I always thought the term "color-blind society" was a good thing until I read this thread. So I did a few google searches and found that the term is used by some to justify eliminating affirmative action type programs. But it is also used by others to praise the ideals of Martin Luther King.
The Meaning of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday, By Coretta Scott King
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The King Holiday honors the life and contributions of America’s greatest champion of racial justice and equality, the leader who not only dreamed of a color-blind society, but who also lead a movement that achieved historic reforms to help make it a reality.
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In the following article the writer uses the term "color-blind" to emphasize integration vs. desegregation.
Martin Luther King’s Vision
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Integration, as King understood it, is much more inclusive and positive than desegregation. Desegregation is essentially negative in that it eliminates discrimination against blacks in public accommodations, education, housing and employment -- in those aspects of social life that can be corrected by laws. Integration, however, is "the positive acceptance of desegregation and the welcomed participation of Negroes in the total range of human activities."
But King did not believe that the transition from desegregation to integration would be inevitable or automatic. Whereas desegregation can be brought about by laws, integration requires a change in attitudes. It involves personal and social relationships that are created by love -- and these cannot be legislated. Once segregation has been abolished and desegregation accomplished, blacks and whites will have to learn to relate to each other across those nonrational, psychological barriers which have traditionally separated them in our society. All of us will have to become color blind.
As King said, desegregation will only produce "a society where men are physically desegregated and spiritually segregated, where elbows are together and hearts apart. It gives us social togetherness and spiritual apartness. It leaves us with a stagnant equality of sameness rather than a constructive equality of oneness." But integration will bring in an entirely different kind of society whose character is best summed up in the phrase "Black and White Together" -- the title of one of the chapters of Why We Can’t Wait and the theme of one stanza of the civil rights movement’s hymn "We Shall Overcome." Integration will enlarge "the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness."
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