Power + Imagination: Addressing the Racism of Color Blindness

I have a clear memory of standing with my mom and little sister in front of a towering wall of dolls at Toys “R” Us that seemed to stretch across the entire back of the store and stand 15 shelves high. When we finally settled on which type of doll to get, my white mom held a doll up to me, her brown daughter.

“What about this one?” she said. It was white, but it had dark hair and eyes.

“I want this one.” I cradled a white baby with blonde hair and blue eyes.

“But it has dark hair and eyes, like you.” She held it up.

“No. I want this one.” I loved make-believe and imaginative play. If I were to pretend to have a real baby that was beloved and precious, it would not have brown features. (I’m not alone. See The Doll Test.)

My internalized racism was amplified throughout my childhood because I swallowed any discussion of race or racism back down my throat like a vurp — with horrid surprise that it popped up and with urgency to get it back down. (Y’know, a vurp = vomit + burp).

BEACH BALL EYES & RAINBOW SKIN

I have two distinct memories of directly talking about my race with my parents: 1) When I refused, over and over again, to get the brown-eyed, black-haired dolls and 2) When in first grade, I got off the school bus and told my mom that kids had stretched their eyes into slits and taunted me with “ching-chong.” I was six-years-old, heartbroken, and ashamed of my difference.

My mom tried to coach me. “When they do that to you, tell them they have beachball eyes.” She used her pointer finger and thumb to pry her big, round eyes open even wider.

Even at such a young age, I knew that was a silly, ineffectual comeback. Everyone around me had “beach ball eyes,” even my parents.

My parents, my school, my community projected the message that racism was inherently bad. People said, “I don’t care if you’re black, brown, red, yellow, green or rainbow, it’s who you are on the inside that matters.” This is a great message. For children. It’s a simple and appropriate way to help young children understand the fundament principals of equality, but when left undeveloped and unchallenged throughout adulthood — through segregated communities, lack of learning opportunities and access to quality information, two-dimensional images of racialized people in mainstream media, or plain old willful ignorance — color blindness remains an immature, naive perspective on race.

Basically, to put it bluntly, color blindness is racist. Period. It is one of the primary mechanisms in today’s society to maintain racial inequality. For a clear list of the ways color blindness is problematic, check out Jon Greenberg’s “7 Reasons Why ‘Colorblindness’ Contributes to Racism Instead of Solves It.” But when we tell a person who claims color blindness is a form of modern racism, we often find ourselves talking to a wall.

Why?

When we hear the word racism (or clearer: white supremacy), the images that are conjured are slavery, lynching, the n-word, whites only establishments, targeted harassment and violence, i.e. explicit racism. We see the beaten, bloated face of Emmett Till, tortured and murdered at just age 14. We see burning crosses. People are triggered by the word “racism” because it is associated with rigid images of the past. We shutter our minds, refuse to listen, and reject dialogue around our own racism because we psychologically can’t reconcile our self image with these horrific images. Of course no one wants to be seen like those monsters.

It’s similar to how some women who advocate for equal rights for women reject the word feminism. This is the case with my mother, an anti-feminist, evangelical, religious conservative who ironically raised me as a gender-conscious feminist. She tried to prepare me for a sexist world, to protect myself and to never, ever, “let any man define me or tell me I’m less.”

When I got older and we’d have a pro-women discussion, I’d say, “That’s feminism, Mom.”

And she’d say, “No, it’s not. I’m not a feminist.”

“You think women are treated unfairly. You advocate for equal rights for women. It’s that simple. That’s feminism.”

“No, it’s not. I’m not a feminist.”

“You can be conservative and still be a feminist.”

“I’m not a feminist.”

“Okay,” I’d say. I mean, where do you go from there?

In her mind, a feminist is a verbally abusive, man-hating, lesbian, atheist, who brutally slaughters unborn babies in the way that a racist is a violent bigot who is disgusted by non-whites, thinks they are inhuman, calls people apes, and meets in secret societies, wearing white, pointy hoods. How’s that for the power of words?

That’s a table.

No, it’s not.

