Conceptualizing color-evasiveness: using dis/ability critical race theory to expand a color-blind racial ideology in education and society

Abstract

Color-blind racial ideology has historically been conceptualized as an ideology wherein race is immaterial. Efforts not to ‘see’ race insinuate that recognizing race is problematic; therefore, scholars have identified and critiqued color-blindness ideology. In this paper, we first examine Gotanda’s (1991) identification and critique of color-blind racial ideology, as it was crucial in troubling white supremacy. We then explore literature in both legal studies and education to determine how scholars have built upon Gotanda’s intellectual theoretical foundations. Finally, using a Dis/ability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) framework, we end by expanding to a racial ideology of color-evasiveness in education and society, as we believe that conceptualizing the refusal to recognize race as ‘color-blindness’ limits the ways this ideology can be dismantled.

Keywords:

• Critical Race Theory
• Dis/ability Critical Race Theory
• color-blindness

In his Plessy vs Ferguson¹ (1896) dissent, Justice Harlan argued:

(O)ur constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. (Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 559 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting))

Harlan’s oft repeated lines have been cited when arguing for a color-blind² racial ideology. Color-blind racial ideology has historically been conceptualized in the U.S. as ‘race is irrelevant’ and therefore, it should be disregarded (Gotanda 1991, 268). Harlan’s original intent was that all should have access to civil rights (as long as that person was a man³), regardless of race. Yet, many in society have since interpreted this quote of Harlan’s as a commitment to ignore race (Murray 2012). The underlying message of this interpretation insinuates that recognizing race is problematic and therefore the solution is to discount race (Guinier and Torres 2002).

Conservatives and liberal legal scholars alike have embraced a color-blind racial ideology since it was applied in Plessy. In fact, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was so invested in a refusal to see race that he equated laws meant to subjugate particular races with laws using race conscious policies meant to mitigate years of bias. In 1995, Thomas wrote:

As far as the Constitution is concerned, it is irrelevant whether a government’s racial classifications are drawn by those who wish to oppress a race or by those who have a sincere desire to help those thought to be disadvantaged…. In each instance, it is racial discrimination, plain and simple. Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 240–1 (1995) (Thomas, J., concurring).

Thomas’ interpretation that any government acknowledgment of race was equally problematic, whether to discriminate or to ameliorate discrimination, has become the basis of U.S. antidiscrimination law (Haney-Lopez 2007). Katzenbach and Marshall (2000) note of this interpretation:

It is very nearly as if this court has simply mandated that what is the country’s historic struggle against racial oppression and racial prejudice cannot be acted upon in a race-conscious way-that the law must view racial problems observable by all as if oppression and prejudice did not exist and had never existed. The court’s majority, in other words, has come very close to saying...that courts cannot be permitted to see what is plain to everybody else. (55)

However, even with these objections, there has been a plethora of U.S. legal cases and articles that have utilized color-blind racial ideology (Banks 2000; Getches 2001; Hernandez 1998).

A commitment to color-blindness swept through the U.S. and color-blind rhetoric was taken up heartily in the field of education as evidenced by several education policies and practices that utilize color-blind language (Rodriguez 2015; U.S. Department of Education 2010). Educators have grown to embrace color-blind ideology as demonstrated by the surplus of color-blind approaches to educational research, policy analysis, and teacher education discourse (Milner 2007). Wells (2014) argued that U.S. education policy and reform advance color-blindness:

(T)he two central educational reforms of the last few decades – the standards/accountability movement and free-market school choice policies – have both been framed as outcome-based solutions to the racial achievement gap without directly addressing any societal or educational issues related to race… NCLB…is, quite simply, a reflection of the most popular “colorblind” approach to addressing racial disparities in education: Ignore stark racial inequality when implementing policies and then bemoan vivid racial inequalities in educational outcomes. (1)

Wells’ (2014) analysis of education policy and reform reflected that similar to law, a commitment to color-blind racial ideology in U.S. education conflated acknowledging race with being racist, and therefore the implications for educators have been to refuse to recognize race is to be morally superior (Rogers and Christian 2007). Unfortunately, education outcomes in the U.S. illustrate that race does matter with racism impacting achievement, discipline, and special education status, to name just a few (Annamma, Morrison, and Jackson 2014; Berlak 2001; Fabelo et al. 2011). In other words, the temporal racialized contours of the education debt cannot be denied (Ladson-Billings 2006).

In 1991, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and U.S. legal scholar Neil Gotanda wrote a seminal law review conceptualizing and critiquing color-blind racial ideology as a tool to maintain white supremacy.⁴ Gotanda noted this color-blind racial ideology preserved white supremacy by sustaining, ‘the social, economic, and political advantages that whites hold over other Americans’ (3). The purpose of this paper is to examine Gotanda’s (1991) critique of color-blind racial ideology, explore theoretical expansions of Gotanda’s work made in the legal and educational literature, and further expand his conceptualization of color-blind racial ideology to color-evasiveness. Given the seminal nature of Gotanda’s conceptualization and critique of color-blind racial ideology, we believe we must first examine Gotanda’s work, as it was crucial in troubling white supremacy. We then explore literature in law and education to determine how scholars have built upon Gotanda’s intellectual foundations. Finally, we end by expanding to a racial ideology of color-evasiveness, as we believe that conceptualizing the refusal to recognize race as ‘color-blindness’ limits the ways this racial ideology can be dismantled.

