Colorblindness Quotes

“Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Racism is a complex and interconnected system that adapts to challenges over time. Colorblind ideology was a very effective adaptation to the challenges of the Civil Rights Era. Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused.”
― Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy

“If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous words, “the problem of the color line,” then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.”
― Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America

“Some well-meaning folks think if we stop talking about racism, it’ll magically disappear, like the smell of an errant fart. But like a fart, people might try to be polite and ignore it, but everyone knows it’s there. Avoidance has never been a great tactic in solving any problem. For most situations in life, not addressing what's going wrong only makes matters worse. It’s like someone breaks your arm, and the person who slammed the baseball bat into it is saying, 'The only reason it won’t heal is because you keep complaining that it hurts.' How about you get me a cast so the bone can set straight again? America does not want to put the effort into providing this cast. This is why we must talk about race, and we must do it openly.”
― Luvvie Ajayi, I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual

“Our teacher says we're supposed to be colorblind. That's hard to do if you can see color, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I'd say so, but I think your teacher means don't make any assumptions based on color."

"Cross on the green and not in between.”
― Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle

“Colorblindness, though widely touted as the solution, is actually the problem.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don't see race. neither did the poplar tree.”
― Danez Smith, Don't Call Us Dead

“The McCleskey decision was not really about the death penalty at all; rather, the Court's opinion was driven by a desire to immunize the entire criminal justice system from claims of racial bias...Racial discrimination, the Court seemed to suggest, was something that simply must be tolerated in the criminal justice system, provided no one admits to racial bias.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“The petition argued that the Court's decision was a dire mistake; if the decision were allowed to stand and prosecutors were compelled to explain gross racial disparities such as the ones at issue, it would...'paralyze the criminal justice system'—apparently because severe and inexplicable racial disparities pervaded the system as a whole.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness