If you can’t see skin color without making assumptions, the answer is to stop making assumptions, not to stop seeing skin color.
As a non-USA citizen, I was not familiar with the phrase “I don’t see color” and its usage. At first sight it seemed to me quite innocuous but after reading the posts I realized it may sound at least condescending when uttered by someone who’s racially privileged.
That’s a failure of imagination on your part.
not a bad person eh? but certainly one you are happy to pin the label “racist” to without necessarily having any evidence for that. It stinks of “original sin”, something else I don’t sign up to.
For any given individual, of course it is and if you have enough individuals able to say they are not racist and they will fight against racism then you have a better society.
I cannot see why you have a such an aversion in allowing decent, non-racist people to assert that fact. Is their behaviour not a good example? Surely trumpeting the fact that non-racist people exist provides a example of progress?
No, like “atheist” it is pretty much a non-label, one I don’t need to assert until such time as someone else (you in this case) are trying to label me as a racist. I’ll then tell you (I don’t need your approval) that no, I’m not a racist.
You think that “racist” is a suitable status for an individual but that the reverse has no meaning?
Then you are playing a meaningless word game and anything I say is pointless. You are tying yourself up in semantic and logical knots in order to avoid allowing for the possibility that someone can truly not be a racist.
Do you apply the same logic to the terms “not-criminal, not-homophobic, not-religious, not-misogynistic” etc? Are those also statuses that have no meaning?
Which is true to a greater or lesser extent of certain societies but does not damn all that live within it to be properly labelled as “racist” It demeans those who are not racist and cheapens to term to the point of irrelevance.
Look at your first paragraph. It seems you think that a group average tells us accurate information about an individual that belongs to that group . Don’t you see how that could be problematic?
I think he is asserting that everybody is racist, no matter what group they belong to. Black and white teachers alike treat black students more harshly, black and white cops alike see black people as more threatening, etc. Thus blacks and whites are alike racist.
Can you explain how babies have grown up in a racist society?
Regards,
Shodan
It is totally stupid to say you don’t see color when its so obvious.
At work I’m often the only white guy on my tour. I know it. They know it. Sometimes we joke about it.
All the other arguments to the side (not that they should be put to the side but just for the sake of this point) saying “I try to see each person as an individual, regardless of color” suggests that the speaker is humble and acknowledges the possibility of their own fallibility; “I don’t see color” sounds like an arrogant asshole patting themselves on the back.
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In light of current events I am absolutely gobsmacked by that comment.
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I’m too lazy to look it up right this second but I believe all of the above is borne out by scientific study. In the US, blacks and whites (and others) all absorb the prevalent anti-black bias. In order to be “race-neutral” you would have to be constantly checking yourself to correct that bias.
The point about the babies is that human beings seem to have an instinctive bias towards people who look like themselves. Seems like a reasonable adaptation for our distant ancestors to have had. In modern US, as babies grow and absorb the dominant social messaging, that bias is channeled towards white people and against black people.
Think about this: close your eyes and picture an “average person”.
Most Americans will be picturing a white man. Whenever a movie or tv show wants to portray an “average Joe” it’s going to be a white man. But statistically speaking, we should all be picturing a dark skinned woman.
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I’d still like to see a cite for it’s use pre-colbert, and non-ironically.
I would be interested in the basis for this claim.
I disagree. I’ve got 99 problems, but race isn’t one. I do honesty try my best to hate them all equally.
It’s a fine line when a poster characterizes themselves in a specific derogatory way and someone else simply repeats the same characterization in response, but this goes too far. This is a warning for personal insults. If you feel you must, the BBQ Pit is right around the corner.
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Why? It’s not like a random person is exposed to the whole world and then averages the results.
Of course there are plenty of schools named after Confederate figures, they are from a time when Confederates were revered. Now schools are not named after confederates, they are routinely named after black people and civil rights figures. If I gave you $10 for every school named after a confederate in the last 20 years and you gave me $1 for every school named after a black person who would end up with the most money. Me, and it would not be close. That is because society has changed, your failure to acknowledge the obvious discredits your case.
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If no one can be not racist, then it must mean everyone is racist. That is just simple logic.
If MLK was a racist and so was George Wallace then the word no longer has any meaning.
Since you are too lazy to look up the science I will share it with you.Black teenagers have higher self esteem than those of other races. Black women are more likely to describe themselves as confident, successful, and beautiful.
Black men have higher self esteem than other races. The idea that society is sending a message that blacks are bad and that blacks are absorbing it is totally false.
If you mean the average American then the average person would be a white woman, if the average person in the world it would be an asian woman.
It’s tough to do detailed research and citations on my phone at work. But I would direct you to the Wikipedia page on implicit stereotypes ( Implicit stereotype - Wikipedia ) for a pretty decent grounding in what folks in this thread are talking about.
As to my comment about picturing a dark skinned woman, I think I was conflating a number of things in my head. Including:
A Nat Geo article with an image of what an “average American” will look like in 2050
The fact that the US sex ratio is very slightly tilted to women (globally it goes the other way though)
A claim that the modal human is now a Han Chinese man
The intuitive sense that about half of humanity is Asian and another seventh or so African and therefore “whites” even broadly defined can’t be more than a third and even within that group, the average skin tone probably is darker than most Hollywood leading men
Even in the US “whites” are only 60% of the population, so the “average” is likely to be darker than white
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Admittedly not super scientific but I just did a quick scan of the first fifty results when I did a google image search for “movie poster”. I looked for the focus of the image even if there were multiple people or items shown. Here’s my breakdown:
White men: 48%
White women: 24%
Black men: 2%
Black women: 0%
Other (human): 0%
Other (non human): 16%
There appeared to be more movies starring cars than black people.
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If no one can be not racist, then it must mean everyone is racist. That is just simple logic.
If MLK was a racist and so was George Wallace then the word no longer has any meaning.
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Of course it does. Everyone is, to some degree or another, unhealthy or unhappy or deceptive (or healthy or happy or honest), but that doesn’t mean that the words don’t have meaning, that we can’t meaningfully discuss to what degree these things are true for ourselves and other individuals, or strive to adjust our own behavior to grow/mitigate these characteristics.