I believe there are two types of colorblind, although maybe only one is conventional, and both are awful and result in no steps forward to increased equality between races. The first is being completely blind to people of color. Just pretending they're not there or don't exist. Like the one story in Citizen where she's waiting in line and some white guy just cuts in front of her and didn't see her at all, or the man who knocked over a little black boy and didn't notice at all. If people refuse to see people of other races, how can we expect to improve equality? We can't. In fact, this leaves us taking steps back. Other races are forced to miss out on opportunities because other people don't even know they're there.
The second type of colorblindness is the more conventional one. Some people believe that in order to achieve equality in our society we need to view everyone as the same race. There are companies that will hire a certain number of black people no matter who is best fit for the job, just to seem diverse and "colorblind." For example, when Claudia Rankine writes a story on page 15 about a man who told her he had to hire a woman of color. Then how are we supposed to make progress? If everyone is seen as the same race, they must all be seen as equal. Then the inequalities will go unnoticed and no change will occur. In addition, this colorblindness will diminish the cultural diversity that our country benefits from having people from so many countries around the world. Learning other people's cultures is important to building our own and understanding other people and other countries. This idea of colorblindness will destroy those cultural differences.
Your initial statement on how colorblind could be not seeing people of color at all was interesting, I had never thought of it that way before. Your second definition, which as you say is the more conventional one, is the one I also mostly think about. Rankine talks a lot about separating history from white and black interactions today and while that is important she also stresses that we need to do something about the situation of people of color, obviously. This tight rope can make tense relations between different races and it is important, though scary to talk about.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you used two definitions of colorblind that you aren't necessarily the first ones that pop into your head. When I normally think of colorblindness, I think about it in the traditional sense of someone born with or developing the inability to see certain colors. I agree with both of your definitions, and have heard people talk specifically about your second one frequently. Rankine did an amazing job of emphasizing that in Citizen and I liked the style in which you decided to write about it.
ReplyDeleteInteresting interpretations of colorblind - I had never thought of it before as ignoring people of different races. The second definition, when people avoid seeing the race of someone is, well, hard, because we interpret race mostly by the color of ones skin, and that's unavoidable if you're not blind. Though I agree that this second, more conventional definition of colorblindness is not a good practice, the opposite practice — being intentionally aware of race — reinforces the power binary between black and white (or latino and white, etc). It's a Benjaminian paradox, impossible to avoid.
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