I'm a little bit confused. You both criticized color-blindness and took hope from multiple studies which are fully consistent with color-blind (or more color-blind) students.

The only one that wasn't consistent with better results from a color-blind outlook was very clear in the abstract how they envisioned things working: "The results have implications for understanding children’s potential to serve as agents of social change by regulating other children’s racial biases and behaviors."

As you described, the test was presupposing a highly color-aware but anti-black biased situation to begin with! Don't we also want to know, maybe even more, what reduces the chance that the dynamics will end up that way in the first place?

All the other positive-seeming results, as you've described them anyway, are completely consistent with kids just not caring about or paying that much attention to race, especially when they're younger. Maybe that's what's going on?

And anyway, if we want to know whether we're doing better or worse as a society, we need historical data: we can't compare 12 year olds now with 6 year olds now because the differences might be due to changing culture or simply aging. We'd need to compare 12 year olds now with 12 year olds 10, 20, 30, etc. years ago.