ABSTRACT
Post-racialism, with its conceptual ancestry in color-blindness, is most interesting and defensible as a prescriptive normative ideal. Color-blindness has similar descriptive and prescriptive branches, but as with post-racialism its status as an ideal is independent of its truth as a descriptive claim. The values at the heart of the post-racial ideal are worthy and they harmonize with the American narrative of racial progress, so the idea of a time and place that is post-racial seems reasonable and credible utopia. The idea of post-race is offered as a normative ideal that is a prescription for society's racial ills, and what it prescribes is a guiding vision of transcendence from racial beliefs, categories, and habits. The moral core of color-blindness, and by extension, post-racialism, as stated is the robust claim that holds that ethnic and racial categories are irrelevant moral characteristics and should have no role in moral decision-making.