Gotanda’s conceptualization of ‘Our Constitution is colorblind’

In his seminal law review, Gotanda (1991) stated that he ‘examines the ideological content of the metaphor “Our Constitution is color-blind”, and argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of color-blind constitutionalism-a collection of legal themes functioning as a racial ideology-fosters white racial domination’ (2). Though we will not try to summarize the entire 69-page law review here, we highlight the five themes that arose in Gotanda’s analysis:

•	The public–private distinction. Through an examination of several cases, Gotanda found that, ‘Under this racial public-private distinction, public officials exercising state powers operate according to the rule that race is not to be considered. In the private sphere, however, race may be considered’ (8). Therefore, even if race could be completely discounted in the public sphere by law, there is no such requirement in the private sector;
•	Non-recognition of race. This theme addressed how race is allowed to be noticed, but not considered and Gotanda recognized, ‘The inherent self-contradictions of nonrecognition can be summarized in terms of dialectical logic: A subject is defined by its negation, hence, an assertion of nonconsideration necessarily implies consideration’ (23). Said differently, to know when one must ignore a racial difference, one must first recognize that racial difference;
•	Racial categories as immutable facts. Gotanda noted that the problem with this attempt to see race classifications as objective obfuscated ways ‘socially constructed racial categories white and Black5 are not equal in status. They are highly contextualized, with powerful, deeply embedded social and political meanings’ (6). To claim racial categories are objective discounts the historical fact that since the founding of the U.S., race has never been a neutral category, but instead has indicated citizenship, power, and property (Harris 1993);
•	Formal-race and unconnectedness. Gotanda argued that when racial categories were viewed as objective facts, ‘the color-blind mode of constitutional analysis often fails to recognize connections between the race of an individual and the real social conditions underlying a litigation or other constitutional dispute (7). Viewing these racial categories as neutral requires ignoring how racism is linked to racialized outcomes in the U.S.,
•	Racial social change. Ultimately, Gotanda noted a problematic solution for instances of racism that a color-blind racial ideology advanced, “Under the color-blind constitutional model, the prescription for racial problems in American society is for the government to adopt a position of “never” considering race’ (Gotanda 1991, 7). Yet, he recognized, there is no proof that never considering race will make racism go away.

Gotanda ended by recognizing that:

Whatever the validity in 1896 of Justice Harlan’s comment in Plessy-that“our Constitution is ... color-blind”–the concept is inadequate to deal with today’s racially stratified, culturally diverse, and economically divided nation. The court must either develop new perspectives on race and culture, or run the risk of losing legitimacy and relevance in a crucial arena of social concern. (68)

Thus, Gotanda argued that from the contamination insinuation in American law’s ‘one drop rule⁶’ to reverse discrimination charges arising from affirmative action efforts, the suggestion of a color-blind racial ideology ignored the realities faced in lives and litigation. By analyzing race from multiple uses and categorical perspectives, Gotanda concluded that the U.S. Supreme Court should reject its contemporary use of color-blindness much like it had rejected ignoring religion.

U.S. scholars across disciplines, particularly in legal studies (Haney-Lopez 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2011) and education (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995), took up Gotanda’s conceptualization and critique of color-blind racial ideology, identifying the ways that color-blindness had seeped into various institutions in society, and critiquing its use (Bonilla-Silva 2006). CRT scholars recognized that color-blind racial ideology was ‘…expressed in rules that insist only on treatment that is the same across the board, [and] can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimination’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2001, 8). Education scholars argued that with a CRT analysis, ‘The guise of color-blindness, fairness, and equality is lifted to reveal the biased nature of the policy’ (Valles and Villalpando 2013, 264), as well as education research and teacher education discourse (Milner 2007). For example, in education research, it has been found that teachers prone to a color-blind stance have difficulty in critical self-reflection on the production of racism in their own classroom contexts (Dixson and Rousseau 2005). Therefore, Gotanda’s (1991) naming and critiquing of a color-blind racial ideology was necessary and useful in disrupting white supremacy.

Expanding Gotanda’s conceptualization of color-blind racial ideology

Though the conceptualizing and critiquing of the racial ideology of color-blindness is an essential step in troubling white supremacy, we believe that conceptualizing the refusal to recognize race as ‘color-blindness’ limits the ways this ideology can be dismantled. Therefore, we explored the legal studies and education literature through this question: How do theoretical expansions of color-blind racial ideology afford and constrain those working to disrupt white supremacy? To address this question, we:

1.	Reviewed expansive notions of color-blind ideology in law and education to understand the foundational importance of Gotanda’s critique;
2.	Introduced a Dis/ability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) framework (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013b) in order to recognize and address the inherent limitations of color-blindness to describe a racial ideology wherein the recognition of racial realities is viewed as negative;
3.	Expanded a color-blind racial ideology to color-evasiveness in order to capture ways that the ideology of refusing to acknowledge race functions in society more accurately.

