Ever since he attained the age of majority some four decades ago, Terence Hamilton, now 57, has voted in Mississippi’s Second Congressional District, covering 30 counties across the western part of the state. First drawn in 1986 to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the district’s scope has shifted somewhat over the years. But the bottom line has been a majority-black district in a state where African Americans comprise 38% of the population.

Like many of his black neighbors, Hamilton has reliably backed the district’s incumbent US representative, Democrat Bennie Thompson, who’s held his seat since 1993. But the US Supreme Court has now disrupted the pattern, holding that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to draw majority-minority districts like Hamilton’s. In response, Mississippi Republicans have rushed to redraw the state’s electoral map in a manner that is certain to dilute black votes.

They’re doing this, of course, in the name of colorblindness.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 miles away, Ethan Chen, aged 18, is preparing to attend Georgetown University, not far from his family’s home in Bethesda, Md. It is a bittersweet transition for Chen, who had always considered Georgetown a “safety school.” His dream was to attend either Stanford or one of the Ivy League schools. But during the winter and spring, he received one rejection letter after another, despite a perfect grade-point average and equally impressive test scores.

How did this come to be, after another high-court ruling that barred colleges from discriminating against white and Asian applicants in the name of “affirmative action”? Chen, of course, will never know what exactly went into admissions officers’ decisions to reject him. What he does know is that many schools have continued to use essays and other “soft” factors to practice affirmative action and racecraft under another name.

The college officials, too, claim to uphold colorblind justice.

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These two stories — based on composite characters — illustrate the paradox of race and colorblind justice 250 years since the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” The two recent Supreme Court decisions — on affirmative action and on voting rights — have clarified something profound about American public life. They reveal that two-and-a-half centuries since the Founding, we are trying simultaneously to transcend race and to manage its consequences and even “win” on racial terms. These ambitions pull against one another, suggesting that race will continue to indelibly stamp the American experience.

Consider the parallel nature of the two decisions. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, decided in 2023, the Supremes prohibited universities from explicitly using race in admissions. In Louisiana v. Callais, they sharply constrained the use of race in congressional redistricting under the VRA. On the surface, both decisions advance the same constitutional ideal of “colorblindness”: government should treat citizens without regard to race. Yet in practice, both rulings immediately generated what one might call a politics of proxies.

Universities didn’t abandon the pursuit of racial diversity after the high court proscribed affirmative action. Rather, university leaders shifted emphasis toward other considerations, some of which are strongly correlated with race: economic hardship, neighborhood disadvantage, first-generation status, personal adversity, and essays narrating the experience of marginalization. Formally speaking, these are race-neutral criteria. But everyone understands that they may also function as indirect means of sustaining black and Hispanic representation at selective institutions, as they appear to be doing.

Meanwhile, in the voting-rights context, a similar proxy logic holds. Red states attacking minority-majority districts increasingly invoke race-neutral partisanship, rather than race, as the guiding principle of line-drawing. Since black voters in much of the South overwhelmingly support Democrats, partisan gerrymanders often produce substantial racial consequences without having to explicitly classify voters by race.

The symmetry is striking. In both cases, non-racial instruments are being employed that have predictable racial effects. But political partisans see the cases differently. Conservatives who object to universities using race-correlated proxies to preserve minority enrollment often defend partisan districting as constitutionally neutral. Meanwhile, liberals defend “holistic” admissions criteria as part of a legitimate effort to broaden opportunity. This, even as the Left often condemns partisan gerrymanders precisely because their racial effects are foreseeable. Both sides, in other words, alternate between formal and substantive understandings of equality depending on context, thus illustrating what I call the colorblindness paradox.

This suggests that the stakes are deeper than ordinary partisan inconsistency. The real problem lies in the incoherence of colorblindness itself when race remains deeply embedded in the social structure. For decades, the Supreme Court has increasingly embraced a view of the Constitution that is suspicious of racial classification. The central danger, in this account, is the government sorting citizens by race and allocating benefits and burdens on that basis. This principle — suspicion of government racecraft, even when it’s used for “positive” or non-invidious reasons — dominates the high court’s equal-protection jurisprudence. Rightly so, in my view.

