Talking About Race Without Talking About Race: Color Blindness in Genomics

Race is a human invention that is deeply institutionalized within society as racial practices and understandings shaping how people interact and perceive reality. By changing how it is approached and discussed race as an ideology is adept at transforming and adapting to societal shifts and resistance without significantly altering its basic structures. The ideology of color blindness represents a new race alteration. This study evaluates how color blindness as a normative sensemaking frame operates as a rhetorical mask that obscures researchers' racial thinking in genomics. Drawing on 20 open-ended primary interviews with genomicists from various subfields, the article demonstrates that it is impossible to comprehend the persistence of racial thinking in genomics without considering how color-blind racial definitions and engagements mediate genomicists' understanding of genomics.