The Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down the use of race-based classifications in university admissions reflects its growing commitment to the concept of “colorblindness,” which has implications well beyond education. In anticipation, many schools and other actors are already moving toward alternative, facially race-neutral strategies for promoting diversity and reducing racial disparity. But what will happen when those policies too are challenged because they have race-related motives? Will courts soon find all race-conscious policymaking unlawful based on its ends? This is the next stage of the legal battle over colorblindness, and it is already underway.

The first wave of this litigation has centered on selective public magnet schools at the K-12 level. At the time of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, four challenges to magnet school admissions policies were already pending in, or had just been decided by, the federal courts of appeals. All of the policies in question are race blind: Applicants’ race is not considered in any way. But all were nonetheless challenged under the theory that they were crafted impermissibly with diversity concerns in mind. In one, a district court threw out the policy. These cases are clearly designed to be vehicles for the Supreme Court to extend the colorblindness principle to the ends sought by policymakers, not merely to race-conscious means. Such an extension would completely upend the government’s role in addressing racial inequality and throw countless existing policies into question. Other similar challenges will surely soon follow. This Article uses the magnet school litigation as an entry point to examine the future of colorblindness, arguing that precedent and many other considerations counsel against extending the principle beyond racial classifications.