Color-blind rhetoric functioned as an arsenal of racist dog whistles

Evidence

Reagan’s attack on affirmative action, his calls for constructive engagement with apartheid South Africa, his eventual evisceration of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, all in the name of color blindness, signaled a hard change in the tone and substance of racial politics in the country. Calls for law and order (and the war on drugs it would unleash), demands for smaller government, and pleas for personal responsibility as a replacement for government “welfare programs” became part of an arsenal of code words and dog whistles for white resentment and racist retrenchment. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 488

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is a precise unpacking of how ‘color blindness’ operated — not as neutrality but as cover for dismantling civil-rights institutions.
• XREF: connects to: Colorblind mestizaje narratives re-suppress already marginalized racial subjects — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1840; Dog whistles activate latent racial prejudice while evading egalitarian norms — Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer, Who Is Called by the Dog Whistle?…, 5; Racial dog whistles replaced explicit slurs after the civil rights movement — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 89 (+3 more)