Color-blind rhetoric revived segregationism by condemning discussion of racism as itself racist

Evidence

“Racism will not disappear by focusing on race,” House speaker Newt Gingrich argued in the wake of Clinton’s national race conversation. This reaction to Clinton’s conversation synthesized into a newly popular term: color-blind. “Color-blindness” rhetoric—the idea of solving the race problem by ignoring it—started to catch on as logical in illogical minds. “Color-blind” segregationists condemned public discussions of racism, following in the footsteps of Jim Crow and slaveholders. But these supposedly color-blind segregationists were much more advanced than their racist predecessors, announcing that anyone who engaged Clinton’s national discussion in any antiracist way was in fact racist. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1162

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘color-blindness’ rhetoric as the idea of solving race problems by ignoring them, and classifies it as a new, advanced form of segregationism.
• XREF: This directly maps onto Kendi’s three-way scheme — ‘color-blind’ as the new cloak for segregationism — which the reader wants to test and apply. — connects to: The dismissal of reverse racism can silence what the marginalized are actually saying — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 61; Affirmative action was recast as the truest form of racism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1762; Respectable segregationism paired capitalism rhetoric with veiled mob violence — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 132 (+9 more)