great, almost unanimous misunderstanding about the reforms of the 1960s. White Americans wanted to believe that the new constitution tended toward race-neutrality and toward freedom, just as the old one had. To the contrary, as those who administered it understood almost immediately, it tended toward race-consciousness and government direction. But the ideal of colorblindness was tenacious. So stirring were its resonances with the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, so necessary had it been to public acceptance of civil rights in the first place, that it became a sort of
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