Notes on: Loury, G. (2026) Can America ever escape race? Unherd. 9 June 2026. https://unherd.com/2026/06/colorblind-justice-an-impossible-dream/ Dave Harris [This is about what the author calls the 'paradox of colourblindness', the way in which colourblindness still leads to discrimination on the basis of ethnicity in American politics, by both liberals and Republicans. He is an economist, and he doesn't really explain too well the origin of the other social factors that he lists as important for  inequality, nor does he mention working class students anywhere]. The piece starts by considering a boundary change in Mississippi. The US Supreme Court has recently ruled that the Voting Rights Act of 1986 does not require special consideration of 'majority – minority' districts, and so Mississippi Republicans have been able to redraw the state's electoral map 'in a manner that is certain to dilute black votes', and have defended this policy 'in the name of colourblindness'. In a second case study, a student has applied to a number of Ivy League universities but has been rejected by all of them despite 'a perfect grade point average and equally impressive test scores'. This is after another High Court ruling that has prevented universities from discriminating on ethnic grounds, pursuing '"affirmative action"' which was seen as discriminating against white and Asian applicants. The student will never know exactly why he was rejected, but many universities have continued to use 'essays and other "soft" factors to practice affirmative action and racecraft under another name', and again in the name of 'colourblind justice'. Specifically, in a 2023 judgement, the Supreme Court prohibited the explicit use of race in admissions and constrained the use of race in congressional redistribution, again in the name of colourblindness — 'government should treat citizens without regard to race'. Yet instead, 'both rulings immediately generated what one might call a politics of proxies' Universities still pursued the goal of racial diversity by shifting emphasis towards other considerations, 'some of which strongly correlated with race: economic hardship, neighbourhood disadvantage, first-generation status, personal adversity, and essays narrating experience of marginalisation'. Formally these are race neutral but they offer indirect means to sustain desired proportions of black and Hispanic representation. The same goes with redrawing boundaries [I didn't understand this bit — apparently it is to do with 'race – neutral partisanship, rather than race', and since black people overwhelmingly support Democrats, equalising voters by partisanship produces racial consequences]. It's possible to approve of one policy and not the other, to defend 'holistic' admissions criteria while criticising gerrymandering. There are interacting notions of 'formal and substantive understandings of equality' — 'a colourblindness paradox'. This will not go away, the author thinks, and will continue to haunt modern America 250 years after its foundation. If race is embedded in the social structure, colourblindness must be incoherent. The concept of race has long been suspected by the Supreme Court, who have favoured equality. Race is still highly correlated with other variables, however, such as 'educational attainment, neighbourhood quality, wealth, family structure, social networks, geography and partisan affiliation', and all of these affect the exercise of government powers. As a result, there are paradoxical and ambiguous consequences of policies such as affirmative discrimination, since applicants have real educational disadvantages in the first place. It might be legitimate to consider particular students who are talented and have developed capacities despite adverse conditions, however, but this will affect racial composition as well. [They do not consider class?]. Universities may well know this and be pursuing diversity as a deliberate policy to overcome recent Court rulings. The redistribution of boundaries can also reveal partisanship with a cover story, although political affiliation is 'a legitimate organising principle in democratic politics' [in the USA, apparently — to stop permanent safe seats?]. Courts can only forbid the explicit signals of race. There may be a deeper confusion between 'racial blindness and racial indifference'. Racial classification may be prohibited, but concern with racial outcomes might remain, and the author suspects universities and political re-distributors of this. So explicit racial language and classification has disappeared, but not indifference to racial disparity. We have more indirect forms racial management. Purely procedural solutions have been bypassed. What is needed is attention to social development — 'differences in the networks, norms, institutions, and cultural practices through which human capacities are formed… The synapses of social networks' [through which 'opportunity is marshalled']. Human capital is formed by 'family stability, educational culture, neighbourhood order, mentoring relationships, and access to trusted institutional pathways' and these long precede the process of university admission. 'Racial identity' figures prominently in these processes. It is no point to try to correct downstream disparities via antiwhite "reverse discrimination"' without addressing upstream inequalities [sounds very much like Sewell]. Formal neutrality can become 'morally evasive' by ignoring historical conditions and social outcomes. The past cannot be simply escaped by declaring a new era of colourblindness. Paradoxically, racial management can entrench 'the kind of group consciousness the liberal democracy ought to transcend'. Endless racial accounting 'risks weakening common citizenship', but 'abstract invocations of neutrality' cannot deal with developmental realities that produce unequal outcomes. America seems to oscillate between transcendence and remediation, to offset racial history and to become a society where race is irrelevant. In practice persistent racial disparities remain visible, despite attempts to maintain colourblindness, but affirmative action preserves race [I think]. It might be defended as a 'temporary bridge', and it expresses the right 'moral impulse' but it is not a substitute for adequate social development. The drive towards producing 'racially calibrated outcomes' in every institution is unsustainable. The Supreme Court is trying to limit racial administration, but it leaves the underlying realities and 'proxy politics'will emerge. Indifference to the roots of racial inequality is 'actually inconsistent with achieving colourblindness'. [Lots of liberal dilemmas and paradoxes here too, of course, with a big silence about the sort of reform that is required. Whether proxy politics can be eliminated with more extensive liberal economic and educational reforms must be doubtful].