Five Takeaways From Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Essay on the ‘Colorblindness’ Trap
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How a 50-year campaign has undermined the progress of the civil rights movement.
Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in college admissions was not constitutional. After the decision, much of the discussion was about its impact on the complexions of college campuses. But in an essay in The Times Magazine, I argue that we were missing the much bigger and more frightening story: that the death of affirmative action marks the culmination of a radical 50-year strategy to subvert the goal of colorblindness put forth by civil rights activists, by transforming it into a means of undermining racial justice efforts in a way that will threaten our multiracial democracy.
What do I mean by this? Here are the basic points of my essay:
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