“Colorblind” Is Not Code For “Racist“
When the Tea Party came into Congress, the new normal for Republicans was the assertion that if one was not in lockstep with these Far Right zealots, then one was centrist and might as well work for the other side of the political fence.
As the Progressives come into Congress, the charge to Lefties not in lockstep with their policies and views is centrist and in league with the devil himself.
This sort of reductive labeling is phenomenal propaganda and is a super effective way of demonizing those you’d like to bully into backing your specific power grab. Every loud mouthed asshole with a following and a pulpit uses the technique. Intelligent people see right through it.
What a bunch of bullshit.
The cultural meme that states that any one committed to being colorblind when it comes to race is just another way of justifying their inherent racism smells quite similar to that particular pile of bovine crap.
No one is actually “colorblind” (unless, you know, they can’t distinguish between red and gray on the light spectrum) so the term is, like so many other reductive labels, easy to expand or contract to mean multiple things.
Under the pseudo-intellectual structures of Critical Race Theory (pseudo-intellectual in that rather than utilizing facts to support the thesis that all things in society boil down to racial divisions perpetuated by anti-black perspective theorists use almost exclusively anecdotal support), there can be no such thing as color blindness and those who perpetuate the call for inclusivity with little regard to race are exhibiting the exact anti-blackness that CRT hopes to center.
Racism and anti-blackness are not the same animal. Anti-blackness is a very smart way to reposition racism in general to focus strictly on black people (but certainly not all black people, just those American black people) as the recipient of the worst racism. It posits that bigotry and institutional barriers pitted against black Americans is far more egregious than, say, racism against Koreans or Mexicans or Jews.
Again, that’s some special kind of narcissistic bullshit.
They [U.S. born blacks] know that even “white allies” are not true comrades in the fight against injustice, that many of them just want to feel like the savior of the brown, to profit off social justice efforts by occupying positions of power within those spaces. They know that for things to change, whiteness itself must become obsolete.
Spectacular, well-written, highly effective BULLSHIT.
I consider myself colorblind. This is not to indicate that I am, in fact, blind to the nuances of color or culture. I see and celebrate all of the colors and do my best to avoid judging anyone by the tone of their skin. A world without color is fucking lifeless and a world where all the colors are reduced to stereotypes is ugly.
The key to being truly color blind is to first do your level best to avoid making assumptions about people you don’t know (or rather try to assume the best in them every time). I’d argue without this reframing of humanity, we can never dismantle the systems in place that proliferate inequality.
By seeing the human being, looking past the costume pieces of race, sex, culture, economic status, education, we begin to see the similarities present. If I’m working at it, when I see a black queer femme I actively see myself within the framework of differentiated identity and that is the road to empathy.
That’s what colorblind means to me. Seeing past all the trappings of culture and recognizing that each one of us is almost exactly the same in our desires and needs. When race and culture eclipse fundamental humanity then bigots win almost every single time.
Does this mean that I dismiss the historical horrors of oppression and marginalization of those not white in this country? Nope. It is, however, my step forward to equalizing the playing field for all of us rather than flipping the bigotry switch and reversing the power dynamic out of spite and moral outrage.
