Conversational Red Herrings (Deux): I don't see color

Up next in our everlasting game of Bullsh*t Bingo is "I don't see color!". This particular red herring is close kin to "I don't care if you're red, yellow, green or purple!" and about exactly as meaningless.

My first response to the I-don't-see-colorers is, "Congratulations! Tell me though, how do you manage that? I mean really, how? Do you actually not see color or is it that you'd rather I not be a color? There is a difference."

The great challenge of the "I don't see color" response is that it claims a level of diversity awareness that simply does not yet exist. If you were born and raised on this planet, you see color. I hate to break it to you, but you do. There is no part of planetary history that isn't bathed in noxious notions and judgments about race. Unless someone has deliberately taken the time to teach you a history not written by conquerors and brutes, you've imbibed anti-otherness with mother's milk. To suggest different to is lie to yourself which is fine, and to lie to others which ain't. 

Consider also that if you are actively trying to be sensitive to the issues born of racial and other forms of diversity, sometimes referred to as being politically correct a decent human being, you have to see those differences to resist stereotyping. Resistance begins with unpacking the ways difference is portrayed - particularly in mass media - and resistance continues with processing how those portrayals seep into our social practice in dangerous ways. None of that occurs under the flag of the "I don't see color" nation. That is not how this works. 

As a couple of friends of mine succinctly put it the other day, "I don't see color" isn't about not seeing color, it's about not seeing pain, not seeing oppression, not seeing injustice. It isn't that you don't see color, sure you do, you just want colored people to shut up about how color affects their lives, so you can go on blindly (and callously) enjoying the privileges your lack of color brings you and yours, disclaiming all culpability. Like Shaggy, your belief is that it wasn't you. You ain't got nothin' to do with it! You just outchear trying to sing Kumbaya or somethin'. 

But let's say I take you at your word. Let's say you really don't see color. What does that mean for me? Does that change my life in some significant and lasting way? Does that make me less prone to targeted financial predation? Will it save me as I traverse the highways and byways of this great nation, or will I still be one pretext stop away from an untimely death and a hashtag memorial?

When I wrote about White fauxgility, I pointed out that fragile responses were a means of emotional manipulation. Pearl clutching, demands for trust and acknowledgement of self-proclaimed allyship are efforts to avoid any culpability for the sins of your forebears. What I didn't mention in that discussion, was the notion that conversational gambits such as "I don't see color" and "I don't care if you're red, yellow or green!" suggest that you believe that your goodness eclipses other folks' not-so-goodness. Seriously? What about the guy next to you named Dylan, the one with the gun? Or the guy named Ditka? Or the men and women on Capitol Hill or in capitols planet-wide? Even if you're the best man/woman on the planet, your goodness and mercy can't follow me all the days of my life or into all the places in my life where ungoodness and no mercy will be surely reside. Tell me how your not seeing color translates into anything meaningful in the larger world in which people like me live, breathe, and have our being. I'm all ears. 

Probably the single most dangerous thing about the whole "I don't see color" mindset, is that it wholly disregards the lived experience of POC supplanting our lived experience (not to mention hundreds of years of actual history) with your Polly-Annaish pretense. It pretends that your self-proclaimed colorblindness has actual consequences for POC beyond our interactions with you. You know it doesn't and we certainly know it doesn't, but you want us to play with you any way. Nope. Not happenin'. And  you want to pretend that your colorblindness extends to POC whom you don't know as well as you think you know us. That's a lot of games to be playing. I'm tired just thinking about it, especially since only you know the rules of this game and you always win. So nah, I'm not playing today, and tomorrow ain't looking too good either. 

Polly Anna will not save us or ours from an all White jury neither will she save us from over-punishment in the school room, the court room or the Board room. 

Polly Anna will not save us when we're looking for a job with our Black sounding names nor will she come to our aid when we're at work. 

Polly won't show up for duty when we're minding our business doing our jobs and strange men try to make reference to our Muslim heritage to suggest we too could be sketchy. 

"I don't see color" is the conversational equivalent of whistling past the graveyard. It may cover your fear of the realities of racism, but the bones of racism are still in there my friend, the bones are still there. And they still rattle in the dark.

Whistle on.