Failing race paradigms left a vacuum that neoconservatism and colorblind ideology filled

Evidence

All three paradigms suffered from serious deficiencies, largely because their concepts of race were reductionist: They relied on other, supposedly more fundamental phenomena, such as culture (the ethnicity paradigm), inequality (the class paradigm), or “peoplehood” (the nationbased paradigm), to explain the social fact of race. … The subsequent waning of class-based (generally Marxist) and nationalist movements, and of the specific organizations operating within these challenging paradigms, left a vacuum in racial theory and politics. This created the political space for the resurgence of neoconservatism, which developed in the 1970 and 1980s as a reworked, rightwing version of the ethnicity paradigm. This contributed to the rise of colorblind racial ideology. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 160

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s CRT claims about colorblindness as racial ideology — this passage locates colorblindness’s genealogy in the failure of the three competing paradigms. — connects to: A middle-class antibusing movement forced segregationist ideology into a ‘color-blind’ populist frame. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 51; Suburban homogeneity made conservatism’s color-blind claims plausible by removing the evidence against them — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 35
• DEFINE: Clarifies the three reductionist race paradigms — ethnicity (culture), class (inequality), nation (peoplehood) — and the critique that all reduce race to something more fundamental.