Declaring color-blindness cannot undo entrenched racialized inequality

Evidence

To pretend race has not been central is a fallacy; and to organize society as if it is irrelevant will only exacerbate racialized inequalities. One cannot abolish the effects of past racism simply by pretending they do not exist today. We cannot just reverse these entrenched experiences simply by declaring society “color-blind.” White Americans have tried to deny the significance of race, but “insisting on the meaninglessness of race to the American identity, are themselves full of meaning. The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion” (Morrison 1992:46). Or, in other words, “in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language” (Morrison 1992:12—13). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1840

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how naive solutions to structural problems fail — echoes the Milgrom point that informal reputation alone cannot sustain honest trade without institutions. — connects to: Formal colorblindness preserves racial inequality in privatized, unnamed form. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 129; Cordial racism legitimizes inequality by refusing to name race as its cause; Official colorblindness lets familiar-partner privilege continue unchecked as exclusion — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1621 (+4 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1840