Methodology

Our goal of this paper was to examine work that theoretically furthered Gotanda’s (1991) argument, not to examine every paper that has utilized Gotanda’s definition of color-blindness, as the far-reaching impacts of Gotanda’s work are immeasurable. For example, typing the term ‘color-blindness’ into Google Scholar resulted in over 36,000 results, many referencing Gotanda. Specifically, Gotanda’s 1991 piece has been cited over 1400 times when searched on Google Scholar alone. Though identification of color-blindness in different facets of society is necessary and useful, we sought work whose aim was to theoretically expand on the critique of color-blindness. Some examples of articles that were excluded because they did not theoretically develop Gotanda’s work further are articles that: (1) referenced color-blindness as a tenet of Critical Race Theory or racial ideology (Cooper 2009; Han 2006); (2) discussed color-blindness but did not build on Gotanda’s work; or (3) applied an analysis of color-blindness in law or education (e.g., curriculum, teaching, and/or discourse) using qualitative or quantitative measures with no theoretical expansion (Briscoe 2014; Niemonen 2007). In other words, to be included in our literature review of expansions of color-blind racial ideology, the papers had to go beyond identifying color-blindness as it currently exists in society and focus on expanding Gotanda’s critique of color-blindness.

In order to complete a systematic exploration of ways color-blindness has been theoretically expanded on, we searched in two major areas. We began in legal studies with the rationale that law was where Gotanda first published his seminal work. Using West Law, Lexus Nexus, and Hein Online, because they are three primary legal research tools, we searched the term ‘critique of color blindness’ as this was closest to Gotanda’s original use of the term. We also included the terms: colorblind, color-blind, critique, and critical. This gave us 97 articles to review.

The second major field we searched was education in order to see how our own field had taken up the racial ideology of color-blindness. We searched ERIC, a frequently used educational database and research tool, with the phrase ‘critique of color blindness’ as we did in law but found that this search term was too narrow. After exploring the education literature more, we found that the term ‘critique’ had shifted to ‘analysis’ and thus searching for ‘color blind analysis’ provided a broader range of articles to review. Using the same variants of color-blindness as in law, we found 98 education articles in this database.

After our initial searchers, we reviewed the resulting 195 articles in both law and education. We included papers between 1991 and 2015 with the rationale that Gotanda’s piece was written in 1991, so no paper before that would theoretically expand on what had not yet been written. We omitted book reviews, books, and dissertations, as that work was not always peer reviewed. We also precluded work that focused on the medical condition of color-blindness. Finally, we reviewed the remaining articles to exclude work that only referenced color-blindness or cited Gotanda without theoretically expanding on his critique of color-blindness. These parameters left us with 13 articles, 12 law, and 1 education, all of which are reviewed below.

Legal studies’ expansions of color-blind ideology

In order to critically evaluate how the racial ideology of color-blindness was taken up in U.S. legal studies, we began with Gotanda’s (1991) argument that, ‘modern color-blind constitutionalism supports the supremacy of white interests and must therefore be regarded as racist’ (62–63). Three arguments found in legal studies’ theoretical expansions of Gotanda’s work included color-blindness ideology’s reliance on historical ignorance, social acceptance, and legal immorality. These three arguments are further explored below.

First, for color-blindness to persist, one must disregard historical facts. Ignoring historical and social contexts of domination in the U.S. allowed racism to be viewed abstractly and inappropriately (Cook 1991). Doing so not only violated logic, but the intention of earlier Courts. By drawing on Justice Harlan’s analysis of racial pride and cases beyond Plessy, Golub (2005) argued that Justice Harlan’s conception of color-blindness both allows and requires judicial attention to the social and political forces through which race was made meaningful (593). In contrast, the Court’s contemporary color-blindness ‘more closely resembles the majority in Plessy than Justice Harlan’s dissent’ (596). These social and political forces, acknowledged by Harlan and ignored by today’s Court, have been created, indoctrinated, and strengthened over time.

Others similarly advanced the importance of the U.S. historical perspective in legal studies to extend Gotanda’s conceptualization of color-blindness. Just as Golub (2005) noted that Justice Harlan utilized history, Iheukwumere and Aka (2001) showed that when the Supreme Court first considered affirmative action (a primary target of color-blind ideologists), the Court did so with a firm consideration of history and the law’s need to ‘remedy the deplorable condition of African-Americans within the national economy’ (23). America’s ignorance of history, grounded in resisting any national Black identity, allowed the Court to utilize color-blind redistricting plans (Blacksher 1996).

Second, another theoretical expansion of Gotanda focused on how socially the result of ignoring history ‘reduces race to symbolic ethnicity’ (Calmore 1997, 69). Irish-Americans may find pride in the University of Notre Dame’s mascot.⁷ In contrast, America’s Indigenous peoples must find various ways to continually legally and politically fight against the use of the Washington D.C. football team name ‘R**skin’⁸ and racially problematic caricatures used by Cleveland’s baseball team.⁹ ‘The fraud of color-blindness is…. the denial of racism as … people of color live it’ (Calmore 1997, 70–71). In other words, people of color consistently have to contest the social acceptance of using racial slurs as complimentary representations, whereas white Americans are allowed to take pride in their ethnicity while maintaining white supremacy.

