Color Blindness (race) in The United States - Criticism of Color Blindness

Criticism of Color Blindness

In 1997 Leslie G. Carr published "Color-Blind Racism" (Sage Publications) which reviewed the history of racist ideologies in America. He saw "color-blindness" as an ideology being promoted in to undercut the legal and political foundation of integration and affirmative action. Stephanie M. Wildman, in her book Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America, writes that many Americans who advocate a merit-based, race-free worldview do not acknowledge the systems of privilege which benefit them. For example, many Americans rely on a social and sometimes even financial inheritance from previous generations. She argues that this inheritance is unlikely to be forthcoming if one's ancestors were slaves, and privileges whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality.

Critics allege that majority groups use practices of color-blindness as a means of avoiding the topic of racism and accusations of racial discrimination, and thus hide their true racial views, and that color blindness is used as a tool in attacking group legal rights gained exclusively by some minority groups.

Critics assert that color blindness allows people to ignore the racial construction of whiteness, and reinforces its privileged and oppressive position. In colorblind situations, whiteness remains the normal standard, and blackness remains different, or marginal. As a result, white people are able to dominate when a color blind approach is applied because the common experiences are defined in terms which white people can more easily relate to than blacks. Insistence on no reference to race, critics argue, means black people can no longer point out the racism they face.

Sociologists such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva of Duke University and Ashley Doane of the University of Hartford describe color-blindness as a dominant "racial ideology", or as Bonilla-Silva explains, "the collective understanding and representation produced by social groups to explain their world". He also explains that we have this new racial ideology because of events that occurred between the 1940s and 1960s that led to a change in the racial structure of the United States. Thus he stresses that studying the ideologies of color-blindness is not about accusing or blaming individual people, "of finding good and bad people", but rather looking at the "collective" understanding and representation produced by social groups to explain their world". Bonilla- Silva examines the most salient "frames" of these alternative racial ideologies and of color-blind racism. They are abstract liberalism (e.g. statements such as "I am all for equal opportunity and that's why I oppose affirmative action"),"biologization of culture" (e.g. "Blacks are poor because they do not have the proper values"), naturalization of matters that reflect the effects of white supremacy (e.g. "Neighborhood segregation is a sad but natural thing since people want to live with people who are like them"), and minimization of racism and discrimination (e.g. statements such as "There are racists out there but they are few and hard to find").

Critics of color-blindness argue that color-blindness operates under the assumption that we are living in a world that is "post-race", where race no longer matters, when in fact it is still a prevalent issue. While it is true that overt racism is rare today, critics insist that more covert forms have taken its place. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests that racial practices during the Jim Crow Era were typically overt and clearly racial, whereas today they tend to be covert, institutional, and apparently nonracial. Another criticism is that color-blindness views racism at the individual level (e.g. Lines of reasoning such as "I don't own slaves" or "I have very close black friends" to defend oneself) without looking at the larger social mechanisms in which racism operates. In an article in the journal New Directions for Student Services, Nancy Evans and Robert Reason argued that color-blindness fails to see the "structural, institutional, and societal" levels at which inequalities occur.

• A Look at Color-Blindness