color blindness
noun
variants
or colorblindness
or less commonly color-blindness
: the quality or state of being color-blind: such as
a
: partial or total inability to distinguish one or more chromatic colors
In color blindness which affects as many as 8 to 10 percent of men, a person may lose the ability to see all colors or merely the capacity to discriminate between certain hues.—R. Lipkin
"Colorblindness" is almost always a misnomer. In the vast majority of cases, people can still see many colors, but they can't discriminate as many as people with regular vision.—Amos Zeeberg
b
: the act or practice of treating all people the same regardless of race
For [Justice John] Harlan, color blindness forbade the state from creating invidious racial categories; for Rehnquist (and Reagan and Steele), color blindness means racial neutrality—as if we live in a world where wishing makes prejudice go away.—Julian Bond
Note: While this sense can be used with positive connotations of freedom from racial prejudice, it often suggests a failure or refusal to acknowledge or address the many racial inequities that exist in society, or to acknowledge important aspects of racial identity.
Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of colorblindness as an ideology. They argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of colorblindness.—Adia Harvey Wingfield
They [critics] argue that since race is a major contributing factor in all sorts of societal outcomes, from who goes to jail to what educational opportunities a child has, to adopt color-blindness as an ideology is to ignore important discrepancies, thereby allowing them to fester.—Jesse Singal
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Merriam-Webster unabridged
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