A
Critique of Colorblindness is
a text, the main idea of which is to challenge the idea that a race is a fixed
category with the use of the Critical Race Theory by focusing on politics as
well as law in order to reformulate legal doctrines. It starts with looking
through the assaults from both the left and the right. Both of which have their
own wrong approaches towards colorblindness. While the Left is using silent
racial politics in order to keep its votes from Whites as well as Blacks, the
Right’s approach towards race is also not helping the situation at all since
they do not really believe in the reality of race as something socially
constructed. It is mentioned that as long as the use of race remains invisible,
the democratic political space where groups come together to mobilize to engage
in social change or to represent their much larger society, vanishes. In order
to prevent that and make people see the race as it is, the text introduces us
to the three major flaws in the colorblindness approach, which are: (1) the
assumption of racial inequality is a problem of individuals, (2) people do not
actually look closely to the established racial inequality due to the
colorblindness idea of theirs, and (3) the belief on how the colorblindness
acts inefficiently on grassroots organizations by preventing civil rights
communities from mobilized and being unified. Besides, it is pointed out that
civil rights movement lost their moral and analytical power and conservative
and neoconservatives persuaded us that solely individual initiative can change
something, others cannot do anything about it. Moreover, “The Brazilian
Experiment in Race-Blindness” is other crucial point of the text. In this part,
it is emphasized that the race is dealt with differently in Brazil and there is
color caste system instead of racial caste system to which we are familiar from
the US.
This
text touches upon many subject that has been studied during this course. One of
which is the idea of how people still believe that race is only about the skin
color yet as we studies in our courses, race is a socially constructed term
since it changed through time and country according to what is the best for
political power and relations as it is also mentioned last week’s reading, Race,
Class, and Gender in the United States. Also it is mentioned, there is no
help in acting as if there is no race at all when there is racial inequality.
Instead of acting as if there is nothing wrong, we need to do something in
order to prevent this inequality as we have talked for the previous two weeks.
The one of the most important problems mentioned in the text is how race is
seen as a personal problem rather than social, economic, historical system
(However, is it really possible to take an individual and her/his behavior
without any consideration to the society s/he belongs to?). By doing this,
putting the whole blame on individuals, the problem is still staying there and
not speaking about it will not help anyone. The solution as mentioned in the
Matter of Whiteness as the Critiques of Colorblindness, is informing
people about different racial groups other than hiding the facts. Besides, in
the text it is pointed out that conservatives “blackened” the poverty, it means
that they demonstrated all black people as being poor by ignoring many poor
white Americans living in the country. They do this generally to demonstrate
that it is not a problem, which concerns all the people and these poor black
people who can solve the problem, which they created for themselves. In Race,
Class and Gender in the United States, it is mentioned, “the social
construction of class is analogous but not identical to that of race.” This
statement clearly shows us that, we cannot identify class by attributing them
to certain races.
We
found this text really informative, not only about the conception of race
within the society but also about the deep ideology of the race, about the
different political approaches and their reasons. It was interesting to learn
about the colorblindness and how it is approached wrongly by people. Some of
these wrong approaches and their explanations correct our wrong approaches
towards race. We realize sometime we also use colorblindness as if it makes
everything perfect, yet all it does hiding something which is already there and
this thing is racism. Besides, it showed us that how color blindness is the
new way of racism instead of being a solution for this issue. We saw its effect
on politics and social life by focusing on conservatives' and neoconservatives'
approaches to the concept. Moreover, we really found interesting the different
approaches adopted by the US and Brazil towards color and race. Finally, we saw
how the concept of “color blindness” distorts our perception and creates “new
racism” instead of it is supposed to eliminate it.
*If you haven't seen the picture changing, wait a minute and look carefully*
We would like you to watch this amazing TED Talks video of Mellody Hobson, who is an African-American investment expert, on colorblindness and color bravery.
http://video.ted.com/talk/podcast/2014/MazdaRebels_PL/MellodyHobson_2014-480p.mp4 (or you can reach the video from here: http://www.ted.com/talks/mellody_hobson_color_blind_or_color_brave)
"We cannot afford to be a colorblind, we have to be color brave" -Mellody Hobson
Do you agree with her? Why? Why not?
Some other questions to think about on this subject:
- Is it possible to talk about racial equality while there is still the identification as African-American, Latin-American, Asian-American? Is it bad that we have these identifications? Do they matter?
- Why do you think there is no commonly used identification as White?
- Why do conservatives try to link “black people” and “poverty”?
- How Brazil and the US deal with race issue differently?
Ezgi ULUSOY &Yasemin ÖZTEMÜR
