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09/23/2008: "Colorblindness is insanity"

There is a growing trend in America today, especially among Whites, to embrace the idea of colorblindness when it comes to race relations. Mind you, I'm not really talking about the dream articulated by Martin Luther King four decades ago, that one day his children would be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. No, I'm referring to literal colorblindness whereby Whites claim that they don't even so much as notice the race of other people around them.

Have you ever had a conversation like the fictional one above, in which the person you're talking to (or you yourself) have hesitated before using race to describe someone? Even when mentioning race would so would be a perfectly reasonable way to disambiguate who it is you're trying to describe? This is the type of colorblindness I'm describing.

Or the observations of Janet Schofield, a psychologist who conducted a study of a junior high school in which the teachers claimed not to notice the race of their students and went to comical lengths to avoid any mention of race in the classroom. She reported the amazing story that one of the students in the class was quite surprised to learn during an interview with the research team that Dr. King was Black, not White.

What is behind this effort to avoid acknowledging that we even notice racial difference? Typically, it's the thought that if I don't even notice race, then I know I won't be called a racist. In other words, colorblindness has emerged in many circles as the safe way to handle the potentially dicey topic of race.

[ If you don't give allowances for ethnic differences, then the majority race, especially as long as it is white, will consider various ethnic differences to be down to weirdness, and attribute blame to individuals where the tolerance of accepting a biological difference would be far kinder. It is also involves such mental gymnastics to think in this colorblind way, that science has shown it depletes cognitive function for some time after such an incident. ]

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-of-small-talk/200809/i-dont-think-were-supposed-be-talking-about