Via Liz Henry @ Flickr.
Dear Harpies,
Recently a gentlemen contacted me through an online dating site. He was the first one after having my profile on there for three months (I have the word feminist in my profile). After a few back and forth emails, he wrote this in one of this emails:
I’m pretty color/looks blind with my friends. I remember a dinner at my old place in London where a friend was saying that most people are a bit racist or make choices based on race. He asked me if I had any black friends, and I said no, I couldn’t think of any. He took this as proof of his point, I don’t think of myself as racist, but I chose not to have black friends. Then my flatmate walked in and said hi – and I realized he was black. It just hadn’t been relevant in any way, I so hadn’t seen it. Of course, if asked, I could have described him, but I tend not to classify people.
He is white (non-American) and I am brown.
I find this statement problematic because it is a clear expression of white privilege when you can be “colour blind.” When I sent his e-mail to a white female friend of mine, she responded:
i do not see a problem in this statement. i think that the closer people are in your life, the less you classify them in superficial categories. you tend to think of them as they are as people. it may be a bit strange to forget about race, since it is such an obvious visual part of a person. it suggests that race has never been an issue — for good or bad. my advice to you would be: do not try to find problems where there may not be any. this statement will not tell you enough about that person to be able to be a judge of character about him. it would literally only lead to a judgmental opinion.
Now, I could throw the gentleman under the bus in a heartbeat. But what of my friend? We are friends as well as colleagues. She is important enough for me to want to take this event and make it a teachable moment. She always sees me as the emotional, illogical of the two and therefore I am reaching out. I want to explain to her that her statement and that of the dude above is condescending to me. All of my attempts to write a response are well over two pages, single spaced and very academic sounding – which may very well be the way to go.
I ask you and your readers to help me with my response. The job of writing a logical and calm response despite the pain and hurt I am feeling has been very difficult. I did pose this question in the Jezebel groupthink section and did get validation that there was reason this upset me. But I want to know how to address both of them and tell them they are wrong in a way that they will listen and possibly even understand.
Thank you.
BeckySharper: It’s highly suspect when anyone says “I don’t notice race!” I always think “You must be pretty fucking dumb, then.” This dude’s roommate was black and he “never noticed”? BISH PLZ. Delete those emails in good conscience. I think he may have been trying to impress you with how open-minded and “real” he is, but he’s clearly a self-congratulatory asshat who does.not.get.it.
SarahMC: Pretending to not see race allows the (white) person to continue believing that people of all races are treated equally and that racism is not a problem. And if there is a problem, they are not contributing to it and can do nothing to solve it. As I’m sure you know, one way they try to sweep racism under the rug is to say they don’t see race!
Claims of “color blindness” come from a place of privilege and defensiveness, and of course, they are bullshit. I think these people tend to be the type to think bringing attention to racism is itself racist, because bringing attention to racism brings attention to race. People of color don’t have the privilege to just “forget” they are oppressed, unfortunately.
PhDork: Nth-ing the “ditch the dude” suggestion. Now, your friend. Can you talk about this with her? Can she listen? Or maybe an email will work better? It *might* be easier on both of you if its less about Blindy McNoRace specifically, and more about helping her see this as a huge pattern of behavior that you–and a hell of a lot of other non-white people–deal with all the fucking time.
BeckySharper: I agree, and I think your friend is just ignorant, but probably not malicious, just clueless. It’s easy for her to dismiss your feelings because she will never have to have that conversation herself. It’s an empathy FAIL and I think you’re right to be upset. The whole “don’t go looking for problems where there aren’t any” is exceptionally clueless; the dude’s attitude towards race is obviously very important in this situation. To say you’re looking for problems is a classic example the usual lack of empathy white people have for issues that POC face. So yeah, I think you got hit by the privilege tidal wave, and I’m sorry about that. It’s definitely worth saying something to her—even if it’s just for the sake of not swallowing your anger.
PhDork: It’s not incumbent on you to school her, of course, but if you want her to pick up the clue-phone, maybe you could send her a brief email with some links about racial privilege and why this does matter, and why you’re not over-reacting.
