Color-blindness is the belief that the fairest way to address racism is to ignore race, in law, policy and personal life. It is often voiced as "I don't see color." Critics argue that ignoring race leaves existing racial inequality in place, because many gaps were created by past and present policies that did see race.
The phrase traces to Justice John Marshall Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared the Constitution color-blind. Civil rights lawyers once used that line to fight segregation. Later, opponents of affirmative action adopted it. In Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The Court's 2023 ruling ending race-conscious college admissions drew on the same idea.
Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls this color-blind racism in his book Racism without Racists, first published in 2003. He argues that color-blind language lets people explain away racial gaps as the result of culture, choice or the market. Color-blindness matters because a policy cannot fix a gap it refuses to measure.