Um, yeah, that’s a table. It’s got a flat surface and sits on four legs. That’s a table.

No, it’s not.

Um, okay.

NUH-UH, YOU’RE THE RACIST!

The twisted logic of colorblindness also perpetuates the false idea of reverse racism: You’re the racist for talking about racism. Here’s the pattern: If you talk about race, then that means you see race, and if you see race, then you’re a racist.

To some, that I talk about racism means I’m racist because I’m bringing it up. Its almost a kind of “I’m rubber, you’re glue. It’s a whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you” kind of argument.

BUT IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU

When people say they are color blind, what they mean is:

• I, myself, do not discriminate against anyone for their skin color. I treat people as individuals.
• I, personally, believe race shouldn’t matter and therefore it doesn’t matter.

But the problem here is that these people make other people’s reality about their reality. What they actually are saying is: Because I have this specific value of color blindness, your experience of being racialized in the world is inaccurate — because I am color blind. It just doesn’t make sense. Or, to put it more plainly:

• Because I am color blind, you have not experienced racism.
• Because I am color blind, racism doesn’t exist anymore.

It just doesn’t make logical sense. People who haven’t experienced racism hijack the conversation and make it about themselves, their experiences, their frames. They don’t realize that they are making statements of personal value, and personal values are different from reality. It’s also disingenuous to claim color blindness because, really, who doesn’t see race? But perhaps most importantly — it does not address structural oppression.

So, let’s do a basic primer on power and oppression.

When people claim color blindness, they do not see structural or cultural power, and they do not understand oppression, the most meaningful, significant part of racism — how it works.

I AM COLORBLIND, SOMETIMES, KINDA, ISH

I understand colorblindness as a concept and as a partial reality. I see the intention, and the sentiment is nice. It’s quaint. Folksy, even.

A few years ago, a white graduate student in a teaching program observed my class for three weeks. In one of our debriefs, she addressed a racial tension she had been experiencing. “It’s awkward for me to be only one of two white people in the room, sitting there in a position of power, observing students of color. It’s uncomfortable.”

This shocked me: I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized how diverse my class was. I hadn’t noticed! My classrooms are always very diverse, and I began to take that for granted. It’s my norm. And, I didn’t realize that she saw me as a person of color rather than just the teacher of the class. I had to remember, “Oh, right: I’m a person of color.” (More on my white privilege and white identification in another blog post). In my mind, my primary identification was as teacher, and their primary identities were as my students: This one who should’ve been in a higher level class. This one who was an amazing reader but a poor writer. This one full of text anxiety. This one, struggling to complete homework. Etc.

But then, of course, I did not ignore race, deny it. For large part, the reason my students were in my developmental education class at a community college in the first place is because of systematic oppression due to their race. Race matters. It needs to be seen, discussed, addressed.

Here’s another example: years ago, when in a hypothetical discussion about adopting a Black child, my ex-husband, who is white, said to me, “I just don’t know how a black child would cope with bring raised by white parents.” I glared at him. “What did you just say?!” He couldn’t believe he’d said it, took it back immediately, and we had a good, long, productive discussion. He didn’t defend the idea of colorblindness. My race mattered to him because it matters to me, because it has informed enormous parts of my life, my opportunities, my self-esteem and self-concept.

To my white parents who raised me, my primary identity was not as their Korean-American daughter. I got to be many things to them. All the other parts of me eclipsed my racial identity. It was shocking to me to go out into the world and be made aware of how Asian everyone thought I was. In contrast to my parents, to many people, my Asianness was the my primary identity that eclipsed all else.

My parents perhaps so much wanted me to be just their daughter that they dove deep into a colorblind philosophy that accidentally, but ultimately hurt me more than helped me. Their intentions were perhaps good, but one can only stretch intentions so far: If I don’t intend to not see you, if I don’t intend to miss you when you’re crossing the street and I’m driving, and I don’t intend to run you over and send you to the hospital, you’re still in pain. I still messed up. I still hurt you. I’m still accountable. And, therefore, I’m go to try my damnedest to understand how and why I made the mistakes I made, so that I can try to make sure I don’t it again.

