Color-blindness replaced explicit white supremacy as racism’s new justification

Evidence

This wasn’t your old-fashioned racism. Now the people who had once declared the importance of racial distinctions and an explicit commitment to white supremacy embraced a lesson they found in King himself: true justice was color-blind. … What conservatives wanted now was not a restoration of the pre-Brown social order with its memories, customs, institutions, and rules of racial place and etiquette. They did not want history restored, or even remembered. What conservatives wanted now, they insisted, was a common, equal playing field and judgment on the basis of individual merit alone. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 299

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-shifting inversion: the very language of racial justice is appropriated to erase group history and re-legitimize racial hierarchy under color-blind guise — dense enough to sit with.
• DEFINE: Useful for the reader’s task of distinguishing racial habits from old-fashioned overt prejudice.
• XREF: Parallels the Frankfurt School analysis of how liberal forms and anti-racist language get captured to serve existing power. — 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 ideology enshrined suburban autonomy and white racial innocence as national doctrine. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 113