Riff: When the Vocabulary Flips and the Grammar Stays
On Color-Blindness, Color-Sightedness, and the Settlement Underneath
Dear friends—
Here’s the short version: the phrase “colorblind” sounds like the moral conclusion of the civil rights movement. This riff asks whether it might be doing the opposite — preserving the racial settlement it claims to have moved past.
This week the Supreme Court decided a case, and a Facebook conversation underneath it stopped me. Two friends I’ve known since we were young men in uniform used the word “colorblind” the way I once used it — sincerely, confidently, as if it settled the matter. I sat with that for a long time. What follows is not an argument against them. It’s an attempt to trace the grammar underneath the vocabulary — the framework that went into all of us through the same formation, the same church, the same air.
If that resonates, come sit with me in it.
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The Sentence That Stopped Me
This isn’t the next series essay; it’s a riff that came out of this week’s Supreme Court decision and a Facebook conversation underneath it.
This week the Supreme Court decided a voting-rights case. The headlines said the Voting Rights Act has been gutted. That may be true; I’ll let the lawyers fight about it. What I want to think about is a sentence that came out of a Facebook thread the day after.
A man I’ll call Pete — a classmate of mine from many years ago, the kind of friendship that survives because you took the same oath at the same age — quoted Chief Justice Roberts approvingly: “The way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.” Pete added: Seems reasonable.
A few hours later, another friend from the same era — let’s call him Tim — wrote underneath: Reasonable and Constitutional. The way to become a color blind society is to become color blind. Frankly it’s insulting to all citizens.
I sat with that for a long time. I’m still sitting with it, honestly. Because the sentence is not stupid. It’s not even, on its surface, mean. It sounds like the moral conclusion of the civil rights movement. It sounds like Martin Luther King’s dream — that his children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. It sounds, to most of the people I grew up with in church, exactly like what we were taught was the right answer.
I’m not describing other people. I’m describing what I have felt, repeatedly, in my own body, when someone has named something I would have preferred not to see. The work of these essays — and of the years of formation behind them — has been the slow work of learning to notice this kind of framework operating in me, and to greet that noticing not as an attack but as an invitation.
So that’s the jump-ball question I want to think about with you. Not whether the sentence is reasonable. Whether it’s what we think it is.
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A Story About Two Cases
In 1896 the Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson. The case asked whether a Louisiana law requiring “separate but equal” railway cars for Black and white passengers violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court said no. The Fourteenth Amendment, they reasoned, requires equal treatment under the law. If the cars are equal, the treatment is equal. If a Black passenger feels stigmatized by being required to sit in a separate car, that is — and I’m paraphrasing the actual language — his own subjective interpretation, not anything the law has done to him. The law treats everyone the same.
One justice dissented. John Marshall Harlan, the only Southerner on the Court and a former enslaver, wrote the dissent. The line everyone remembers is this: Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
Harlan lost. The Court’s ruling stood for fifty-eight years. Plessy was the legal architecture of Jim Crow.
In 2026, this past Wednesday, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. The case asked whether a congressional district drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act could survive constitutional scrutiny. The Court ruled against the district. The Fourteenth Amendment, the majority reasoned, forbids the state from sorting citizens by race; if the district’s lines depended on race, the district cannot stand. The Constitution, they explained, is color-blind.
That same Harlan line — our Constitution is color-blind — is now invoked by the majority. The dissent has flipped. The vocabulary has flipped. The constitutional warrant has flipped.
What hasn’t flipped is the result. After Plessy, the racial settlement of 1896 stayed in place for two generations. After Callais, the racial distribution of political power that the Voting Rights Act was designed to disturb stays in place — undisturbed.
I keep thinking: what if the words have always been doing different work than I thought they were doing?
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The Grammar Underneath
Here is the thing about a grammar. You don’t notice it. That’s how grammar works. You notice the vocabulary. You catch yourself when you use the wrong word. You don’t catch yourself when the sentence structure is doing something the words don’t say.
I’ve been writing about this for the whole series — about how the vocabulary of a tradition can stay constant while the underlying logic shifts to a different framework, and how the people most invested in the vocabulary are often the last to notice that the grammar has changed underneath them. I called it grammar conversion in Essay 9. I’ve been tracing it through Christian theology — how the language of incarnation gets conscripted into the logic of domination, how the language of grace gets put to work in the service of merit, how the words of the Sermon on the Mount get deployed by people whose actual operative grammar is Pharaoh’s.
I didn’t expect to find the same move in a Supreme Court opinion this week. But there it is.