Finally, legally, a theoretical expansion of Gotanda’s critique of color-blindness recognized the result of ignoring historical, social, and political facts was to create immoral outcomes, immoral politicism, and an immoral Court (Culbertson 2008). By continuing to embrace color-blindness, the U.S. Supreme Court solidified its role as ‘guardian of the racial caste’ because it denies ‘the history and complexity of race, races, and racism in the United States’ (Ghosh 2008, 53–54). Color-blindness then infected a variety of legal disciplines, from voting law to patent law, where inventors seek legal protection for their creative solutions that are somewhat or wholly designed for certain races (Ghosh 2008).

Ultimately, like the racism connected with slavery and Jim Crow laws, color-blind racial ideology has been used as a tool for white supremacy. The Court has used this tool to permit deviation from using discriminatory intent as a 14th Amendment lens developed by the civil rights era (Haney-Lopez 2007, 2010a, 2011). Historically, the Court used discriminatory intent in claims suggesting violation of the 14th Amendment. The Court moved away from that to explicit discrimination (e.g. KKK) using color-blindness as the mechanism. This tool has shackled African-American attorneys who are expected to cure racism outside the courtroom while remaining silent to racial implications inside the courtroom (Russell 1997). Like many other tools of white supremacy, color-blindness went from a mechanism to support the historically marginalized to a mechanism to suppress them, or from a tool for lifting up to a tool for keeping down (Haney-Lopez 2011).

Education expansions of color-blind ideology

Education scholars demonstrated that, ‘In effect, educational practices that appropriate “colorblind” ideologies are not color-blind at all – these strategies of erasure are simultaneous practices of whiteness’ (Rios, López, and Morrell 2014, 3). In 1995, Cochran-Smith wrote in the American Educational Research Journal about the idea of color-blindness as a problem in teacher education as did Solorzano in 1997 in Teacher Education Quarterly. Education scholars took up the identification and critique of color-blind racial ideology in U.S. education policies, practices, and outcomes (Alemán et al. 2011; Su 2007). Some focused on pinpointing color-blind ideology in education institutions in a variety of quantitative and qualitative ways (Buenavista 2010; Chapman 2013). Though the recognition and critique of ways schools (re)produce color-blind racial ideology in discourse, policy, and practices was wholly necessary, much U.S. education scholarship did not seek to theoretically extend Gotanda’s work. It was not until the last decade that Gotanda’s critique of color-blindness began to transform within the field of education.

In 2006, Williams and Land expanded on Gotanda’s critique of color-blind racial ideology, specifically in terms of the normalized white standard in educational testing and the resulting academic tracking. They argued:

Any students who have been through a form of compulsory formal education are products of a tracking system. Positions in life or socioeconomic status (SES) are partially decided during the formative years of schooling. This often goes unquestioned because this practice of sorting students based on perceived academic abilities has been a major factor in school organization since the beginning of testing. Standardized tests tend to legitimize academic tracking to make differentiation seem fair. Students are largely selected for ability groups by test scores. (Williams and Land 2006, 581).

Williams and Land (2006) went on to argue that such standardized tests reinforce white cultural knowledge, thus by design positioning students of color as inferior and reproducing racism through differential access to post-educational opportunities. This educational practice was a direct result of a commitment to color-blind racial ideology in assessing student learning which maintains white supremacy.

Both U.S. legal and education scholars sought to apply and expand Gotanda’s conceptualization and critique of color-blindness in their respective fields, which afforded these scholars the opportunity to recognize ways the law and education have limited positive outcomes for communities, people, and students of color through particular legal and educational mechanisms (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995). However, we found through this review of the literature that while providing theoretical expansions, the authors were constrained by the term color-blindness itself. We attributed this constraint to a limited application of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989). In the next section, we examine the affordances of turning to a DisCrit framework to re-frame the racial ideology of color-blindness.

Conceptual framing

We framed our interrogation of color-blind racial ideology and its critiques in CRT and its branch, DisCrit. In this section, we began with a brief history of CRT. Next, we provided the rationale for using DisCrit, a relatively new branch of CRT, to build an intersectional framing (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013b). Finally, we ended with the affordances this conceptual framework provides for exploring color-blind ideology.

CRT’s intellectual lineage in the U.S. temporally links to scholars as far back as Phillis Wheatley, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois. The formal creation of CRT stemmed from Critical Legal Studies where legal scholars applied a class analysis to the law but did not substantially engage with race (Crenshaw et al. 1995). After extensive development of CRT in the law (Bell 1976; Crenshaw 1989; Delgado 1987; Matsuda 1987), CRT was applied to education (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995). CRT was a tool for addressing: (a) the centrality of race and racism in education (Dixson 2006; Lynn 1999; Parker 1998; Stovall 2004); (b) specifically addressing the issues particular racial groups faced through branches including LatCrit (Solorzano and Bernal 2001; Villalpando 2003); and (c) interrogating whiteness within the system of white supremacy (Gillborn 2005; Leonardo 2004; Matias 2013). CRT has developed many branches, demonstrating the pervasive presence of race and racism and the multiple forms racism has taken in our society.

