The Atlantic: Color-Blindness is Counterproductive

[gollygee]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/

My colleague Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, for example, has written extensively about the idea of colorblindness, charting the ways that it functions as an ideology that legitimizes specific practices that maintain racial inequalities—police brutality, housing discrimination, voter disenfranchisement, and others. His book Racism Without Racists is part of a broad set of sociological research that draws attention to the ways that colorblind ideology undergirds bigger, more problematic social issues.

There are more than a few members of the “academic left” who argue that colorblindness is problematic precisely because it offers a way to avoid addressing social problems.
Yet, in addition to suggesting that the academic left casts all proponents of colorblindness as naïve, Friedersdorf also contends that they waste time picking apart this concept rather than addressing “macroagressions” like police brutality and growing expressions of virulent racist hatred. But Bonilla-Silva, among others, describes the ways that colorblindness sustains these very macroaggressions that Friedersdorf thinks are ignored. In other words, Friedersdorf suggests the academic left wastes time dissecting the concept of colorblindness, and would be better served focusing on more pressing, systemic processes of inequality. But a careful read of sociological literature in this area finds that there are more than a few members of the “academic left” who argue that colorblindness is problematic precisely because it offers a way to avoid addressing these exact social problems. Other sociologists like Jessie Daniels and David Cort focus explicitly on researching hate speech on the internet and the lower rates of crime among immigrants relative to native born Americans, respectively—the very issues that Friedersdorf, by his own admission, charges are important and believes are overlooked by the academic left. Sociologists are actually very involved in highlighting these macroaggressions—and in underscoring the ways colorblind ideology allows them to go ignored.

Advocates of colorblindness, like Friedersdorf, tend to claim that emphasizing whites’ group identity as whites (rather than as individuals) is counterproductive. Rejecting colorblindness and encouraging whites to see themselves as members of a distinct racial group, they argue, will produce nativism. They will cling to, rather than critique, the privileges that whiteness affords, which are jeopardized by a more multiracial society. Friedersdorf calls it naïve to believe that upon focusing on their status as members of a racial group and the privilege and power that affords them, “masses of white people will identify more strongly with their racial tribe and then sacrifice the interests of that tribe.”


This is, in the abstract, a compelling point. The trouble is that the weight of the scholarly evidence directly contradicts this argument. Sociologists like Karyn McKinney, Eileen O’Brien, Joe Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Matthew Hughey, who have studied the pathways and trajectories by which whites become involved in antiracist activism, show that contrary to Friedersdorf’s beliefs, moving away from colorblindness can actually serve as a pathway towards antiracism. In many of these studies, as whites came to understand themselves as members of a racial group which enjoyed unearned privileges and benefits, this compelled them to forge a different sense of white identity built on antiracism rather than simply supporting the status quo. Moving away from the colorblind ideology that sociologists critique—the idea that it’s admirable to profess not to see color, that it’s problematic to see oneself as a member of a racial group—is, according to the research in this area, actually an important step to antiracist activism.

[Nye Bevan]

1. Most of these academics would be out of a job if everyone was truly colorblind.

So it's understandable that they see it as a problem.

[Shandris]

2. I remember reading some weird definition of colorblindness once...

...that seems to be the one everyone else talks about when discussing the topic. It's nowhere near what I was taught, and what I was taught was also called 'colorblindness'.

Also, 'macroaggressions' is a new word meant to legitimize 'microaggressions'. I'm not willing to stipulate they even exist. Aggression is aggression.

[Starry Messenger]

3. k&r