Casting a Blind Eye: The Ironic Consequences of Color-Blindness in South Africa and the United States

Abstract

This paper addresses the politics of color-blindness in comparative perspective as its meaning has changed over the past half-century. Drawing on the cases of South Africa and the United States, I focus in particular on the socio-political and psychological functions that color-blind ideology performs for whites in defending white advantage in the present context. Although in the past color-blindness served as an effective rallying cry for the abolition of Jim Crow and the demise of apartheid, the very same principle serves in the post-segregation context to stall transformation of the racial order in the direction of greater equality. It is an irony that the principle of color-blindness that so effectively mobilized opposition to the institutionally racist order in both national contexts mutates at the very moment of apparent victory into one that radically limits the anti-racist imagination.