Color Blindness is a more contemporary form of ahistorical racism that is epitomized by the phrase, "I do not see color." In essence the term refers to one who places racism squarely in the past.
Whiteness is a vague racial-socio-economic category that has shifted definition over time. In the early-mid 20th century the category of whiteness was expanded to include people of Irish, Slavic, Greek, Jewish, and various other backgrounds which had previously been excluded from the category. This shift has been attributed to individuals within these categories attaining middle class status.Brodkin, Karen. 1999. “How Jews Became White Folks.” In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 25-52. This gives whiteness an economic aspect in addition to the ethnic and racial aspects.
Backlash is a term used to describe the phenomenon of resistance to, or counter-movements against, movements of equality. Backlash can come in many different forms such as overt, bigoted, and violent resistance to progress, such as the K.K.K, or institutional regression such as mass incarceration as backlash to the movement towards racial equality in the 1960s. Color blindness is deployed as backlash to modern racial equality moments by claiming that race and racism no longer have a role in modern socio-economic inequality.
Color Blindness, Whiteness, and the Creation of Backlash-Kensie The modern day conception of race is surprisingly not much different than it was at the time of colonialism; many still perceive race as biological, and contribute human differences to this myth. In the discussion of what is meant by racial groups, “the consensus among most scholars in fields such as evolutionary biology, anthropology, and other disciplines is that racial distinctions fail on all three counts—that is, they are not genetically discrete, are not reliably measured, and are not scientifically meaningful”.Smedley A, Smedley B. 2005. Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real: anthropological and historical perspectives on the social construction of race. American Psychologist 60(1): 16-26. While science has failed to reveal what defines racial groups, anthropology and history have offered meaningful insight in the discussion of race. This already reveals the subjective nature of race, and alludes to the problematic consequences that always arise with subjectivity. Race can better be understood by looking at the social and historical context that allowed for its construction.
Renato Rosaldo and Cultural Invisibility
While “no domain of life is more or less cultural than any other,” humans have become accustomed to differentiating their own culture from others.Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Border Crossings.” In Culture and Truth. Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 196-217. Renato Rosaldo explains the all too common narrative of cultural invisibility, or how we tend to see ourselves as the norm and therefore, render our unique culture invisible. Naturally, this emphasizes the culture of others and unfortunately, creates this idea that they themselves are in fact the “other.” One begins to feel like a detached observer, making it far too easy to develop a superiority complex for themselves and their culture. While this ethnocentric perspective arose centuries ago with the rise of eurocentrism, it still persists today. Rosaldo argues that “in the pseudo revolutionary ladder, people begin without culture and grow increasingly cultured until they reach that point where they become post cultural and therefore transparent to ‘us’”.Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Border Crossings.” In Culture and Truth. Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 196-217. This ladder is unchanging and is linked to “tactic notions of social mobility”.Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Border Crossings.” In Culture and Truth. Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 196-217. It has created and reproduced a linear hierarchy throughout history that persists today, whether it is intentional or unintentional, realized or not realized.
Pamela Perry and Ethnicity Pamela Perry analyzes the narrative that we are all equally cultural, yet whites are understood as “cultureless.” To better understand this notion, she went to two high schools in California; one being predominantly white and the other being racially diverse. She questioned one white, middle class girl from the predominantly white school on what white American culture looks like, for the student to answer: “I wouldn't be able to tell you. I don't know”.Perry, Pamela. 2001. “White Means Never Having to Say You're Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 30(1): 56-91. While the white students at each school existed in different environments in terms of diversity, they all “defined white as cultureless”.Perry, Pamela. 2001. “White Means Never Having to Say You're Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 30(1): 56-91. Perry discovered that these students were able to come to the same consensus due to two processes. Those who go to the predominantly white school “define themselves and other whites as people without culture due to the process of naturalization—the embedding of historically constituted cultural practices in that which is taken for granted and seems ‘normal’ and natural.” This same attitude was achieved at the racially diverse school “through the process of rationalization—the embedding of whiteness within a Western rational epistemology and value paradigm that marginalizes or subordinates all things ‘cultural’”.Perry, Pamela. 2001. “White Means Never Having to Say You're Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 30(1): 56-91. While some see white as normative due to a historical sense of privilege, and others see white as normative by marginalizing the “other,” both perspectives have proven to be quite damaging to our society as they play into the power hierarchy.
