hard is the existence of racial disparities in a range of areas including education, income, health, and incarceration rates. These differentials make it virtually impossible to ignore skin color as a central factor in today’s America. I wish all three authors had grappled more with the practicality of bringing color-blindness to fruition. Whether we like it or not, patterns of outcomes disaggregated by race are visible markers of progress, or lack thereof.
That said, it is important to stipulate that not all differences in outcomes for different groups by race, ethnicity, or national origin are avoidable or even inherently bad. Chinese children consistently overperform in math skills versus national averages. First-generation Indian Americans are one of the most economically successful ethnic groups in the U.S., immigrant or nonimmigrant.
There is no law of nature that commands that the performance of a given identity group must exactly equal that of another group, nor precisely match their proportional representation in the society. Where things get problematic is when racial differences—particularly between blacks and whites—point in a negative direction.
Relative to their white peers, black families do possess a fraction of their wealth. Black women do have disproportionately far higher nonmarital births as compared to any other racial group. In New York, black mothers die during or after childbirth at a rate more than four times higher than white mothers.
These stubborn racial disparities in outcomes are what fuels the idea that race matters most. But are any of these phenomena occurring because of skin color, either due to genetic predisposition or anti-black racism or white supremacy? Or could it be that these disparities are driven by factors that are more consequential than race?
Take for example our nation’s massive collective failure to effectively teach literacy and build verbal proficiency across all races and classes. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (otherwise known as NAEP or “the Nation’s Report Card”), in 2022 only 42% of white fourth-grade students and only 38% of white eighth-grade students were reading at or above NAEP-proficient reading achievement levels.
It is unlikely that systemic racism is the cause of such poor academic performance among white students. But for those captured by color-consciousness, racial animus is the only and all-purpose explanation for why there are even lower reading proficiency rates among black and Hispanic students. This kind of “mono-causal” thinking—racial disparities must be caused exclusively by racial discrimination—crowds out the ability to identify more universal reasons that could help improve outcomes for kids of all races.
As someone who has run public charter schools in low-income, minority communities in the Bronx for more than a decade, I have observed how race is frequently not the most salient factor driving poor student outcomes. Rather, lack of high-quality school options is more often the culprit. Moreover, the disintegration of family structure has adversely affected students’ home lives and academic results. I have also seen how knowledge-based curricula and effective instruction grounded in the science of reading can yield significant learning gains for students of all races. But in a color-obsessed world, these non-race-based factors pale in terms of the attention they receive relative to race and racism as explanatory factors.
Despite the arguments made by these three credible messengers for our nation to pursue color-blindness, they still face stiff opposition from a hyper color–conscious elite.
In response, what these authors, and all of us who advocate for color-blindness, need to emphasize even more is that an obsession with color-consciousness often draws attention away from the factors that substantially contribute to human advancement. In other words, a hyper-focus on color-consciousness typically obscures more than it reveals. But pure color-blindness is likely unattainable as long as the types of racial disparities persist that demand we confront the role that race or racism does play in their formation.
In other words, to be color-blind does not mean to be color-indifferent. For example, the reason I launched a high school in the Soundview section of the Bronx is because of the racial disparities that exist for low-income minority students in that area. They require a high-quality education to compete on a level playing field. That isn’t color-consciousness—that’s opportunity-consciousness. If you create a world in which the playing field is equally accessible to all, then you can be truly color-blind. It’s as Bob Marley says in “War”: we should strive to build a world in which “the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes.”
