After a hiatus from guest posts, I’m glad to announce the return of what I’ve called the “10 in ’10″ – 10 guest posts in 2010. Thanks to Jim, Tom, and Christine for getting things going. Today’s guest post is from a fellow blogger who comments here from time to time. Stephanie Nannen blogs at her site http://www.infinitequeso.com/ and is a colleague of mine in my ministry organization – though we have still never met 
I appreciate many of her postings dealing with social justice, race and ethnicity, and other spiritual themes.
Her post today is along those same lines and she was kind of enough to offer it up as a guest post here. Please comment as I believe this topic actually can be quite polarizing and I’d love for their to be some constructive dialogue. As always I encourage everyone to comment and engage more than you normally might if it were just me posting Without further delay, here is Stephanie’s guest post entitled: “Why This White Girl Believes “Color-Blindness” Is Just Another Form Of Racism”
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The position is common among white Americans. I myself have held it, and possibly even verbalized it. It goes something like this:“When I look at my minority friend, I don’t see race. I just see a person. I don’t feel any differently about them because of the way they look. I don’t base my view of people on their race or ethnicity.”It’s called “color-blindness.” And it’s the most insidious of racism out there.Allow me to unpack a little of why I would make this assertion:
1. Color-blindness is based on a lie. Only white people are able to adopt this view. We are the only race of Americans who have the (dis)ability to believe that race issues are no longer relevant to daily life. White privilege has allowed us to believe our American society is a meritocracy.
Professor Roger Wilkins, in his excellent 1995 article about affirmative action, “Racism Has Its Privileges,” writes:
“Blacks and whites experience America very differently. Though we often inhabit the same space, we operate in very disparate psychic spheres. Whites have an easy sense of ownership of the country; they feel they are entitled to receive all that is best in it…Many of them think of this as a white country and some of them even experience it that way. They think of it as a land of opportunity…
To blacks there’s nothing very easy about life in America, and any sense of ownership comes hard because we encounter so much resistance in making our way through the ordinary occurrences of life. And I’m not even talking here about overt acts of discrimination but simply about the way whites intrude on and disturb our psychic space without even thinking about it. For most blacks, America is either a land of denied opportunity or one in which the opportunities are still grudgingly extended and extremely limited.”
2. When we claim to be color-blind, what we mean is we have found a way to overcome our own personal cultural biases. (Or so we think.) But by our statement we deny the very real systemic racist structures we are inherently party to by being a member of the majority culture.
In her enlightening 1988 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, writes:“My [white] schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will… I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.”
3. What we often (really) mean by our color-blindness: I don’t want to acknowledge our cultural differences, let alone learn about and appreciate your culture. I invite you—and expect you—to fully adopt my culture and “become white” just like me.
British professor Mark Halstead, in his 1988 book, Education, Justice, and Cultural Diversity, writes:“What is it that makes color-blindness a type of racism rather than merely a misguided form of action?…When a color-blind approach is adopted to any social policy in this country, white people are usually able to dominate because the common experiences are defined in terms which white people can more easily relate to than blacks and which tend to bolster the white self-image at the expense of the black.”
What do you think? Is being “color-blind” a virtue to be sought after? Or a moral flaw to be avoided?
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Stephanie Nannan along with her husband Scott serve on the national leadership development team of Bridges International, Campus Crusade for Christ’s International Student Ministry, and they reside in Austin, TX.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
