Color blindness and race consciousness compete as major schemes for determining the proper treatment of race in social policy.2 In the political arena, advocacy for color-blind policies is based on the assertion that racism has ceased to be the cause of social inequities, while race-conscious policies are promoted as a necessary means for remedying persistent institutional racism. Color blindness emerged as a conservative strategy after the civil rights movement succeeded in toppling the Southern Jim Crow system and forms of de jure segregation in the North.
