Colorblind Blindness 0

White folks, including me, aren’t very good at talking about race with not-white folks. I know that one way I tried to deal with it in the earlier days of desegregation was to ignore ignore it–that is, to be silent.

I have learned that that amounts to ignoring history and reality.

I never pretended that I was somehow “colorblind”; being colorblind does not follow from growing up in a Jim Crow world. Rather, I didn’t know how to bring the subject up in personal terms (though I must say that, thanks to some of my friends, I’m getting better at it).

I have, indeed, been troubled by those who claim that they are “colorblind,” especially when they support policies that clearly are not. For example, persons will claim that they are against affirmative action* because they are “being colorblind,” in the face of the truism that perpetuating existing inequities created through discrimination is ipso facto discriminatory, because it lets the effects of discrimination live on.

At Psychology Today, Monnica Williams attacks the myth of racial and ethnic “colorblindness.” A nugget:

Let’s break it down into simple terms: Color-Blind = “People of color — we don’t see you (at least not that bad ‘colored’ part).” As a person of color, I like who I am, and I don’t want any aspect of that to be unseen or invisible. The need for colorblindness implies there is something shameful about the way God made me and the culture I was born into that we shouldn’t talk about. Thus, colorblindness has helped make race into a taboo topic that polite people cannot openly discuss. And if you can’t talk about it, you can’t understand it, much less fix the racial problems that plague our society.

Whites tend to view colorblindness as helpful to people of color by asserting that race does not matter (Tarca, 2005). But in America, most underrepresented minorities will explain that race does matter, as it affects opportunities, perceptions, income, and so much more. When race-related problems arise, colorblindness tends to individualize conflicts and shortcomings, rather than examining the larger picture with cultural differences, stereotypes, and values placed into context. Instead of resulting from an enlightened (albeit well-meaning) position, colorblindness comes from a lack of awareness of racial privilege conferred by Whiteness (Tarca, 2005). White people can guiltlessly subscribe to colorblindness because they are largely unaware of how race affects people of color and American society as a whole.

Be careful when you hear someone espouse “colorblind” policies. It’s more of the code. It means they don’t want discrimination to go away.

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*The EEO enforcement folks where I used to work were adamant that “affirmative action” does not mean selecting the unqualified over the qualified; it means, after the unqualified are weeded out, giving preference to a member of a protected class.

Where I have seen affirmative action improperly implemented–and I have seen that often–it has happened out of managerial misunderstanding or, much more common, incompetence.