But implementing that principle is another matter altogether. The difficulty here is that race in America remains highly correlated with countless other variables that public institutions may legitimately consider when allocating scarce benefits or opportunities. Educational attainment, neighborhood quality, wealth, family structure, social networks, geography, and partisan affiliation — all continue to bear the imprint of racial history. And they all are relevant when exercising the government’s discretionary powers.

As a result, banning explicit racial classification needn’t preclude racially differentiated outcomes. It merely changes the mechanisms through which those outcomes are pursued — or avoided. The colorblindness principle provides little guidance here. This is why our public arguments about colorblindness increasingly revolve around debates over the use of proxies.

Take college admissions. If a university gives special weight to applicants who overcame severe educational disadvantage, is it pursuing a morally defensible concern for human development? Or is it covertly pursuing racial “balancing”? The answer isn’t obvious, since the non-racial criteria that serve as proxies for race are themselves neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. Educational disadvantages are real. Unequal access to stable schools, family resources, mentoring networks, and social capital is real. Moreover, non-racial criteria that correlate with race may genuinely identify talented students (of all races) whose capacities were developed under adverse conditions. Thus, it is legitimate for an admissions process to consider them.

But such consideration also predictably shapes the racial composition of entering classes, and it is plausible to suspect that this is precisely why some institutions are using them more heavily now than before the 2023 anti-affirmative-action ruling. If so, those institutions are violating the spirit if not the letter of the court’s holding, as Chen in our narrative learned to his chagrin.

Or consider redistricting. A legislature produces a map to maximize Republican advantage, knowing that such a map will reduce black electoral concentration. Is this merely ordinary political hardball with unfortunate racial side effects? Or is it something uglier — partisanship masquerading as a cover story for anti-black animus? Again, the answer isn’t straightforward. Political affiliation is itself a legitimate organizing principle in democratic politics. Yet in a society in which race and party remain so tightly aligned in some regions, the distinction between partisan and racial intent is hard to discern.

The difficulty here is that, while the court can forbid the explicit consideration of race, it can’t forbid the use of statistical signals that correlate with racial identity. Everything turns on the motivations of officialdom, which aren’t easy to determine.

This points toward a deeper conceptual confusion in our racial discourse, which arises from our conflating two very different ideas: racial blindness and racial indifference. A society may prohibit explicit racial classification while remaining intensely concerned with racial outcomes, embracing blindness while rejecting indifference. Indeed, that is precisely our current situation. Universities remain deeply invested in racial diversity even after affirmative action. Voting-rights advocates remain deeply invested in preserving black political representation even after the court’s retrenchment. The disappearance of explicit racial language hasn’t produced indifference to racial disparities. It has simply displaced racial management, and racial politicking, into more indirect forms. This distinction matters, because it exposes the limits of purely procedural solutions to racial inequality.

I have spent much of my professional life arguing that durable inequality isn’t sustained merely by discriminatory transactions at the point of selection. It is sustained through differences in social development — differences in the networks, norms, institutions, and cultural practices through which human capacities are formed. Opportunity travels along the synapses of social networks. Human-capital formation depends upon family stability, educational culture, neighborhood order, mentoring relationships, and access to trusted institutional pathways. These developmental processes unfold long before a university admissions office reviews an application or a legislature draws district boundaries. And racial identity figures prominently in these processes of social development in the United States.

This is why legal and administrative efforts to engineer proportional representation at the endpoint often feel unsatisfying. They attempt to correct downstream disparities via anti-white “reverse discrimination,” which the Supreme Court now decries, while leaving untouched the upstream developmental inequalities from which those disparities partly emerge.

And there is another drawback to the method. Formal neutrality can itself become morally evasive if it ignores the historical conditions that continue to shape social outcomes. A society can’t simply declare itself colorblind and thereby escape the consequences of its past. The legacy of racial exclusion remains embedded in institutions and inherited patterns of advantage and disadvantage. The Terence Hamilton in our opening narrative might be the great grandson of a slave and the son of a father who endured de jure racial apartheid. Those historical realities and their consequences don’t disappear the second a court in Washington holds them irrelevant.

Thus our predicament: the paradox of colorblindness. On the one hand, permanent racial management threatens to entrench precisely the kind of group consciousness that a liberal democracy ought to transcend. A political culture organized around endless racial accounting risks weakening common citizenship. The more every institutional disparity is interpreted through the lens of racial representation, the harder it becomes to encounter one another simply as fellow citizens. On the other hand, abstract invocations of neutrality may fail to reckon adequately with the developmental realities that shape unequal outcomes in the first place.

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America oscillates between these two poles because we seek both transcendence and remediation. We wish to become a society in which race no longer governs public life. Yet we also seek to offset the stubborn consequences of racial history. These goals aren’t fully compatible.

Indeed, the deeper paradox may be this: the more persistently racial disparities remain visible, the harder it becomes to sustain genuine colorblindness. But the more aggressively institutions organize themselves around racial outcomes, the harder it becomes to achieve a society in which race recedes in civic importance. No constitutional doctrine can fully resolve this tension, because it doesn’t arise merely from law. It arises from the unfinished social condition of the nation itself.

I supported affirmative action many years ago because I regarded it as a temporary bridge across inequalities inherited from Jim Crow. I remain sympathetic to the moral impulse behind such policies. But over time, I have grown skeptical that endless procedural adjustment at the point of selection can substitute for the harder work of social development. Nor do I believe that a healthy republic can indefinitely sustain a politics in which every important institution is expected to produce racially calibrated outcomes.

The Supreme Court’s recent interventions are therefore both understandable and welcome, but they are also incomplete. They reflect an effort to limit explicit racial administration in public life. Yet they can’t eliminate the underlying realities that make proxy politics inevitable, and inscrutable, in the first place.

For that reason, the real challenge before us isn’t simply legal. It is civic and developmental. If we want a politics in which race matters less, then we must build a society in which the capacities required for flourishing are more broadly and deeply cultivated across all communities. No amount of doctrinal refinement can spare us that obligation.

The paradoxes will remain. But 250 years after a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson penned his majestic words, perhaps we can at least begin speaking about them honestly. Indifference to the roots of racial inequality is actually inconsistent with achieving colorblindness in the conduct of our public affairs.

So why does it seem that Democrats are fumbling a winnable midterm cycle?

Two recent developments within the past few weeks reveal the party’s fundamental problems leading into the fall. The first demonstrates the real limits of Democrats’ ability to fight back against Trump. And the second shows that the party’s refusal to admit its mistakes prevents it from unifying around a coherent strategy to win.

Consider how badly Democrats lost the redistricting war with President Trump over federal congressional seats. Last year, Trump coordinated a sweeping national redistricting effort designed to lock in Republican control of the House. In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger decided to “fight fire with fire” by gerrymandering their own states to counterbalance Republican gains in places like Texas. But this response made things worse.

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In Virginia, the state supreme court struck down the new Democratic map, ruling it violated the 2020 voter-approved redistricting reforms. Worse, Newsom’s California plan — which could create five new Democratic-favorable seats — gave Republicans exactly the rationale they needed to escalate their own gerrymandering efforts in states where the GOP initially showed reluctance to do so. North Carolina Republicans explicitly cited Newsom’s redistricting as justification for their own maps, saying the Golden State was “blocking the efforts of blue state Democrats to take control of Congress.”

The math is daunting. As of now, Republicans stand to gain roughly 13 House seats from their gerrymandering efforts nationwide. Democrats, thanks to Newsom, may gain five. That is a net gain of seven seats for Trump. In sum, Democrats’ attempt to fight back didn’t stop Trump’s redistricting efforts. Rather, they normalized a sleazy policy and gave hesitant Republican-led states the push to escalate the effort.

If Trump’s redistricting efforts hold, Democrats could fail to retake the House this fall. Without at least one chamber to create institutional leverage, Democrats would be unable to access critical tools to reach voters before the 2028 presidential election, such as investigative power, subpoena authority, and a platform for high-profile hearings. Instead, they would be forced to continue their symbolic protest and opposition for the remainder of his term. 

But the real fumble of Democrats leading into 2026 and 2028 comes not from losing the redistricting fight or any of the other defeats to Trump, but from the party’s ongoing refusal to honestly examine why it lost the 2024 election. 

This institutional failure has come into focus with the Democratic National Committee’s recent release of its much anticipated 2024 election post-mortem, a report that was supposed to answer hard questions about why the party lost, but instead highlights the insularity and self-protective tendencies of the small professional class of Democratic operatives who influence the party.

The timeline of the report’s suppression and eventual release illustrates this problem. In February 2025, Ken Martin, the then chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, won the election to become the next DNC chairman. He defeated Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, who had the backing of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and other top Democratic leaders.

