Ever since he attained the age of majority some four decades ago, Terence Hamilton, now 57, has voted in Mississippi’s Second Congressional District, covering 30 counties across the western part of the state. First drawn in 1986 to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the district’s scope has shifted somewhat over the years. But the bottom line has been a majority-black district in a state where African Americans comprise 38% of the population.

Like many of his black neighbors, Hamilton has reliably backed the district’s incumbent US representative, Democrat Bennie Thompson, who’s held his seat since 1993. But the US Supreme Court has now disrupted the pattern, holding that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to draw majority-minority districts like Hamilton’s. In response, Mississippi Republicans have rushed to redraw the state’s electoral map in a manner that is certain to dilute black votes.

They’re doing this, of course, in the name of colorblindness.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 miles away, Ethan Chen, aged 18, is preparing to attend Georgetown University, not far from his family’s home in Bethesda, Md. It is a bittersweet transition for Chen, who had always considered Georgetown a “safety school.” His dream was to attend either Stanford or one of the Ivy League schools. But during the winter and spring, he received one rejection letter after another, despite a perfect grade-point average and equally impressive test scores.

How did this come to be, after another high-court ruling that barred colleges from discriminating against white and Asian applicants in the name of “affirmative action”? Chen, of course, will never know what exactly went into admissions officers’ decisions to reject him. What he does know is that many schools have continued to use essays and other “soft” factors to practice affirmative action and racecraft under another name.

The college officials, too, claim to uphold colorblind justice.

These two stories — based on composite characters — illustrate the paradox of race and colorblind justice 250 years since the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” The two recent Supreme Court decisions — on affirmative action and on voting rights — have clarified something profound about American public life. They reveal that two-and-a-half centuries since the Founding, we are trying simultaneously to transcend race and to manage its consequences and even “win” on racial terms. These ambitions pull against one another, suggesting that race will continue to indelibly stamp the American experience.

Consider the parallel nature of the two decisions. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, decided in 2023, the Supremes prohibited universities from explicitly using race in admissions. In Louisiana v. Callais, they sharply constrained the use of race in congressional redistricting under the VRA. On the surface, both decisions advance the same constitutional ideal of “colorblindness”: government should treat citizens without regard to race. Yet in practice, both rulings immediately generated what one might call a politics of proxies.

Universities didn’t abandon the pursuit of racial diversity after the high court proscribed affirmative action. Rather, university leaders shifted emphasis toward other considerations, some of which are strongly correlated with race: economic hardship, neighborhood disadvantage, first-generation status, personal adversity, and essays narrating the experience of marginalization. Formally speaking, these are race-neutral criteria. But everyone understands that they may also function as indirect means of sustaining black and Hispanic representation at selective institutions, as they appear to be doing.

Meanwhile, in the voting-rights context, a similar proxy logic holds. Red states attacking minority-majority districts increasingly invoke race-neutral partisanship, rather than race, as the guiding principle of line-drawing. Since black voters in much of the South overwhelmingly support Democrats, partisan gerrymanders often produce substantial racial consequences without having to explicitly classify voters by race.

The symmetry is striking. In both cases, non-racial instruments are being employed that have predictable racial effects. But political partisans see the cases differently. Conservatives who object to universities using race-correlated proxies to preserve minority enrollment often defend partisan districting as constitutionally neutral. Meanwhile, liberals defend “holistic” admissions criteria as part of a legitimate effort to broaden opportunity. This, even as the Left often condemns partisan gerrymanders precisely because their racial effects are foreseeable. Both sides, in other words, alternate between formal and substantive understandings of equality depending on context, thus illustrating what I call the colorblindness paradox.

“We are trying simultaneously to transcend race and to manage its consequences.”

This suggests that the stakes are deeper than ordinary partisan inconsistency. The real problem lies in the incoherence of colorblindness itself when race remains deeply embedded in the social structure. For decades, the Supreme Court has increasingly embraced a view of the Constitution that is suspicious of racial classification. The central danger, in this account, is the government sorting citizens by race and allocating benefits and burdens on that basis. This principle — suspicion of government racecraft, even when it’s used for “positive” or non-invidious reasons — dominates the high court’s equal-protection jurisprudence. Rightly so, in my view.

But implementing that principle is another matter altogether. The difficulty here is that race in America remains highly correlated with countless other variables that public institutions may legitimately consider when allocating scarce benefits or opportunities. Educational attainment, neighborhood quality, wealth, family structure, social networks, geography, and partisan affiliation — all continue to bear the imprint of racial history. And they all are relevant when exercising the government’s discretionary powers.

As a result, banning explicit racial classification needn’t preclude racially differentiated outcomes. It merely changes the mechanisms through which those outcomes are pursued — or avoided. The colorblindness principle provides little guidance here. This is why our public arguments about colorblindness increasingly revolve around debates over the use of proxies.

Take college admissions. If a university gives special weight to applicants who overcame severe educational disadvantage, is it pursuing a morally defensible concern for human development? Or is it covertly pursuing racial “balancing”? The answer isn’t obvious, since the non-racial criteria that serve as proxies for race are themselves neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. Educational disadvantages are real. Unequal access to stable schools, family resources, mentoring networks, and social capital is real. Moreover, non-racial criteria that correlate with race may genuinely identify talented students (of all races) whose capacities were developed under adverse conditions. Thus, it is legitimate for an admissions process to consider them.

