The Case for Returning to Colour-Blindness: Why the Old Ideal Still Holds Moral Weight

Reclaiming colour-blindness not as denial, but as an ethical horizon that resists reifying race and recenters our shared humanity.

There was a time, not long ago, when colour-blindness was taught as a moral aspiration. The point was never to pretend racism had evaporated; it was to insist that the deepest truth about a person was not the racial category they were assigned. For many of us, that instinct felt right. It captured the basic human commitment to see the individual before the label, character before category. Over time, the cultural mood shifted. We now hear that colour-blindness is naïve, harmful, or even an erasure of lived experience. The logic goes like this: because race shapes people’s interactions with the world, failing to foreground race is a refusal to acknowledge reality. But that argument carries a subtle leap that discernment makes visible. It moves from a legitimate point, that race has real social consequences, to a far stronger claim: that race must therefore remain the central lens for understanding identity, conflict, and moral life. That isn’t recognition; it’s reification.

Philosophically and scientifically, race is a social construct in the precise sense that human genetic variation does not map neatly onto racial categories. Those categories were forged through law, economics, and historical power arrangements, not biology. Racism operates; racial essences do not. If that distinction holds, then race has no inherent claim to permanence as a moral or interpretive framework. Yet in contemporary discourse, race is often treated not as a tool for diagnosing injustice but as a stable identity one is expected to inhabit indefinitely.

At the same time, it would be wrong to ignore why racial identity became salient in the first place. For many communities, naming race was an act of survival and solidarity in systems that made their suffering invisible. Recognizing that origin story is essential. But acknowledging why identity-based language arose does not require accepting that it must define every human encounter going forward. The risk is fixation: the moment a concept created to reveal injustice becomes the lens through which all experience must be filtered.

The clearest way through this tension is to recast colour-blindness as an ideal theory, a long-term ethical horizon, not a description of current realities. In the non-ideal world, where discrimination and structural disparities persist, we obviously cannot behave as though race is irrelevant. Policymaking, data collection, institutional accountability, and reform all require attending to where harm falls along racial lines. That is an instrumental use of the category: a temporary analytic scaffold necessary for dismantling injustice. But instrumental use does not mean the category should become a permanent identity anchor. Short-term recognition does not demand long-term reification.

Once this distinction is explicit, the common objection collapses. Colour-blindness is not a moral shield used to avoid confronting racism; it only has moral authority when paired with the real work of repair. The ideal can never be an excuse for denial. Instead, its purpose is to ensure that once injustice is corrected, race does not ossify into a permanent moral frame. The scaffolding should not become the structure.

This is why the intuition that “too much attention on race feels off” is not mere discomfort but an early warning signal. It senses the drift from using race as a diagnostic category to elevating it into a defining one. It recognizes that honouring lived experience is not the same as insisting that race must remain the primary truth about a person. When those lines blur, even well-intentioned anti-racism risks freezing the categories it set out to dismantle.

The case for reclaiming colour-blindness is straightforward: we can address racialized harm today without accepting that race must remain morally primary forever. We may need to see race clearly to repair what racism broke, but the horizon should still be a world in which racial categories lose their gravitational pull on how we see one another. Reclaimed in this way, colour-blindness is not denial. It is a commitment to the truth that the human being beneath the construct is where our loyalty ultimately belongs.