SarahMC: You can express your feelings to her without making it about her, per se. For instance, you could write, “You know, I don’t think I’m going to continue talking to so-and-so. His email really turned me off. He thought it would impress me that he mentally erases black people’s racial identity and defaults everyone to “white” but I hear that “colorblindness” spiel all the time and it’s insulting. [Then whatever else you want to say that might make her light bulb go on].”
Adam Serwer is pretty great on this issue:
Colorblind rhetoric doesn’t actually seek to end racism; it seeks to end the means by which racism is exposed and dealt with, like medieval Europeans carrying around pockets full of flowers to mask the scent of the plague
PhDork: And this has some choice words (and links to other stories).
BeckySharper: If I can offer one woman’s white perspective here for just a second—entirely for the sake of explanation, not as an excuse—I’ll just say that it’s fairly easy for white people to fall into the “I don’t notice/see/care race” trap. We’ve mostly been brought up to believe that racism is bad, and we don’t want to be that bad racist person. We get that message loud and clear; which is why white people squeal when they’re accused of racism—they know it’s wrong to be racist even if they often don’t quite know what racism is or how they’re being racist. Problem is, some of us have no idea how to deal with that or to relate to people of color. So, as SarahMC said, we try not to be racist by sweeping racism under the rug. Can’t see it! No problem! I’m not racist so let’s be friends!
Unfortunately, this overcompensation/rug-sweeping can lead to boneheaded statements that were genuinely well-intentioned, but got mangled when filtered through ignorance/privilege/awkwardness of Whiteness. I see this all the time and it leads to some real head/desk-y moments. I’ve inadvertently done it, my friends have done it, my family has done it. So these conversations are always useful checks, because needless to say, racism ain’t going to change anytime soon.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by D Drapeau and Zoe Stavri, Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: Help Me Harpies!: Colorblindness Edition @ http://bit.ly/9SeDfl [...]
I think Becky’s last comment is right on the mark…and also think your friend is not completely wrong.
‘It suggests race has never been an issue – for good or bad’ sounds about right to me. It sounds like she’s saying that he probably never has had to think about race deeply. That’s the same impression I got from his email. Is that evidence of white privilege? Absolutely. But it doesn’t seem to be mean-spirited or arrogant to me, just a little clueless.
It sounds like up until this email, everything was gong well, so maybe you could try writing back to him and briefly tell him why he should re-think the idea of color-blindness. If he doesn’t get it/refuses to take it in, then of course you could still erase those emails.
This is tricky because I can understand the friend thinking that by not ‘seeing’ the other person’s race, you’re actually letting them be a human being as opposed to a human being with a melanin problem. Which is wrong because the idea that white people are the only real ‘people’ is what underpins the idea in the first place. It’s also disingenuous, because nobody really claims to not notice that friend A is a blonde while friend B is a redhead and friend C is a brunette, do they? They may never mention it, it makes no difference to them as human beings, but hair color is a detail that is pretty obvious and noticeable and there’s nothing wrong with noticing it. What is wrong is basing assumptions about each person’s character and background based on the color of their hair.
Maybe what your friend needs to understand is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong in noticing difference. Like I said above, it’s this idea that if you notice a person’s difference from white people you’re dehumanizing them that is pernicious because it has at its source the idea that only white people are people.
I think it would be premature to throw guy emailer under the bus based on the paragraph you cited. I have a hard time believing that he forgot his roommate was black, but maybe he’s light skinned or something. I also do not think he or your friend was being condescending.
I’m usually a lurker, but I need to speak up on this one. You mentioned the guy is non-American – so am I (I’m brown, not white). And it may be that he had the same true colorblindness that I had for the longest time. I only realized a colleague of mine was African-American eighteen months after working closely with her – she was light skinned, so I never noticed or cared. I didn’t know until after hearing many, many speeched of Barack Obama that he was half-black/half-white. Yes, this is an expression of privilege – not white privilege necessarily, but just the privilege of not having had to deal with everyday racism because I’m originally from a country where most people look like me. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to recognize race. That definitely makes me (and your letter-writing dude above) privileged and blind to our my privilege, but it doesn’t by and in itself make us prejudiced or bigoted.
