Color-blind rhetoric reframed race-specific remedies as the true racism

Evidence

Many conservatives used this formulation to attack certain features of the civil rights agenda. They sought to roll back busing as a remedy for segregated school districts, to dismantle affirmative action as a way to tackle generations of structural racism, to challenge minority set-asides that sought to address years of racial exclusion in the public sector, and to deny the significance of race in how voting districts were drawn. In each instance, the underlying assumption was simple: race-specific remedies amounted to a new kind of racism, and color-blindness was the solution. … The sin in Pendleton’s mind is not persistent racial inequality or black misery but the category of race itself. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 302

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how the inversion ‘anti-racist remedies are the new racism’ travels across eras, from post-civil-rights backlash to current anti-CRT and DEI attacks.
• XREF: connects to: Color blindness functions to re-anonymize racial rule after anti-racist exposure — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1728; Color-blind language like ‘community integrity’ could package segregation acceptably — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 189