Becoming Colorblind Pt.2
It’s Hard to Find Answers with Broken Questions
Welcome to Part 2. The topic being continued here is an exploration into the term, “colorblindness”, and how might we truly embrace “becoming colorblind”.
People have been asking the wrong questions about race and society due to early onset mis/ information about the origin of our species. What is attempted here is to rectify the thought processes leading to the need to behaviorally condition ourselves on the ground of race. Because without that, there is no hope for becoming colorblind.
Looking at the biological definition of race, we know that means a diminishing ability to see color. However, the way this term is used today, is often in conjunction with race which has many other contexts that wrapped into it.
The crux of my argument is that, in the context of all the social relationships that are at play around you based on your senses. That means your perception is the primary medium to inform your world-view, body-identity , and mental-identity (i.e., how we think and feel about ourselves), as well as how we perceive each other. If colorblindness was actually presented as an ideal, it would deal with the fact that our very perception is the root of our identity.
Ideals, in my experience, tend to have positive connotations that are often aspirational, that means we have to put in work to get there. If we want certain ideals to become properly integrated into society to become a form of societal transformation and healing, then we must start with ourselves and not the boogeyman of the past or present. In fact, with this understanding, we should all aspire to become colorblind.
Yet we must look at the current stigmas around being “socially colorblind”, it is often used as an insult for someone who is ignorant rather than having a specific connotation for relationships or systemic injustice. “Anyone who doesn’t see race is racist.” Yet, if we want to be politically correct let us at least look at the definition.
What are the biological underpinnings around race? For all living humans, there are no separate races from a scientific and biological stand point. Let’s let that sink in. No difference. The discernible traits that people use to categorize race today are features not bugs of a single species.
When we say race, we are using it in a purely sociological constructed context that leads debates about power dynamics and arguments of superiority or inferiority.
In this article, I dare to argue that is not the greatest form of colorblindness is the ability to deny race. If we can’t argue about who is black or white, then how would you argue about a lot of other topics. You could use a class conscious argument or a human security argument to solve most things in my opinion.
I struggle with how to convey the uselessness of race to me because I could not explain to you where your race begins or where mine might end? Is it in my child? Is it in my grandchild? When does one switch? At one point can you detect a fractional percentage of dominant “whiteness”?Can anyone point to it?
Race is an abstract concept, impossible to track biologically even in the human genome because we are all just admixtures of one another.
You may say you have mixed heritage, but what in fact you refer to is cultural heritage such as “my Mom is from Sweden, my Dad is from Panama,”, does that make you White, Black, or Indifferent. I’d say none truly matter as long as you can have a cultural connection to your different ancestral identities which are in some ways distinct from your colonial identities.
Fast forward to today, in the U.S., the ability to point the concept of race a recent invention. We only have the ability to talk about race due to the legal framework it was underpinned (see The Color of Law), this is more commonly known by things like the one-drop rule, which reified the separation of humans by “origin” when in fact Humans have been moving across this planet for millennia because ‘moving is human’. I would challenge your assumptions of who is Black and who is White, which are used as the counterbalance of radicalized thinking.
Questions, I ask myself when engaging topics when I was learning about it were things like, “how would such a rule be enforced equally without knowing the exact lineage of every person?” “When/where does lineage even start to become linear?” There are so many combinations and permutations of genetics that it would be hard to argue who was of one race opposed to another.
Yet, the idea of race has persisted only because of societal enforcement or non-action or inaction.
Socially, to call one’s self colorblind, is to make the argument you should not have to deal with the complexities of an entangled system because you can’t see the differences between people. Yet, at the same time, it invites a naivety of not inviting solutions at the same time inviting an abandonment of care. COVID-19 in some ways has resurface global attention back to the issues of colorism and racism through movements like Black Lives Matters.
From my view point there are three versions of colorblindness:
A tool for social escape of dealing with complex social issues and tensions around race and origin
An ideal saying that all regardless of race and origin should be treated equal without distinction of difference
A biological inability of sight to see difference between colors
How we use these terms matters..
Historically, there is also something to be named, around critiquing the history and the current state, of countries like the U.S., where there seems to be a desire rectify the past but also a need not be judged by the past.
This uncomfortable catch-22, “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” moment. To me, it would seem that the source of many social issues are “double-binded” in what contexts people believe to be at play (borrowing from Batesonian logic).