I dunno, Chevalier–and hey, welcome!–when the dude said first that he He asked me if I had any black friends, and I said no, I couldn’t think of any. he’s saying one thing, but then later totally contradicts himself by saying that he Of course, if asked, I could have described [the black roommate], but I tend not to classify people.
So I don’t think this is a case where the roommate’s race wasn’t immediately apparent. It seems like the dude is trying to get bonus points for being so open-minded that he didn’t “see” it or “classify” his friend as black. I really wonder what the roommate would have said if he had read that. I generally get the feeling that people of color don’t like being told “Oh, I don’t think of you as black!” (or brown or whatever) by their white friends.
I think it might be worth it to tell the friend that one’s race is part of who one is as a person because it so affects our experience of the world and how people treat us. Maybe this will encourage the friend to examine her own experiences and start to see herself as having a race in a meaningful way?
Also I would ask the friend, totally apart from the colorblindness stuff, why she doesn’t think it’s a problem that this guy is able to say unashamedly that he chooses not to have black friends.
[...] August 4, 2010 · Leave a Comment Can you really say, “I don’t even notice race!” Pursuit of Harpyness wants to know. [...]
Whenever I’m actually on a dating site, my knee-jerk reaction is to toss people under the bus… but I think this actually reads more as a tone-deaf thing…why on earth would he tell this story given it’s weird combination of privilege and contradiction?
I would have to agree with your friend, though I can see why you’d want to continue the conversation with her.
I say get this guy off the internet, meet him in person and if he says something dumb/you don’t like him in the first 15 minutes call it a day.
I agree with baraqiel; that was the most problematic section of the guy’s response — why does he choose not to have black friends? Maybe he picked his words poorly, but to me, that signifies that he is *intentionally* deciding NOT to be friends with black people.
And I also second the statements people have made that the “I don’t think of you as black” mentality *shows* the person thinks of white as “default human”, which is problematic in and of itself.
As for your friend, maybe the links above will help, or something like this cartoon.
Friend is not innocent. That response (presumably emailed?) rubbed me every wrong way.
The closer people are in your life, the more you identify with the issues that are overwhelming in their lives, is my experience. And if we’re talking about emails at a date site, the ONLY thing that’s important is how the recipient feels about the persona presented in the contact emails. Therefore, there IS a problem because you feel there is one: she is not toying with entering a relationship with Site!Guy, YOU are, so you are totally not making a problem where none exists if you try to figure out how he may treat you from how he claims to react to an issue crucial to you. Geez, not rocket science, Friend.
I never did get a date of my preferred gender out of the site I tried, so I totally identify with the desire to see a possibility when someone finally seems interested after a long drought. But not only would I not respond further to some(white)one who is trying to get cookies from a brown person for being “colorblind” (Oh, Guy, are you so colorblind that you tell white women this?), but in your shoes I’d probably file Friend in my “okay to talk to as long as the subject does not personally matter” cabinet from now on.
You sound more forgiving than I do, but agh! No more advice from anyone who tells me my issue is not really important and my unease is “too judgemental”!
I don’t have a problem with him not “noticing” that his flatmate was black–I tend to agree with your friend that once you get close to someone, their automatic categorzation stops being “my black flatmate” and switches to “my flatmate who never does the damn dishes,” and it’s possible that upon being asked about his friends who aren’t white, his brain never went there.
But that’s pretty beside the point, because the fact that he told you this story at all makes me feel like he’s gonna have issues with dating a non-white person, and do you really need the aggravation of dating a white dude with repressed race anxiety?
Perhaps he isn’t aware of this, if he’s non-Amerrican, but if your friend is American then she should be aware that Stephen Colbert’s character is obsessed with being “colorblind.” I thought that was proof that we all recognize that being colorblind is definitively racist? maybe pointing this out to your friend would help with explaining why this mentaility is dangerous.
