We should fight for a color-blind society — not one separated by race

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.