“Colorblind” in race and art
May 25, 2007 by will shetterly
The Angry Black Woman has fine rants about race and other issues. She’s not The Nice Black Woman, so you should expect her rhetoric to be strong. She has a short post titled Things You Need to Understand #5 - Color Blindness. Since it’s short and I’ll address it all, I’ll present it all (but it’s worth clicking on the link to see the discussion that follows the post):
When white people say:“I don’t see color”
or
“We should live in a colorblind society”
What they’re actually saying is:
“I refuse to deal with how our culture and societry treats people of color because it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to understand how having a different skin color or ethnicity affects other people because that means I would have to think and consider other points of view. What I want is to not have to think. I prefer to believe I live in a fantasy land where no one ever pays attention to skin color, ethnicity, culture, or religion. I am part of the problem with race relations, not its great savior.”
Just so you know.
I first heard “colorblind” used in theater, where it means you cast the actor, not the actor’s skin. It means you can have a white Claudius and a black Gertrude whose son, Hamlet, is Asian. It doesn’t mean anyone is denying that the actors’ ancestors came from different continents, and it doesn’t mean their cultural experiences are invalid. It is simply the purest form of letting words and deeds speak.
In life, that’s trickier. In his Pierre Berton Interview (from 1965, though he’s identified as Malcolm X), El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz said, “I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being.”
That doesn’t mean that if you asked him what color Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy were, he would be unable to answer. It doesn’t mean he wanted to “live in a fantasy land where no one ever pays attention to skin color, ethnicity, culture, or religion.” He denounced white racism up to the day he died. He saw race clearly from the time of his hajj. His “neither white, black, brown nor red” meant what’s meant by directors who announce that they’re holding colorblind auditions: judge the person by the deeds.
I’ve never heard anyone say, “I don’t see color”, but I can imagine someone using the metaphor. I have used “colorblind” as a shorthand, but I won’t anymore. “Blind” suggests we’re choosing to fail to see a part of a person when our goal should be to see all of a person. The things about our outer selves that we cannot change will affect our inner selves. Angry Black Woman is right: we need a new metaphor.
I’ve not thought about this re: “colourblind” until now, but isn’t interesting that according to some equality can only be achieved via congenital defects.
I dunno if I’ve told you this story (and if it’s useful, please use it) but when I was in the ASL Interpreting program at Saint Paul Tech something happened in one of my intro classes. It was an immersion class, so I hadn’t heard the teacher vocalize until a month or so into the session.
Now, you know, since they can’t hear themselves speak, most Deaf people don’t know hot to modulate their voices, so they sound…
Uh…
Stupid.
As soon as she her mouth I could feel my impression of her do a quick “IQ drop”–I could almost feel it. It took me a few minutes before it really sunk in, and I had to almost had to take myself out in the hall lecture to myself.
Maybe the term to use is “bias-blind”.
There’s a Deaf expression, “Fish don’t think about water” that seems apropros.
Well, do me a favor and let me know what it is when someone finds it. I have many friends. I don’t break them down by race, as that would take forever (african, arab, persian, chinese, japanese, austrian etc.) I grew up in on the bottom edge of middle class Orange County. From elementary school on up I was in a highly mixed group of ethnicities, and very rarely did I ever run into race issues (Although I did know one very confused half Vietnamese wanna be skinhead). In the military, matters of race were quashed even further, I am hard pressed to recall a racially motivated incident (class division, on the other hand, is alive and well. And taken too far in my humble opinion). I just don’t consider the color of skin any more important than I consider the color of someones hair. But I am not blind to the fact that racial discrimination exists.
Thanks for this, Will.
I’ve always understood “colorblind” in the theater sense: not “I don’t see color” but “Color isn’t a factor in the decision.” However, I think you and ABW are right that there are problems with it as a metaphor, for the reason you give.
Give all the credit to ABW! I didn’t figure it out until I was almost done writing this post. I started off defending the word’s use, and then I realized: “Wait. Why defend it? If it doesn’t work for some people, maybe there’s a problem with it.” Then I started thinking about blindness and saw I hadn’t thought through the implications.
I’m still thinking about how to express, well, color consciousness. Friends know you’re accepting all of them. I think it’s trickiest in print, where you’re separated by a common language and trying to find out what you each mean when you say what you say.
I do like the way the military can simplify prejudice. Truman handled race exactly right, and Clinton was a weasel on homosexuality. A leader simply says, “This is the mission now. Shut up about your fear of catching cooties and do it.”
…is perhaps only appropriate for people who have been blind from birth.
I met a couple while the woman was doing her practicum session for her RMT license. She was black, he was white, they had a beautiful baby, and they were poor and in love.
So — did it enter into their existence at all, except how others perceived them? Or did they discuss things and try to work through any problem as it blossomed? I didn’t know them well enough to ask, and they aren’t around here anymore.
I would never presume to be colorblind. I had friends of both races injured in race riots in 1970, and didn’t go to “away” games because you couldn’t be sure how tensions were bubbling along.
But I was told the best doctor in multiple states for a “female problem” was a black specialist here in town. My doctor I drove to Dallas to see was retiring. And I thought about it — mostly because I did not want to be embarrassed, nor embarrass him.
Absolutely no problem. He is a brilliant surgeon, the gentlest doctor I’ve ever met, and someone I would love to know socially. It was a meeting of minds — two people curious about the world and people.
But would I have gone to him in my early 20s? Maybe not — I was neurotic enough then without adding that into the mix.
I know many of us have gone a long way in understanding and acceptance. I hope that as the percentage of people of every ethnicity grows in the US, that race things will become non-issues. In large swaths of the country, kids who are straight go to school every day with gay kids — and it’s pretty much a non-issue. (Yes, in other places terrified adults and their children are legislating against every right those kids have. I’m confident that we will either repeal those acts eventually, or a Federal Law will take precedence.)
And families need to deal with comes their way. The only child born in the next generation with my last name is half white American, half Vietnamese-American. He’s a dynamite kid. And that is all that I care about.
We’re not there yet. I like to think that many of us are working on it.
PS — The ass Stephen Corbert plays on his news parody show says “I don’t see color” before going into one of the character’s idiot positions on race. Which is where you hear it a lot these days.
The ass Stephen Corbert plays on his news parody show says “I don’t see color”
Ah!
And I should add that one nice thing about being 51 is I have seen a lot of social progress. It’s not moving as fast as I had expected, but it’s moving.
Excellent expression!
But as far as a new term goes, the problem is with the implications of “blind.” We need something like “all-embracing.” Or maybe we don’t need a new phrase; we just need to let that old one die.
Ditto.
(We don’t have flying cars yet, either. But I do think the inside of a Prius looks a lot like a spaceship, so maybe we’re close?)
[...] about such, and are thus both selfish and part of the problem rather than enlightened allies. But the truth is more complex and less vicious: In his Pierre Berton Interview (from 1965, though he’s identified as Malcolm X), El-Hajj Malik [...]