I Am Not Colorblind

I have a lot of students with the same name in the same class. In fact, I have two Zachs in my class this quarter, and they sit right next to each other. When I call on them in class, I call one Zach and one Zachary to try to avoid confusion. Zach is white, Zachary is black.

Yesterday, I had students circulate around the room to interview one another using the grammar we had just gone over. When it was time for students to share their findings, I asked "Who interviewed Zach?" When a lot of people raised their hand, I realized that people who had interviewed both were raising their hands. I looked over to them, saw Zach had a hat on, and said "The Zach with the white hat." My mentioning of white set off a wave of uncomfortable-ness. Zachary started cracking up, saying "white Zach in the white hat!" A lot of people in the class looked uncomfortable because of this declaration of race. As if we should all be colorblind.

There was a time when I thought that must be the best solution. That is, to avoid talking about race, pretending not to see it. Listening to the way my family would talk about people according to their race, at my graduation: "those black people sitting in front of us were so obnoxious during the ceremony," has made me aware of how one can bring up race unnecessarily, or in the wrong context. Had there been white obnoxious people in front of them during my graduation ceremony, I know they still would have complained. But because they prescribe to the idea that white is like the "default race," they would never have said "those white people sitting in front of us were so obnoxious during the ceremony." White would not have been a descriptor. I can't entirely blame my family for the way they see the world. I have tried to explain to them how I find that using race in this way is offensive. So when it is unnecessary, I really don't think race needs to be brought up.

However, it is quite another thing to pretend not to see race, to avoid even talking about it, and to generally invoke a policy of colorblindness. This doesn't make you enlightened, progressive or tolerant. It exposes ignorance. Why else do you think Stephen Colbert uses it as an ironic element to his on-screen personality on the Colbert Report? Colorblindness is something that intolerant people use as an excuse to pretend that they are tolerant. This is just like when people say "I don't care what gay (/trans/bi/queer) people do as long as they don't flaunt it in my face." It is a way to feign tolerance while simultaneously being intolerant.

I don't know if things will change in regards to this topic in my lifetime, but I know that I am ending a legacy of intolerance in my family by refusing to continue traditions aligning with the -isms of intolerance. I hope that many other people are similarly challenging ways in which they were brought up that might be similarly racist, sexist, classist and homophobic.