The grammar of Plessy was: the law is satisfied when it does not actively impose racial classification, regardless of what happens to people in the spaces the law declines to reach. The vocabulary was the vocabulary of equality. The grammar was the grammar of leaving the racial settlement undisturbed.
The grammar of Callais is the same. Same grammar. Opposite vocabulary. The vocabulary of Plessy affirmed separation. The vocabulary of Callais affirms integration. In neither case does the vocabulary describe what the law is actually doing. What the law is doing — in both cases — is declining to disturb a racial distribution it inherited.
We’ve covered some ground — two Supreme Court cases, a hundred and thirty years apart, and the claim that the same grammar is running underneath both. Before we go further, I want to name what the next sections do. They get more personal and more psychological. You don’t need to agree with the legal analysis to follow what comes next. The question underneath all of it is simpler than the cases: what is the framework protecting?
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What I Wrote in the Bishops’ Report
I want to bring forward something I worked on a couple of years ago, because it goes directly to what’s happening here.
In 2024 I served on the Episcopal House of Bishops Theology Committee, which was tasked with producing a report on Christian Nationalism.1 I wrote the section on what sociologist Ruth Braunstein has called the Colorblind Judeo-Christian Nation narrative.2 I’m going to paraphrase what I wrote, because I’ve watched the diagnosis play out in the wild this week and I want to share it with you.
There is a way of being a religious American — and you may know this person; you may be this person; I have been this person — that combines a sincere commitment to civil-rights-era values with a refusal to address the conditions that civil-rights-era legislation tried to remedy. The framework does this by making a single rhetorical move.
It converts race from a category of origin into a category of culture.
Once you make that move, here is what becomes possible. You can hold yourself accountable to a colorblind ethic. You can sincerely oppose discrimination based on skin color. You can name overt racism as evil and mean it. And you can simultaneously construe the people who are harmed by the racial distribution of resources, opportunity, and political power as people who have failed to embody the dominant culture’s norms — its rugged individualism, its self-sufficiency, its traditional family structure, its work ethic, its respect for authority. They aren’t being discriminated against because of their origin. They’re being judged because they fail to conform to the culture. And they’re being judged not by anyone in particular, but by the culture itself — which the framework treats as if it were neutral.
The framework absolves adherents of charges of racism without committing them to any policy that might address racism’s enduring effects. It enables seeing oneself as practicing colorblind inclusivity while the established practices of exclusion and privilege continue undisturbed.
And — this is the part I want to underline — it makes the person who notices the racial settlement underneath the cultural framework into the offender. The discrimination is no longer the racial pattern. The discrimination is the naming of the pattern. Frankly, it’s insulting to all citizens.
Once you see this move, you cannot unsee it. It’s the move Callais makes at the level of constitutional doctrine. It’s the move Tim made in the comments. It’s the move I made for most of my life without knowing I was making it.
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Why This Got Inside Me Before I Could Think
I want to do one more turn here, because the political analysis isn’t enough. The reason this framework has been so durable — the reason I held it for so long, the reason Tim holds it now, the reason most of the people I grew up with in church hold some version of it — is that it does work for us at a level deeper than reasoning.
I’ve been writing in this series about shame and pride. About how shame, properly understood, is not a verdict but a signal — the body’s way of calling us back to the communion we’ve disrupted. About how shame, mishandled, becomes toxic, and toxic shame protects itself by converting into pride. About how a particular kind of pride — the kind that does not need to be earned because it is rooted in who you are rather than in what you’ve done — becomes the most stable defense available, and also the most dangerous.
The colorblind framework is, among other things, a mechanism for managing shame. American history contains an actual moral injury — the injury of enslavement, the injury of Jim Crow, the injury of redlining, the injury of mass incarceration. Those of us who grew up white in church were taught that history.
We were also taught — most of us, by sincere people — that we were not personally responsible for it. The combination is psychologically unstable. The history is real, the harm is real, and the relationship between us and the history is not zero, even if it is not the same relationship our grandparents had to their history.
The colorblind framework offers a way out. It says: the harm is in the past; the present is colorblind; therefore the only remaining moral obligation is to refuse to discriminate, which I am already doing. The shame is metabolized. The pride is preserved. The settlement underneath is undisturbed. Everyone gets to be a good person.
And then someone notices the settlement. And the noticing produces a feeling of being accused. And the feeling of being accused — because the framework has converted the actual harm into a cultural matter — gets experienced not as appropriate moral reckoning but as an insult. Because in the framework’s grammar, that’s what it is.
