I’ve been reading a lot lately that colorblindness is a sham and that it should be replaced by “race consciousness”. So some questions for debate:
Is the goal still colorblindness for the majority of people who spend a lot of time thinking about race issues, or is “race consciousness” the new consensus? Or is this a hotly debated topic?
Is it possible to treat men and women exactly the same or is that simply impossible given our differnet biological natures and rather extreme social biases that we’ve been taught?
Are genderblindness and colorblindness even related? Is one possible and the other not?
If we accept unconscious bias as a fact, how should we handle instances where we’ve committed a biased act without realizing it, and when it hasn’t been pointed out to us?
What’s the best way to handle an accusation that you’ve acted with bias when you are sure you haven’t? How about if you realize you may have committed it without realizing it and the accuser is right?
It’s not actually anywhere near that simple. That’s why so much time and energy has been spent trying to make people like me “woke”. So I’m trying to learn here. I once thought it was just as simple as you’re trying to make it out to be. Heck, maybe it is, maybe I’m buying into a bunch of sociological pseudoscientific gobbledygook. Is that your view in a nutshell?
Here is an example of gender blindness being useful. When symphony orchestras started to audition musicians behind a curtain, the number of women getting into orchestras rose.
This obviously can’t be done everywhere, but I wonder if there have been studies about percentage of resumes getting interviews with gender neutral names - like the studies done with race neutral names.
Your views could very well be correct, but the point of this thread is to get into some of the newer thinking on these issues, much of which I believe to have merit, but some of which is probably nonsense.
All else being equal, I fully support making the continent their grandparents came from into an irrelevant factor in their success (or opportunity to best use their natural abilities).
It depends on how it is said. To me, it more often comes across as naive that someone can have total confidence that implicit bias has no impact on their thinking. I find it more problematic that someone can believe that our society is largely free of bias and that we genuinely have an authentic meritocracy. That sort of thinking seems really self-serving to me, and I suspect people who expound that belief of being scientific racists.
Well, I would hope we all recognize that systemic bias is real. Anyone who says society is colorblind is naive or trying to handwave away a serious problem they don’t want to deal with. But is it possible for an individual to be colorblind? And even if an individual is capable of that, should they be? From what I’ve been reading, you shouldn’t even try to be colorblind, you should take race into account when making decisions. ALthough I’m not sure how that leads anywhere good.
For a lot of people of color, their race is part of their identity, so saying “I don’t see color” ranges somewhere between naive and patronizing and “I don’t want to see you as black/Arabian/Chinese/whatever.” Though obviously this varies from person to person and sentiment to sentiment. There’s a reason Stephen Colbert saying “I don’t see color” was a joke parodying conservative talking heads who advocated for racially insensitive policies since probably the inception of the Colbert Report back in 2005.
Even if race as we know it is almost purely sociological, it has very real cultural effects, and recognizing the unique challenges and (sub)cultural differences that may exist for, say, a black American is important. Not to mention they have black skin. The goal isn’t to eliminate descriptions of people’s features or skin, so much as to erase white as the “norm”. Don’t mention race if it’s not pertinent information, but also note small biases like when it is relevant, mention when someone is white as well, don’t assume white is default and every other race needs to be discriminated from that.
Gender is similar to race in the sense that a lot of the goal is to eliminate male normativity (and similarly with homosexuality and heteronormativity, trans and cisnormativity etc), the concept of normativity and the goal of its erasure is common in intersectional feminism.
That said, while acknowledging differences is important, things like race-blinding and gender-blinding things like resumes or musical auditions can, as mentioned, be important for eliminating implicit biases.
Blah, this happened while typing the last response. In short, the idea that you should take race and gender and such into consideration is basically the idea of opportunity. If someone black seems competent but doesn’t quite have the qualifications of a white applicant on paper, you may recognize that because of their skin color they may have been denied opportunities to receive those qualifications due to their skin color.
(NB in this case “denied” doesn’t necessarily, but can, mean actually actively denied. It could simply me systemically denied due to failure to provide good schooling as we often do in poor black areas, or financial denial, the pressure of having to work a second job instead of doing hobby projects or volunteering, etc).
The idea here is that “selecting the best person for the job” is on its own biased towards privileged people who had the opportunities to receive qualifications, training, and other things that look good on their resume or portfolio. Obviously there’s a balance here, nobody is saying to select a black person or a woman if they seem incompetent, but it’s important to be aware that someone competent-seeming may appear “under-qualified” on paper or have a few small inconsequential holes in their knowledge you can easily patch if they have certain backgrounds.
