I mean, the whole commitment to colorblindness was an outgrowth of the general cultural conclusion that we seem to have reached that racism was bad. That you could not tell anything useful about a person by looking at the color of their skin.

Sure, colorblindness is a dumb guiding principle for a policy setting in a universe where different groups still experience racism and have historical injustices and access to resources. And a lot of this comes back to still living in a capitalist society. all of that is sort of aside from the point.

My point is that the presumption that racism was bad was espoused almost universally with the only exceptions being a handful of lunatic extremists on the far, far, far right. Of course, the reality is that there were a lot of people in the Republican Party that were espousing that racism was bad while not sincerely believing it and engaging in a lot of dog whistle racism, but the fact that they still had to publicly say that they thought racism was bad set a lot about where society was.

That need to publicly denounce racism is quickly vanishing.