A different kind of blindness towards color

I loved the quotation that Skeff placed front-and-center in her blog, so I figured I'd write my post as a response to it: "This is not a race issue. This is a commitment to education issue."

I remember hearing part of this podcast live, and then rushing to listen to the whole thing. What I didn't remember was that apparently it aired in July 2015, which means I would have heard this blog after my first summer teaching at a low-income, highly segregated public school in Philadelphia and just before my first full year teaching at low-income, highly segregated public school in Rhode Island. The angry shouts of white parents, echoes of what I had hoped we'd left behind decades ago ringing loud and clear through twenty-first century sound recording technology, chilled me to the bone and cast a pale of jaded fear over my hopes for doing anything meaningful within such a segregated school that first year. They're no less visceral today.

Skeff is right to draw the parallel between the seeming color-blindness of the mother that Nikole Hannah Jones quotes in the This American Life piece, "The Problem We All Live With," and Trump's claim that his objection to the NFL protest had "nothing to do" with race. It is, however, a different kind of color-blindness. Skeff points out that there were cheering crowds in both situations: first the angry cheers of parents not wanting to integrate schools, and then the joyful cheers of Trump supporters agreeing that race had nothing to do with it. This keeps coming up as a theme in our course: Johnson said we're so fearful to even discuss race that we avoid talking about it, "like a married couple where one's been unfaithful and both know it but collude in silence to keep the thing going" (p 8). Delpit argued, "We must learn to be vulnerable enough to allow our world to turn upside down in order to allow the realities of others to edge themselves into our consciousness" (p 47). And Armstrong and Wildman brought the argument home by proposing "color insight" (p 67) as a means to combat the color-blind aesthetic that silences conversations on race before they even begin. That quotation in the Jones podcast - that it's "not a race issue" - fits the mold.

Skeff helped me crystallize my thoughts on Jones. Jones plays with color blindness in two ways. First, she's being brilliantly - excruciatingly - strategic with how she presents her argument. She doesn't come in, guns blazing as a leftist, angry, feminist, Communist, tear-the-whole-system down kind of radical. She's probably aware that the ways she doesn't fit the SCWAAMP mold will, in the eyes of some people SCWAAMPier than she, undermine the legitimacy of her arguments just because of who she is. So she's careful to make an argument that stands on its own, even to people who see through a colorblind lens. You think race isn't an issue? No problem! You can still get on the side of integration, in the name of educational quality. That's how she opens and closes the interview.

And second, embedded in her line of reasoning there is actually a very robust examination of 352 years of indisputably racialized history. She's acutely aware of all the issues that are about race, which led to the problem we all live with. Still, she returns to a philosophical ideal of egalitarianism that runs on a deeper plane than any particular historical fact. She argues that we need to fix racial problems because at the end of the day, morally speaking, it doesn't matter whether you're brown, black, blue, or yellow. Jones reminds us that we would like to live in a world where color didn't determine all that it does - but we need to grapple deeply with all the ways that race does alter life trajectories if we're going to ever get closer to it.