It’s Not Bad to Be Colorblind
In fact, we must be.
Let me first clarify what I mean when I use the term “colorblind.” It hopefully goes without saying that I do, of course, recognize the existence of different skin tones, and the unjust actions by people against others because of them. I’ve certainly had my own share of such experiences because of my skin tone. What I mean when using the term “colorblind” is that I do not assume anything about a person’s life story from their skin color.
If I say to a person “I don’t see color” — though I might not word it that exact way — it means that I hold no supposition, by looking at their race, that they are in any way inferior or superior to me, or that they have suffered more or less than I have. Once I learn their story, only then do I allow myself to suppose that their circumstances may have been more or less challenging than mine. One would think that this is a very common-sense approach.
And yet, we are now in a period in which the avoidance of race-based presumptions seems to be anything but that. The phrase “I don’t see color” is increasingly frowned upon. There’s even a Medium publication whose name — I Do See Color — is a rebuke to that statement. The response to it is often something along the lines of “If you don’t see color, you don’t see me.”
Do I not? Am I expected to infer from skin color that one’s life has turned out a certain way? Is that not the antithesis of treating others as individuals and not as a race?
Indeed, equity based on race is a concept whose popularity has rapidly spread among numerous organizations in the United States. Our president himself has embraced it. It creates a hierarchy of oppression in which individuals gain favor by how oppressed they are perceived to be, based on presumed setbacks and privileges associated with their complexion.
Let’s imagine that I walk up to two people who I haven’t met before, one of them being of a certain race and the other being of another race. Both of them suffer from financial difficulty, but only one of them has dealt with unjust arrest by the police. Some people might feel, looking at the subjects’ race, that it’s obvious which person was unjustly arrested, and therefore which one has faced more obstacles. But what if — just what if — it wasn’t that person? Since race has no absolute bearing on outcome, that may very well be true. It is this simple understanding of reality that should make us think twice about “seeing color.”
That doesn’t mean forgetting that racism does indeed still exist, and that there are correlations between one’s race and the difficulties that they are likely to experience. For sure, blacks in America — who are about 12 percent of the general population — are very disproportionately imprisoned compared to other racial groups, thanks in part to the intergenerational effects of slavery and segregation.
What it does mean is that we should be fair to everybody by not assigning a perceived outcome to them by their race. That is the essence of colorblindness, and that is why we still need it today.