Introduction

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz

The essays in this volume reflect and engage the profoundly contradictory role of the university in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial stratification and domination. Stretching from the racially specific projects of the past to the colorblind conventions of academic performance today, leading scholars in the social sciences, law, and humanities reveal in this book how disciplinary frameworks, research methodologies, and pedagogical strategies have both facilitated and obscured the social reproduction of racial hierarchy. The indictment of the knowledge-producing industry contained in these pages uncovers the chapters of racial history that remain undisturbed behind the walls of disciplinary convention and colorblind ideology. At the same time, the conditions of possibility out of which these essays were produced situate the university as a site in which antiracist projects can be seeded and developed. The disciplines not only produce racial power and inhibit racial knowledge, they also offer discursive tools and analytic moves that, properly contextualized, enable and enhance the telling of race and the reimagination of racial justice. In grappling with this duality, this collection embodies the twin objectives of the Countering Colorblindness project: to unpack and disrupt the racial foundations of the disciplines, and to aggregate and repurpose disciplinary insights into an alternative understanding of the social world.

This volume amplifies the methods and challenges that are foundational to critical race projects that interrogate the epistemic parameters of racial power in order to enable emancipatory possibilities both within the academy and in the social world beyond. Countering Colorblindness transcends the institutional and discursive boundaries that contain racial knowledge in multiple ways. The project is first and foremost transdisciplinary. The story it tells about the foundations of racial hierarchy and its contemporary disavowals across the university — in particular the traveling and uptake of particular orientations toward race between disciplines — can only become fully legible through the aggregated sum of its disciplinary parts. One cannot, for example, understand the narrowed ways in which racism has come to be imagined within law as the bigotry of specific individuals without engaging similar containments within sociology, social psychology, and the like.

Countering Colorblindness, however, transcends not only boundaries within the university, but boundaries between the university and civil society more broadly. The contemporary social conditions shaped by histories of white supremacy — education, health, criminal justice, employment, housing — are linked to the construction and disavowal of race within the academic disciplines themselves. Most institutions are now formally organized around the untested assumption that colorblindness is the exclusive measure of a fair and just organizational practice, an assumption that is predicated on and enabled by the privileging of colorblind solutions to color-bound problems within scholarly disciplines. Questions of racial discrimination, inequity, and injustice are typically framed as problematic only to the extent that the troubling conditions can be attributed to contraventions against the colorblind ideal. This resort to colorblindness is not solely an institutional-level response. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's work has long documented, individuals now defend themselves against the slightest intimation that their preferences or decisions might be racially inflected with the all-purpose disclaimer that they neither see race nor take it into account.

As a political project, colorblindness derives from a seeming naturalness and inevitability. It resonates with time-honored practices and ideals in Western thought and social relations. A long history of artistic expression and humanities scholarship has grounded aspirations for social justice in the elision of difference. The market subject of classical capitalist theory, the citizen subject of liberalism — and even the universal worker of Marxism and the universal woman of feminism — all rest upon an ideal of interchangeability wherein differences are said not to matter. These traditions teach that similarity should trump difference; that beneath the surface the appearance of "otherness" masks a common human condition.

Although many humane and egalitarian projects in history have been based on humanist concepts of liberal interchangeability, contemporary scholars have raised questions about the dangers of ignoring fundamental differences, particularly distinctions linked to social position, vulnerability, and power. While conceding that all of our fates are linked and acknowledging the sordid histories of parochial particularism, these scholars contend that some important differences do...