HISTORICAL, STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION DOESN’T JUST END

We have an equity problem in this country. Poor white people are disadvantaged. They are oppressed. They are trapped in a system — with laws, policies, and culture — that keeps them in place. Historically. It is wrong. It is abhorrent. It is unethical and immoral. AND, still, when considering race, they have a racial advantage. People of color with money might have financial advantage — but they do not have racial advantage. The two are different, though intersecting and overlapping in complex ways. Though focusing on class and nearly 11 years old now, this short article “Class in America,” by Gregory Mantsios helps explain structural oppression from a socioeconomic lens with a section on racial oppression at the end.

In “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nahisi Coates lays out a detailed description of historical, structural oppression and the ways it still permeates through American society. Coates writes of America’s unwillingness to look at the way the past affects the future, saying:

“Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.”

In this frame, when people refuse to acknowledge race and the oppression that is connected with skin color, it is like saying:

• “It doesn’t matter that you’ve been repeatedly stabbed over and over from the day you were born (actually earlier, as pre-natal healthcare and the health of the mother are affected by institutional racism). What matters is that I’m not holding the knife.”
• “Because I’m not holding the knife, you’re not wounded.”
• “I didn’t cause the injury, so you need to help yourself.”
• “Heal faster.”
• “What were you doing getting stabbed in the first place?”
• “If you got stabbed once, shouldn’t you learn so you don’t get stabbed again?”
• “You can overcome your wounds with grit, perseverance, and hard work, even though you keep getting stabbed.”
• “Barack Obama had wounds. And he became president. We’re in a post-wound society, and you can make it with wounds!”
• “Wounds are a state of mind.”
• “I have wounds. Everyone has wounds. All wounds matter.”

There is a psychology that comes with being stabbed over and over again, in nearly all areas of your life. And if you are stabbed so many times, in so many unrelated situations (anything from the education you get to policing and criminal justice to something as simple as being profiled shopping for new underpants at the mall), you begin to expect to be stabbed. You know that even though a person isn’t waving a blade at your face, they might be carrying one in their pocket. The threat is always there. Where’s the freedom in that?

RACISM IS UNIQUE

We do not deny people’s circumstances in many other areas of life. We even go so far with considering people’s life circumstances that we make excuses for all sorts of crazy, shitty, even criminal behaviors and choices. When men abuse their wives and girlfriends, we say, “What he did is wrong, but look at his upbringing! Look at where he came from, how far he’s come!” When a college kid rapes a young women, we say, “But he was drunk. He was just a kid!” When people make awful parenting choices, we say, “But consider how abused she was a child!” We look at their circumstances dead in the eye (the things out of their control), and we often embrace these people with compassion and understanding. But we also excuse people for all sorts of shitty choices that they make on their own volition, which only enables and perpetuates all sorts of toxic, abusive behaviors that we then also excuse.

But — racism is unique, for when it comes to racism, something completely out of an individual’s control, we blame people. We refuse to see how race impacts their lives. Being non-white, having darker skin, immigrating from a non-white foreign country gives people a kind of socially-induced disadvantages. If I were blind, and you said, I don’t see that you’re blind, I’d be puzzled, offended, confused. Of course I’m blind! And it’s okay. It’s a big deal to me because it affects how I engage in the world and the opportunities that I have.

In many ways, if I am blind, I am at a disadvantage from those who are seeing. And you still, obviously, should view me as a capable, competent person with just as much to offer the world. People have no problem with that.

But, this analogy can only be stretched so far. Race is NOT a disability. The color of one’s skin should not affect the opportunities that one has in the world. But it does.

COGNITIVE DISSOANCE: I’M SO CONFUSED

When I was growing up, my parents always talked about how it was so much easier for “people with money.” People with money, they said, don’t have to worry about A, B, or C. People with money can afford to do X, Y, and Z. These statements implied, since we don’t have money, life is harder for us. We had fewer choices, more worries, more struggle. My parents were right.

