Race, the Enduring Power of an Illusion in a "Color-Blind" Society

"We Don't See Things and then Define Them, We Define Them First And Then We See Them "--Walter Lippmann On July 4, 1992 Justice Thurgood Marshall gave a speech that questioned the progress of race relations since the Brown Decision of 1954. Justice Marshall said, "I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories, and that liberty and equality were just around the bend. I wish I could say that America has come to appreciate diversity and to see and accept similarity. But as I look around, I see not a nation of unity, but of division--Afro and white, indigenous and immigrant, rich and poor, educated and illiterate" (Higginbotham 1996, picture caption). These are lines from one of the last two speeches Justice Marshall gave six months before his death, January 24, 1993, and just thirty eight years after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education decision 1954, which ended the fifty eight year reign of dejure--Jim Crow--segregation, at the federal level, instituted with the passage of Plessey v. Ferguson of 1896 in which the Supreme Court of the United States subscribed to the doctrine that legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts and laid down the separate but equal ruling for the justification of segregation. Conversely though, it would be the dissenting opinion of Justice John Marshall Harlan in the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson ruling that, ninety six years before Justice Thurgood Marshall's last speech, fore-grounded the notion of "color blindness." Harlan in his interpretation of the Constitution, he viewed the white race as the dominant racial group. One hundred and twelve years ago Justice John Marshall Harlan argued in his dissent that, "The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievement, in education, in wealth and in power. So I doubt not, it will continue to do for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no case here, Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens" (Bell 2004, 26). Harlan in holding conceptual opposites together in his mind could have only made this statement if it was draped in the robe of white supremacy--ironically one has to be able to see color in order to determine the color white is to be the supreme color. What then were Justice Harlan and the Supreme Court up to? Derrick Bell gives us some insight into this by helping us to untangle this racial knot. Bell suggests that the Court's "rejection of the petitioners' plea ... systematically gloss[ed] over the extent to which Plessey's simplistic 'separate but equal' form served as a legal adhesive in the consolidating of white supremacy in America. Rather than critically engaging American racism's complexities, the Court would substitute one mantra for another: where 'separate' was once equal, 'separate' would be now categorically, in practice, unequal," Bell continues by saying that, "by doing nothing more than reworking the rhetoric of equality [the Court] foreclose[ed] the possibility of recognizing racism as a broadly shared cultural condition" (Bell 2004, 27). More precisely, colorblindness covers the deep chasm between the ruling whites and the ruled whites. The glue of racism that holds together these two opposing social and economic positions postpones dealing with in any meaningful way the terrible social inequalities that inhabit the social, political, economic, and cultural terrain of the Untie States. E pluribus a num--from many different whites, one white "race"--and the zero sum game Justice Harlan's opinion was not something that appeared from thin air. There had been of a number of decisions and pronouncements setting in place whites as the dominant group above Africans (blacks) and other non-whites. …