When I See You, I Don’t See COLOR!”

This morning as I was reading, I came across a quote from the book, The Minority Experience by Adrian Pei that I thought connected well with some race-related conversations that I have again been hearing on the theme of “colorblindness.” Pie says the following:

When we tell a minority “I don’t see your color,” what they hear is “I don’t want to hear about good parts of who you are . . . and I don’t want to walk with you in the pain of what you have experienced.”

I appreciate what Pei is saying. And while I cannot (and dare not) try to speak for all African Americans, I am listening to many people’s stories as I mentally read from my own, as yet, unwritten and unfinished life book, The Life Experiences of Bob (non-fiction). When a person says to me, dear reader, “I don’t see your color,” it comes across to me in the following way:

You are not like the other African Americans…you are the exception. This statement has negative connotations towards all other African Americans, as in: there is something ‘wrong with them,’ something “less than” about them and it disregards how the larger society so often views and regards African American people, including me, in this country. It denies my own personal reality and the realities of most others who look like me. The world I live in is a world that clearly says: “From the first moment I see you, the first thing I see about you is…your color and I will make judgments about you…your worth…your abilities…your character…your ethics…your intentions. I will make my first impression of you based primarily, if not solely on the color of your skin. As a Christian, African American man, who is a trained professional social worker, a retired university professor, a public speaker, a trainer and a member of a national nonprofit board of directors, my observations, conversations with other African Americans and my personal experience has been that those initial value judgments based on color…are 
usually negative value judgments.

When a person says to me: “Dr. Hewitt, (or Bob) “When I see you, I don’t see color!”  I think… “How can you not see color when you see me?!?” This often well intended, simple, albeit short-sighted, statement then opens the door for a twisted, false narrative that is developing in our country that says this America (a country that I love by the way) is not inherently racist. It promulgates a falsehood that every person regardless of race, ethnicity, blah, blah, blah… is viewed and accepted as equal to all others and has an equitable opportunity to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  This soon leads to the next step which is, let’s do away with all this training propaganda about cleaning up racism in this country because it doesn’t exist and these kinds of diversity propaganda trainings are anti-American and should be stopped. And if there is any such thing going on in this country it would go away if we would just stop bringing these kinds of topics to the table.

So, after reading this, I hope that if nothing else, the next time you hear or are tempted to say to someone,“When I see you I don’t see your color,” you’ll stop and consider what you might be conveying to the man or woman who is standing before you and then ponder what you’re really hoping to say to them and take the time to convey those thoughts instead.