This ideology is very popular \u2013 like a racial utopic version of the Golden Rule \u2013 but it\u2019s actually quite racist. \u201cColorblindness\u201d doesn\u2019t acknowledge the very real ways in which racism has existed and continues to exist, both in individuals and systemically. By professing not to see race, you\u2019re just ignoring racism, not solving it.<\/p>\n Still, the idea of \u201ccolorblindness\u201d is incredibly popular, especially with young people who believe racism is a problem for the older generation and will soon die out. According to a 2014 study<\/a> done in partnership with MTV and David Binder Research, almost three-fourths of millennials believe that we should not see<\/em> the color of someone\u2019s skin, as though it\u2019s a choice. Nearly 70% believe they have achieved this and are now actually colorblind; and the same percentage shockingly believe that we make society better by not seeing race or ethnicity.<\/p>\n But that ideology does present a very interesting question: If you were truly unable to see people\u2019s skin color, could you still be racist?<\/p>\n Dr Osagie Obasogie, a professor at the University of California\u2019s Hasting College of Law and the author of Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind<\/a>, wondered the same thing after seeing the biopic \u201cRay,\u201d about legendary blind musician Ray Charles. While watching the film, he found that Ray Charles seemed acutely aware of race, despite not having sight. He left the theater thinking about blindness and racism, and then spent the next eight years exploring it in his research.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What he found is that even people who have never had sight still use visual representations of people \u2013 including a person\u2019s perceived racial or ethnic identity \u2013 as a major marker for how they interact with them.<\/p>\n In Obasogie\u2019s interviews, he found that blind people use non-visual cues to determine race when meeting a new person. They combine evidence from their other senses \u2013 hair texture, accent and other markers (with varying degrees of reliability) \u2013 to create an understanding of someone\u2019s racial identity. And once a blind person figured out a new acquaintance\u2019s race, they would treat that person accordingly.<\/p>\n In one interview, Obasogie told me, a woman told a story from her childhood in which she walked in on her mother aggressively cleaning the kitchen. When she asked why, her mother responded that her black babysitter had been in the kitchen and black people had a smell, which she needed to wash away. The next day, the woman remembers going to smell her babysitter, finding she did have a smell and from then on always associated that smell with black people, despite never having noticed it before.<\/p>\n Racism \u2013 both the personal kind and the systemic kind\u2013 isn\u2019t necessarily triggered by the visual cue of another person\u2019s skin color. Racism is about the social value we assign to people and their actions based on their physical attributes, and neither blind nor colorblind people avoid that acculturation just because they lack the visual cues.<\/p>\n According to Obasogie, there\u2019s not much other research on the relationship of blindness and racism. But one important modern scholar has investigated the question: Dave Chappelle. His \u201cBlind Supremacy\u201d skit from 2003 \u2013 a year before Ray premiered in theaters \u2013 comes to the same conclusions as Obasogie\u2019s research. – Zach Stafford, The Guardian<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People love to tell me that they often forget that I\u2019m black. They say this with a sort of \u201ca-ha!\u201d look on their faces, as if their dawning ability to see my blackness was a gift to us both. When I point out that their eyesight had never left them, that my skin has never … Continue reading “Even if you don’t see race, you’re still racist – Guardian columnist”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[492],"tags":[10900,65,157,10901],"class_list":["post-17553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-osagie-obasogie","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-zach-stafford"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17555,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17553\/revisions\/17555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"zach_stafford\"](\"http:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/zach_stafford.jpg\")
<\/a>I don\u2019t see race!<\/em> is usually their next tactic, followed by I am colorblind<\/em>, though they never give credit to Stephen Colbert. By \u201ccolorblind\u201d they don\u2019t actually mean that they can\u2019t see green or red; rather, they are suggesting that they can\u2019t ever be racist, because they don\u2019t register skin color at all.<\/p>\n