Recently developed, DisCrit addresses how ‘the legacy of historical beliefs about race and ability, which were clearly based on white supremacy, have become intertwined in complex ways that carry into the present day’ (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013b, 2). It is a tool that is indebted to, and simultaneously further strengthens, CRT because it recognizes the mutually constitutive and normalized nature of the processes of racism and ableism (Erevelles and Minear 2010). DisCrit acknowledges how these normalizing processes of racism and ableism position unwanted bodies outside of the category of normal in order to justify their exclusion, segregation, and even termination. DisCrit explores how perceptions of race and ability are built upon each other, socially constructed in tandem, and how those labels impact the embodiment and positioning of those who are constructed as less than.

Conceptual affordances of CRT and DisCrit

Since CRT has no singular list of canonical tenets, we find it more useful to address the affordances of an intersectional conceptual framework of CRT and DisCrit (Delgado and Stefancic 2001). First, because racism and ableism are normalizing processes that are interdependent, bodies that do not fit into a norm are identified as problems. Second, once branded, those differences are viewed as deficits and marked as abnormal. Third, once a person is labeled with differences or dis/abilities, there is justification for segregation in the name of remediation. Fourth, the only way to resist master-narratives that pathologize bodies different from the ideal is to provide space for counter-narratives by oppressed people. These counter-narratives cannot stand alone but must be juxtaposed against the master-narratives. Finally, counter-narratives must be multidimensional, considering multiple intersections of identity.

A DisCrit conceptual framework recognized that racism and ableism inform the racial ideology of color-blindness by locating (un)spoken¹⁰ norms, where differences are viewed as abnormal. Instead of the insistence that different bodies need to be fixed, DisCrit refused to view these differences as deficits. It sought to view the strengths embodied in difference. Therefore, DisCrit allowed for an intersectional reading of what has traditionally been a uni-dimensional understanding of color-blindness as a racial ideology to perpetuate white supremacy.

Color-evasiveness: expanding a color-blind racial ideology

Often, when used in everyday discourse, disabilities are metaphors for weaknesses or limitations (Schalk 2013). Consider these examples: disabled cars on the highway, myopic views and emotionally handicapped, to name a few. Moreover, race scholars also use dis/ability as a metaphor for disadvantage: racism cripples, deaf to the argument on racial injustices, and shortsighted views on racial inequities. Yet, people with physical differences experience racism; deaf people can listen to arguments; and those who are nearsighted can still understand complex situations. These terms are inherently problematic, as they do not accurately depict the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while simultaneously maintaining a deficit notion of people with disabilities (Watts and Erevelles 2004). Color-evasiveness, as an expansive racial ideology, resists positioning people with disabilities as problematic as it does not partake in dis/ability as a metaphor for undesired.

Specifically, the racial ideology of denying the significance of race should not be equated with blindness because it is an inadequate descriptor. Color-blindness, as a racial ideology, conflates lack of eyesight with lack of knowing. Said differently, the inherent ableism in this term equates blindness with ignorance. However, inability to see is not ignorance; in fact, blindness provides unique ways of understanding the world to which sighted people have no access. Blind people are knowers. DisCrit encourages us to resist the urge to position blind people as deficit (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013b). By identifying the ideology of race as irrelevant – as color-blindness – scholars critiquing race and racism are perpetuating what Gotanda (1991) was arguing against, non-recognition. ‘Nonrecognition fosters the systematic denial of racial subordination and the psychological repression of an individual’s recognition of that subordination, thereby allowing such subordination to continue’ (Gotanda 1991, 16). The ways ableist language perpetuates non-recognition allows for the subordination of dis/abled people and misses the intersections between being socially constructed racially as the other and dis/abled.

Moreover, when CRT and other scholars of race, racism, and white supremacy use dis/ability as a metaphor for lacking, it signifies a deep misunderstanding of how ability and dis/ability are socially constructed (May and Ferri 2005). The same people who recognize race as a social construction often overlook that dis/ability labeling is the result of similar (but not exactly the same) social processes, ignore the ways race and ability are socially constructed in tandem, and equate difference with deficit (Erevelles and Minear 2010). In this sense, by subscribing to the racial ideology of color-blindness, we are perpetuating a parallel trend that Gotanda (1991) originally critiqued – the idea that race is an immutable fact. In this case, assuming dis/ability is an immutable fact disguises the social processes that position children of color as less than making them more likely to be labeled with a dis/ability and ignores the ways society dis/ables many people (Kliewer, Biklen, and Kasa-Hendrickson, 2006).

The goal here is not to scold or to police the language of race scholars but to instead suggest that if we use an intersectional framework, we can all strengthen our critique of a racial ideology that rejects the recognition of race through confronting the (un)spoken norms lurking within concepts of race and racism. By naming this racial ideology as color-evasiveness, we demonstrate the social construction of race and ability while simultaneously confronting the social and material consequences of racism and ableism.

Additionally, informed by narrow understandings of blindness by sighted people, color-blindness implies passivity. Here, blindness is imagined as something one is struck with or victim to – something that happens to them. Yet, that ignores the power of white supremacy, and whiteness situated within it, to actively evade discussions on race. As Bonilla-Silva (2006) found, there are purposeful rhetorical moves employed to avoid the discourse of race, racism, and racial inequities and maintain white supremacy. One must, ‘repress, avoid, and conceal a great deal in order to maintain a stance of “not noticing” color’ (Frankenberg 1993, 33). This is not the passive characteristic that the term color-blind suggests; instead, this actively (re)inscribes racial stereotypes (Williams and Land 2006).

