The new rhetorical strategy conservatives employ when dealing with the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Brown is the idea that the goal of Brown was to achieve a "colorblind" society. To say you "don't see someones' color" may seem like a compliment, but it's actually a patronizing insult. Not only is it dishonest, since to make such a comment you would have to be conscious of my color as a social factor to believe not "seeing it" is some kind of virtue, but what the philosophy of colorblindness actually says is that being black is somewhat like having a disability, it is something to be "overlooked", ignored, like the stump of a severed limb or an awkward lisp.

Of course, what conservatives mean by colorblindness is the removal of all cultural and historical context from matters of importance--not because such issues don't matter, but because it allows them to write their own prejudice out of history.

Take George Will's most recent column:

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Seattle, which never had school segregation, and Louisville, which did but seven years ago completed judicially mandated remedial measures, must stop using race in assigning children to schools to produce particular racial ratios in enrollments. How did we get from this: "Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere" (the NAACP's brief, written by Thurgood Marshall, in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case), to this: local public education establishments routinely taking cognizance of race in assigning children to schools?

[...]

reyer said that last week's decision abandons "the promise of Brown." Actually, that promise -- a colorblind society -- has been traduced by the "diversity" exception to the equal protection clause. That exception allows white majorities to feel noble while treating blacks and certain other minorities as seasoning -- a sort of human oregano -- to be sprinkled across a student body to make the majority's educational experience more flavorful.

This repulsive practice merits Clarence Thomas's warning in his opinion concurring with last week's ruling: Beware of elites eager to constitutionalize "faddish social theories." Often, they are only theories. As Roberts said, Seattle and Louisville offered "no evidence" that the diversity they have achieved (by what he has called the "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race") is necessary to achieve the "asserted" educational benefits.

Evidence is beside the point. The point for race-mongering diversity tinkerers is their professional and ideological stake in preventing America from achieving "a colorblind mentality."

Once again, someone hostile to integration has chose to quote Justice Thurgood Marshall in a lengthy and out of context manner, distorting his words to fit an essentially racist end.

The fundamental premise of Brown is simply this: "Segregated is inherently unequal."

By no measure are public schools in America either integrated, or equal in the education they provides their children. The Supreme Court case doesn't rely on Jim Crow to maintain segregation, but rather the cultural practice of racism that results in the de-facto segregation of residential areas. There is no need for Jim Crow when Americans segregate themselves voluntarily.

Since a significant portion of the American electorate still feels as though any effort to help African Americans gain access to adequate public education, the best way to create opportunities for minority children is to place them in schools where those opportunities exist--most of these schools are white schools. The goal of "colorblindness," a social farce; the only people who claim never to take race into account are those who do so without restraint. The purported goal of "colorblindness" is an attempt to distract from Brown's real goal, a goal the United States has failed, to give the same educational opportunities to black kids that it gives to white kids.

The court can choose to ignore the circumstances out of a desire for "colorblindness" but "colorblindness" has become a euphemism for "blind to the issues faced by people of color."

George Will gave us a taste of his conception of "colorblindness" last week when he wiped away the reasons for George Wallace's Presidential Campaign:

A candidate can succeed in giving an aggrieved minority a voice—e.g., George Wallace, speaking for people furious about the '60s tumults.

Any mention or understanding of he fundamental, the only purpose of Wallace's campaign, "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever" is eliminated from Will's account of his success in representing "an aggrieved minority".

This is the "colorblindness" conservatives are aiming for. One where racism is removed from all historical and social context; not to grant equality of opportunity, but to pretend that racism doesn't exist as social force, and never did. Not a world where race doesn't matter, but a world where you can't say that race matters.

The results of such a goal, not the elimination of Americas' racial prejudice but the willful ignorance of it, we can see, are not so different from those of Governor George Wallace.

The goal of those interested in eradicating racism should not be that society pretends racism does not exist, but rather, as Manning Marable puts it:

New formations composed primarily if not exclusively of racialized ethnic minorities have a special responsibility for crafting new strategies of political intervention and mobilization. What we should seek is not a color-blind society but a more democratic social order where race disappears as a fundamental category for the distribution of power, material resources and privilege.

That of course, as anyone who has read Will's column regularly knows, is the last thing he would ever want.