I DO see color.

August 18

Curt and I are headed to Iowa today to visit with anti-racist activist Jane Elliott.  I have been re-watching the videos that I saw in college about her brown-eye/blue-eye experiment. There is so much there to think about and to comment on, and I cannot write about them all in one post, so I am going to limit myself to two comments. First, after I watched one video with Solana, she commented at how often she hears white people say, "I don't see color." I cannot remember the last time I heard someone say that, so I was surprised. Solana has not said it herself because she does not feel that way, but she said she was never able to explain why the comment sounded wrong. This morning, we were discussing this and then trying to explain it to Frances, who is 10. I asked Frances what it would feel like if I said I don't see her as a girl. We all laughed. It is so ridiculous. And we all agreed, we like being girls and we value this part of our identity. It is just as ridiculous to say one doesn't see race. That basically says that I don't value or want to hear about that person's experience as a person of that race. If I say to Frances that I don't see her as Korean-American, I am saying that I don't see any need to discuss her experience as a Korean-American. I am dismissing a vital part of her existence. If someone says that they don't see me as white, well, I guess then I wonder what they do see. Why are we afraid to say that we see someone's race? A person saying he/she doesn't see race implies that seeing race is a bad thing, and somehow absolves that person of being seen as racist. So then we have to ask, what does racism look like? Is it simply seeing race or not seeing race?

The other part that struck a chord from one of Elliott's videos was a moment when she was doing the experiment with prison employees and picking on a white man (with blue eyes) who was being uncooperative. Something about the way she kept saying, "You," brought me back to my St. Winifred's classroom in Barbados. A black girl, whose name I cannot recall, was standing up in the back corner with the teacher yelling at her about how she was wasting everyone's time, not listening, not following her instructions, etc. "You. . . .you. . . you. . . you. . . "  She was shaming this girl, and the rest of the class sat in silence. I watched other girls of color go through this same shaming experience over and over during my year there. I never experienced it as anything other than a witness. I was called out for pushing the rules, but I was never called "stupid" or made to feel less than. I knew it was because I was white.