In the Obama years, whatever political truce had been forged among U.S. elites over colorblindness unraveled, particularly once states moved to limit voting after the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder released them from federal oversight under the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, the persistent problem of racial disparities in police violence and criminal punishment erupted with a new intensity. The rise of Black Lives Matter protests gave decisive impetus to longstanding criticisms of the colorblind legal and policy regime, reinforcing the perception of racial stalemate during the post–civil rights era, with America’s penal complex, according to a popular title, described as tantamount to a “new Jim Crow.”
The resurgent idea that “racism is in our DNA” has emerged as a shorthand for thinking about the historical continuities of racial domination and overturning the colorblind legal and policy approach. If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed little or nothing. Colorblindness counseled “benign neglect” in the face of persistent racial disparity, viewing the latter as a “tangle of pathology,” which Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously argued was now “capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.” The claim that “racism is in our DNA” insists instead that racial disparities are evidence of social injustice produced by racism, demanding policy remediation.
The metaphors we live by tell us a lot about our predicament. Colorblindness—an impairment of the senses—was always more about sanctioned indifference to racial inequality than ensuring fairness. To explain away enduring racial disparities, colorblind partisans reopened the door to racist science and culturalist explanations of poverty. But those who focus exclusively on racial disparity risk falling into a trap of their own by treating racial differentiation as if it stands outside of history and determines its course. The bitter irony is that essentialist thinking about racial inheritance has crept back into contemporary life, as we can see in the turn to epigenetic trauma, DNA ancestor quests, and ontological conceptions of racial identity.
Colorblindness and the DNA metaphor are linked by an unstated commitment to the stubborn truth of racial difference, particularly along a black/white axis, as the prime mover of American social and political life. Each abandons more ambitious efforts to denaturalize race: to supersede both racist and racial frameworks. Racism and racial differentiation repeat not because they have been designed or preset in a manner that determines or codes the future, let alone our bodies, but because they are conserved by moral, legal, political, economic, and spatial orderings of society that have never been fully or even adequately reconstructed on non-racist principles and according to non-racial standards of justice.