Colourblind social policy

My Positions

1. I support colourblind social policy.
2. Laws, institutions, and public policies should not take race or ethnicity into account, either to disadvantage or to benefit individuals.
3. I would expand this principle to include gender, sexuality, religion, and other protected characteristics. The state should see individuals, not categories.

Notes

1. Colourblind social policy is the principle that laws, institutions, and public policies should not take race or ethnicity into account, either to disadvantage or to benefit individuals. It is the principle expressed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in the UK Equality Act 2010's prohibition of direct discrimination, and in Martin Luther King's hope that his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin.
2. I acknowledge that historical and systemic disadvantages exist, and that they are real and measurable. But I believe they should be addressed by targeting the specific nature of the disadvantage, such as poverty, educational gaps, housing, or geographic barriers, rather than by using race, gender, or group identity as a proxy for it. A poor white child in a former mining town and a poor black child in an inner city have more in common with each other than either has with a wealthy member of their own group, and a policy that helps on the basis of group membership will help the wealthy member and miss the poor one.
3. Justice should be grounded in individual circumstances, not collective categories, to ensure fairness without reinforcing division. Policies that allocate benefits by group identity require the state to classify its citizens by race, which is the very practice that produced the historical injustice in the first place, and they teach each group to see the others as competitors for a fixed pool of state favour.
4. Social policies should treat individuals as equals under the law, without preference or prejudice based on race or ethnicity. While historical injustices must be acknowledged, I believe the path to a fair society lies in fostering universal principles of justice, equal opportunity, and individual merit, rather than in reinforcing group distinctions through differential treatment.
5. The same principle governs my support for Gay Marriage and Gay Adoption: the state should not distinguish between its citizens on the basis of whom they love, in either direction. And it governs my secularism: the state should not distinguish on the basis of what they believe.
6. Colourblindness is a principle for the state and its institutions. It is not a claim that race does not matter socially, nor that individuals must pretend not to notice it, nor that racism has ended. It is the claim that the remedy for discrimination by the state is the end of discrimination by the state, not its reversal.

Also see

• Equality
• Equality of opportunity
• Equality of outcome
• Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics (2024)
• John Rawls, on justice as fairness
• Chief Justice Roberts in Parents Involved v. Seattle (2007): "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."