Two recent major-press books — Andre Archie’s The Virtue of Color-Blindness and Coleman Hughes’s The End of Race Politics — make a case that is considered quite bold today, would have been wildly controversial in 1953, and would have been thought a reiteration of the obvious during most years in between. Specifically, both texts argue for the virtue of racial color-blindness, and for not acting as a bigot in any particular direction.
To both Archie and Hughes, “color-blindness” means pretty much what it meant to Martin Luther King Jr. — at least in public — and what it would have meant to almost any white or black citizen who played some varsity ball during the 1990s. As Hughes (whom, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say I know well and like) puts it, the color-blindness principle is simply: “We should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.” A bit more at length and at least as eloquently, Archie contends that to live in a color-blind fashion is “to understand that an individual or a group’s racial membership should be irrelevant when choices are made or attitudes formed. This approach helps define what it means to be American in both creed and culture.”
This sort of approach to life is combined by both authors, particularly Hughes, with what might be called the commonsense definition of traditional, or real, racism — which can be summarized as disliking other people, or believing in their inferiority, owing simply to their racial-group membership. Hughes conceives of this concept almost in “evo-psych” terms, noting that “humans have an inbuilt tribal instinct — a tendency to identify strongly with a group, to aim empathy inward toward its members and suspicion and hatred outward.” That externally projected and largely illogical dislike, simply put, is racism.
Archie and Hughes argue, accurately enough, that traditional definitions of this kind, which together might be summed up as “prejudice based on the variable of race,” are what most major black and Caucasian civil-rights leaders in America had in mind when they sought the eradication of racism as a social evil. While some forms of discrimination do require some level of societal power, as modern race activists are fond of noting, others, such as racially motivated murder or forcible rape, do not — and King himself famously said that “black supremacy would be equally as evil as white supremacy.”