Politics & Power Quote by Newt Gingrich

Gingrich isn’t offering a theory of race so much as staging a trap: if you disagree with him, you risk sounding like you’re defending “a black racist” or “a Latino racist,” categories almost no one wants to be seen endorsing. The line is engineered to force assent before the argument even starts, a familiar politician’s move that borrows the moral clarity of anti-racism while quietly redefining what counts as racism in the first place.

The list-making matters. By marching through every major racial identity, Gingrich performs evenhandedness and inoculates himself against the charge that he’s singling anyone out. But the symmetry is rhetorical, not historical. It flattens differences in power, policy, and legacy into a single behavioral sin: prejudice. That flattening is the subtextual pivot that allows the second sentence to land: “either color blind or we’re not color blind.” It’s a binary designed to delegitimize any race-conscious analysis (from affirmative action to voting rights enforcement) by framing it as a moral failure rather than a response to material conditions.

“Color blind” also functions as a nostalgic keyword, evoking a post-civil-rights ideal while sidestepping the uncomfortable fact that American institutions have rarely been blind in practice. The sentence structure tightens like a closing argument: no room, no exceptions, pick a side. It’s not an invitation to grapple with race; it’s an attempt to set the rules of the conversation so that noticing race becomes suspect and addressing it becomes, by definition, racist.