But such consideration also predictably shapes the racial composition of entering classes, and it is plausible to suspect that this is precisely why some institutions are using them more heavily now than before the 2023 anti-affirmative-action ruling. If so, those institutions are violating the spirit if not the letter of the court’s holding, as Chen in our narrative learned to his chagrin.

“The real problem lies in the incoherence of colorblindness itself.”

Or consider redistricting. A legislature produces a map to maximize Republican advantage, knowing that such a map will reduce black electoral concentration. Is this merely ordinary political hardball with unfortunate racial side effects? Or is it something uglier — partisanship masquerading as a cover story for anti-black animus? Again, the answer isn’t straightforward. Political affiliation is itself a legitimate organizing principle in democratic politics. Yet in a society in which race and party remain so tightly aligned in some regions, the distinction between partisan and racial intent is hard to discern.

The difficulty here is that, while the court can forbid the explicit consideration of race, it can’t forbid the use of statistical signals that correlate with racial identity. Everything turns on the motivations of officialdom, which aren’t easy to determine.

This points toward a deeper conceptual confusion in our racial discourse, which arises from our conflating two very different ideas: racial blindness and racial indifference. A society may prohibit explicit racial classification while remaining intensely concerned with racial outcomes, embracing blindness while rejecting indifference. Indeed, that is precisely our current situation. Universities remain deeply invested in racial diversity even after affirmative action. Voting-rights advocates remain deeply invested in preserving black political representation even after the court’s retrenchment. The disappearance of explicit racial language hasn’t produced indifference to racial disparities. It has simply displaced racial management, and racial politicking, into more indirect forms. This distinction matters, because it exposes the limits of purely procedural solutions to racial inequality.

I have spent much of my professional life arguing that durable inequality isn’t sustained merely by discriminatory transactions at the point of selection. It is sustained through differences in social development — differences in the networks, norms, institutions, and cultural practices through which human capacities are formed. Opportunity travels along the synapses of social networks. Human-capital formation depends upon family stability, educational culture, neighborhood order, mentoring relationships, and access to trusted institutional pathways. These developmental processes unfold long before a university admissions office reviews an application or a legislature draws district boundaries. And racial identity figures prominently in these processes of social development in the United States.

This is why legal and administrative efforts to engineer proportional representation at the endpoint often feel unsatisfying. They attempt to correct downstream disparities via anti-white “reverse discrimination,” which the Supreme Court now decries, while leaving untouched the upstream developmental inequalities from which those disparities partly emerge.

And there is another drawback to the method. Formal neutrality can itself become morally evasive if it ignores the historical conditions that continue to shape social outcomes. A society can’t simply declare itself colorblind and thereby escape the consequences of its past. The legacy of racial exclusion remains embedded in institutions and inherited patterns of advantage and disadvantage. The Terence Hamilton in our opening narrative might be the great grandson of a slave and the son of a father who endured de jure racial apartheid. Those historical realities and their consequences don’t disappear the second a court in Washington holds them irrelevant.

Thus our predicament: the paradox of colorblindness. On the one hand, permanent racial management threatens to entrench precisely the kind of group consciousness that a liberal democracy ought to transcend. A political culture organized around endless racial accounting risks weakening common citizenship. The more every institutional disparity is interpreted through the lens of racial representation, the harder it becomes to encounter one another simply as fellow citizens. On the other hand, abstract invocations of neutrality may fail to reckon adequately with the developmental realities that shape unequal outcomes in the first place.

America oscillates between these two poles because we seek both transcendence and remediation. We wish to become a society in which race no longer governs public life. Yet we also seek to offset the stubborn consequences of racial history. These goals aren’t fully compatible.

Indeed, the deeper paradox may be this: the more persistently racial disparities remain visible, the harder it becomes to sustain genuine colorblindness. But the more aggressively institutions organize themselves around racial outcomes, the harder it becomes to achieve a society in which race recedes in civic importance. No constitutional doctrine can fully resolve this tension, because it doesn’t arise merely from law. It arises from the unfinished social condition of the nation itself.

I supported affirmative action many years ago because I regarded it as a temporary bridge across inequalities inherited from Jim Crow. I remain sympathetic to the moral impulse behind such policies. But over time, I have grown skeptical that endless procedural adjustment at the point of selection can substitute for the harder work of social development. Nor do I believe that a healthy republic can indefinitely sustain a politics in which every important institution is expected to produce racially calibrated outcomes.

The Supreme Court’s recent interventions are therefore both understandable and welcome, but they are also incomplete. They reflect an effort to limit explicit racial administration in public life. Yet they can’t eliminate the underlying realities that make proxy politics inevitable, and inscrutable, in the first place.

For that reason, the real challenge before us isn’t simply legal. It is civic and developmental. If we want a politics in which race matters less, then we must build a society in which the capacities required for flourishing are more broadly and deeply cultivated across all communities. No amount of doctrinal refinement can spare us that obligation.

The paradoxes will remain. But 250 years after a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson penned his majestic words, perhaps we can at least begin speaking about them honestly. Indifference to the roots of racial inequality is actually inconsistent with achieving colorblindness in the conduct of our public affairs.