Sorry for missing a day this week on the blog. My laptop was misplaced and thus I was unable to post today’s blog. I’m making up for it though by bringing you a great guest post by my eFriend turned “Driving Ms. Crazy” Chauffeur (heh! How’s that for switching roles!) Stuart McDonald. I could really give him one heck of a intro, but I’ll leave it alone. Follow him on twitter and then check out his blog.

He’s awesome.

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Ah, yes — Post-racial America. That is what we’re living in, right? No? Oh…

With all this talk of race swirling around, I’ve heard quite a few people propose the idea of being colorblind. They say, “We just need to be colorblind; that will solve all of America’s racial problems.” I wonder about the idea of colorblindness — is that what we really want to be? Are there a true benefit to being colorblind, or is it one of those things that we agree with because it sounds good and we see no obvious opposition?

Let’s first define what it means to be colorblind. If a person is colorblind, they are “partially or totally unable to distinguish certain colors; not recognizing racial or class distinctions.” In other words, a person who is colorblind can’t tell red from green or blue from orange. They might not even be able to differentiate Black from White, nor do the see poor from rich. While the idea may appear great, and the goal, of treating everyone with the same respect, seems like it would solve a lot of our issues, that may not be true. At all.

If we are colorblind, the ideas is that we make no distinction between the races; we treat everyone as if they were the same — effectively of one color. The problem that arises is this: we are not one color now, nor will we ever be (because as many interracial relationships as there are today, it may never be the majority).

It’s absolutely imperative to understand how we’ve gotten to where we are today. Marcus Garvey says, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

To look at all people as being the same color would strip a particular race or culture of their heritage and serve to perpetuate the standard of Whiteness that we in White America hold so dear. To take from African-American historian and author, Carter G. Woodson, “If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition… it stands in danger of being exterminated.”

The idea that we should be colorblind obviously came from a White. Why? Hasn’t it always been the goal of White supremacy to eliminate, or at the very least, greatly undermine any achievements made by Blacks. Why? Because Whites did — and some still do — believe that Blacks are inherently inferior for no other reason than for the increased pigment in their skin. But Woodson knew better. He saw that, “the different-ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess.”

While the goal of colorblind thinking may not be to get everyone to become White, if the different cultures and races are lost as an effect, does it matter? If we lose our heritage, we lose everything. In order to fully appreciate where we are now, and who we’ve become, as a race and a country, we must understand where we’ve come from.

At the end of the day, the key isn’t to just not see the color, but rather to see the color, appreciate it for what it is, understand where it came from and why it is what it is today and then treat everyone the same in spite of, not because of their color.

-Stuart

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