How ‘Our Colorblind Constitution’ Became the Supreme Court’s Governing Race Doctrine

How ‘Colorblind Constitution’ Language Reshaped Voting Rights and Admissions

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Allen v. Milligan (2026), a redistricting decision that is expected to replace one of Alabama’s Black Democratic members of Congress with a white Republican. In its first sentence, the majority framed the case as a clash between the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and “our colorblind Constitution.” All three of the Court’s Democratic appointees dissented.

The phrase was not a rhetorical flourish. Just over a month earlier, in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), the conservative majority used the same logic to neutralize a 1982 amendment to the VRA, an amendment signed by President Ronald Reagan. Three years before that, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), it applied similar reasoning to end affirmative action in nearly all American universities.

Under the colorblind theory, any law that classifies by race is constitutionally suspect, regardless of whether it was enacted to enforce segregation or to undo its legacy. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in a 2007 school-integration ruling, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” That principle, once confined to the fringes of conservative legal thought, now anchors the Court’s approach to race, voting, education and public contracting.

The practical consequences extend beyond elections. If the Constitution truly is colorblind, judges are required to strike down race-conscious programs in hiring, federal contracting, university admissions and even the military. The Harvard decision left service academies an open question, but advocacy groups are already pressing the doctrine in court challenges to minority scholarships, minority-owned business development programs and surveys of Black students.

Inside the Roberts Court’s Colorblind Doctrine: Origins, Reach and Stakes

From Harlan’s Dissent to Roberts’s Majority

The colorblind slogan is usually traced to Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), where he wrote that “our Constitution is color-blind.” But the article notes that Harlan made that statement while declaring the white race “dominant” in prestige, education and power. The modern doctrine is younger, emerging in the 1970s as legal scholars split between two theories. Yale law professor Reva Siegel labels them “antisubordination,” which forbids state action that enforces the inferior status of historically oppressed groups, and “anticlassification,” which forbids government from classifying by race at all.

The pre-Roberts Court never fully embraced the second theory. Even in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Court allowed universities to consider race as a factor because minority students bring experiences that “enrich the training of its student body.” Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the controlling opinion, deferred to universities’ expertise in building diverse classes. The current Court, by contrast, treats every racial classification with the same suspicion, a shift the article describes as a loss of the humility visible in Powell’s opinion.

The Roberts Court’s Long Arc

Chief Justice Roberts began pushing the doctrine almost immediately after his 2005 appointment. In Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), he wrote that voluntary school-integration schemes were no less odious than Jim Crow segregation, although Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurrence at the time limited the holding by saying schools could still consider race in some circumstances. Kennedy retired in 2018; with that constraint gone, the conservative majority has been free to apply the principle to universities in Harvard and to the Voting Rights Act in Callais and Allen.

How Far the Doctrine Reaches

The full consequences are already showing. The article reports that pro-colorblindness groups have filed lawsuits targeting scholarships for minority youth, organizations that support minority-owned businesses, and university surveys of Black students. Because the Court has framed colorblindness as a constitutional command rather than a policy preference, it creates a standing invitation to challenge any government or institution that uses race to allocate benefits. The only unresolved boundary the article identifies is the military: Harvard did not decide whether service academies can consider race in admissions.

Who Gains and Who Loses

The clearest winners are the conservative legal movement and advocacy groups that spent decades building a case for the doctrine; their legal position is now anchored in controlling precedent. The losers include Black voters in states such as Alabama and Louisiana, whose congressional representation is directly affected by the Allen and Callais rulings; universities that relied on race-conscious admissions; and minority-owned businesses and contractors whose programs are now exposed to constitutional challenge.

Who Needs to Act After the Colorblind Rulings

The Allen, Callais and Harvard rulings give institutions and advocates a clearer legal boundary to work with, even if that boundary is unwelcome.

• Universities and federal contractors that maintain race-conscious admissions, hiring or supplier-diversity programs should review their eligibility criteria against the strict-scrutiny standard applied in Harvard and expect challenge litigation from pro-colorblindness groups.
• Organizations running minority scholarships or minority-business development programs should assess whether their criteria use explicit racial classifications; the article names these programs as already targeted in pending lawsuits.
• Civil-rights advocates and legislators seeking to restore Voting Rights Act protections cannot rely on the existing statutory text — Callais neutralized a 1982 amendment signed by Reagan — and will need new language drafted to survive a Court that treats race-conscious remedies as constitutionally suspect.
• Watch for the unresolved service-academy question: the Harvard opinion left military academies untouched, so a future case is the main pending test of whether the colorblind doctrine has any limits.