This sense of passivity is not benign. The implication of passivity and the use of blindness within the racial ideology of color-blindness locates the problem and the power within an individual; one can simply ignore race, and racism will go away (Gotanda 1991). In other words, the underlying argument for the racial ideology of color-blindness is that everyone will be treated fairly if race was discounted. In fact, as Leonardo (2007) noted, the racial ideology rewards those in power who ignore race,

Of course, it is possible that today’s color-blindness is a way of feigning color-consciousness, that is, color-blindness is really a misnomer in a color-obsessed nation. But to the color-blind society, they amount to the same thing because color-blind people do not recognize it as feigning but as a reality and more significantly, an accomplishment. (266)

Thus, those espousing a color-blind racial ideology are individually positioned as racially enlightened while simultaneously reproducing power and inequity in a system of white supremacy. It is the systemic violence of racism that impacts our daily lives, not just through individuals but also through institutions. The racial ideology of color-evasiveness allows for an understanding that this failure to address material conditions is not passive, but purposeful. As Gotanda (1991) argued, we must link the race of an individual with the social conditions in which they must survive. Color-blind racial ideology allows for a justification of inaction that propels the system of racial inequities forward. In other words, it is not that whites have trained themselves not to notice color. Instead, those in power often have ‘selective engagement with difference rather than no difference at all’ (Frankenberg 1993, 143). Though Frankenberg argued that along with color-evasion there also occurred a related power-evasion, we argue that those are one and the same. In the context of white supremacy, actively avoiding talking about race is a form of power.

Calling the racial ideology of refusing to acknowledge race color-blindness also implies that racism is perpetuated only through sight and resisted through sightlessness (Obasogie 2010). However, racism is multimodal and is not limited to only one modality. In other words, racism is informed by visuals, graphic, text, speech, and audio (Lopez 2015). For example, Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) responded to 1300 employment ads with more than 5000 resumes, some with Black sounding names and others with white, and found that resumes with white names receive 50% more callbacks for interviews. More recently, Edelman, Luca, and Svirsky (2015) found that in the sharing economy, guests with Black sounding names on the website Airbnb were approximately 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with white names. Huber (2011) shared the experiences of a Latina participant, who was forced to go to speech classes to correct her accent,

Despite her fluency in English several years later, she was removed from the mainstream classroom to participate in “speech therapy” where she was taught the “proper” pronunciation of English words. Carolina’s description of this experience as “speech therapy” signifies that there was something wrong with the way she spoke English that required a remedy. (392)

This testimonio (Perez-Huber 2011) reflects not only the multimodal, or multisensory, nature of racism (Perez-Huber and Solorzano 2015), as Carolina was segregated for remediation of her accent, but also ways racism and ableism work interdependently. Once Carolina was constructed as different via her accent, her difference was viewed as deficit and was used as justification to label her as deficit and remove her from her peers (Matsuda 1991). Moreover, Black deaf people often sign with a different variance of signs than white deaf people (Woodward 1976). A commitment to (un)spoken norms-in this case that racism is only perpetuated through the modality of sight-can mask the ways the social processes of racism, ableism, and other oppressions are multimodal. Said differently, color-evasiveness illustrates the multiple hidden normatives of not just the body, but also other social and cultural considerations of what is considered normal and therefore good (Broderick and Leonardo 2016).

As many of the legal expansions of Gotanda (1991) have noted, the racial ideology of color-blindness is a-historical as is Justice Thomas’ idea that laws discriminating on the basis of race are equal to laws seeking to address racial inequities through race-conscious policies (Cook 1991; Haney-Lopez 2007). In fact, in order to redress the wrongs of the past, ‘the Congress which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment also enacted numerous laws specifically benefiting Blacks’ (Haney-Lopez 2007, 993). Locating the problem in the individual through the racial ideology of color-blindness ignores the fact that racial inequities that currently thrive in institutions did not appear overnight (Gotanda 1991). Racism has been built into the foundations of the country when Blacks were considered three-fifths of a person, and native people were considered cannon fodder (Tyack 1973). This a-historicism perpetuates a commitment to (un)spoken norms by pretending to be objective, or perspectiveless (Crenshaw 1988). As Crenshaw (1998) notes, ‘The appearance of perspectivelessness is simply the illusion by which the dominant perspective is made to appear neutral, ordinary, and beyond question’ (6). For example, this a-historicism allows for stories of meritocracy to permeate the American consciousness, focusing on individual actions instead of the country’s historical lineage of racism, white supremacy, and oppression. Alternatively, naming the ideology of refusing to recognize racial difference as color-evasiveness allows for a sense of temporality, conceding the evasion of systemic racism has allowed inequities to be perpetuated throughout history.

People of color are always fighting the erasure of their lived experiences, their very right to exist. Gotanda (1991) noted, ‘To use color-blind(ness)… effectively…we would have to fail to recognize race in our everyday lives. This is impossible. One cannot literally follow a color-blind standard of conduct in ordinary social life’ (18). Color-evasiveness as an expanded racial ideology acknowledges that to avoid talking about race is a way to willfully ignore the experiences of people of color, and makes the goal of erasure more fully discernible. In other words, to use the term ‘evade’ highlights an attempt to obliterate.

