“The trap bigots have laid”: Colorblindness, the Red Scare State, and the Liberalizing of Civil Rights

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that the construction of a second Black-majority district in Louisiana to grant Black voters electoral power proportionate to their census population was reverse discrimination against white voters—a cataclysmic decision that has overridden the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 and undermined the already-limited political representation of Black voters in the name of equality. The Court questioned whether the VRA provided adequate justification for the explicit invocation of race in districting, arguing that the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits all intentional racial discrimination, even in cases where “discrimination” would result in more equitable voting power across demographics. Ultimately, in the Court’s official ruling, Justice Samuel Alito stated, “allowing race to play any part in government decisionmaking represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” effectively equating acknowledgement of the “social fact” of race with the racism prohibited by the Fifteenth Amendment.  

Conservatives’ weaponization of civil rights rhetoric to attack legislation aimed at uplifting Black Americans, “colorblind constitutionalism,” has been an element of racist politics throughout US history. As scholars like Reva Seigel and journalists like Nikole Hannah-Jones have demonstrated, colorblindness has roots in post-Civil War Reconstruction and Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that legalized “separate but equal” Jim Crow segregation. The modern iteration of the tactic emerged in response to the Civil Rights Movement’s mainstream turn in the 1960s and 1970s, as segregationists worked to dismantle affirmative action and other civil rights programs by reframing them as contradictory to the goal of equal treatment under the law.

This liberal paradigm that has allowed reactionaries to weaponize colorblindness for their own ends was, however, an earlier product of the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s.

This liberal paradigm that has allowed reactionaries to weaponize colorblindness for their own ends was, however, an earlier product of the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s. Fearing communist infiltration in progressive spaces, the American state mobilized the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to push activist organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and cultural industries like Hollywood to redefine the liberatory struggle in ways that prioritized individualism and a shared American identity over equitable political-economic restructuring.  Alternative definitions of racism, as a system foundational to the country requiring restructuring, were in turn marked as “subversive” threats to the nation, justifying surveillance and demanding incarceration. By cultivating a civil rights discourse that denied racism as an issue of the state and economy, the US neutralized a perceived “un-American” threat during the Red Scare, laying the groundwork for arguments against explicit consideration of race in politics that would be used to reverse civil rights advances as far up as the Supreme Court, into the present day.

Postwar Civil Rights and the Red Scare State

World War II and the Cold War drastically altered perceptions of racism among white Americans and simultaneously triggered a latent fear of communism suppressed during the War—a paradox that the Red Scare state would resolve through the vociferous kneecapping of civil rights activism. During and after the War, racism became nationally topical in a way that it had not been before, as the United States positioned itself in opposition to the racist ideology that its own Jim Crow segregation was founded upon. To a similar effect, the horrors of the Holocaust exposed Americans to the logical conclusion of such policy. This awareness was further exacerbated by the military’s treatment of Black people, who—while fighting against racism overseas—were placed in segregated units, relegated to service work, and still enduring segregation at home. In response, organizations like the NAACP and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) gained mass membership bases during and immediately after the war.

What inspired liberals and progressives looking for social change—in Hollywood and in civil rights groups across the country—worried Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party who saw Black activism through the lens of communism. Their efforts to censor and criminalize such activism resulted in a punitive crackdown on civil rights organizations and accusations that prominent Black leaders were alleged communists, regardless of their true political alignment. One of the foremost perpetrators of this conflation was the Red Scare state’s central litigative body, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

A Congressional committee founded in 1938, HUAC investigated suspected subversives with influence on the general American populace. Though there were certainly Black communist and socialist activist organizations, HUAC consistently utilized accusations of communist sympathies to prosecute virtually anyone deemed “un-American.” In his 1947 report accusing the CRC of being a communist front organization, Chairman J. Parnell Thomas made the sweeping claim that, “It has been a time-honored Communist tactic to set up…cry for civil liberties precisely at a moment when boldest attacks upon democracy are intended.” While the CRC did harbor some radical members, Civil Rights organizations of all stripes were aware of this association. In a letter written between 1947 and 1950, the firmly anti-Communist NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White recounted a protest he had made to Thomas: “Some…have been charged with being ‘communist’ because they have tried to live up to the American ideal of treating all human beings fairly. We urge your committee to be most careful lest you fall in the trap bigots have laid.”

