> Speaking as a citizen of the french colonial empire which has pretended since at least WWII that being blind to race would erase racism, it definitely has not. Moreover, ignoring racial issues only reinforces racism by making it harder to denounce.

I think this is probably one of those cases where there's a spectrum, and the extremes are both bad. It's bad to be race-blind at a policy level, since that prevents dealing with unjust race-based disparities. However, it is also bad to encourage people to be hyper-aware of race and racial categories; because that perpetuates those categories, gets in the way of forming natural connections between members of different races, and even can fuel a more explicit discriminatory racism in some people. IMHO US cultural trends are pushing for the latter bad situation (amongst other more positive reevaluations), and those trends are being exported.

It's probably not practical, but I've thought that the most effective way to ultimately solve racism would be to setup schools such that it would be difficult to impossible to have an opposite-sex romantic relationship with a classmate that was not in some respect interracial. In the short term the amount of contact that would force would blunt stereotypes, and in the medium/long term is it would hopefully lead to muddling the racial categories until they're meaningless in a contemporary context.