Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy for racism, with white people insisting that they didn’t see race or, if they did, that it had no meaning to them. Clearly, the civil rights movement didn’t end racism; nor have claims of color blindness. But reducing King’s work to this simplistic idea illustrates how movements for social change are co-opted, stripped of their initial challenge, and used against the very cause from which they originated. For example, a common response in the name of color blindness is to declare that an individual who says that race matters is the one who is
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