Two recent major-press books — Andre Archie’s The Virtue of Color-Blindness and Coleman Hughes’s The End of Race Politics — make a case that is considered quite bold today, would have been wildly controversial in 1953, and would have been thought a reiteration of the obvious during most years in between. Specifically, both texts argue for the virtue of racial color-blindness, and for not acting as a bigot in any particular direction.

To both Archie and Hughes, “color-blindness” means pretty much what it meant to Martin Luther King Jr. — at least in public — and what it would have meant to almost any white or black citizen who played some varsity ball during the 1990s. As Hughes (whom, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say I know well and like) puts it, the color-blindness principle is simply: “We should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.” A bit more at length and at least as eloquently, Archie contends that to live in a color-blind fashion is “to understand that an individual or a group’s racial membership should be irrelevant when choices are made or attitudes formed. This approach helps define what it means to be American in both creed and culture.”

This sort of approach to life is combined by both authors, particularly Hughes, with what might be called the commonsense definition of traditional, or real, racism — which can be summarized as disliking other people, or believing in their inferiority, owing simply to their racial-group membership. Hughes conceives of this concept almost in “evo-psych” terms, noting that “humans have an inbuilt tribal instinct — a tendency to identify strongly with a group, to aim empathy inward toward its members and suspicion and hatred outward.” That externally projected and largely illogical dislike, simply put, is racism.

Archie and Hughes argue, accurately enough, that traditional definitions of this kind, which together might be summed up as “prejudice based on the variable of race,” are what most major black and Caucasian civil-rights leaders in America had in mind when they sought the eradication of racism as a social evil. While some forms of discrimination do require some level of societal power, as modern race activists are fond of noting, others, such as racially motivated murder or forcible rape, do not — and King himself famously said that “black supremacy would be equally as evil as white supremacy.”

However, this historically popular position — which in fact neutralizes questions about the relationship between power and racism by declaring racial bias to be verboten for people at all levels of influence — has fallen under attack of late. What has replaced it, as these authors note, is an almost obsessive focus on race as a defining and unavoidable human characteristic, with this position shift justified by the claim that ignoring race minimizes the unique harms faced by (all?) members of each distinct racial group (except white people).

For example, asking a young Asian-American woman “Where are you from?” in a college-campus setting might make her feel “othered” or ostracized, and this should be taken into account in all citizens’ interactions with her. African Americans, in particular, seem to have largely internalized this novel view of race relations at the group level. Citing some data and his own observations, Archie notes at one point that black Yanks seem to have become constantly “conscious of race in a way that is completely out of proportion to their actual social status in the real world of the twenty-first century.”

As Archie also points out, this bizarre modern phenomenon began within our disaffected lower elite, perhaps — this is my take — as a strategic technique that facilitated competition with more technically qualified majority-group peers. Archie contends that these “racialist claims originated with academics at elite institutions in the 1960s” and fermented on the campus before they “gained momentum in the 1980s with the emergence of multiculturalism.” Today, ominously, many of the most evangelical devotees of wokeism are still the primary cultural influencers within U.S. upper-middle-class society — college professors and prep-school dons, pundits and television-news readers, NGO activists, print journalists, and so forth — and they have not stopped their Gramscian “march through the institutions” since the creation of politicized black-studies departments in the late 1960s.

The Virtue of Color-Blindness pungently outlines the academic and social “contributions” of a good many such people, including Ta-Nehisi Coates (Ibram Kendi before Ibram Kendi), Dr. Ibram Kendi himself (né Hank Rodgers and the author of Antiracist Baby), Robin DiAngelo (described by my research assistant as the “token white-leftist grifter” in this space), and triple OG critical theorist Derrick Bell. More briefly, Hughes describes a near infestation of this stuff across “all of our key institutions: government, education, and media” — as evidenced by such disparate phenomena as academic “studies” departments, corporate departments and offices of diversity, and the ever-present alphabet soup of high-dollar consulting courses in “DEI,” “ESG,” “SEL,” “CRT,” “NU-HR,” and more.