I’m coming at this from a teaching point of view. If someone was a principal and they never even noticed that every teacher on their faculty was a middle-aged white woman, I would see that as a failure. Kids click with different types of people and they need mentors and role models. There are kids who cannot click with middle aged white women ( and I say this as a middle aged white woman teacher). There’s a terrible monotony in having all your teachers have a middle-aged white woman perspective.
I’d say a lot depends on the job and the needs of the business. Personally, I think businesses should try to be as colorblind as possible, but if they do not have a diverse workforce they should look into why that is. Sometimes it has to do with factors beyond their control, like schooling, but sometimes it could be unconscious bias.
Where I think lines get crossed is when a business’s goals to diversify their workforce suddenly bring a screeching halt to the careers of white and male employees. There’s a fine line between expanding opportunity for minorities and shrinking it for white males(or possibly even Asian males).
To use an example from my own company, our IT department is about 50% minorities, but no African-Americans and no women except in management. We do have black immigrants though(all from Haiti), and lots of Latinos. Is there something we should be doing to increase female and African-American representation? For my part when there have been openings I’ve actively recruited African-American and female candidates within the company for openings, but they never want the jobs. Is that the extent of our responsibility in this regard or should we be doing something more?
The general idea here in not being colorblind (etc) is that to fight racism, sexism, etc you have to play the long game. Our society has a feedback loop in having or lacking role models in certain positions, cycles of poverty, gender/racial stereotypes and pressures, and so on. Being aware of these systemic issues and fighting them is the key to fixing it.
This is also where things like Affirmative Action or scholarships for social minorities come from. It’s fudging the system a little and yeah, might select people who really can’t handle the positions or opportunities they’re given. However, it’s also recognizing that even if you’re giving someone an opportunity when “on paper” they’re not good enough, even if some of them end up failing, those that work through it and get a high profile job or position accumulating over 50, 100 years help slowly balance out the distribution.
Admittedly, this is more of a collectivist argument than an individualist one. On an individual scale you’re correct that this may deny white males and such opportunities, but by and large white people and men and cis people and straight people (listed separately because these are all individual characteristics, but I will subsequently list as “cishet white men” for brevity) are still going to be doing fine in terms of opportunities.
Of course, this is all very capitalist too and while other economic systems won’t fix racism and that completely, our current situation complicates things with the rise of unemployment and things like the gig economy making things much more painful for anyone denied employment, cishet white man or not. It would be much easier to push things like this if the economy were doing well and there was always another job even if it wasn’t your dream one.
This ends up being sort of an economic version of the “trolley problem” – do you give marginalized people opportunities at the expense of some cishet white men, or do you damn the marginalized people to continue struggling in a bad economy while you advocate not damning some of the dominant class. I’d argue for giving marginalized opportunities because cishet white men are, statistically, more able and more in a position to bounce back even given the shitty economic situation, but it’s not a clear cut question.
Try also recruiting in, say, local African American cultural centers or women’s centers, if any exist (just flyers, maybe a single recruiting night, not a huge fanfare). The problem you’re running into is likely the STEM imbalance in general which isn’t really your fault. Carnegie Mellon did wonders fighting gender inequality in its CS department but it’s still only around 30%, but it took a lot of research. I applaud you for trying, but depending on the size and how public-facing your company is there’s only so much you can do to recruit.
I would advise anyone in those circumstances to be open to the idea that they were letting implicit bias affect hiring decisions. For example, in my life I’ve seen several examples of teachers hired because they looked like the person they replaced. I don’t mean the same race/gender–I mean, they were physically similar in terms of face/body type/style of dress. I really think people get an idea in their heads of what a good [whatever] looks like, and they respond to it. I probably do it. If everyone on the hiring committee is convinced this is an insulting claim–they “know” they just see talent and they “know” they know talent when they see it, and to suggest otherwise is insulting–then I think that’s a problem.
ETA: One type of implicit bias I see a lot: women and minorities, and especially women minorities, just do not get the benefit of the doubt. If a woman is a stellar candidate and the man is so-so, she get the job. If both candidates are so-so, there’s a real tendency to assume that the man will be able to figure it out/grow into the role and a real anxiety that the woman/minority won’t. So it’s not hard to justify not hiring/promoting them–they weren’t qualified. But it’s harder to justify why you did hire the white dude. I think women and minorities really internalize this, which is part of the reason they don’t apply for internal promotions as much: they look at the job requirements and see they don’t have them, and experience shows them that they are unlikely to be promoted and then trained. Men have confidence that that option is on the table, so they go ahead and apply. This is the kind of think hiring committees need to be aware of.
My company created specific job descriptions that worked around school hours, obv. part time employment. It has to chime with any social security benefits so it makes financial sense. Turned out to be efficient way because it created a more flexible whole.