Colorblind Racism

Colorblind racism, as mobilized by McGowan in todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press, names a contemporary ideological formation in which race is disavowed at the level of perception in order to evade any interrogation of structural racism. Drawing on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological concept, McGowan re-theorizes the phenomenon within a Lacanian-political framework: the refusal to "see" race is not innocent neutrality but a specific ideological operation that mistakes the erasure of a particular marker for genuine universality. By insisting that race does not matter — that "all lives matter" equally — the colorblind racist performs a false universalism that is in fact a retreat into particularism, protecting existing arrangements from critique by withdrawing the very categories that would make inequality legible.

Within the Lacanian frame, colorblind racism is best understood as a form of fetishistic disavowal operating at the level of ideology. The colorblind subject "knows very well" (je sais bien) that racial inequality exists as a structural reality, but proceeds "nevertheless" (mais quand même) as if not-seeing race dissolves that inequality. The disavowal does not abolish the knowledge of racism but relocates it, installing a fantasy of already-achieved equality as the veil that permits the subject to continue functioning within racialized social arrangements without acknowledging them. Crucially, this is not simply false belief — it is, in McGowan's argument, the ideological operation through which the additive, particularist pseudo-universal ("All Lives Matter") displaces the genuine, constitutive universalism ("Black Lives Matter") that fights at the site of what all particulars lack.

This concept appears at a pivotal argumentative moment in todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press (p. 182), where McGowan is distinguishing genuine universalism from its ideological counterfeits. It serves as the negative case — the example of false universalism — against which Black Lives Matter is positioned as a genuinely universalist political movement. In this respect, colorblind racism is a specification of Ideology as theorized in the corpus: it is not a matter of consciously held false beliefs but a structural operation that organizes the subject's relationship to social reality by screening out the constitutive antagonism (racial inequality as a form of Lack) that genuine universality would require confronting. Like ideology in its Žižekian elaboration, colorblind racism survives demystification — one can acknowledge racism abstractly while still enacting the disavowal in practice.

The concept cross-references Fetishistic Disavowal most directly, as its operative psychic mechanism: the colorblind subject sustains a split between knowing and doing. It also implicates Fantasy, since the fiction of an already-colorblind society functions as the fantasmatic supplement that papers over racial antagonism and gives social reality its false consistency. The contrast with Particularism is structurally essential to McGowan's argument: colorblind racism presents itself as universal inclusion but is in fact a defense of the particular (existing, racialized arrangements) against the universalizing demand articulated by oppressed singularities. Finally, its relationship to Lack is definitive — genuine universality, for McGowan, is located precisely at the site of what particulars lack, and colorblind racism is the ideological move that forecloses access to that site by refusing to name it.

Universality and Identity PoliticsTodd McGowan · 2020 (p.182)

Those adopting this position insist on not seeing race in order to avoid interrogating racism.

The phrase "insist on not seeing" is theoretically loaded because it marks the disavowal as active and willed rather than passive ignorance — the colorblind subject does not simply fail to see race but works to maintain that not-seeing, which is precisely the structure of fetishistic disavowal; the infinitive "to avoid interrogating racism" then reveals that the perceptual refusal is in the service of protecting an ideological arrangement, connecting the mechanism directly to the Lacanian account of ideology as sustained by a constitutive non-knowledge.