"Colorblind" Blind: Race Today

Two subway stops, equidistant from my Brooklyn place—which to use?

One is reached through a predominantly middle-class enclave before it spills you out onto the chaos of Flatbush Avenue. The route to the other takes you through streets of diminishing wealth to Nostrand Avenue, as busy as Flatbush but of an entirely different character. Both routes take one through racially mixed areas, but the white person is rarely “alone” when heading towards Flatbush. That is, there are generally other whites in sight as one dodges through the crowd. And a number of the blacks one sees look successful, as comfortably middle class as the whites. Towards Nostrand one hears much more Haitian Creole and music blaring from the open doors of double-parked vans.

Now, here’s the question: Is it racism that inclines the whites in the neighborhood to gravitate to the Flatbush stop?

It all depends, as Bill Clinton might say, on what the meaning of “racism” is.

And the meaning of racism, unfortunately, is about as toxic a subject for discussion in America as one can find.

bell hooks, in an interview more than a decade ago, commented:

Look how in this country we have lived for years with the simplistic idea that racism is about overt prejudice - a burning cross, lynchings, the not wanting to sit next to the black person, the not wanting there to be interracial relationships. The fact is, when a lot of those taboos were altered, that white-supremacist thinking was still intact.

Unfortunately, the power of this assertion (and similar ones) has repelled discussion of both its truth and its nuance. Not wanting to be even accused of “white supremacist thinking,” few whites have been willing to address questions of racism at all, preferring to let them lie with the simplistic notion that that all recognition of race by whites is “white supremacist thinking.” And few blacks have wanted to enter into the discussion either, perhaps wary of it turning to examination of their own prejudices.

For we all have prejudices. But, rather than admitting this and dealing with it, we seem to be going to a rather unfortunate opposite extreme. Patricia Williams, writing in The Nation about a recent Supreme Court decision, says:

Colorblindness, as [Chief Justice] Roberts and [New York Times writer Jeffrey] Rosen use it, means that any openness to race as a social factor is by itself the vice of prejudice.

Taken more broadly, this seems to indicate that we shouldn’t really consider race at all, in anything if we are to pretend towards lack of prejudice.

What nonsense.

Race, ethnicity, and religion color almost all of our human interactions. There’s no way around that, and to claim that we can or should ignore any of these factors in trying to shape our society for a successful future is idiotic—and ultimately self-destructive.

Now, that we whites are aware of racial differences does not mean that we are all white supremacists… but it does mean something, and we should have the ability to examine that without taunts. And, as a culture, we should be able to consider the impact of differing attitudes towards race (and ethnicity… and religion) and to use our laws to help right things when they get out of kilter. The “colorblindness” Williams refers to won’t do that. In fact, it does only the opposite: it allows systemic racism carried over from the past to continue to flourish… even while the “colorblind” laud themselves for having moved beyond racism.

[Cross-posted from Shake Off the Flies, a new blog. Coming from different sides of that mythic but powerful barrier, the color line, Annie Seaton and I will be using Shake Off the Flies as a forum for discussion of (among many, many other things) the questions of race that American society refuses, for the most part, to face. I will cross-post to ePluribus Media most of my diaries from there, and many from One Flew East, my personal blog.]