The mainstream sectors of the Movement shifted away from deconstructions of the racial-economic stratification of Black people as a class, and toward a colorblind civil rights—under threat of Congressional retaliation.

The mainstream sectors of the Movement thus dealt with the untenable position of civil rights (as simultaneously a weapon for and against communism) by shifting away from deconstructions of the racial-economic stratification of Black people as a class, and toward a colorblind civil rights—under threat of Congressional retaliation. This distinctly “American” form of activism involved reformational pushes for individual awareness among white people, inclusion into unchanged state systems, and an emphasis on a predominant American identity that unified all citizens regardless of race. Beginning in 1946, HUAC, along with the FBI, the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, and other state organizations, began intensive surveillance of the NAACP.

As a means of survival, the Association therefore ran its own HUAC-style tribunals to weed out communist sympathizers in its ranks and even broke off alliances with more radical groups. In a 1952 letter to White, CRC National Executive Secretary William L. Patterson lamented the NAACP’s rejection of radical activism, writing “There were those who…alleged that the [NAACP] was immune to persecution if only it did not become too ‘radical;’ that it could make substantial and fundamental gains for the Negro people by placating and soothing its persecutors.” In a political environment that treated all structural criticism of the United States as dangerous, radical groups that failed or refused to embrace a colorblind ideology often did not survive the Red Scare: the CRC, a self-identified “militant” group, was forcibly disbanded in 1956. In turn, the NAACP, and even individual leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., were able to employ colorblind rhetoric to appease both HUAC and curry mainstream support from white liberals, and gain remarkable ground in the battle for integration and equal rights into the 1960s.

The Culture of Liberal Civil Rights

Within this hostile environment, Hollywood released five films about anti-Black racism between 1949 and 1950, with little backlash from Congress. Valuing civil rights rhetoric to the extent that it combatted communism, but monitored by a state apparatus imprisoning filmmakers for alleged attempts to further the communist agenda, the same paradox plaguing the Civil Rights Movement was present in these films. As such, their solution was identical: The “racism” depicted in these features was conspicuously divorced from a structural critique of the US. Rather, they consistently highlighted white characters’ philanthropy and Black characters’ incorporation into a colorblind America where racism needs no systemic solutions.

This vision of racism, ensured through pressure from HUAC, was made legible through conservative Hollywood guild and HUAC collaborator, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA-PAI), in their 1947 “Screen Guide For Americans.” Member of the Alliance, author, and ideologue Ayn Rand was enlisted to compose this guide, which laid out guidelines for filmmakers to ensure they were not “introducing…propaganda into innocent stories—thus making people absorb the basic premises of Collectivism.” All the points included were related to representations of class or economy, like: “8. Don’t Glorify Depravity,” under which she advised, “Don’t drool over weaklings as conditioned ‘victims of circumstances’ (or of ‘background’ or of ‘society’) who ‘couldn’t help it,’” implying that any blaming of a character’s poor conditions on structural inequities was straightforwardly communist propaganda.

While a coalition like MPA-PAI could not practically enforce a prohibition on depictions of systemic inequities or solutions on film, Hollywood’s own censorship apparatus could. All studio films were subject to censorship throughout the development process by the Production Code Administration, and many states had state-level and municipal censorship boards to check films on “controversial” subjects (i.e., racism). Explaining her reasons for approving Home of the Brave, a 1949 feature about a Black soldier experiencing racism in the military, Atlanta censor Christine Smith (miscited as “Christian”) stated, “‘Home of the Brave’ emphasizes the fundamental principle that all human beings are alike when it gets down to basic emotions – regardless of the color of the skin. The picture does not have any outright pleas for the breaking of segregation.’” As was made clear through the restructuring of the Civil Rights Movement itself, the only palatable discussions of racism, even on screen, were those that did not threaten legal and political institutions, or white viewers.