White Universality This construction of whiteness deems white as the universal human and everyone else as the ethnic other. This notion of cultural invisibility has not only constructed the framework of white as the invisible, but it has also allowed for the privilege that comes with it to be rendered invisible as well. When white privilege is taken for granted, a white person can ignore the power imbalances that exist all around them. A white person does not have to worry about being pulled over and interrogated by a cop while a black person might fear for their life the second that the red and blue lights turn on. It is dangerous for race to be unmarked like it is in the case of whiteness. It allows society to ignore the power imbalances that revolve around the social construction of whiteness, and ignore our history of white domination. Perry argues that “to more effectively dismantle white domination, we need to be aware of and ready to work with its different manifestations and internal contradictions”.Perry, Pamela. 2001. “White Means Never Having to Say You're Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 30(1): 56-91. We must no longer deny the fact that there is a white culture because this “post cultural or even anticultural” viewpoint allows for the existence of the idea that white people are beyond and more rational than their peers.Perry, Pamela. 2001. “White Means Never Having to Say You're Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 30(1): 56-91. This social construction situates white people in a category by themselves at the top of the social hierarchy. It is a privilege for a white person to be able to be color blind, but it is this privilege that creates disadvantages for others.
Whiteness, Colorblindness, Slavery, and History-Eli As outlined above, the category of whiteness is somewhat arbitrary. In Matthew Frye Jacobson's The Fabrication of Race, the example of how in contemporary America a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children,Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1998. “Introduction: The Fabrication of Race.” In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press, pp. 1-14. is illustrative of how whiteness is a category more vaguely defined by exclusion rather than an academically useful taxonomy.
Colonialism is the practice of one nation or state exhibiting control, either militarily or economically, over another area or group of people.
White Ethnicity Because whiteness is vaguely defined, often times whites in America will pick up other ethnic labels they have genetic, not necessarily cultural ties to, in order to "play the white ethnic card."Gallagher, Charles A. 2003. Playing the White Ethnic Card: Using Ethnic Identity to Deny Contemporary Racism, in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism. ed. by Ashley Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. NY: Routledge Press, pp.145-158. This is often combined with colorblind rhetoric in order to argue that racism existed squarely in the past and claim that every ethnicity has had hardship in the past, so therefore there should not be any more movement towards racial equality.
Slavery in the United States The colorblind view is flawed because of the history, of slavery and racial discrimination in the United States. The concept of race evolved alongside the institution of slavery, causing the two to be intrinsically linked as racism became the ideological justification for slavery.Johnson, Walter. 2001. "Marking Bodies, Marking Race." Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University Press, pp. 135-161. The ideology of racism put in place to justify slavery put whites at the top and blacks at the bottom of a biological hierarchy. This normalized the institution of slavery by framing the economic exploitation of black bodies as natural and, ultimately, good for blacks.
Historical Oppression In Audrey Smedley's Race in North America the author quotes John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss who outline black labor in the earliest points in American colonial history."Thirty Negros, including Nuflo de Olano, were with Balboa when he discovered the Pacific Ocean, Cortes carried blacks with him into Mexico, and one of them planted and harvested the first wheat crop in the New World. Tow accompanied Velas in 1520. When Alvardo when to Quito, he carried tow hundred with him. They were with Pizarro on his Peruvian expedition and carried him to the Cathedral after he was murdered. The Africans in the expeditions of Almagro and Valdivia saved their Spanish masters from the Indians in 1525.
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Africans were with the French in their explorations of the New World... When the Great conquest of the Mississippi Valley was undertaken by the French in the seventeenth century, Negroes constituted a substantial portion of the pioneers who settled in the region. Around 1790, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a French-speaking black, erected the first building in a place that came to be known as Chicago.Franklin, John Hope and Moss, Alfred in Smedley, Audrey. Chapter 5: “The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery.” Race in North America. pp. 93-111.The contributions of Black and Brown individuals and just how much the United States Colonial Project relied on slave labor is not something covered in high school history courses, and efforts to add such information, such as the New York Times' 1619 Project, often receive backlash in the form of colorblindness. Colorblindness is deployed to claim that adding such information into the curriculum would disrupt racial harmony.
A-Cultural Culture, Whiteness, and Colonialism-Natalie