Scholars of race in the United States agree that the post-World War II era marks a sea change in conceptions of race, which led to an official disavowal of racism by the state and the endorsement of color-blindness as a doctrine and policy, with desegregation as its centerpiece. Color-blindness names the legal doctrine that has governed post-1945 racialization in the United States, but the use of the concept of color-blindness as a metaphor for racial tolerance extends well before 1945. As is well known, in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was constitutional, so
long as segregated facilities were “separate but equal”; in his dissent, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan famously argued against the notion that one race or class was superior to any other, stating that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” When the Supreme Court overturned separate-but- equal in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, then, a “color-blind” interpretation
of the Constitution prevailed, setting the new standard for the Court’s future rulings regarding racial discrimination. According to legal scholar Neil Gotanda in his article “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Color-Blind,’” the concept of color-blindness, which holds that the state does not and should not “see” race when making legal decisions, thus
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“developed after the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and matured in 1955 in Brown v. Board of Education” (2).
While the stated goal of color-blind racial ideology is to create “a racially assimilated society in which race is irrelevant” (53), Gotanda argues that in fact a color- blind interpretation of the Constitution “legitimates, and therefore maintains, the social, economic, and political advantages that whites hold over other Americans” (2). Under a color-blind constitutional model, “the prescription for racial problems in American society is for the government to adopt a position of ‘never’ considering race” (7). But by reducing race to its formal definition, treating racial distinctions such as ‘Black’ and ‘white’ as merely formal categories (“neutral, apolitical descriptions, reflecting merely ‘skin color’ or country of ancestral origin”) and evacuating race of its historical, cultural, and social meanings, the “nonrecognition” of race has the effect of entrenching rather than redressing racial disparities (18). As such, Gotanda argues that color-blindness “ultimately supports the supremacy of white interests” (18) and ends up furthering the subordination of people of color. He cautions that the concept of color-blindness is “inadequate to deal with today’s racially stratified, culturally diverse, and economically divided nation” (68).
In “Color Blindness, History, and the Law,” Kimberlé Crenshaw also shows how color-blindness “has been deployed to do the ideological work of legitimating racial hierarchy” (281). Crenshaw argues that by the time of her writing in 1994, exactly forty years since Brown v. Board of Education, the law has come to endorse the narrative that
Brown constitutes a fundamental break with white supremacy, a “celebratory narrative”
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granted full citizenship status” in America (280). But although Brown is popularly
regarded as having overturned Plessy, she argues, “it would be a mistake to focus solely
on the rejection of the formal doctrine [of separate-but-equal] while failing to uncover the continuity of Plessy’s social vision and its analytic,” which are in fact “reincarnated in
color-blind jurisprudence” (284). In Plessy, the Court authorized segregation as the
“symmetrical” treatment of black and white passengers on a train, and the fact of the inequality between the two kinds of cars was relegated to the private sphere, reflecting a vision of a “racial marketplace” in which “the state [could not] interfere to redistribute racial value” (283). The contemporary doctrine of color-blindness, she argues, endorses this notion of a “free market of race” (287). For Crenshaw, the heart of Plessy was “its
admonition that the law could not be looked to in order to bring about social equality” (283); a lesson to be drawn from both Plessy and Brown, then, is that “formal equality in
conditions of social inequality becomes a tool of domination, reinforcing that system and insulating it from attack” (285).
As Crenshaw, Gotanda, and other critical race theorists have demonstrated, the legal doctrine of color-blindness purports to legislate the public sphere of government action, in which race is not be considered, rather than the private sphere of individual freedom, in which race may be considered (Gotanda 8). But the concept of color- blindness has also taken hold in wider social understandings of race: as the sociologist Howard Winant writes, in recent decades, “the ironic view has emerged that we are now in a post-racial, color-blind world” (1). Winant attributes this view to what he calls the “racial break” of the post-World War II period. He argues that the “upsurge of anti-racist activity since World War II constitutes a fundamental and historical shift, a global rupture
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or ‘break,’ in the continuity of worldwide white supremacy” (2). As evidence of this racial break, he points to: the racial dimensions of World War II and the anti-genocide position it generated; the social movements and revolutionary uprisings that followed the war, including the civil rights movement in the United States and anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa; the scrutiny that the Cold War conflict placed upon the racial policies of superpower nations; and the mass migration of formerly colonized peoples from the global rural South to the metropolitan North (7). In this framework, color- blindness emerges as one symptom of the post-World War II racial break, which Winant argues was “at best a partial shift away from formally avowed white supremacy,” a shift that has now left us in a “racial interregnum … between the discredited but undead racial past and the much anticipated but far from realized racial future” (6).
In a recent critique of Winant’s theory of the post-World War II racial break, literary critic Jodi Melamed argues that rather than simply a “partial shift” away from white supremacy, the “break” of the World War II moment “instantiated a new
worldwide racial project that…supplemented and displaced its predecessor: a formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity articulated under conditions of U.S. global
ascendancy” (4). For Melamed, the advance of this new racial project signaled a decisive move away from white supremacy, as the U.S. state newly came to embrace “official antiracisms” in its administrative workings. The result of this process of racial reordering, she argues, “was a new and old role for race as a unifying discourse,” as the narratives of liberal antiracism – “of reform, of color blindness, of diversity in a postracial world” – took precedence over prior narratives of the white man’s burden (8). Like Winant, Melamed takes World War II to be a breaking point for U.S. and global racial orders, but
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she views the present racial order, which she dubs “neoliberal multiculturalism,” as less an interregnum than a new mode that must be assessed on its own terms.
The sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva offers a slightly different periodization of color blindness in his analysis of contemporary racism, proposing that the new racial ideology he terms “color-blind racism” gained dominance in the late 1960s. “Whereas Jim Crow racism explained blacks’ social standing as the result of their biological and moral inferiority,” he argues, color-blind racism “rationalize[s] minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations” (2). He contends that in the post-Civil Rights era, the “normative climate…has made illegitimate the public expression of racially based
feelings and viewpoints” (11), resulting in a framework in which “most whites assert they ‘don’t see any color, just people’” (1). As he points out, this professed color-blindness is at great odds with the “color-coded inequality” that persists in the United States (2). For Bonilla-Silva, this inequality is “reproduced through ‘New Racism’ practices that are subtle, institutional, and apparently nonracial” (3). He points to the “slippery, apparently contradictory” language of color blindness as evidence of the dramatic changes in the “normative climate” between Jim Crow and the post-Civil Rights era (53).
These scholars of race thus point to different moments as the breaking point of the post-World War II racial break—World War II itself, the onset of the Cold War, Brown v.
Board, the Civil Rights movement. The Korean War, which falls between World War II
and Brown v. Board, does not factor into any of these analyses. The Korean War may not
mark the arrival of desegregation on a national scale; indeed, as I will discuss below, desegregation was not evenly implemented throughout all of the units fighting in Korea,
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much less throughout all levels of the U.S. military. Moreover, because the battlegrounds of the Korean War seem to be so far from home, the utility of Korea for assessing the transformation of the postwar racial order on a wider scale may appear limited. But as I argue in this chapter, the Korean War, the first war fought after Truman’s desegregation of the military by executive order, is central to the development of color-blindness as a state and popular discourse. As I will show in the following section of this chapter, it was in the transnational, racially unfamiliar space of Korea, in the controlled environment of the military amidst the uncontrollable circumstances of war, that color-blindness was developed as a technique of racial management.