Courtney Martin on the myth of “color blindness”:
After President Barack Obama‘s State of the Union address last week, Chris Matthews had an epiphany about the president: “I was trying to think about who he was tonight. It’s interesting; he is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”
Although a year ago it seemed safe to assume that the inauguration would mark the peak of post-racial rhetoric, the urge to pretend as if it’s now possible to erase race seems to have only gotten worse. Instead of Obama’s election feeding a deeper, more complex conversation about race in this country, his presidency has intensified the craving for “color-blind” politics — a prospect even more impossible, at this point, than bipartisanship.
