South Africa's brief experiment with colour-blind government died, and was not revived until Nelson Mandela's triumph in 1994.

ECONOMIST: South Africa

Hiring policies there are colour-blind to a fault, as a casual visit to any British hospital will confirm.

ECONOMIST: An investigation into unfairness turns up the opposite

Those who believe America has become a colour-blind society, the younger King said sternly, must themselves be blind.

ECONOMIST: The next King

Demographically, by freeing the labour market and operating a colour-blind immigration policy, the reforms have created an increasingly cosmopolitan society.

ECONOMIST: No worries? | The

Although the voters of Illinois now seem to want to turn her out, Democratic leaders are not yet that colour-blind.

ECONOMIST: Illinois politics

Another difficulty on the road to King's colour-blind America concerns higher education.

ECONOMIST: Forty years after the murder of Martin Luther King

Mr Connerly puts it down to his belief in a colour-blind society.

ECONOMIST: Ward Connerly��s trumpet blast

V4 region, he will become completely colour-blind.

ECONOMIST: The biology of art

For the time being, the ways of dealing with ethnic rivalry extend along a spectrum with, at one end, a colour-blind, race-blind and religion-blind democracy and, at the other, a more or less despotic system in which one lot sits on the other.

ECONOMIST: Forlorn Fiji