“Racism is a complex and interconnected system that adapts to challenges over time. Colorblind ideology was a very effective adaptation to the challenges of the Civil Rights Era. Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused.”
Source: What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy
“If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous words, “the problem of the color line,” then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.”
Source: The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America
“Our teacher says we're supposed to be colorblind. That's hard to do if you can see color, isn't it?"
"Yeah, I'd say so, but I think your teacher means don't make any assumptions based on color."
"Cross on the green and not in between.”
Source: The White Boy Shuffle
“Colorblindness, though widely touted as the solution, is actually the problem.”
Source: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
“i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don't see race. neither did the poplar tree.”
Source: Don't Call Us Dead
“Many thought of the election of Barack Obama, not as the end of racism, but certainly as a turning point. And it was. But for many, President Obama's election was a turning point in a different direction. It spurred a backlash among white supremacists invested in maintaining the status quo.
It can be no coincidence that the carnage of the Voting Rights Act so central to the Shelby decision occurred during the presidency of our first-ever Black president. It is no coincidence that in the decade since Obama's election, voter suppression has gained more momentum, velocity, and animosity than it had in the previous three elections combined. Since Shelby County v. Holder, voter suppression has taken on more pervasive and pernicious forms than ever before.”
Source: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
“Those who rage against and work against expanding the electorate know what's at stake. The goal is to block access to the ballot and to policy making because letting the agitators inside might yield new laws to remedy inequality or injustice. The fear of these elected officials is a loss of power, grounded in an assortment of causes like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, or an inchoate desire to keep the world as it was when they sat at the peak of influence. They forget that the bygone days of political tranquility never truly existed—the agitators simply hadn't amassed sufficient power to be heard. But they are getting closer to it every day.”
Source: Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America
“Another powerful tool to stop African Americans from having any political voice was the white primary. Key to the white primary effectiveness was the fact that from Reconstruction until 1968 the South was a one-party system—only Democrats needed apply, so despised was the party of Lincoln. Several of the states, therefore, began to discern that one way to skirt around the Fifteenth Amendment was to tinker with the primary election, during which the Democratic candidate was chosen.”
Source: One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
“She didn’t know where this path would take her or how she’d fare, but the unknowns didn’t scare her like they used to.
After all, amidst a thousand mysteries, she knew one thing for certain.
Time and time again, this was the path she’d choose.”
Source: Of the Sun and Sea
“The tools of Jim Crow disfranchisement worked all too well. In 1867, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in Mississippi was 66.9 percent; by 1955, it was 4.3 percent.”
Source: One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy