The Daily Signal - Why Colorblindness Is a Virtue

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass were both dedicated to bringing about an America that was colorblind, Andre Archie says, but their work is being undermined.  “When I say colorblind, it's not naive at all,” says Archie, an author and professor at Colorado State University. “It speaks to a tradition that we find with MLK, with Frederick Douglass, with the Founders, right, in principle. We also find it in the Western philosophical tradition; so, my goal is to rehabilitate that.”   In his new book, “The Virtue of Color-Blindness,” Archie explains how what he calls the “cult” of diversity, equity and inclusion has harmed society and is contrary to the vision of America’s greatest civil rights leaders, and what can be done about it.  Archie joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain the role conservatives must play in restoring a vision of a colorblind America.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, January 8th. I'm Virginia Allen. Author and speaker, Andre Archie, says that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass were dedicated to bringing about an America that was colorblind. But according to Archie, both of their visions have been undermined. In his new book, The Virtue of Colorblindness, Archie explains how the so-called cult of diversity, equity, and inclusion have harmed. society and worked in opposition to some of the greatest civil rights leaders in American history. Stay tuned for my conversation with author Andre Archie as we discuss his book and solutions to bring back in America that is colorblind.

As conservatives, sometimes it feels like we're constantly on defense against bad ideas, bad philosophy, revisionist history, junk science, and divisive politics. But here's something I've come to understand. When faced with bad ideas, it's not enough to just defend. If we want to save this country, then it's time to go on offense. Conservative principles are ideas that work, individual responsibility, strong local communities, and belief in the American dream. As a former college professor and current president of the Heritage Foundation, my life's mission is to learn, educate, and take action. My podcast, The Kevin Roberts Show, is my opportunity to share that journey with you.

I'll be diving into the critical issues that plague our nation, having deep conversations with high-profile guests, some of whom may surprise you. And I want to ensure freedom for the next generation. Find the Kevin Roberts Show, wherever you get your podcast. It is my pleasure to be joined today by author, speaker, professor at Colorado State University. Andre Archie, Andre is the author of the new book, The Virtue of Colorblindness. Andrei, thank you for being with us today. I really appreciate it. Oh, sure. I appreciate the invite. I'm excited to be here. Well, let's start by talking about the driving force behind your new book, The Virtue of Colorblindness.

Why did you see such a need to write this book? Yeah, because I think that, and I'm really concerned, because I do think that we pay lip service to the idea that we should judge people according to their characters as opposed to their skin color. But in fact, what we get in the public square, especially in public education, higher education, is the idea that we have two groups of people. We have victimizers and victims. The victims tend to be people of color, in particular African Americans, and the victimizers tend to be white people. And the idea that we know Martin Luther King for, the idea that we will judge people by the

their character has been marginalized. And so I thought it was time that someone gets into the public arena and puts forth a narrative that we used to take for granted, that we felt as if it was natural, it was intuitive, that we're not going to divide America up into racial categories, into racial groups. We're going to try to see Americans as individuals. Of course, groups work together, the civil rights movement, we had a certain degree of identity politics there, sort of a positive conception, but of course that's morphed over the years. It's quite negative now. But we're a country of individuals, and so we've moved beyond that. In my book, the virtue of colorblindness, is trying to rehabilitate that noble racial tradition that we

work so hard to maintain and to to to establish. When we use the word color blindness, I think that there can be a lot of things that come to people's minds or maybe definitions that they've heard different people give. For the sake of our conversation, can you define what you mean in the book when you say colorblindness? So what I mean is that a script of quality such as race, gender, should not confer moral merit by their possession or non-possession. And so what really matters at that point is character, individual actions. Now, it doesn't mean that we're going to be woefully ignorant of the past

of certain traditions that we've gotten away from, but it does mean that we're going to try, in an aspirational sense, to see each other as individuals. So when I say colorblind, It's not naive at all. It speaks to a tradition that we find with MLK, with Frederick Douglass, with the founders, right? In principle, in principle, we also find it in the Western philosophical tradition. So my goal is to rehabilitate that. So this idea of colorblindness, I think, is quite realistic. It's also, in a sense, aspirational because we are humans.

And so, again, the idea of colorblindness simply says the ascriptive qualities that were born into the world with, such as race, should not confer any moral merit whatsoever by their possession or non-possession. So that's what I mean by colorblindness. Well, you mentioned Martin Luther King. You mentioned Frederick Douglass, individuals who advocated for this position of, like you say, of looking at people not based on the color of. their skin, but their character. When did we begin to see a shift in thought of, no, we do need to look at skin color? And of course, of late, I think people think about 2020 and George Floyd. Was that really the spark? Or were there things happening before then that kind of brought this shift? Right. I think things were happening before then. I think really.

really, if we had a starting period, let's say roughly, I would say in the 80s, with the emergence of multiculturalism, and we tend to think of multiculturalism as rather innocuous, we're celebrating different cultures. But in fact, there was a hard edge to it. There was a political component. And that was the idea that groups should be recognized, that groups were more important than the individual. That is, the individual belonged to groups, and those groups were more important in terms of defining who and what that individual is. And so with this politics of recognition with multiculturalism, we started equating different cultures, or at least putting all cultures, let's say, the Greeks, the Romans, because that's my specialty. We put cultures

on the same level. And so we thought it was offensive to say, for example, America originated out of the Western philosophical tradition in which we had the Greeks and the Romans, that became offensive. And so that sort of morphed into the great, great books debate. I don't know if you remember that. Alan Bloom's book, Alan Bloom's book came out, The Closing of the American Mind in late 80s. So that was all a part of that pushback against multiculturalism, sort of this hard-ed version of it. And then if you fast forward, with the death of George Floyd, marginal racial ideas such as DEI, anti-racism, really came to the fore and started dominating the public square in terms of how we discuss race and issues of race. And so I think that with the emergence of these

ideologies squarely in the middle of the public square, again, with the death of George Floyd, it's sort of supercharged this idea of the politics of recognition. And so we're to the point now where in Evanston, Illinois, we're separating high schoolers. I don't know if you've seen this article in the journal. It was published last week, but we're separating high schoolers at Evanston Township High School by race. And it's explicit. Now, supposedly it's optional, but the teacher has to be the same race as the students. That doesn't seem optional to me. And that seems unconstitutional. But in any case, the question that you asked is an excellent question. So, yeah, in the 80s, we were moving in that direction of this pernicious type of identity

politics that gets supercharged with the death of George Floyd. And that's what we're dealing with today. And it's, I'm not exactly optimistic. I see some signs of change, but we'll see. Yeah. What is the danger to the next generation, to the current generation that's in school, right now, if we don't get this right, if we don't pull back from some of the things that individuals like Ibermx-Kendee, who talk about in the book, are promoting, if there's not a course correction, what's the result for young people? That's right. That's right.

And my last chapter of the book, in the virtue of colorblindness, it's titled Comfortable Racism. So I think that we're slowly accepting the fact that we do have victims and victimizers. And we're slowly starting to see teachers, professors, higher education, see blacks in particular as needing coddling. And we have to create safe spaces for African Americans. Now, I focus on African Americans because I really think that it's sort of ground zero in terms of who are we trying to compensate for in terms of outcomes, educational outcomes, family outcomes, et cetera. So I think we're to the point now where this idea of comfortable racism, a certain sense of exhaustion with race, sort of middle class exhaustion with race, mixed with anti-racism. With that mix, you get people saying, okay, what least our kids will learn

about our past when it comes to racial issues. And so I'm pushing back against that sort of comfortable racism, that sort of, I call it separate but equal, sort of a contemporary version of separate but equal. So in other words, to answer your question directly, if we don't see a course correction, a lot of these ways of thinking about race and that races are separate and racist should be catered to will become natural. And I think with a younger generation, they take certain things for granted, such as blacks have been mistreated. America is systemically racist and we have to radically reorganize society in order to account for those differences and to correct for those differences.

