The claim that colorblindness is racist requires you to believe that the core principle of the civil rights movement — judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin — was wrong. That's a remarkable position.

Colorblindness as a principle doesn't mean pretending racial differences don't exist or that racism never happened. It means that in our laws, institutions, hiring practices, and personal interactions, a person's race should not determine how they're treated. This was the central demand of the civil rights movement and the principle behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The alternative being proposed is race-consciousness: deliberately treating people differently based on their racial category. Historically, treating people differently based on race has had consequences ranging from slavery to Jim Crow to internment camps. The principle of colorblindness was developed precisely to combat these injustices.

Research in social psychology supports the colorblind approach. A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that colorblind messaging reduced racial prejudice, while multicultural messaging that emphasized racial differences sometimes increased stereotyping and intergroup tension.

Practically, colorblindness means ensuring that application processes, legal proceedings, lending decisions, and educational admissions don't favor or disfavor anyone based on race. It means a Black business owner and a white business owner follow the same regulations. A Hispanic student and an Asian student meet the same admissions standards.

Chief Justice John Roberts put it well: 'The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.' This isn't a complicated concept. It's the principle that made America's progress on race possible, and abandoning it in favor of racial categorization would be a tragic step backward.