As a young adult I was a subscriber to the idea of a colourblind1 society. I believed in the equality and diversity agenda of New Labour. I had a stock answer for equality questions in interviews (something about treating everyone fairly, but responding to individual needs) and I thought that colonialism and the Jim Crow era of US segregation were well and truly in the past. It takes a lot of unlearning of what you thought you knew to move forwards from there. I did not realise at the time that this was a colour-blind approach to racism, and that my belief in meritocracy was harmful.

Colour-blindness is the practice of not seeing, or claiming not to see, colour or race. It situates racism firmly on the margins, with overt racists. Public discourse is around equality for all, but colour is seen and used as a tool for discrimination in private (Gotanda, 1991). The colour-blind view ignores or conceals the impact of hundreds of years of white supremacist thinking on laws, policy and society (Annamma, Jackson and Morrison, 2016).

With the rise of Black Lives Matter worldwide came better awareness of structural racism (Lander, 2021). Lockdowns due to COVID-19 were a time when anti-racist activism intensified, and the movement gained more traction. Businesses and public sector bodies alike attempted to incorporate antiracist messaging and training for their workforce. Unconscious bias training, diversity quotas and publicity were used to claim problems had been addressed and the UK was no longer colour blind. However, as Frankenburg (1993) suggested nearly 30 years ago, colour-blind thinking is exactly that. It embraces diversity while leaving the hierarchies of power unchanged.

Given this context and the fact that colour and racism appear to be more visible now, is colour-blindness still relevant? Critical Race Theory (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017) has in some ways superseded colour-blindness as the lens through which we examine structural racism in society. Critical Race Theory addresses the issue of colour-blindness directly.