Can we rediscover colorblindness?

The men and women who transformed the abolition of slavery from a fringe movement into a mass popular enthusiasm were some of the most interesting and heroic culture-changers in our history. Without their efforts at moral suasion, there would have been no President Lincoln, no public opinion sufficient to sustain a civil war, quite possibly no preserved Union during the climactic unfolding of American freedom.

I have just published a historical novel about three real-life brothers who convinced millions of their fellow citizens to change their minds about human bondage — voluntarily, without private coercion or government force. These persuaders were generous and brave, ruining their personal fortunes and even endangering their lives to stand for principle.

Certainly we want to remember these individuals who so profoundly elevated our society, especially at this time when positive examples of racial reconciliation and boundary-crossing social collaboration could be a national balm. Right?

Well, that’s not what I kept hearing from Manhattan publishers and Hollywood insiders as my story snaked its way to publication and an option for video streaming. You see, the Americans who campaigned to end slavery in the mid-1800s were mostly white.

Not all of them were, to be sure. Samuel Cornish, Frederick Douglass, Jermain Loguen, Samuel Ward, David Ruggles, Harriet Tubman, the Edmonson sisters and other free Black people play important roles in my tale. But for obvious reasons, the African Americans oppressed by slavery couldn’t be very active in the organized campaign to end that ghastly institution. So it was white citizens who provided most of the impetus behind abolitionism.

Lots of today’s gatekeepers to culture want nothing to do with chronicles, characters or events that involve white people aiding Black people. That’s a forbidden “white savior” narrative. That’s colonialism. That’s cultural appropriation. 

According to this view, narratives with high stakes for Black people, such as abolition, must show Black leaders directing white allies, never the reverse. And the story should only be told in Black voices. Facts that are out of sync with prevailing fashions must be ignored. Even the biggest events may be shunted aside or rewritten if they unfold in ways objectionable to current race theorists.

And this is precisely why you have never heard of Arthur and Lewis Tappan. 

In addition to being patron saints of abolitionism, they organized and funded much of our 19th-century progress against illiteracy, addiction, sex trafficking, violence and poverty. These brothers were some of the most consequential civil-society reformers in U.S. history. But they were also dead, white, European, evangelical and wealthy Wall Street merchants. 

Many contemporary tastemakers find those details inconvenient. The voguish rewrite machine wants more acceptable paladins leading the crusade against slavery — either to make up characters or to put aside these disobliging events as if they had never occurred.

What’s interesting is that the Tappan brothers themselves were amazingly colorblind. They were unimpressed by origin, wealth, power and occupational status. They reached across racial boundaries constantly. Arthur accidentally sparked a riot by bringing a Black friend into his church pew during an era of racial separatism. When Lewis assembled a mixed-race choir and mixed-race audience for one of his speeches, promoters of racial identity shut down Manhattan with several days of massive disorder.

Their brother set legal precedents by refusing to recognize race in lawsuits he decided as a judge. All of these men regularly pulled Black professionals and artisans into crucial roles in their projects.

The Tappans believed that while people diverge and converge in many ways, race is not an essential determinant. Their view was identical to that later expressed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White Power!’ When nobody will shout ‘Black Power!’ But everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.”

What would the Tappans make of today’s trendy claims that race establishes each person’s worldview and existence — that we mustn’t stray out of our own racial lane when offering societal analysis, and that racial identity is a trump card? They were told those things all the time by racists — including well-known and influential people such as their mortal enemy, John Calhoun. 

Senator and Vice President Calhoun promulgated the idea that race is a deep and unignorable attribute, more significant than class, nationality, religion or individual character. Race matters, he insisted, and so the sorting of people by racial criteria must be part of all law, etiquette, and everyday decision-making.

Calhoun insisted that race-neutrality is not only unachievable but nefarious. He vilified anyone calling for colorblindness.

The Tappan brothers utterly disagreed. Their view was that individual personality, experience and education, among other things, are much more important than race in forming any member of God’s family. Across society, they believed, the commonalities of human existence are deeper than the distinctions of color.

As donors, Arthur and Lewis were key backers of a pioneering school called the Oneida Institute, the first in the nation to enroll white, Black, and Native American students without distinction. At one point, Lewis asked President Beriah Green for the school’s enrollments in each racial category. Green said he had no idea, and could offer only loose guesses. 

At first, Lewis viewed this as sloppy, but then he realized: This school wants students of all shades to take rightful places in society, without deference to race or other arbitrary traits. Not pigeonholing them was therefore a good start.

After one newspaper attack on his colorblindness, my book records Lewis spluttering, “I am heartily sick of all this race talk, brother. Everyone will get on much better if we take color out of our decisions.” 

That was the practical judgment reached years ago by many of our country’s most effective and beneficent social reformers. Rediscovering the utility and justice of colorblindness today is well within our reach.

Karl Zinsmeister is author of the new historical novel “The Brothers: a true-life saga of the remarkable family who made America free.“