The framework treats every invitation as an attack. It cannot do otherwise. That’s what it was built for.
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A Word About What “Free” Means
Two more voices, briefly, because they sharpen what’s at stake.
Civic republicanism — the political tradition whose leading contemporary voice is the Irish philosopher Philip Pettit — argues that freedom is not, fundamentally, the absence of interference. To be free, on Pettit’s account, is to live in a community where no one has unaccountable arbitrary power over you. The wrong of a racial settlement is not principally that one group does not get its proportional share of outcomes. The wrong is that one group lives under the unaccountable arbitrary power of another. The remedy is the structural securing of contestability — the practical ability to push back, to be heard, to hold power accountable.
Adam Przeworski, the Polish-American political scientist, argues something complementary from a different angle. Democracy cannot be expected to deliver substantive equality. Democracy’s promise is more modest: that elections can produce the alternation of those in power. That losers can lose, accept the loss, and try again. That no group can lock itself permanently into power.
What both voices help me see is what the colorblind framework is actually protecting.
Not skin color. Not even cultural norms. Structural unaccountability — a political and economic arrangement in which a particular distribution of power can be sustained without anyone having to account for sustaining it. The framework’s genius is that it makes the arrangement appear to be the natural product of free choice, when the arrangement is in fact the cumulative effect of centuries of unequal treatment whose effects have not been remedied because remedying them would require seeing them.
The framework prevents the very accountability the republican and democratic traditions require. It does this not by openly rejecting accountability but by reframing the request for accountability as itself a kind of injustice. Frankly, it’s insulting to all citizens.
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Where This Leaves Me
I’m not writing this to score points against my friends. I love them. I have known them for a very long time. We were formed by the same institutions, shaped by the same sermons, taught the same answers to the same questions. The framework I’m describing went into them the same way it went into me — through the air we breathed, the church we sat in, the school we attended, the country we served. It is not their fault that they hold it. It was not my fault that I held it.
The fault, if there is fault to be assigned, lies in the formation itself — in the common life that has been doing this work to all of us for a very long time, while the church we trusted to give us a different grammar mostly handed back the same one with different vocabulary.
What I’ve come to believe, slowly and not without grief, is that the only response available to me is to keep naming the grammar when I see it.
Not in contempt — that just generates more shame, which generates more pride, which calcifies the framework rather than dissolving it. But in the kind of patient, undefended attention that the gospel of a dispossessed Christ has always asked of us. The slow practice of noticing what I’ve been formed to want without my noticing.
This is what I have come to understand about the work of these essays. They are not — they cannot be — arguments designed to defeat the framework in someone else’s head. The framework doesn’t lose to arguments.
It loses, slowly, to a different kind of formation. To people doing the small embodied work of paying attention to who is in the room and who is not, who has standing to speak and who does not, what is being protected by the language we are using and what is being made invisible. To people willing to receive the noticing of the settlement as gift rather than as insult — even when the noticing comes from a stranger on Facebook, even when it costs us something we did not know we were holding.
I don’t know how to do this work except slowly. I don’t know how to do it except in community, and the community I have is the one I have, with all its frameworks and all its grief. I keep thinking about the line at the end of Make the Coffee Slowly: we walk together. That’s what I have. It’s not much. But it’s what I have.
If you’ve felt the framework operating in you the way I’ve felt it operating in me, I’m with you in it. The first noticing is the hardest. The thousandth noticing is also hard, in a different way. But the noticing is the beginning of the long undoing.
We walk together.
Endnotes
1. The Crisis of Christian Nationalism: Report from the House of Bishops Theology Committee, ed. Allen K. Shin and Larry R. Benfield (New York: Church Publishing, 2024). I served on the committee that produced this report and contributed to its analytical framework. The report distinguishes among varieties of Christian Nationalism, including what it calls “Colorblind Judeo-Christian Nationalism” — the variety I am tracing in this riff. ↩
2. The phrase and the analytical framework come from Ruth Braunstein. See her articles “A Theory of Political Backlash: Assessing the Religious Right’s Effects on the Religious Field,” Sociology of Religion 82, no. 3 (2021): 293–312; and “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America,” Religions 12, no. 2 (2021): 95. Her book-length treatment of these themes is Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), which examines how religious Americans across the political spectrum understand and practice democratic citizenship. The diagnostic I developed for my section of the Bishops’ Report draws on her sociological framework. ↩
Hero image: Midjourney. The bench, the wall, the light — and any ghost you see — are not photographs of any specific place.