On "color-blindness," again.

[gaudior]

Another day, another column pointing out the inherent racism in a film (John Shore on 'Hop'), another idiot commenter saying:

I just feel these race issues have gone on too long. Why can we not see each other as humans? Affirmative action only furthers the idea that each race is different... I just don’t think we should be focusing so hard on this.

But it seems like a good chance to trot out a new way of explaining the problem with this argument.

Saying "we should all be color-blind and see each other as humans without thinking of race" is very much like if I go up to someone and say, "Bob-- I don't care that you're wearing a long-sleeved shirt today. When I see you, I don't even think to myself about what kind of shirt you're wearing-- it's like I can't see it at all. I just see you as a human being, like me-- why should it matter that your shirt has long sleeves?"

People of different races are, in fact, different. They have different cultural heritages and ways that people treat them and (sometimes) languages and traditions and skin tones. If you didn't think difference meant something bad about the person, there would be no reason not to mention it.

It's true that pretending there's no difference is better than, say, beating Bob up or refusing to hire him or serve him. It's definitely a step in the right direction. But it means that nobody will take Bob to the hospital after someone beat him up for wearing a long-sleeved shirt, because that would mean acknowledging that he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, and that there were consequences to other people reacting to that.

And besides the more serious consequence of people ignoring the real results of racism-- claiming colorblindness is silly. There's nothing wrong with wearing a long-sleeved shirt, so there's no earthly reason not to mention it and acknowledge it when it comes up. There's nothing wrong with someone being a different race, so there's no earthly reason not to mention it and acknowledge it when it comes up. Doesn't that seem straightforward?

--R

Comments

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

Plus the problem (not yours, a general problem) of using "color-blindness" when the term already has another, different meaning.

The argument I keep trying to make, which goes for a lot of isms including but not limited to race - Instead of focusing on treating all people the "same," why don't we focus on treating everyone with the same level of respect? In reality, this sometimes means identical treatment and sometimes means different treatment, and sometimes means adressing differences and sometimes means not adressing them.

[q10.livejournal.com]

on the other hand, ‘color-blindness’ is a tremendously misleading term for that other thing, and really as somebody with a ‘color blindness’ condition i'd be just as happy to see the term decommissioned in that use, which makes it hard to get too indignant about this other thing's use overlap. after all, the vast majority of ‘color blind’ people have trichromatic vision, while only a tiny minority are actually monochromatic (i.e. truly and totally unable to distinguish color independent of darkness/lightness).

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

Also true. . . maybe we should decomission both of them in favor of "race non-discrimination" and "deuteranopia" etc. Of course, I'm also in favor of decommissioning both current uses of "diabetes" and collect medical terms which are either inaccurate or out-and-out contradictions, so I'm probably not the one to ask.

[q10.livejournal.com]

‘race non-discrimination’ is laden with all the baggage of the word ‘discrimination’, so probably not ideal for the kinds of conversations we're talking about (putting it that way gives unfair rhetorical advantage to the pro-‘color-blindness’ camp). maybe ‘formal race neutrality’?

as for color-blindness, i don't mind the idea of having a blanket term (there are certainly cases where we want to treat, say, Protanopia and Deutranomaly separately, but there are also a lot of cases where treating them as part of a more general category is pretty reasonable) - i'd just prefer something like ‘color vision abnormality’ one that didn't give quite so much of a false impression.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

I like both these suggestions.