Chief Justice John Roberts gave modern colorblind constitutionalism its most famous formulation:

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

The principle sounds simple. But it fails when applied to a society built through racial classification and exclusion.

For generations, America did not ignore race. Government used race to determine who could be enslaved, who could become a citizen, where people could live, which schools they could attend, whom they could marry, and whether their voting rights would be protected.

A system cannot be built through racial distinctions and then simply declared colorblind while their effects persist.

That is the central flaw in Roberts’s approach:

Colorblindness may prevent new racial classifications, but it cannot, by itself, dismantle barriers created by earlier ones.

And that is where the Fourteenth Amendment matters.

The colorblind approach can turn the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause into a limit on race-conscious remedies for the very racial conditions that made the Amendment necessary.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s command of equal protection should be unquestionable. But what that command requires has become a contested judicial question, decided by increasingly narrow majorities.

A back-and-forth with @JRem today exposed where that philosophy leads in ordinary debate.

I argued that racial discrimination still exists and that, in some circumstances, recognizing race is necessary to identify and address it.

The response was that recognizing race means supporting racial discrimination, and therefore makes me racist.

That is the trap:

Recognizing race’s continuing significance is increasingly treated as racism itself.

The result is a distorted definition of equality.

The system was permitted to see race while constructing inequality.

But anyone who argues that we may still need to see race to understand or dismantle it is accused of perpetuating racism.

The way I see it, that is not racial equality.

It is colorblindness being used to preserve the consequences of a system that was never colorblind to begin with.