Finally, the racial ideology of color-evasiveness directly questions the goal of color-blindness – to become a society where race does not matter. Gotanda (1991) noted,

Moreover, it is far from clear that a race-blind society is necessarily a desirable goal. Indeed, examination of color-blind constitutionalism suggests that extending this notion from the public sphere into a generalized social goal risks further disapproval and repression of African-American culture” (7).

Using the racial ideology of color-evasiveness directly calls into question the presupposed goodness of ignoring race. Evasion is about avoidance or escape, not about explicitly creating solutions to problems. For all the reasons listed above, we argue that the refusal to address race, and its corollary racism, should be conceived as color-evasiveness.

Implications

We believe that the expanded racial ideology of color-evasiveness performs important functions, those that directly contrast color-blindness, and provides important implications. In Table 1, we address the implicit assumptions that fuel color-blindness, how those assumptions negatively impact people of color, the explicit assumptions of expanding the racial ideology to color-evasiveness, and the implications. We found it particularly important to address how this expansion of racial ideology would provide additional opportunities to address systemic racism as a form of praxis (Freire 1996).

Table 1. Expanding Color-blindness to a Racial Ideology of Color-Evasiveness.

Color-blindness	Hidden norms	Color-evasiveness	Implications
Utilizes dis/ability as a metaphor for lacking and equates blindness with ignorance	Views people of color with dis/abilities and others that stand at the intersections of multiple identities as less than by those that subscribe to color-blindness	Resists positioning people with disabilities as problematic as it does not partake in dis/ability as a metaphor for undesired	Requires positioning historically marginalized students as fully human while simultaneously recognizing how avoiding talking about race and dis/ability is problematic (Ferri and Connor 2006)
Ignores the social construction of race and dis/ability, as well as the material and social consequences of both are perpetuated via unspoken norms	Overlooks that dis/ability is not an immutable fact, ignores the ways race and ability are socially constructed in tandem, equates difference with deficit (Erevelles and Minear 2010); and disguises the social processes that position children of color as less than making them more likely to be labeled (Kliewer, Biklen, and Kasa-Hendrickson 2006)	Demonstrates the social construction of race and ability while simultaneously confronting the social and material consequences of racism and ableism	Recognizes how people of color and their communities can be oppressed through standards, both explicit and hidden, compelling all to articulate and resist those norms (Annamma et al. 2013a)
Rewards individual passivity and discounts ways systems work to reinforce and (re)inscribe power	Allows for a justification of individual inaction that propels the system of racial inequities forward and disregards the system of white supremacy in which institutions, discourses, and practices are located	Situates individuals in systemic context, identifying how these systems constrain and enable participation of the historically oppressed	Contests the hyper-focus on individualized views of people of color and instead articulates the ways institutions, discourses, and practices (re)produce power and oppression through upholding subscription to norms (Brantlinger 2006)
Promotes a single sensory understanding of racism and disregards the ways unspoken norms are enforced via schools in visuals, graphic, text, speech, and audio (Lopez 2015)	Limits identification of racism to only skin color and things that can be seen by individuals, making it difficult for individuals and communities to address the unspoken norms that perpetuate racism and ableism	Illustrates the multiple hidden normatives of not just the body, but also other social and cultural considerations of what is considered normal and therefore good (Broderick and Leonardo 2016)	Refuses the obscuring of multimodal racism and instead provides a framework to understand how racism and ableism are perpetuated in schooling policy, practices, and discourses
Perpetuates a-historicism flouting the role of school throughout history as repressive state apparatuses (Leonardo 2005)	Preserves a commitment to unspoken norms by pretending to be objective, or perspectiveless (Crenshaw 1988) which is promoted through a-historicism	Acknowledges the ways systems have reproduced power historically, conceding the lineage of systemic racism that has shaped the institutions’ policy, practices, and discourses	Locates current racial inequities within a larger historical context, addressing how promoting particular standards rewards those who meet those norms and punishes those that do not
Obliterates the lived experiences of the oppressed	Emboldens ignoring the voice of marginalized people, though people of color are the experts in what is working and what needs to be reformed	Concedes that to avoid talking about race is a way to willfully ignore the experiences of people of color, and makes the goal of erasure more fully discernible	Demands listening to counter-narratives of people of color, their families, and communities while juxtaposing against the master-narratives of differences as deficits
Positions the act of ignoring race as the solution to racism	Coerces individuals to ignore the racialized contours of institutions, and therefore limits solutions to inequities fueled by racism	Questions explicitly the presupposed goodness of ignoring race	Addresses the racial and abled outcomes as well as the causes – racism, ableism – and other normative expectations – temporally, socially, and spatially (Ladson-Billings 2006; King-Thorius and Tan 2016; Vélez and Solorzano in press)

Expanding the racial ideology of color-blindness to color-evasiveness then is not simply a commitment to updating our language, but an opportunity to expose the (un)spoken norms thriving in the racial ideology of color-blindness. As Leonardo (2005) noted, ‘Critical work on race does not only study its real manifestations…it must critically understand its imaginative (i.e. ideological) dimensions, or how people imagine race in their daily lives’ (404). By expanding Gotanda’s original racial ideology to color-evasiveness using an intersectional framework, we were able to address how people imagine race currently through color-blindness by exposing hidden norms and how a racial ideology of color-evasiveness provides more productive racial ideological dimensions while concurrently studying manifestations of race and racism through unpacking implications.

