Colorblindness in Action and Policy

I can’t help but view colorblindness as the ideal.  

This does not mean that I favor instituting colorblindness right now, either in policy or my personal actions (although I do think the standard for overriding the presumption of colorblindness in my personal actions is/should be/is and should be higher than that in policy).  

Any questions about the effectiveness of affirmative action in redressing/rectifying institutional/structural racism, I would oppose ending affirmative action on the grounds of colorblindness.  

I support slavery reparations (again, everything else being equal and thus strategic and priority considerations aside).

I don’t think having double standards for the establishment of black groups and spaces and white groups and spaces is wrong or racist or even really inconsistent.  The same goes for such cases that arise in our individual lives, like the use of language like insults, stereotypes and racial jokes.

Why I have these views and their rightness is best demonstrated, I think, with the example of slavery reparations.

I support reparations as restitution for harm done.  The fact that we recognize and grant intergenerational property rights through inheritance law makes the case for reparations almost incontestable.  The labor and wealth stolen from slaves should be paid back to their ancestors just as much as inheritance should be passed down to make the victims of slavery whole again.   

But the injury of slavery is more than just the value stolen from slaves.  Like restitution in almost any case involves not only the victim being made whole again, it also involves compensation for pain and suffering, the magnitude of which in the case of slavery must surely imply an immense level of compensation.  To those who may grant that reparations ought to made for the value of stolen labor, but contest that it ought to include compensation for the pain and suffering of slaves since it is being paid not to those who endured it but their descendants, there are two responses*: first, the descendants also experience pain and suffering derived from the same original crime of slavery and, second, had the sums for compensation for pain and suffering been paid to the victims of the original generation, the slaves, their descendants would have received it in some form anyway.  

So current generation’s descendants should receive, in addition to the value of unpaid labor of slaves plus interest accrued, reparations must also include the difference in value between the wages earned by the non-slave descendants and the wages they would have earned if not subject to disadvantaged participation the US labor market due to their starting point without accumulated financial capital, and their unequal treatment in society at large, plus interest.  Some measure of compensation must also be included for their deficit of other types of capital, cultural, social, etc.  

And even this does not fully answer the question, since only the crime of slavery has been addressed, and not the subsequent crimes of Jim Crow, segregation, and more.

   

But this particular view in support of reparations accords with my holding colorblindness as the ideal (and with the reasoning of the US Supreme Court that it is legitimate for the state to interfere with and prohibit private discrimination because it is still a delayed result of original government policy; “badges of inferiority”) in that I am justifying non-colorblind policy and action on the grounds that it is to reverse the effects of earlier non-colorblind action that was harmful; i.e., to the extent that today’s poverty and marginalization of black people is the result of slavery, government can combat it with non-colorblind policy.  The end of slavery in the law does not mean that the harm from it is over if its effects persists over generations.

All this is to say that I still can’t help but hold racial colorblindness as the ideal, a la MLK’s quote about “not color of skin but content of character” that is so often naively invoked by those who oppose racial justice, and that such an ideal is still compatible with, nay still even obligates reparations, affirmative action, and more non-colorblind and progressive policy.

As for how to implement this ideal then given all these conditions I’ve laid out?  One might say that as soon as racism is over, all the debts paid back and all the socialization by media and culture undone, then policy should revert to colorblindness.  But there are strong reasons to suppose that, not only will this never be the case (because the means necessary to achieve it will never be politically possible), but it cannot be the case.  After all, as rational beings we automatically conceptualize and categorize; as biologically descended beings through a process of evolution, we are hard-wired groups and parcel out trust accordingly.  If this is the case, might it be right, either permissible or (more likely) even obligatory, to still establish some permanent and pervasive means of providing some small advantage to black people to counteract this disadvantage, even after all the discrete debts like reparations have been paid?

The demographic change of the country would of course make this worth evaluating again.  

*Although this is a good question that I am not certain on as a legal principle: should restitution for past crimes paid to the descendants of the crimes’ victims, now deceased, include compensation for pain and suffering in addition to being made whole again?  

Does this question conceive of payments for the purpose of restitution and for the purpose of pain and suffering as separate?  

What about payments to compensate what it took to be made whole again with regard to the harm of the original crime?  For this question, it seems that we shouldn’t conceive these separately since to be made whole again with regard to the original crime, one must endure the further burden of engaging the process to do so.