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https://jeffjacoby.com/28359/back-at-last-to-the-color-blind-principle
Back, at last, to the color-blind principle
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 26, 2025
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A FIERCE commitment to racial color blindness — the principle that every individual should be treated by the law and by society without regard to
race or color — was fundamental to the Civil Rights movement. That
principle was enshrined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which
unambiguously prohibited employers and unions from discriminating on the
basis of race. Indeed, the legislation was so unambiguous that when
critics during the Senate debate on the bill said it would lead to
racial quotas in hiring, Senator Hubert Humphrey, the bill's lead
sponsor, didn't hesitate to refute the claim:
"If the senator can find ... any language which provides that an
employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related
to color, race, religion, or national origin," Humphrey memorably vowed,
"I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in
there."
But it wasn't long before the law's plain meaning was turned inside out.
In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which
mandated "affirmative action" in government contracting — a directive
that eventually grew into an elaborate skein of racial preferences,
quotas, set-asides, and "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI)
policies that compelled discrimination for the sake of racial balance.
Over time, liberal policy makers and civil rights organizations went
from upholding color blindness as the highest aspiration of a racially
just society — Martin Luther King's storied dream — to disparaging it as bigotry in disguise.
Thus it became the consensus on the Democratic left in recent decades
that discrimination by race was the only way to overcome racial
inequity. Any racial imbalance or statistical underrepresentation was
taken as proof of "systemic" racial bigotry — even if no actual racial
animus could be detected. In the words of Boston University's Ibram X.
Kendi, a leading exponent of such thinking, "As an antiracist, when I
see racial disparities, I see racism."
Racial preferences in government hiring, contracting, and spending
reached obsessive levels during the presidency of Joe Biden. His
inaugural address four years ago was studded with references to
"systemic racism," "growing inequity," "white supremacy," and "a cry for
racial justice." On his first day in office, he issued an executive
order that doubled down on "advancing racial equity" and "closing racial
gaps" by promoting race-conscious DEI mandates through "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda."
Now that agenda has been overturned. Good riddance to it.
In his first two days back in the White House, President Trump signed
several sweeping executive orders banning affirmative action, racial preferences, and DEI policies in federal employment and contracting. He explicitly rescinded LBJ's Executive Order 11246 — a dramatic rejection
of the racial identity politics of recent decades and reaffirmation of
the great civil rights ideal: color blindness.
In left-leaning precincts, Trump's move to dismantle racial preferences
has unsurprisingly generated a degree of hysteria. "When does he bring
back segregated water fountains?" was journalist John Harwood's unhinged reaction, while Harvard law professor Noah Feldman charged the new
president with delivering "the death blow to diversity."
In reality, the Trump administration is reviving the old commitment to a color-blind society that was the dream of civil rights heroes from
Frederick Douglass to Bayard Rustin to Zora Neale Hurston. The principle underscored by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in a 1948 Supreme Court
brief — that "classifications and distinctions based on race or color
have no moral or legal validity in our society" — is the principle the president's executive orders are meant to restore.
As noted, much of the intellectual justification for affirmative action
rests on the assumption that racial disparities must be caused by racial bigotry. The planted axiom of the DEI racial spoils system is that if
members of a racial group constitute X percent of the public, they ought
to constitute X percent of any setting or segment in society. Thus, to
again quote Kendi, "if Black people make up 13.2 percent of the US
population, then Black people should make up ... somewhere close to 13
percent of Americans sitting in prisons, somewhere close to owning 13
percent of US wealth."
But that's a fallacy. Disparities between groups are often wholly
benign, as the writer and podcaster Coleman Hughes pointed out last year
in his compelling book The End of Race Politics. Such disparities have
existed throughout human history and are often a reflection not of
bigotry or unfairness but of cultural or other differences that have
nothing to do with race.
For instance, Hughes wrote, "consider the cultural differences between
Blacks of American descent and Blacks of Caribbean descent" living in
New York City. While both demographic groups belong to the same race,
those of Caribbean background "were more likely to express disapproval
of drug use ... and more likely to condone strict parenting....
Caribbean Blacks also earned more money than American Blacks, were more
likely to be employed, and less likely to be teenage mothers — despite
living in equally segregated neighborhoods."
The point, as Hughes stresses, isn't to pass moral judgment on any
group. Rather, it is to show the inanity of automatically attributing
any disparities between groups to prejudice, systemic or otherwise.
It's a point people intuitively grasp in many contexts. Black athletes
account for more than 70 percent of NBA players, but no one attributes
that disparity to anti-white racism. Around 93 percent of all prison
inmates are men, but no one sees that as proof of rampant discrimination against males. Nor does anyone blame bigotry for the fact that while
China is home to less than 18 percent of the global population, an
estimated 80 percent of all pianists worldwide are Chinese.
What is true in those cases is true broadly. Though racism and
discrimination certainly exist, they don't come close to elucidating the
myriad statistical disparities between groups. The majority of such
disparities cannot be explained by bigotry, systemic racism, or
unfairness, writes Hughes. Demographic and cultural differences are
almost always more illuminating.
At the heart of the vast diversity-industrial complex that arose over
the past few decades was a refusal to acknowledge such differences. The
DEI worldview was that government should mandate not equality of
opportunity for individuals but equality of outcome for groups. Most
Americans have never shared that view. Even in deep-blue California, for example, voters twice rejected racial preferences. When the Supreme
Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, polls found
that nearly 70 percent of the US public approved of the decision.
Trump, who was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day, has moved quickly
and forcefully to reestablish as the law of the land the color-blind
principle for which MLK lived and died. If he succeeds, Americans of
every color and political stripe will be better off.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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