“Color-blinded-ness” IS racism

There’s been a lot of conversation about the Supreme Court ruling to end affirmative action in Michigan. It presents an opportunity to explain some things that may be difficult for my fellow white folks to grasp. Hopefully I can do so in a way that doesn’t immediately induce scowls and burst blood vessels. I read a very helpful and influential book several years ago called Race: A Theological Account By J. Kameron Carter that opened my eyes to a critical subtlety within the history of modern racism. Paradoxically, the way that racism came about originally was through the quest of European Enlightenment thinkers to transcend and deny cultural specificity and simply exist as a rational, universalized (secular Christian) humanity. Their attempt to be “color-blind” was the reason they became racist, which is a critically important lesson to white people today who think mistakenly that “color-blinded-ness” is the goal. Please hang in with me while I break this down. 

Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes and other Enlightenment philosophers were developing their thought amidst two centuries of horrible bloodshed between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe. They longed for a universal value system that could transcend religion and national identity. Before the Enlightenment, there was no such thing as white people yet (I’m painting a broad stroke to make this accessible so give me some grace here). There were simply French, Germans, Spaniards, Turks, and so forth. It’s certainly true that darker-skinned nationalities were sometimes viewed negatively by the lighter-skin ones. The warfare between Islam and Christianity had been going on a lot longer than the one between the Catholics and Protestants. But while people of darker-skinned nationalities may have been strategic enemies who were viewed with suspicion, modern racism didn’t begin until darker people became subhumans who could be immediately grabbed and sold into slavery like cattle. Modern racism, the “discovery” of the New World, and the Reformation were basically one big European cultural trainwreck that all happened at the same time.

The way that people of color came to be subhuman to white people was something that happened first to the Jews living Europe. Jews were the main non-Christian people-group who lived all throughout Europe, so they were the original guinea pigs of modern racism. The problem with the Jews was that they didn’t fit in with the spirit of the Enlightenment. The ideal of Enlightenment thinking was a rational system of thought that could be divorced from all cultural specificity and simply built on the reason universal to all humanity. All the Enlightenment thinkers had their roots in Christianity, but they viewed the authority of tradition with a lot of suspicion and disdain. To them, cultural tradition was the reason that stupid religious wars were being fought, so they wanted to mine the universal truths out of Christianity and develop a transcendent, universal rational system of thought they could share in common with all people. 

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