Color-Blind Racial Ideology

Defining Racial Color-Blind Ideology

There are a number of complementary but competing definitions of racial color-blindness. Couching racial color-blindness as an expression of modern-day racism, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identified four frames or types: abstract liberalism (i.e., emphasizing political liberalism and the availability of equal opportunities to everyone, regardless of race, and the belief that political/economic interventions only serve to create a schism between racial groups); naturalism (i.e., interpreting racial clustering as a natural and preferred occurrence); cultural (i.e., using essentialist arguments to explain racial disparities, thus rooting racial differences in cultural practices); and minimization of racism in today's society. Ruth Frankenberg, also a sociologist, viewed racial color-blindness as a perspective consisting of two types: color-evasion (i.e., placing an emphasis on racial sameness to the detriment of seeing or acknowledging differences in experiences and political realities) and power-evasion (i.e., the belief that resources are fairly distributed to everyone and success is attributed to individual effort).

In the Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists, authored by the APA, the interpersonal aspects of racial color-blindness are emphasized. Based on this perspective potential racial differences are minimized in favor of universal or human experiences. There is a great deal of commonality across cultures; however, the color-blind perspective dismisses potential differences based on racial group membership and downplays how these differences may shape human experiences. This limited awareness of the manifestation of race and racism in society is the foundation for most conceptualizations of racial color-blindness. Regardless of the definition, racial color-blindness is also thought to help justify existing racial practices or policies that ultimately create and support existing racial inequalities.

Consistent with these articulations, researchers argue that racial color-blindness reflects a broader ideological stance. Racial ideology is complex, but essentially it can be conceptualized as a global term referring to the dominant views about race within a hierarchical society. Ideology in this regard consists of a shared worldview about race that helps to justify and legitimize the current racial status quo; it accounts for individual beliefs and dominant societal racial beliefs or ideas that are commonly understood and transmitted through a variety of civil society and structural mechanisms. From this perspective racial color-blind ideology is a set of commonly held beliefs that minimize and distort the existence of institutional racism. This perspective is most consistent with the minimization type of color-blind racism identified by Bonilla-Silva and the power-evasion type proffered by Frankenberg.

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