Colorblindness, The Big Lie: 
Colorblindness and the Taboo Against Honest Talk About Race

"Under our constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race . . .  We are just one race here.  It is American." 
U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

"In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.  There is no other way.  And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.  We cannot – we dare not – let the Equal Protection Clause perpetuate racial supremacy." 
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun

The assumption that Americans are no longer racist is central to the argument against race-based affirmative action.  Opponents of affirmative action proclaim that we have won the war against bigotry and achieved a society that is essentially free of racial prejudice.  Slavery, the genocide of native populations, segregation, the wartime incarceration of Japanese American citizens, are all distant memories, unfortunate blemishes on an otherwise glorious history.  If there was a time when some significant number of us were bigots, the argument goes, that time is long past, and none of us is responsible for crimes committed before we were born.  Certainly, critics concede, a small number of practicing racists remain, but they are social outlaws in a society committed to racial equality, outlaws subject to strong antidiscrimination laws as well as social sanction.  In this book, we call this argument the Big Lie.

Some of our most influential political voices have eagerly promoted such notions.  Robert Dole attacks affirmative action on the ground that slavery occurred “before we were born,” and future generations ought not to have to continue “paying a price” for ancient wrongs.  Newt Gingrich dismisses affirmative action by asserting that the long history of discrimination against African Americans is no different from that faced by white ethnic groups.  “Virtually every American” has been subjected to discrimination, he argues.

The Big Lie is indispensable to the argument against affirmative action.  If we believe that we have eradicated most of American’s racism, there is no need for a remedy that takes racism into account.  If there are no racists employers, then there is no need for government-mandated set-asides to ensure that those employers hire minorities.  If the differences between whites and blacks in education achievement and test scores are not reflective of continuing racial barriers to educational opportunity, then there is no need for minority admissions programs.  If the playing field is already level, then affirmative action is no longer a remedy required by morality and justice.  It becomes “reverse discrimination,” “preferential treatment,” and “racial entitlement.”  Only when such deceits are believed can affirmative action be turned on its head to become racism itself.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that race continues to matter in American, many of us continue to believe that our nation has overcome its racism.  The Big Lie is seductive primarily because most Americans want to believe it is true.  We want to believe that we are not racists.  A racist is an evil person, and most of us know that we are not cruel-hearted bigots.  Moreover, if we can believe there is no racism, or that there is very little, those Americans who benefit from white privilege can continue to reap the benefits of that privilege while denying any moral responsibility for the suffering of others.  Because all of the arguments against affirmative action rely on our eagerness to believe that, as a society, we are essentially free of racism, it is especially important to understand how the Big Lie works and appreciate the source of its seductiveness.

The deception begins with a rhetorical ruse that elides the ideal with reality.  The constitutional ideal of equality is invoked as if equality has been achieved, so now our only concern is to guard against some new inequality, such as discrimination against white males.  “Our Constitution is colorblind” we are told, as if this means that most individuals and institutions are free of racial bias.  To believe this we must accept a formal and extremely narrow definition of racial discrimination or racism, under which only self-professed bigots are racists and none of us is held responsible for perpetuating the white supremacy of even the very recent past.

Today’s colorblind argument has its origin in the famous dissenting opinion of Justice Harlan in the 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson.  “Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Harlan wrote . . .  This element of Harlan’s dissent became the central lesson of Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 landmark case that declared segregation inherently unequal and overruled the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy.  . . . 

To believe that we live in a colorblind society, free of the legacy of slavery and segregation, is to deny what we see and hear every day. 

Finally, in a clever twist, the court and opponents of affirmative action often argue that the Equal Protection Clause protects individuals, not groups.  Because the Constitution protects individual rights and not group rights, there can be no group injuries against a race.  If there is no group injury, then there is no need for a group remedy such as affirmative action.  It is a Catch-22.

Racism is an injury to a group.  White supremacy defines Blacks and other nonwhite races as inferior as groups.  Individual Blacks are discriminated against because of their membership in the group, and the entire group is injured by the beliefs and practices that define and treat them as inferior.  By limiting constitutional rights to individuals, the Supreme Court acts as if there is no such thing as a group injury and denies the only kind of remedy that responds to the way in which racism operates.  No group injury means no group remedy.

Of course the Court is not wrong when it says that the purpose of the Equal Protection Clause is to protect each and every individual without regard to his or her race.  The ideology of formal equality is attractive and powerful because it starts out with a good idea: that of liberal individualism.  Racial classifications are presumed invidious and are looked on with suspicion, because when we judge a person based on her race we disregard her human individuality and thereby deprive her of dignity and freedom of self-definition and self-actualization.  The point here is that race should not limit our humanness or our status as citizens.  This is the meaning of Justice Harlan’s admonition “Our constitution is colorblind” and of Martin Luther Kind’s challenge to us to judge one another by the “content of our character” rather than the color of our skin.

The Supreme Court relies on American’s strong tradition of liberal individualism when it tells us that we can ensure human dignity and equality by promising each person fair governmental process. According to this line of reasoning, considering race in school admissions and employment decisions is suspect because it introduces a factor into the decision-making process that has nothing to do with who we are as individuals.  Racial classification is wrong because if we distribute benefits based on an individual’s membership in a racial group, we are likely to make erroneous assumptions about the attributes of that individual.  Under this view, it matters not whether the purpose of the policy is the perpetuation of racial subordination or its demise.  The classification injures each person whose individuality it ignores.

In an ideal world, where each individual is born into a community that respects and values her as much as any other person, fair individual process is all that is needed.  In such a world, race consciousness and group-based decisions are necessarily in tension with equality and human dignity.  But that is not the world we live in, and a legal theory that acts as if we already live in such a world perpetuates the Big Lie.  When an individual’s rights are denied because her group is subjugated, only remedies creating equality for the group can offer true equality for the individual.

Remembering is a moral imperative.  We must acknowledge the misdeeds of our past and confront their contemporary legacies.  Out of the tragic history of American racism that we share, there is a way to universal human emancipation, if we will only see it.  To see our racism and fight it is the only way to fashion a just world out of an unjust past.  We are all Americans, and we are all racists.  We owe it to our children to admit to our infection with the sickness of racism so that we can begin the work of finding a cure.  We owe it to ourselves to stop telling the Big Lie.

Excerpted from We Won’t Go Back, Making the Case for Affirmative Action by charles R. Lawrence III and Mari J. Matsuda, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997, pp. 67 - 87