2. Creating the Colorblind Campus

Abstract

White evangelical college campuses emerged in the late 1960s as key sites for the construction of Christian colorblindness. As many white evangelical colleges began to actively recruit black students for the first time, contested visions of what it would mean to create colorblind Christian academic communities flourished. On some campuses there was an atmosphere of crisis in the early 1970s as increasingly race-conscious black students demanded reforms and critiqued white evangelical racism. White administrators and students often responded with emerging rhetoric of Christian colorblindness. If only students would practice Christian love and focus on what they had in common as believers, brotherhood might flourish on the Christian campus. Just a few years before, black evangelicals had used the rhetoric of Christian unity to challenge racism. Now white evangelicals used the same language to urge black evangelicals to stop demanding racial reforms. By the middle of the 1970s, most recruitment programs had collapsed.