The question, though, is how to do this if everyone is fixated on race all the time.

There's an entire branch of psychological experimentation on priming which asks people to think consciously about X or about Y; then a little while later asks them to do some apparently unrelated task, and measures how this impacts the results.

There are also psychological experiments where attention to one thing makes one blind to something else (e.g. the famous gorilla experiment, which might not work after I gave away the punchline here--see previous paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo).

And we know that humans are prone to overgeneralization about everything so it's natural that they would also overgeneralize about any correlation between apparent race and something else that seemed important, at least if they noticed.

So, if you take the view of humans as rational animals...wait...no, then there's no racism because it's irrational.

If you take the view of humans as selectively rational in just the right way, then a color-aware approach for individuals makes sense. But psychology indicates that we're not selectively rational in that way.

So I ask the opposite: how can we get a society that isn't racially biased without being mostly color-blind at least as an end-goal? How could that even work, given human psychology?

Now, at the same time, there's no denying that there are substantial problems with both racial inequality and racism of various sorts (personal and structural) right now. When addressing them, our analysis needs to be very color-aware. Almost every societal issue of import has a substantial differential impact on different races. Being a color-blind sociologist in the U.S. is just crazy. But we're not all sociologists.

Nonetheless, it's hard to see the color-aware advice as not being like "when you get a cut, pour iodine on it and scrub it with a toothbrush three times a day!". Yeah, you're gonna kill the bacteria. But good luck healing.

Now, there can be an argument that the wound is too dirty and infected right now--you do need antiseptic and some mechanical agitation to start with.

But that this is so much the case that color-blindness is never even a worthwhile aspiration seems under-justified. Rather, the opposite seems more likely to me: an aggressively color-aware approach will stoke conscious divisions and draw additional attention causing increased manifestation of implicit bias. That is, it will make racism worse.

So my general statement is: unless we have very good reason to believe otherwise, to avoid X-ism, we want by default to be X-blind. It's not the only way, but if you try another way the odds are stacked heavily against you.

Thus, X-awareness fosters X-ism.

In particular, race-awareness fosters racism.

Hence the default anti-racist position is colorblindness even though it doesn't fully work.