Of course Colbert was making fun of it but some do still say it, or at least think it, unironically.
A person who says that is clueless.
Aware of it or not, we all, of all colors, have some amount of implicit racist beliefs. These beliefs that are outside of our explicit awareness impact our behaviors and if one is so uncomfortable with even the possibility they exist as to complete deny the chance then there is no chance to be on guard regarding them.
Assume for the sake of argument that the individual actually has NO implicit racist beliefs. The implied belief that being unconscious of color makes all problems go away is ignorant. If you took out a magic wand and made every single explicit and implicit racist thought in this country disappear we would still be dealing with the structural legacy of racism, aspects built into the system that exist independent of any individual beliefs. Addressing those inequities requires seeing color.
When I was a firefighter, my best buddy on the department had a wonderful wife and kids who would visit the station when we were on duty. His little girl was learning her colors in preschool and had a box of crayons and a coloring book out on one visit. She came over and stood between us and alternately rubbed my arm and her dads arm; after much rubbing and going back and forth to her crayons she announced "daddy, we’re not black, we’re BROWN, and DeepLiquid, she’s not white, she’s PEACH. I always thought her view was beautiful, she saw color as just one shade in her crayon box.
Yeah I don’t think it’s really a good thing to say. It’s self congratulating and dismissive.
To me it sounds very close to “all lives matter.” Claiming to not see color is a way to deny that people’s cultural struggles and history aren’t real or legitimate.
It’s like responding to “I am fat” with “no you aren’t” or “you are pretty.” Like…yes I am fat and I didn’t say I wasn’t pretty! My fatness is real, no need to sweep it under the rug.
Also, nobody is talking about face blindness or general aloofness when they say they “don’t see color” :-/
Yeah, what it’s supposed to be is hyperbole for saying that skin color/race doesn’t matter to you. But how it actually comes across in practice is that you have a very simplistic understanding of racial issues, and think merely ignoring race is enough to make racism go away.
You have to actually notice race to know if a particular race is being discriminated against. You can’t actually ignore it.
I saw an episode of Lee Mack’s “Duck Quacks Don’t Echo” where they did some empirical test of a difference between male and female behaviour. Audience is asked to rate the interestingness of the fact, and they ask some bloke who rated it low why he did so. “I don’t see gender” was his reply.
Several people have pointed out the main thing, which is that this is never a purely factual utterance, unless the person really is claiming to be entirely colorblind. From what I’ve read, even the people who are said to BE colorblind, aren’t ENTIRELY colorblind. To take it quite literally and entirely factually, to be entirely colorblind, would mean you were entirely BLIND. Black and white and shades of grey are colors, after all.
This is a very old phrase. It goes back as far as self-righteous pomposity does. These days, where I’ve witnessed it being used seriously, it was a manipulative maneuver. The person claiming to be so “wonderful” was intent on telling everyone else around them how to live and how to deal with each other, based on THEIR prejudices alone.
Someone above also pointed out that refusing to take all factual elements into account when you are dealing with someone, is NOT something to be proud of.
But mostly, when I see it used, it is by people who are clearly using self-righteousness to avoid personal responsibility for anything.
I view “I don’t see color” as the advanced, 2.0, twenty-first-century version of “I don’t care whether someone is pink, purple, or polka-dots.” That charmingly alliterative phrase has always set off mental alarm bells for me; I immediately suspect that the speaker is suppressing some ingrained racial prejudices.
Well, I don’t know. It was kind of a surprise to me when I learned that Halle Berry was black. Not that I cared. (I was whining about her ending up with Warren Beatty at the end of a movie. The person I was whining to said, “Oh, because she’s black?” No. Because she was young and gorgeous, and he was old. It just didn’t work for me.)
A friend and I once went off to see a movie, and when we got to our cars, she said she’d been a little freaked out that we were the only white people in the audience. I actually…hadn’t noticed. I don’t even know that she was right. There were some very old people in that theater, I noticed that. (The movie was Rabbit Proof Fence, if that has any bearing.) It wouldn’t have freaked me out anyway.
Hispanic being “race” in the sense of “culture” rather than “ancestry”, one can be Hispanic and Asian (cf. Alberto Fujimori), or Hispanic of Middle-Eastern ancestry (cf. Salma Hayek, Shakira), or Hispanic and Black, or Hispanic and a Jewish redhead (promise).
I’ve heard it for much longer than the past 10 years…
I think that the person who says it thinks:
Racism is bad, and I’m not a bad person
I don’t use racial slurs very often
I am polite to the Asian/Brown/Black family down the street
I have A Black/Brown/Asian Friend or I am at least open to the idea of having one
To use an imperfect analogy, it’s like someone saying he’s a Nice Guy.
When I hear it, I assume that the person who says it harbors a lot of racist beliefs, but is willing to get past them in my case … if I turn out to be “one of the good ones.” This will flip on an instant if I ever do anything that reminds them of the negative stereotypes they’ve bought into. They are usually pretty good at recognizing racism that involves church bombing - anything short of that (and sometimes even then), and they’ll twist themselves into insane knots to so as to not to possibly call the act racist, much less the culprit. They’re also saying that they have chosen to actively ignore a not-insignificant part of who I am - because it makes them more comfortable.