Actually while I think the guy’s email reeks of privilege I don’t think he’s saying that he chooses not to have black friends, if you reread the sentence he’s saying that his friend (the one who claimed everyone is a bit racist) took the fact that he didn’t have black friends as proof that he ‘chose’ not to. It’s not a very well structured sentence but that’s how I read it.
As to why I’m bringing that up – because while he’s clearly an idiot who thinks that by stressing his liberal ‘i see no colour’ credentials, I think if you wanted to then you could certainly email him back explaining why his statement was all kinds of awful.
ps I’m presuming he’s British – British people, and I am one, are notoriously clunky on subjects like this. It’s not an excuse just a statement of fact – people can be astonishingly insensitive – as an example I was once stunned by the left-wing liberal Guardian newspaper’s commentators responses to the closing of The Voice, the UK’s biggest black interest newspaper. Unanimously they were all of the lines of ‘why should black people have their own newspaper’, ‘it’s ridiculous to have a black interest paper’ etc etc. Yes, seriously and this was only last year.
My country we have a lot of work to do with race relations.
I am going to admit something here – as a middle class white girl, for a long time I thought that saying I was “colorblind” was the correct etiquette in matters of race. I have since learned, from listening to conversations like this one, why it is condescending and hurtful. But it may very well be that your female friend just doesn’t get it, and has never had the chance to have this conversation. I finally had it explained to me as “Look, if you say that my color doesn’t matter, then you’re implying that there’s something wrong with my race but that you’re magnanimous enough to overlook it. That’s offensive.” After that, I totally got it.
I don’t know the age or background of your friend, but if she grew up in a climate where race just wasn’t discussed much, and certainly not in academic terms, she may just think that claiming “not to see color” is the socially approved progressive thing to do. If I were your friend, I would appreciate an explanation of why that attitude is dismissive and problematic, and would probably change my tune after reflecting on it for a while.
flackette is right, of course, and I think it would be useful to include her friend’s explanation of why it’s hurtful when people say they don’t see color.
@Cimorene: The pic I was going to use with this post was Stephen Colbert’s infamous picture of him with his black friend, but then PhDork found the racist bingo, which is even better. And yeah, Colbert’s right-wing buffoon character is always going on about how he “doesn’t see color.” Which…if Colbert in character is doing it, no one else should be.
I really hope I can put this well – and honestly.
I’ve never claimed not to see color – I’m very much a visual person. I once did claim it didn’t matter to me – but that was based on a very pollyanna, limited experience of the world and how it viewed ME. While color doesn’t mean I treat my friends or acquaintences any differently I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice it. Now combine color/race with bad behavior of any kind and there’s often a visceral response that I take no pride in.
I hope that response would be there regardless of race, and I just dislike assholes, but I’m not guaranteeing that life hasn’t made me zenophobic in some small way.
I take comfort in being suspicious of all MEN’s motives. I blame life for that too.
Another thought – I don’t know where this man comes from, but if it is a place where racial relations are less tense than they are in the US (and let’s face it, they are much more tense in the US than many other places), maybe his cluelessness really does come from a kind of innocence.
I remember when I actually WAS colorblind – when I was very young and very innocent. My teachers at pre-school were black as were a lot of the other kids there, and I never gave it more of a thought than I did blondeness, red hair, etc. The first time I became aware of race was when I told my mother I wanted lots of little ponytails like a black girl at school had and she told me that wouldn’t work on my hair like it would on a black person’s hair. That was the first time I realized that the dark-skinned people at school were ‘black’ – and I rather wished to be black at that point really, I thought that girl’s hair-ties were so beautiful and thought it most unfair that I couldn’t have them.
As I grew older I did become aware of racial issues – but not everyone does, a lot of people who aren’t exposed to racism just don’t stop to think about these things. Maybe your dude really has lived in a kind of cocoon where he’s never had any reason to give it much thought?
I normally just lurk on here, but just wanted to add my sympathies.
