Colorblindness Archives - The Race Card Project

Privilege is Ability to Choose Blindness

January 28, 2024January 28, 2024 Colorblindness, Hannah Oh, husband, Korean, Provo, racial slur, smalltalk, UT, white woman

Hannah Oh,
Provo, UT

I grew up thinking that “colorblindness” was laudable.
To be colorblind was to be “not a racist”.
When people brought up race to me, I thought how misguided they were to obsess over race instead of choosing to ignore race and look at people individually.

Then, one day, I was walking in the park with my husband, a Korean immigrant. We were pushing my sweet, beautiful 8 month old baby in her stroller, enjoying the summer and the perfectly manicured lawn and trees.

Suddenly, I remember hearing a truck revving nearby, and then I heard someone scream out at me.

I tried to ignore it, hoping I’d imagined it. My husband and I were walking faster, maybe just matching paces, maybe both racing forward. We started making stilted smalltalk.

Finally, he said, “You heard it, didn’t you?”

I started crying. “Yes.”

The young men had shouted at me, the white woman, “Hey, what are you doing with those Ch**ks?!”

He said that not just about my husband, who was minding his own business, but about our perfect, innocent baby.

That was the day I realized what white privilege is: White privilege is the ability to be colorblind. It is the ability to be ignorant of racism, because it is avoidable.

My daughters and my son will never have white privilege.

Being colorblind is a choice….but only for some.

Colorblindness means you can’t see me.

September 1, 2020April 26, 2021 Ashley Diaz Mejias, church, Colorblindness, Cuban, diversity, ethnicity, Haitian, mother, Puerto Rican, Richmond, see me, seminarian, student, theology, VA, white

Ashley Diaz Mejias,
Richmond, VA.

I write this as 34 year seminarian and old mom of two girls; my husband is haitian and puerto rican, and I am cuban and white. I am part of a church that, over the past year, has walked through race dialogues in an effort to begin bearing witness to what we all believe to be God’s heart for the world — diversity and inclusivism that neither fears nor dilutes difference, but rather teaches us to bear with one another in the places of tension and suffering. I helped to craft the curriculum that we walked through, and we tried to encourage our church to understand that race is a socially constructed category — in one way, it *doesn’t* matter– and yet it has so profoundly shaped our history, tradition, and experience — so it absolutely matters. We’ve done fairly well, I suppose.

As a student of race and theology in graduate school, I think we have worked very hard. Unfortunately, though, even as the church strives to be inclusive racially, we are still pretty terrible at it. Our church manages to do some things well — we are in a diverse area in Richmond, we do talk about race, a LOT, we are confessional in our theology, and we are beginning to look things like privilege, whiteness, etc. However, my kids — and the kids of many Americans — fall between the cracks in the public conversation on race. My daughters will never have a church that is exclusively for them, they will bear the curse that I’ve born of having people look at them in their colorblindness and assume they are white (I’ve had people say things like, “oh! your last name doesn’t SOUND caucasian” “you’re not really cuban though, I mean, you aren’t right? you’re too white.”). My husband’s ethnicity evokes all sorts of reactions. I realize the understanding that all of these demands is really, a return to a more curious posture towards our fellow human. I often leave these race conversations slightly hopeful and mostly grieved, though, because I know we have so, so far to go. We still give in to the pull towards “colorblindness”, which means, for me, I go unseen.

Colorblindness is Racist…

November 12, 2018November 12, 2018 acceptable, Colorblindness, Detroit, KKC, MI, norm, Racist, USA, Wayne State, white

KKC,
Wayne State,
Detroit, MI

The problem is not color, it is the way we treat people of other colors. When your white, you are seen as the “norm” so when you say you don’t see color you are taking away what makes them different and special to make them more “acceptable” white

Damn, did you see that White girl?

September 27, 2018September 27, 2018 being white, class, Colorblindness, embarrassed, entitled, exclusion, first experience, Harlem, humbled, implicit bias, Lisa Jasinsk, Microaggressions, Power, racial minority, San Antonio, self-conscious, structural segregation, suburban, The Apollo Theater, Trinity University, TX, USA, vulnerable, White girl

Lisa Jasinsk,
Trinity University

In 2007, I spent a year working at The Apollo Theater in Harlem, NY. One day on my way into the office, I slipped on an icy sidewalk on 125th Street, and in a comic prat fall, landed on my bottom in a filthy puddle. A group of guys gathered outside the corner grocery busted up laughing, “Damn, did you see that White girl?”

In the moment, I was embarrassed, self-conscious, and humbled. I wanted to hide and to be anywhere else. I think I just ignored the guys, picked myself up, and walked on. At the time, I remember feeling especially vulnerable when my race was called out, recognizing that being White was something I rarely thought about (in my entitled, privilege way).

In so many ways, that year working in Harlem taught me so much. A decade later, I continue to build on what I was only beginning to figure out as I found myself in the racial minority for the first time in my life. I began to see how the “colorblindness” rhetoric of my suburban upbringing masked lived experiences and disguised hard truths. I began to see the complex ways that structural segregation, microaggressions, exclusion, implicit bias, class, power, and overt discrimination had played out in my own life and the lives of others. And once I saw it, I could never unsee it.