This to me leads me to more deeply inquire about situations like Nice White Parents or Good White People that are center-lined around binary arguments based a concept Race which ideally shouldn’t exist and to me, is ultimately non-sensical.
Again, I ask the questions…
Where does the edge my race of differ from the edge of your race?
How can we be the same and yet different while being of the Human Race?
Who decides the boundaries and the lines of difference?
How far back in time must a difference be placed to change bodily and socially constructed identities?
To explore this, we could set a few scenarios to unpack different of how societal transformation and healing would exist if there was an inability to see race or color differences.
For example, we could imagine picking these three polarizing topics of Black Lives Matters, Immigration and Private Property could be three things that would dissolve or not exist or have an entirely different meanings if the term colorblindness was applied truly and equally.
Yet before that, it might be better to frame our arguments by turning the camera back onto oneself.
One has to look no further than how you are using a computer right now…
Isn’t it fascinating, you are reading something that was written, non-local to you yet is now in your immediate proximity by the miracle of the data tubes on the Internet.
To me, what is most fascinating in this collective pandemic moment, is the erasure of borders. And by reducing our sense of distance, we are lessening our sense of boundaries. The I/Me/Mine of our identities is softening, all the way up the stack .
Whoever said it was turtles all the way down had half of the story.
It’s turtles all the way down and shells all the way up, too.
Borders are porous entities maintained by humans..but can you look at a map and tell me where does your sense of belonging end? Is it the edge of your town, city or block? Can you show me on a map?
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Digital Doesn’t Always Equal Physical
The social and societal systems at play in a digital environment have in someways presented a more democratic system of representation enabled by socio-technological processes and contexts through which we interact. This playground where you have things like YouTube or Substack were only possible by redefining the boundaries of you.
The edges of difference are less perceptible or harder to enforce online vs in-person making it expensive to create places of exclusion or difference.
Digitally, your identity becomes something more sovereign and comprised of personal agency, where you can become who you want to be.
Starting to Unpack the Trauma of Identity
Conversely, in society, you are named and placed without consent from the moment you are born. This to me is the beginning of the traumatization of the individual through racial identities as boxes that continue be upheld and fought over.
To understand how we might heal from our own societal traumas, requires a new view of self and identity about how we relate to the world, ourselves and each other. This to me, is the essence of healing and social transformation work, which is to transmute the contexts and paradoxes that have trapped us into thinking that we can address systemic injustice through a mechanistic worldview of fixing one part of a system.
Looking outwards once again, camera zooming on the abstractness of culture. It also seems that there is a sense and concrete attempt of “do-goodism” in the Americana vernacular and culture that is juxtaposed with actual reform where as colorblindness exists as means that an individual can exclaim that they should be free from social critique.
The idea that racial hierarchies are important to societal organization in countries like through tools like the U.S. Census is just as related to the effects of guilt and shame associated with primary beneficiaries in any social system. This often arise only after being questioned as to why they should receive benefits over others in the first place.
This polemic against race is only possible due to the failure of Western Civ colonialist narratives, under which many societies operates from on a daily basis — extending the idea of difference and using it as a weapon and convener of power and through institutional and systemic controls be it policy, education, economic activity, private ownership and property, militarism, health etc.
If Western Civs, were to become truly colorblind, that is unable see the distinction between each citizen and their perceived value, then western societies would be challenged to create a new set of possibilities, bodies and identities and therefore relationships.
What if in fact, there were no White or Black or other “Coloured people”? This would be to truly acknowledge truth of race being racist idea in its origin. Therefore creating inescapable second-order effect, a fractal intent that makes it impossible to escape a concept that was wrong to begin with. Ultimately, shouldn’t the question be what would the world be like if race as an ideological and mental concept did not exist?
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Coming Up Next
In the next post I will be exploring the subtler questions of what does it mean to be human? What does the experience of mind in which we share our cognition of the world, hold for matters of identity and living in harmony on a complex planet? How does mental perception become influence by the things we perceive? What is, what the Buddhists call, the coloring of the mind? How do these patterns leave impressions? How do we address our present environment by being able to see influences?
I will be drawing from Vedic and Buddhist and Bateson scholarship on ecology exploring the subtlest and most abstract phenomenon, the mind and the coloring of mind.
Sources for Part 3: