Juneteenth Invites Us to See Color

In the Fall of 1898, a group of 2,000 white men in Wilmington, North Carolina, staged the only successful coup d’état in US history, somewhat politely called the Wilmington Race Riot. After nearly a decade of Black progress following Reconstruction, fueled by a Fusion Party coalition of Black Republicans and poor whites, powerful white elites in state politics schemed to dismantle this alliance in the name of “white independence.”

Wilmington was the seat and symbol of Black economic and political achievement. On the morning of November 10, a white mob descended upon the largest city in the state, burned down the Black-owned newspaper, destroyed other Black businesses, murdered an unknown number of Black residents (estimates range from nine to 300), and terrorized their neighborhoods.

At gunpoint, the gang forced the resignations of Wilmington’s mayor, police chief and board of aldermen, installing their own white supremacist officials. Then, in the wake of this uprising, the legislature disenfranchised the voting rights of the state’s Black citizens at the start of its next session.

Yet, these incredible events were not something taught to me in North Carolina schools.

Same Story, New Attacks

Nearly 100 years later, renewed attacks on Black voting rights take a different form. The violent, thuggish tactics of 19th-century Jim Crow have shifted to the litigious tactics of 21st-century James Crow, Esquire. As some parts of the country celebrate the liberation of the last enslaved African Americans with the Juneteenth holiday, the country must also reckon with the conservative Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which effectively guts crucial parts of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965.

The VRA legislated the creation of majority-minority districts in order to secure Black voting rights against intentional dilution in the form of at-large or racially-discriminatory districting. The VRA resulted not only in increased material outcomes for Black communities but also, according to a recent study, enhanced the livelihoods of all citizens.

What is that saying about a rising tide?

The Callais ruling, however, deemed a majority-Black district in Louisiana to be unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered, and in doing so, puts one-third of congressional seats that represent minority districts in jeopardy and weakens protections for Black political representation across the country.

This triggered a mad rush in Southern states to redraw congressional maps to rid themselves of majority-minority districts. And local efforts, including in North Carolina, not far from the site of the white uprising in 1898, have begun to shift to at-large municipal elections, eliminating Black-majority wards and districts.

For 60 years, Black people have tentatively held on to the fragile freedom of political representation in local, state, and federal government. This freedom has always been contested, but this latest ruling constitutes a legal coup d’état against Black political power.

The Myth of Colorblindness

Underlying a ruling like Callais is an ideology of colorblindness, which not only shapes conservative political tactics but also animates attempts at racial reconciliation among churches and theologies, from evangelical to progressive.

Often rooted in a misinterpretation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” colorblindness assumes that racism is an individual and intentional act, and attributes structural racial inequality to nonracial factors. It convinces white Americans that the opposite of being racist is simply not being racist.

This ideology has the advantage of appearing innocuous, even virtuous. It convinces white people that we live in a “post-racial” era and that people of all colors now have equal access, protection, and privilege. Ultimately, it elicits the self-justifying confession, “I don’t see color.”

However, as priest and theologian Kelly Brown Douglas observes, “The only thing postracial about this time in the nation’s history is the refusal to talk about race.”

Such refusals mask the true identity of colorblindness. Like the Wizard of Oz operating behind smoke and screen, it is the curtain that hides the structural and systemic controls that reproduce racial oppression: concealing the continual segregation of American schools which were more segregated in the year 2000 than in 1970, political gerrymandering that keeps minorities underrepresented in legislative bodies, and the criminal legal system that imposes on Black people longer sentences and more death sentences than whites for the same crimes.

As sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva notes, colorblindness stands on the fundamental American beliefs in equal opportunity and individual freedom—tenets that are also underwritten by the American Church. A commitment to equal opportunity allows whites to urge equality while opposing principles like affirmative action or majority-minority voting districts because they grant special treatment to one group. It upholds a faith in meritocracy that considers everyone to have equal access—and thus equal, individual responsibility to “make it on their own.”

The Benefits of Ignorance

White people have not been trained to think complexly about race in school, in mainstream discourse, or in social institutions (remember, I had not even heard of the only coup in US history that took place in my own home state!). And because it benefits us not to do so, our understanding of meritocracy teaches us to consider those who do not succeed to have failed by their own fault—laziness or licentiousness—a belief perpetuated by “the American Dream.” Inequality is explained by many factors other than systemic racism.

Yet this belief system ignores the conditions that created the underlying inequality and neglects the policies that sustain power differences between races. Colorblindness fails to account for the effects of racism in the United States, including the persistence of wage and wealth inequality and obstacles to upward mobility within African American communities. For example, studies demonstrate that locations with more prevalent slavery in the mid-1800s exhibit less upward mobility today.

Yet the true power of colorblindness is its ability to operate, seemingly neutrally or even righteously, while simultaneously empowering white supremacy. Decisions like Callais, which ruled a majority-minority district to be racial gerrymandering, rendered devastating reversals to racial progress in the innocuous name of colorblindness.

Ultimately, the concept and practice of colorblindness often commission failed appeals to racial reconciliation as the solution to racial injustice, especially for white Christians. Yet reconciliation places the same responsibility and urgency for racial unity on all parties, despite locations of racial privilege or oppression.

The idea that we each start from our own end and meet in some imaginary middle, each party contributing equally to the work of unity, compels white Christians to reach for shallow solutions and conceive of premature solidarity. Reconciliation thus becomes a more costly endeavor for Black Christians than for whites, and fails to address the deeper, collective problem of white supremacy.

The Opportunity of Juneteenth

Despite the gutting of minority voting rights and the power of colorblindness to shape our worldviews, Juneteenth is a holiday that invites us to see color in all of its beauty, ambiguity and power. Celebrating Juneteenth in 2026 is an act of resistance to a colorblindness that actually blinds white people from seeing the effects of the systemic racism that has been built over centuries and upon which we still stand.

The Supreme Court’s ruling suggests that those working for racial justice face an uphill struggle. But as the brief example of Wilmington’s Fusion coalition and the collective interracial progress achieved by the VRA suggest, solidarity and liberation are possible.

Juneteenth calls us to begin this work by pulling back the curtain on colorblindness. It compels us to proclaim to those seeking reconciliation that, as best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi reminds us, the opposite of racist is not “not racist” but anti-racist—actively working together to overturn colorblind systems that continue to disenfranchise today.

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This article is adapted from portions of Norris’s book, Liberating Jesus: Christian Ethics for Privileged People (T&T Clark, 2026). Additionally, for more on the error of “racial reconciliation,” see Norris’ book, Witnessing Whiteness, Jennifer Harvey’s Dear White Christians, and David Evans’s Damned Whiteness.