America Must Be Colorblind | 5-Minute Video

Should we judge people by the color of their skin or by their actions? The answer to this question was once obvious. Not anymore. Andre Archie, professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, explains why.

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Script:

America must be a colorblind society, or it won’t be America.

There will still be a country that borders Canada and Mexico and sits between two oceans, but it won’t be the nation envisioned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

Or Frederick Douglass in his “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” oration.

Or Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.

Or Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Until recently, every schoolchild knew what it meant to be colorblind, but that’s no longer true. So, I’ll explain it.

To be colorblind is to be guided by the belief that immutable traits, such as race, tell you nothing important about a person. The color of your skin is as meaningless as the color of your eyes.

What matters are your actions.

No one said it better than Reverend King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

King said those words in 1963. By the time Barack Obama became president in 2009, King’s dream had been effectively realized. Yes, there were still individual racists, but racism was dead, universally discredited. No one who espoused overtly racist views was taken seriously in America.

And then, they were.

Why and how this reversal took place is complex, of course, but if we were to ascribe it to one recent event, it would be the death of George Floyd. Floyd, a black man, died while in police custody in May 2020.

On the heels of Floyd’s death, issues of race preoccupied the nation.

A new vision of America was emerging.

Colorblind was out. Anti-racism was in.

And what is anti-racism? Here’s how Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at Boston University and the leading figure of the “antiracist” movement, described it: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

In other words, only by discriminating against whites can equality be achieved.

How long it will take and who determines when the goal is reached, no one has ever bothered to say.

White Americans, anti-racist thinking goes, are either flat-out bigots or undeserving beneficiaries of past and present racism. The “system” is rotten to the core. Thus, the commonly used term “systemic racism.”

For Kendi, race explains everything. This is Critical Race Theory, or CRT.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, DEI, is another expression of the same idea. If you’re not seen as white, your race explains every personal failure, and if you are seen as white, your whiteness explains every personal success. Your character doesn’t matter.

This is the exact opposite of colorblindness.

You can’t follow Kendi’s “antiracist” philosophy and, at the same time, endorse King’s “I Have a Dream” message. One judges people by their race, the other by their actions. One loathes America, the other has faith in America. One has no finish line, the other does.

In a short period of time, the new racists have created an entire industry devoted to promoting race consciousness. It has spread like a cancer into virtually every university and corporation in America.

The University of Michigan has a DEI staff of 241 and an annual budget of $30 million, all supposedly to root out racism at one of America’s most liberal colleges.

Name a major corporation, and it probably has a fully staffed DEI department. It’s even infiltrated some elementary schools, where students are encouraged to sort themselves by race.

How do we restore the colorblind ideal?

First, we must understand that America’s founding principle, that “All men are created equal,” as Jefferson put it, is colorblind. That’s why Frederick Douglass implored us to “Stand by those principles [in the Declaration and the Constitution]: Be true to them on all occasions.”

To be colorblind isn’t to be ignorant of the role race played in America’s past. It’s to learn from that past. And the lesson is, people shouldn’t be judged by their skin color. To think otherwise doesn’t fight racism; it promotes it.

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