COLORBLIND CAPTURE

We are facing two converging waves of racial retrenchment. The first, which arose following the Civil Rights Movement, is nearing a legal milestone. This term, the Supreme Court is poised to prohibit affirmative action in higher education. When it does, the Court will cement decades of conservative jurisprudence that has systematically eroded the right to remedy racial inequality. The second wave is more recent but no less significant. Following 2020's global uprising for racial justice, right-wing forces launched a coordinated assault on antiracism. This campaign has enjoyed early success. As one measure, Republican Party ("GOP") officials have passed, proposed, or prefiled hundreds of bills designed to stymie antiracist discourse, activism, and organizing. To process this moment, scholars have highlighted patterns of racial retrenchment past and present. This includes decades of right-wing efforts to deny the relevance of race and racism in America following the fall of Jim Crow. These accounts are not wrong, but they obscure a key variable that has enabled racial backlash: the Left. Specifically, privileged voices on the Left continue to rehearse colorblind conceptions of race and racism-even while defending race-conscious reform. I term this phenomenon colorblind capture. To illustrate its ubiquity and impact, I explore decades of affirmative action litigation. This analysis reveals an underappreciated trend. Even as the Left champions affirmative action, the Right sets the terms of debate. This includes the Left's pervasive reflex to defend affirmative action as a "racial preference." This framing is neither inevitable nor strategic. The Left could, for example, defend race-consciousness as essential antidiscrimination-that is, a modest tool to mitigate existing racial (dis)advantage and, thereby, yield a more individualized, objective, and race-neutral process. But as the cases before for the Supreme Court reveal, Harvard and the University of North Carolina ("UNC") continue to rehearse right-wing talking points-even as they defend their own admissions policies. Colorblindness, albeit a creature of the Right, has captured the Left.