Like Home of the Brave, the other 1949 race-themed films—Pinky, Intruder in the Dust, and Lost Boundaries—constructed a narrative in which the solution to racism was necessarily separate from politics and state structures. Across these films, Black characters were encouraged to befriend historically discriminatory institutions like the justice system, the police, white churches, the healthcare system, and the military; and affluent white characters served as colorblind benefactors whose individual acts of generosity—such as willing a Southern plantation to a Black nurse—were portrayed as heroic acts of Black uplift. These movies further emphasized a colorblind discourse through their insistence that racism was equally a problem among Black communities as white ones: Lost Boundaries, for instance, “has a clear eye for weaknesses of both races” as a lightskinned Black doctor is rejected from Black hospitals for being too light, and must resort to white-passing so he can work at a white hospital.

Both critics and the filmmakers themselves highlighted this abstraction of racism as a selling point, emphasizing their relatability to white audiences—echoing the broader tactical shift in the Civil Rights Movement toward appeasing white liberals. A review from Ebony, a leading Black magazine, of the 1950 film No Way Out stated, “No Way Out is the first out-and-out blast against racial discrimination in everyday American life. Where [the 1949 cycle] dealt with…areas that do not personally affect the average white – No Way Out deals with events and people that are part of any community.” Conversely, many critics recognized the disconnect these movies had from the reality of American racism through their avoidance of the societal structures oppressing Black people as a class. In his own review of No Way Out, Thomas M. Pryor wrote, “the cumulative efforts of half a dozen…pictures have not succeeded in clarifying the economic factors which underlie the so-called Negro problem.”

Likewise, in his 1949 Reporter essay “The Shadow and the Act” (compiled in Shadow and Act)preeminent Black author Ralph Ellison emphasized “evasions” across Pinky, Lost Boundaries, and Home of the Brave, describing their “manipulation of the audience’s attention away from reality to focus upon false issues” and arguing, “these films are not about Negroes at all; they are about what whites think and feel about Negroes.” Thus, through the internal surveillance of Hollywood, as with the Civil Rights Movement, the House Un-American Activities Committee (assisted by industry organizations and censorship boards) successfully constructed popular mass media narratives that reframed explicit advances in civil rights as fundamentally divorced from state functions, politics, or economy.

The Colorblindness Trap

The Red Scare state of the late 1940s and 1950s deliberately created a wide-reaching cultural-political vision of civil rights that would undergird appeals to colorblindness in reactionary conservative legislation up to the present day. Through Congressional crackdowns on activism and media production, the US government rendered racism an abstract problem of individual attitude and culture, divorced from politics and economy, in the immediate postwar period.

The Red Scare state of the late 1940s and 1950s deliberately created a wide-reaching cultural-political vision of civil rights that would undergird appeals to colorblindness in reactionary conservative legislation up to the present day.

However, segregationists did not begin adopting colorblind rhetoric as a covert reactionary strategy until the late 1960s and 1970s. Initially, colorblindness was largely antithetical to postwar segregationists’ virulently racist politics, and the ultimate conservative embrace of the paradigm was a concession from these Southern segregationists as they struggled to maintain a hold on constituencies in the face of the Civil Rights Movement’s rapidly increasing sway over white people. By conceding to, and accommodating, this new paradigm, conservatives with intentions to undermine civil rights policy were able to win back white liberals. Then as now, this strategy has enabled reactionaries to position themselves as true Americans fighting for all citizens, regardless of race, against “discriminatory” equity-driven legislation—framing race as a matter that should not be “allowed to play any part in government decisionmaking.”

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Evie Levin is a second-year history PhD student at Purdue University, studying history with Dr. Kathryn Cramer Brownell. Her research centers United States media and political culture during the Cold War, focusing on the ways popular culture institutions functioned as a tool of the American state to reinforce both domestic systems of oppression and US imperial interests.

Image made using “Pro-Segregationists with Quote from Supreme Court Decision on Integration – Central High School Visitors Center – Little Rock – Arkansas – USA” by Adam Jones, Ph.D., licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.