The dating site guy and your friend are definitely wrong, however well intentioned they are. I’m not saying they’re on the level of klan members or whatever, but they’re showing their privilege when they talk about colourblindness. They are basically showing how rarely they think about racism, something people on the recieving end of racism don’t have the luxury of.
I think you could email them the links the Harpies gave and maybe even introduce them to the anti-racist blogosphere in general? There are tons of great blogs out there that talk about race. Also, it shows that you’re not alone in your views and that you’re not being irrational.
Obviously it’s not your responsibility to teach them, but I think using other writersto back up your point is the way to go. Good Luck! xxx
I’m a white woman dating a black woman. So far all of the social attention has been on our respective genders. But I know that race will become an issue to someone somewhere, sooner or later. And I know I’ll probably say or do something which capitalizes on my white privilege at least once. I sincerely hope she has the patience to tell me what I’ve done wrong and how to do it better when that time comes. So yeah, toss that internet schmuck under the bus; but if your friendship has value to you, consider speaking your mind.
I realise I may not be staying on topic, but advice asker, if the tone of his email is problematic to you – go with your gut. You don’t need to school him on why his privilege oozes ickily all over that email, or even reply.
[As an aside, I hope you meet someone/s from that site that you click with and is instead is/are respectful.]
Your friend, on the other hand, what kind of friendship would you like with her? She may need some schooling on issues of how colour-blindness renders everything quite bland and beige, and by default seen with “whiteness” eyes, rather than the full spectrum of peoples that she is friends with.
Coz afterall, our outside appearance does affect how we are treated (for good and for ill) and that treatment does shape (for good and for ill) who we are as an individual person.
It makes me think of this
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=478
Kate, that’s awesome. Perfectly captures how I feel!
@Kate and Becky – the comic is great, and ditto the sentiment it encapsulates.
I don’t know how to react to the emails. All I know is that I didn’t realize that my best friend was native when I was a kid, and that is definitely affecting my reaction. Why didn’t I know? It may have been because she was adopted into a white household (all of their children but one were adopted, don’t know if that makes a difference); it may have been because she didn’t fit any of the native stereotypes I had been taught. I just know that i didn’t know but don’t know what that means in the context of “color blindness = FAIL”. (Now that? Convoluted sentence of the year!)
@wondering: Well, race is not always immediately apparent, so you shouldn’t feel bad about not knowing your friend’s race, especially as you were a kid at the time—since so much of race is social construct, kids take a while to absorb all those messages and apply them.
That’s a totally separate issue from what the letter-writer’s dealing with. She’s got a dude who knows damn well that his roommate’s black but says he never noticed, which is a kind of privileged posturing that’s meant to impress her into thinking he’s an open-minded Nice Guy (TM).
The biggest issue is: why is he talking about this? Is he using this story to brag and impress? If so, ditch him, not because he dances around racism, but because he’s an self-congratulatory idiot. Course, if something prompted him to address why and how he’s open minded, that’s another story. In that it makes him just an idiot.
Yes, you can be friends with people for so long that you forget using their skin color as the first way to describe them. So you don’t think of him/her as your “black friend.” Which, again, is a whole other can of issues. Yeah, so many things one could analyse here, but the most important is that he simply sounds like an idiot. But I guess most people do on dating sites.
Oh this topic has been one that has been bouncing around several of my college courses right now. I normally just read you guys, but I though I would write this time!
On the one hand, I was raised to believe that all people should be treated as humans and therefore equal. I do not view this as a privilege, I was still exposed to racism and sexism. I view this as a wonderful mindset to be raised with. It has made me more open to seeing racism and sexism in front of me and given me an arsenal to be anti racist and fight discrimination when I can. I have adjusted my thinking to include, when I get to know someone, that their race, sex, ethnicity, sexuality(etc) might mean something to them personally. I have run into however more and more this idea that because I am white; I have no culture, no racial identity; no ethnicity and when I do treat people the way I believe is correct, I am insensitive and “don’t get it”. I suppose my internal question is- As a white person it seems that I am either a racist or wrapped in blinding white privilege. How do I escape those ideas or are we just not there as a culture that is still dealing with an inherently racism system?