Me and White Supremacy : Day 8 Journal Questions
I’m leading a group discussion circle on “Me and White Supremacy” by Layla F. Saad. I’m taking the journaling challenge daily throughout February even though I’m not white. If you happen to be white, why not take the challenge? If I can do it, you can do it too.
Day 8 Questions (from the text):
1. What messages were you taught about color blindness and seeing color growing up?
2. How do you feel when BIPOC talk about race and racism?
3. How have you harmed BIPOC in your life by insisting you do not see color?
4. What is the first instinctual feeling that comes up when you hear the words white people or when you have to say Black people?
5. What mental gymnastics have you done to avoid seeing your own race (and what those of white privilege have collectively done to BIPOC)?
- — -
A few years ago I went into a beauty supply store in my majority white town looking for black hair care products. After looking for and not finding what I needed, I asked the woman behind the counter (who happened to be white) if they had a section for Black hair care products.
The woman looked at me with indignance at my ask, and replied back with a thick ‘tude:
“Our hair products are for everyone.”
And yet, I had a specific need that needed addressing. Her one-size-fits-all solution missed addressing that need, so I went elsewhere.
This is only a metaphor, but I still know people who cling to this over-idealized, oversimplified, antiquated concept of color blindness. To those people I say:
Stop.
Stop it right now.
Systems of white supremacy are in no way curtailed by your self-righteous claim to not see color.
In fact, Systems of white supremacy want us to stay silent about all things racial, and not seeing color is just another way to accomplish this silence. You cannot discuss what you claim not to see, and you are actively harming POC by believing that all that is needed for racism to vanish is for people like you to stop paying attention to anything regarding race.
It’s a double whammy. Color blindness allows you to pat yourself on the back, secure in the belief that you are “doing it right”, while simultaneously ensuring that you never think to bring up race, and never fail to dismiss claims of racism in yourself or elsewhere. If white silence is the gold medal of white supremacy, then color blindness is both silver and bronze.
So many times I’ve had people say that “they don’t see me as black, they just see me as a person”, but being that black is an intrinsic part of who I am as a person and who I’ve always been, so that sentiment misses the mark entirely. When you are blind to color, you also dismiss the lived experience of people of color, not to mention their culture and contributions, and colorblindness invalidates claims of struggle in a society that sees white as the ideal.
Color blindness also reinforces that idea of whiteness as a default state or state of “racelessness”. In case you might be unaware, “white” is also a race, and that if you are a white person, your dynamics come into play too, you are racialized too. It just so happens that this dynamic doesn’t work against you (and in fact works in your favor whether you want it to or not), so you are far less likely than POC to notice the effects of this.
So if you consider yourself to be a fair-minded person, I urge you to fight this impulse of striving to be color blind.
It’s hard — I know because I used to strive for it too. I too used to struggle to mention the words “white”, “black”, “race”, “racism”. It took a lot of conscious effort and understanding of how racism actually operates to make verbalizing these things less than completely awkward and uncomfortable. But it is necessary if in fact you wish to do good instead of fooling yourself that by adopting a color blind mindset you already are. And here’s the secret — the more you practice it, the easier it gets, just like anything else.
If we must strive for color blindness, the time for that is only AFTER racial power imbalances have been rectified, economic opportunity inequality has been addressed, and historical and current-day harm due to racism has been accounted for and not a moment before. Color blindness needs to be the very last step in achieving racial reconciliation — though by then it might not even be necessary.