Martin’s strategy to win the most votes from the 448 DNC members, the majority of whom are state party representatives, was straightforward. He promised a “50-state party strategy,” pledging to invest more money in state parties across the country, including the least competitive ones. This stood in contrast to Wikler, who wanted to concentrate resources on media and battleground state elections. Not surprisingly, the candidate promising money to more of the voting constituency beat the candidate advocating for strategic spending focus.

But Martin had to do more than promise money to win. He also had to appease the numerous Democrats angry about the 2024 election defeat. Many of these critics weren’t voting DNC members, but their voices and donations mattered. For them, he promised an independent autopsy conducted by an outside auditor that would rigorously examine why the party lost and tell the truth.

But something changed once he got into office. 

Instead of an independent process, Martin put one of his close friends, Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, in charge of the report. Then, in December 2025, Martin announced that the DNC would not release the final report after all. He justified the decision by saying it would distract from the party’s 2025 wins and take focus away from the midterms.

It was only when CNN was preparing to expose details of the report’s drafts in late May that Martin abruptly changed his position, releasing the complete report on May 21, 2026.

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Much of the fallout has focused on the draft report’s shocking lack of quality, which included factually incorrect claims and missing sources. But the real problem is what the report deliberately avoids. Most strikingly, the report never addresses the simplest, most obvious explanation for why Harris lost: the Biden administration’s record was unpopular, and Harris was not a credible alternative. On immigration, inflation, and governance more broadly, voters rejected the first Biden term. By the time Harris launched her campaign, President Biden’s approval rating had collapsed to 36%, and Harris was unable to credibly distance herself from his record. The autopsy avoids both of these truths.

Instead, the report downplays Harris’s responsibility for the loss, arguing that she was not properly armed for victory. Its key finding: “the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch.” This is absurd. It was never the plan for Harris to run in Biden’s place during his first term, nor was it the plan when he announced his withdrawal from the race abruptly in July 2024. The White House had no obligation to spend four years grooming Harris as a successor, because Biden was supposed to be running for reelection. Any lack of preparedness of the Vice President should be blamed on herself and the dozens of Democratic operatives who opportunistically asserted her name as the natural successor to Biden in the hours following his announcement, thus shutting down the efforts of former President Obama to create a process for new candidates to be selected by the party (and of course, to avoid having Harris be the nominee). A former prosecutor, attorney general, and senator ought to be able to demonstrate her capability to be an effective leader without the handholding of an entire team. If Harris needed more prep time to be a good presidential candidate, it means she was unfit for the position. 

And the reality is that many Democratic operatives knew this simple truth about Harris and either endorsed her bid or hid their hesitation and got behind her. But what can be said about the judgment and character of the Democratic operatives who did this, knowing full well of her ineptness and dysfunctional managerial style, one that resulted in a 91.5% staff turnover rate while she was vice president? They all knew about it but looked the other way. This includes Ken Martin, who was a vice chair of the Harris-Walz campaign before running for DNC chairman.

For many Democrats, the autopsy’s silence confirms their suspicion that a small network of operatives is suppressing a report that would examine their own conduct. Many of these same operatives ignored or hid President Biden’s cognitive decline while prioritizing their own positions over the risk to the country and party. They then helmed a campaign so financially chaotic that it blew through $1.6 billion in roughly 100 days and left the party $20 million in debt. And now they are using the DNC chair to ensure that the most obvious truth about the 2024 election is not stated by the party itself. Namely, that it was the Democratic professional operative class that were the primary drivers for creating a disastrous first term for Biden, and choosing an unfit replacement candidate to succeed him.

Ken Martin was installed as DNC chair to keep this problem from being named. Instead, he and many Democrats want to pretend the party’s current leadership ecosystem is capable of mounting a serious effort in 2026 and 2028, without acknowledging the role many of these operatives played in hiding Biden’s decline, downplaying Harris’s unfitness, and suppressing honest examination of the party’s candidate selection. 

A party that cannot be honest about its own mistakes is destined to repeat them. And in both the gerrymandering fight and the handling of the election autopsy, the party chose to do the expedient thing rather than the right thing — both decisions that have been disastrous. Democrats know these truths about themselves. Until they admit them, they will keep losing winnable elections.