And I think with that sort of mentality, it's quite dangerous because we have a very diverse society. And if we aren't, for the most part, grounded in the principles of our founding and the fact that we're all equal before the law, that's very, I'm fearful of the future, because at that point, perhaps there will be no, common narrative that we agree to in terms of sort of adjudicating differences. So I think that's the difference, sort of the soft racism becoming natural. Yeah, yeah, that is a huge danger and frightening

to think about. And you mentioned being grounded in the principles of our founding. And I'm thinking back to a conversation that I was a brief conversation, brief interaction that I had with probably a freshman in high school that made an offhanded comment. Someone was saying something about one of the founding fathers. And this young person said, yeah, but all the founders were racist. And I think that that's a narrative, for sure, among young people, that they're hearing on social media. Some might be even hearing from teachers in the classroom. So, you know, when we talk about being grounded in principles of the founding, I think a lot of

of young people would automatically say, well, you know, the founding fathers, they were all racist, they didn't have anything to offer us. And, you know, when those kinds of situations come up, you're interacting with young people, what would your response to be to that, to kind of challenge that narrative, but do so in such a way that brings truth, that brings life, and that young people can receive and maybe pull off the blinders a little bit? Yeah, yeah, I've heard some of those arguments as well in terms of the founding fathers. And what I try to remind the young is that when you look at the trajectory of Frederick Douglass, here we have a slave, an individual born into slavery, he meets a person by the name of William Garrison. And Garrison is an abolitionist.

And Douglas learned quite a bit from Garrison, but there was a different. in terms of their growth, their intellectual growth. They ended up growing apart. I discussed this at length in the book, but the point of that chapter is to illustrate that it's not so much what the Founding Fathers did personally. I mean, of course, there was some lots of discrepancies, lots of hypocrisy, but it's the principles. It's the principles that they enshrined in the Constitution. institution. Very foundational. Yes, please continue. Right. Very foundational. The Declaration of Independence. These documents were key for Douglas. He said in these documents, we see the emergence of liberty and the fact that human beings are defined by reason, right? So reason is the differentiia of the

species. And if he is in possession of these qualities, these God gives, in qualities. He's equal to any white person. So he wasn't looking at the personal lives of the founders. He was looking at the principles that they enacted through these documents. And that was very powerful for him. And so when I talked to the young, I remind them, look at our founding principles. Look at our documents. Those documents have been essential in terms of how blacks in particular have gained their rights to be seen equal before the law. Those documents are sacred in terms of their potential in recognizing what it is to be human defined by liberty. So I try to make a distinction between individual founders, human beings that are fallen

and the principles that they enacted and how those principles still can guide us today, and they should be respected. They should be read closely because there we see the key, sort of the foundation to what it is to be an American. Yeah. It's powerful. Yeah. As a successful black American yourself, what advice would you give to that younger generation? Yeah, that's a really good question. because I do have children. And so I try to remind my children that, of course, our past is in all perfect, right?

No past is perfect. No country's past is perfect. But I remind them that we shouldn't be imprisoned. Americans shouldn't be imprisoned by our past. We should learn from our past and we should become better. Listen to our better angels. And so I try to balance the awareness of the past with the potential and the energy and the enterprise that defines us as a country. All the things that Hamilton discusses and the federalist that truly makes us a great country.

So I try to remind them that there's so many things in our history that. we need to take and harness and make flourish and apply to ourselves as individuals and as a country and as a community because we have so much potential to continue to flourish. So to make a long story short, I think it's important to remind the young that no matter what station you're born into, I think we still have the opportunities to flourish as individuals. And I think there's an openness out there in America to encourage that flourishing. And so any ideas or ideas about systemic racism, all of that is just hobbling. And it psychologically harms the young. and it's really unfortunate for children, for students to get that message.

So I try to steer away from that as much as possible and focus on positivity and the fact that we're growing and we have grown as a country. The book is The Virtue of Colorblindness. It released on January 2nd. You can get it wherever books are sold. Andre, tell us where we can follow your work, what you're up to, your writings, you're very, very active in writing and putting thoughts together for the public. Just share with us how we can keep up with what you're doing. So right now I'm in the process of sort of rearranging my Twitter. So stay tuned.

You can find my work at National Review. You can find it at modern age. You can find it at the American Conservative town hall. There's a number of places that you can keep up with my work. I continue to do academic work at Colorado State University. And I just encourage everyone to go out if you can pre-order it now. But in any case, go out, purchase my book, The Virtue of Colorblindness. And I think there are some arguments in there that are going to be very helpful in terms of combating a lot of the pernicious racial ideologies that we hear today in the public square. Andre Archie, author of The Virtue of Colorblindness.

Andre, thank you again for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Again, you can pick up your copy of the virtue of colorblindness wherever books are sold. You can also find a link in today's show notes to pick up a copy of the book.

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