Conclusion

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. (Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 559 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting))

We conclude with Justice Harlan’s original formulation of the racial ideology of color-blindness because our critique exposes the inherent shortcomings of his claims. Justice Harlan’s conceptualization of a color-blind racial ideology ignored the historical underpinnings of racism that had been written into the law (‘But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here’), the social construction of race (‘all citizens are equal before the law’), and the social and material consequences of racism (‘The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color’), all this while simultaneously claiming the superiority of the white race (‘The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.’) (Golub 2005). It is clear that color-blind racial ideology was built within a commitment to white supremacy and (un)spoken norms. As Haney-Lopez (2010a) noted, ‘Colorblindness is a form of racial jujitsu: co-opting the moral force of the civil rights movement, it uses that power to attack racial remediation and simultaneously to defend structural racism’ (1064).

In this paper, we sought to address both the importance of Gotanda’s critique of the racial ideology of color-blindness and the inherit limitations of that conceptualization in the fight for racial equity. Beginning with the understanding that racism and ableism are mutually constitutive, we used DisCrit to recognize Gotanda’s critique of color-blindness as a racial ideology, one that was desperately needed to reject ways racism was and is perpetuated through the refusal to recognize race, racism, and the material realities they produce in a society committed to white supremacy (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013b; Delgado and Stefancic 2001; Erevelles 2011). We then explored how color-blind racial ideology reinforced and (re)inscribed racism throughout society including the law and education. Finally, we distinguished how racial ideology, its discourse, and literacies can be advanced when examined intersectionally in education and beyond. Yet, through an intersectional lens, we were also able to expose how processes of normalizing occur through racism and ableism simultaneously. We suggested an expanded and more nuanced understanding of the racial ideology of refusing to address race, color-evasiveness.

We challenge all critical scholars to think deeply about the power in defining the active avoidance of race as color-blindness, what that racial ideology constrains in their analysis, and how the expanded racial ideology of color-evasiveness allows them to develop their conceptualizations, critiques, and solutions. The shift to color-evasiveness allows for both comprehensively situating the conceptualization and critique of color-blindness as well as thoughtfully considering how to move the underlying ideology forward expansively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to take the time to thank each of the readers who has offered support in the development of this paper. Thank you to Jessica Harris and Neil Gotanda. Your expertise and feedback strengthened this paper. Additionally, thank you to the editors and reviewers of REE. We appreciate the time each of you committed in order for to grow the concepts presented in this paper.

Notes

1. In 1892, Homer Plessy, a Black man, bought a first-class railroad ticket and boarded a ‘Whites only’ railroad car. He was arrested, removed from the car, and fined when he refused to move to a ‘colored car.’ Plessy sued, insisting the 13th and 14th Amendments demanded equal treatment under the law. Plessy V. Ferguson (1896) was a U.S. Supreme Court decision wherein the court ruled against Plessy 7–1 and maintained a separate but equal doctrine, ‘extending constitutional sanction to Jim Crow segregation laws’ (Golub 2005, 563). Justice Harlan was the lone dissenter.

2. We utilize the spelling color-blind throughout the article; however, when reviewing other work, we shall use the form that the author uses (e.g., color blind, colorblind).

3. Of course, Harlan was clearly talking about men only, as his statements are gendered. White women did not get the right to vote until post-1920s, and women of color even later than that. Though we are not addressing the patriarchy in the law or in Harlan’s comments in this article, we find it important to acknowledge these biases.

4. We utilized Gillborn’s (2005) definition of white supremacy, ‘(T)he most dangerous form of “white supremacy” is not the obvious and extreme fascistic posturing of small Neo-Nazi groups, but rather the taken-for-granted routine privileging of white interests that goes unremarked in the political mainstream’ (2).

5. We honor Gotanda’s purposeful choice to capitalize Black while leaving white not capitalized. We encourage readers to read Gotanda’s (1991) 12th footnote on page 4 of the original article to understand why he makes these stylistic commitments.

6. The ‘one drop rule means: “Any trace of African ancestry makes one Black’ (Gotanda 1991, 6)

7. The Notre Dame website states, ‘In keeping with the nickname Fighting Irish and the Irish folklore, the Leprechaun serves as the Notre Dame mascot… The Leprechaun brandishes a shillelagh and aggressively leads cheers and interacts with the crowd, supposedly bringing magical powers and good luck to the Notre Dame team.’

8. As this football team name is a racial slur, we feel most ethical referencing it without writing the entire word out.

9. The Cleveland baseball team’s, the Cleveland Indians, logo is ‘Chief Wahoo’, a ‘cartoon caricature of a red-faced Indian’ (Laukkonen 2016).

10. Here, we use (un)spoken norms to acknowledge how some norms are explicitly articulated and commonly accepted (e.g., passing exams with a particular score and/or being above average on the bell curve) while others are often undetected (e.g., white, male, able-bodied and/or cisgendered). (Un)spoken is meant to capture both specifically expressed and hidden norms.