Yet, my white parents refuse to see the legitimacy in the Black Lives Matter movement. They pronounce, emphatically, “All Lives Matter.” They believe immigrants take American jobs. They resent them, think there should be a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

So it confuses me that people like my parents refuse to acknowledge, in meaningful ways, the advantages that people with white skin have over others, to see the systemic racism and how they benefit simply by being white. I know they understand, on some level, that their own lives have been shaped by their lack of generational wealth. They understand they do not have advantages (and luxuries) that “people with money” have, and they could not give their children the advantages that “people with money” have that they surely would’ve given if they had it. For my entire childhood, I watched the burden of their financial worries weigh on them like a lead blanket. Just a couple weeks ago, my mom wrote to me in an email, “You married into a family with money so you have no worries about finances.” They believe I now have advantages that they do not have.

They are correct.

It confuses me that my anger and urgency about these issues are seen as “accusations” and “as far left progressive liberal rhetoric.” Their minds slam closed to entertaining the thought, and they double down, claiming, “We are so used to being mocked, demeaned, demonized and hated for our beliefs that we are just immune to it all” (← my adoptive mother’s exact words, and by her beliefs, she means “Trumpian Republican and Christian evangelical). The belief that white people are victims when they are challenged to see racism and that the answer is to become “immune” to the hard, painful, and emotional realities of race justifies inaction and perpetuates inequality, not just for people of color, but for all of us stuck in a system that unfairly privileges some over others, that pits people against each other.

It confuses me because my parents are generally decent people. I grew up in religious fundamentalism, and I believed what I was taught. I no longer consider myself a Christian, per se, but my morality and ethics are founded on Christian values: forgiveness, faith, non-violence, abdication of material desires, equality, compassion, and love — love for self, other, and enemy.

None of these things are easy, especially in today’s world. Everyday, I struggle to resist attaching to and focusing on my anger. I try to remember to let my anger run its course and pass through, to use the wisdom embedded in it, but not to act angrily. As Julia Cameron says, “Anger is not the action itself. It is the action’s invitation.” Everyday, I struggle to forgive others and to forgive myself, to remember that we will never go wrong if we act from a place of love, which, in its purest form, transcends this cruel world. Love, rather than being color blind, is a beautiful mélange of all the colors, with their similarities and differences and countless combinations.

In the end, I suppose most of us are just doing the best we can with what we have. But is our best good enough?

CULTIVATING IMAGINATION

My mother-in-law is an artist. A couple weeks ago, we visited her home where she had set up a “junk art”workshop in her yard for a show at the town art center. She invited my daughters and I to try our hand at making junk art, sculptures out of debris she’d collected over the years: rusty ship remnants that washed onto beaches; drift wood; old kitchen gadgets; farm tools; twisted wire — piles of broken miscellany. My children, with their bright imaginations, jumped right in and started to create.

I, on the other hand, struggled to see how to combine the random items into anything aesthetically pleasing. Where my children saw helicopters, I saw only an old spool. Where my children saw birds, I saw only driftwood.

“Step back,” my mother-in-law guided me with a gentle smile and hand softly on my shoulder. “Look at things from all angles. Let the idea sit for a while, and see what comes to you. Try a bunch of different combinations. Be patient. Be open.”

And she modeled this herself. Her art is beautiful. And inspiring. As is she.

By the end of the day, we all had created pieces we were proud of and had a lot of fun creating. With her artist’s eye, with her vision and imagination, my mother-in-law encouraged me to see broken things in new, beautiful ways, to be open to possibility.

Wendell Berry said, “Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time?”

Perhaps colorblindness is really a lack of imagination, difficulty in seeing the world in new ways, from different perspectives, putting unfamiliar things together to create something new, sitting with ideas, being patient, and being open.

Though my parents have hurt me deeply with their racism and claim to be “colorblind,” they did at least one thing right. They gave me, their non-white daughter, the gift of seeing in color. On some level, they appreciated and encouraged my imagination. They loved that I wanted to be an artist. They complimented my dyed-pink hair, my DIY thrift-store sewing projects, my sloppy and emotional murals painted all over my bedroom walls — even when I knew they didn’t understand. Or agree.

* For some good theory on this topic, check out the book: Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Or see this for a short summary of the book.