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How a fringe idea about race took over the Supreme Court

A brief history of “colorblindness,” the idea that gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Last June, in a case that effectively guaranteed one of Alabama’s Black Democratic members of Congress would be replaced by a white Republican, the Supreme Court used a single word that delighted movement conservatives and made many longtime civil rights advocates want to weep.

In the first sentence of its decision in Allen v. Milligan (2026), most of the justices concluded that there is a tension between the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark law that ended Jim Crow-era race discrimination in elections, and “our colorblind Constitution.” All three of the Court’s Democratic members dissented in Allen.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

The word “colorblind” might not suggest, to many casual observers, the gravity of what the phrase means, how much power it has to roll back civil-rights reforms enacted in the 1960s — and the major ideological change ushered in by this Supreme Court. Proponents of colorblindness argue that any law that draws distinctions on the basis of race, for any reason whatsoever, is equally repugnant under the Constitution. Under this theory, laws like the Voting Rights Act and similar efforts to lift up historically disadvantaged racial groups are legally indistinguishable from the very kind of Jim Crow discrimination that the VRA sought to abolish.

The Supreme Court recently declared that the Constitution is “colorblind.” This means laws that seek to elevate historically disadvantaged racial groups are just as unconstitutional as Jim Crow laws.

Colorblindness was once a fringe idea, but now it is the law of the land. It is the reason why the landmark Voting Rights Act is almost entirely dead.

Although proponents of colorblindness claim their idea was embraced by post-Civil War drafters of the 14th Amendment, it’s really a much newer idea that began to emerge in the 1970s.

It’s an idea that cuts across the Roberts Court’s race decisions, including its decisions abolishing affirmative action in nearly all universities, its decisions undercutting public school integration, and its decisions dismantling the VRA. Under the colorblind thesis, the Constitution sees a modern law intended to guarantee some Black representation in Congress as precisely as intolerable as a 19th-century law forbidding Black people from voting at all.

As Chief Justice John Roberts summarized colorblindness in a 2007 opinion, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

And lest there be any doubt, the Court’s commitment to this project extends far beyond a few pithy quotes. Just over one month before Allen, in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), the Court’s Republican majority imposed colorblindness on the laws governing US elections, effectively killing a 1982 amendment to the VRA — which was signed by President Ronald Reagan — in the process. Three years earlier, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the same justices implemented colorblindness in college and university admissions, ending affirmative action in nearly every institution of higher education in the country.

Allen’s reference to “our colorblind Constitution” confirms the breadth of this project, because if the colorblind thesis is imposed by the Constitution itself, that means that judges must strike down any law or government program that takes account of race, whether in hiring, federal contracting, university admissions, elections, or the military. (Though it is notable that the Harvard decision did dodge the question of whether service academies such as West Point may take account of race in admissions, after military leaders raised concerns that a racially diverse enlisted corps would resent being commanded by a corps of officers who do not resemble them.)

This shift in the Court’s approach to race cases is likely to lead to a purge of programs intended to benefit historically disadvantaged groups. Armed with precedents like Callais and Harvard, pro-colorblindness advocacy groups have filed a wide range of lawsuits challenging scholarships for minority youth, targeting groups that promote minority-owned businesses, and even trying to prevent universities from conducting surveys of Black students.

How America lost its commitment to the right to vote

The GOP’s hard-right turn against laws like the Voting Rights Act is a recent development. Callais, after all, neutralized a law signed by Reagan, a Republican. An earlier Supreme Court case invalidating much of the VRA, Shelby County v. Holder (2013), struck down an extension of the VRA that was signed by Republican President George W. Bush. A significant faction within the GOP has fought against the VRA since the Nixon administration, but they repeatedly lost in the two elected branches of government and only prevailed after they captured an unelected judiciary.

But the victory of the “colorblind” theory in the conservative legal movement is also the result of decades of work. It is largely a story of how a once-fringe faction within the Republican Party took over both that party and then the Supreme Court. And, now that it controls the Court, that faction seeks to lock its approach to racial questions in place forever.

The pre-Roberts Court’s approach to race

Proponents of the colorblindness thesis often trace its origins to Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court’s infamous decision permitting racial segregation. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote in that dissent, “and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

Yet, while Harlan was a racial progressive by the standards of late 19th-century legal elites, his views would offend nearly all modern-day Americans. The full context of Harlan’s famous “color-blind” line suggests that he rejected segregation, at least in part, because he viewed it as unnecessary to maintain white supremacy. “The white race deems itself to be........

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