Whatever its roots or most frequent host environment, this movement often culminates in what an honest observer can only describe as a new variety of racism (“neoracism,” to Hughes). Per that author: “Neoracists agree that race matters deeply and inherently, but not because of genetics or divine decree.” Instead, these contemporary bigots claim that race matters and likely always will “for societal and historical reasons.” For neoracists, “discrimination in favor of non-whites is justified on account of the hardships they endure — and hardships their ancestors endured — at the hands of whites.” In practice, of course, once justified, this form of discrimination operates basically as racial bigotry always has — taking forms such as reluctance to hire members of an out-of-favor group or admit them to college.

While the hardship-based argument of today’s minority racialists is prevalent, it just does not make much sense — a fact that perhaps exposes the amoral, strategic roots of the DEI paradigm. In a world where seven or eight of the highest-earning American ethnic groups are non-white and the best-educated ethnic group (Nigerians) is made up of black people, it is not logical to argue that all “POC” have negative experiences that whites as a group do not. Beyond this, serious research done into concepts such as “privilege” invariably reveals that dozens or even hundreds of factors — not simply two or three, e.g., race and sex — predict outcomes such as income and happiness.

Any competent short list of these variables, such as those entered into models by the economist June O’Neill back in 1990 and again in 2005, would have to include age, the region of the country where people live, IQ and aptitude-test scores, and level of voluntary education. I myself, on the basis of past quantitative analyses, would throw in factors such as rural (vs. urban or suburban) background, residency in the South rather than in the North, LGBT status, disability status, level of physical attractiveness, and plain social class as things that often predict how hard or easy the life of any person might be. Empirically, there seems to be no more logical reason to argue that one should not judge a black job applicant purely on his merits (“But he might once have suffered!”) than there is to contend that this can never be done with a rural white southerner. Every person is a unique individual, that most vulnerable of all minorities.

Interestingly, Hughes’s book includes an extension of this argument that I have rarely seen coherently made in long form: The legal/formal racial categories currently in use in the United States make no logical sense. While race in some 23andMe sense almost certainly does exist (check out geneticist Razib Khan’s writings on the topic), racial groups such as “Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander,” which are employed in U.S. affirmative-action jurisprudence, were essentially just made up by lawyers.

As The End of Race Politics points out, it was not until the late 1970s that the U.S. dreamed up the “canonical list of five categories we use today: Black, Hispanic, White, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American/Alaska Native.” And “population geneticists were not consulted to help create these categories.” This last fact, dryly presented, seems evident enough. The Hispanic category alone includes (among others) Amerindian Mexican Americans, entirely white Argentines and Chileans of Italian descent, and essentially black Cubans and Puerto Ricans.

Census race is a remarkably poor stand-in for something like past disadvantage. As Hughes writes, the group-level experiences of black Americans who immigrated to the United States after the Civil War were almost unbelievably different from the experiences of those who lived through slavery, so “historical victimhood” is not adequately measured by using “race as a proxy.” A bit more bluntly, African Americans — who on average earn $48,297 per household annually — are one of the poorest of all large U.S. racial groups, while black immigrant groups such as the Guyanese ($83,412) and Ghanaians ($72,089) easily outpace the national average of $65,000–$69,000 and often catch whites ($74,932). This is no mere silly side point: Twenty-one percent of all U.S. blacks are currently first- or second-generation immigrants — and that group would not include successful and long-settled West Indians. Life is complex and should be treated accordingly.

More could be said about both books. There are certainly some criticisms that could be raised. Archie, in particular, comes close to advocating a conservative version of Marcuse’s repressive-tolerance thesis in response to the more obnoxious sort of liberal speech — saying at one point that “conservatives in particular should be aware of the moral hazard of legitimizing certain ideas by thinking they can be defeated solely by open and rational discussion” and, at another, that “for far too long, American conservatives have been too willing to give a fair hearing to points of view and ideas that are contrary to core American beliefs.”

Overall, however, both texts are excellent summaries of the case for the defense of a principle — a principle, oddly enough, that no sane person in recent history would have thought it necessary to defend until perhaps 2012.