The recent financial travails taking place at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research are unfortunate. The staff layoffs and the unaccounted-for $55 million in donations to the center don’t bode well for the celebrity academic and his anti-racism cause. However, this is an opportune time for all Americans to reacquaint themselves with what anti-racism has nearly vanquished: the notion of color-blindness. In his books and public appearances, Kendi consistently argues that the notion of color-blindness is a mask to hide racism. I beg to differ.
In his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 at his March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that he envisioned that his “four children [would] one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Earlier that same year, and in a radically different context, King in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” wrote searingly about racial prejudice and its collateral damage to black Americans and white Americans and to “those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” No other public figure in modern times has expressed sentiments so resonant with the color-blind tradition in the Western intellectual tradition.
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