Google and the rapper Ludacris released a music video, “Buying All Black,” to promote the company’s post-Thanksgiving “Black-Owned Friday.” This event began in 2020 and celebrates a Google feature, also added in 2020, that allows black-owned businesses to be identified in searches by a special badge. The idea is that identifying businesses as black-owned will help bring them customers. A few decades ago, after the civil-rights movement succeeded in ending legal discrimination, American society was content with colorblindness as the goal of human racial relations: We ought to strive for a society in which we don’t make assumptions about people or discriminate because of skin color. Affirmative action was the exception that proved the rule.

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