Social Justice Usage
Source: DiAngelo, Robin J. White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018, pp. 41–42.
Consider color-blind ideology from the perspective of a person of color. An example I often share occurred when I was co-leading a workshop with an African American man. A white participant said to him, “I don’t see race; I don’t see you as black.” My co-trainer’s response was, “Then how will you see racism?” He then explained to her that he was black, he was confident that she could see this, and that his race meant that he had a very different experience in life than she did. If she were ever going to understand or challenge racism, she would need to acknowledge this difference. Pretending that she did not notice that he was black was not helpful to him in any way, as it denied his reality—indeed, it refused his reality—and kept hers insular and unchallenged. This pretense that she did not notice his race assumed that he was “just like her,” and in so doing, she projected her reality onto him. For example, I feel welcome at work so you must too; I have never felt that my race mattered, so you must feel that yours doesn’t either. But of course, we do see the race of other people, and race holds deep social meaning for us.
New Discourses Commentary
One of the primary reasons that Social Justice advocates are afraid of allowing a (liberal) colorblind approach to race and racism—which is likely to work very well in practice—is because they assume that colorblindness (not seeing race, meaning not placing social significance in socially constructed racial categories) makes it impossible to see racism when it occurs.
This is, of course, absurd, but it follows from the understanding that racism is ultimately a systemic problem that requires putting social significance in race in order to understand and address the problem (see also, identity-first, critical consciousness, critical race Theory, intersectionality, and wokeness). In particular, one is to be aware of the oppression that comes along with race and the ways in which whiteness acts to create, maintain, enforce, justify, and perpetuate that oppression and its own dominance (see also, white, internalized dominance, and white supremacy). Social Justice expects people to see the relevance of racial (and other identity) categories in all things so that it can apply critical methods to the alleged systems of power that it believes operate, more or less permanently (see also, new racism), along lines of identity (see also, critical theory and identity politics).
Related Terms
Colorblind; Critical; Critical consciousness; Critical race Theory; Critical theory; Dominance; Identity; Identity-first; Identity politics; Internalized dominance; Oppression; Race; Racism (systemic); Social construction; Social Justice; Systemic power; White; White supremacy; Whiteness; Woke/Wokeness
Additional Examples
Source: Thompson, A. “Colortalk: Whiteness and Off White.” Educational Studies, 30(2), 1999: 141–160, p. 143.
Certainly there is some warrant for this equation of colorblindness with non-racism; in many everyday encounters with white people-in the grocery checkout lane, for instance, or when driving a car—people of color would indeed prefer not to be treated differently because of their skin color. But colorblindness is not always non-racist. In a multicultural and racist society, whites’ refusal to acknowledge color will sometimes mean refusing to recognize the obstacles facing people of color or to see that, depending on the context, different ethnic and racial groups may have distinct needs and interests.
Revision date: 1/31/20
3 comments
De Angelo’s claim that color-blindness denies the reality of a black person must be conflating blackness with something in NEED of recognition, and that only makes sense if she equates blackness with underprivilege. Leaving asside the development of that conflation in light of slavery, and its present day falseness, the ONLY identity group that might be denied reality, indeed refused reality, in her world, are underprivileged whites! The concept of ‘white privilege’ doesn’t accidentally neglect but positively denies the existence of underprivileged whites. This inclines me to see White Fragility as an epitomy of an elitist whites’ need to scapegoat their own guilt, for it is only their ancestory that ever had slaves, including white slaves, as during the early days of Australia.
“racism” must die. The use of that word, I mean. It gets deployed as a fork-weapon by the Woke. We must destroy it. I always challenge: “cite specific bigotry, fine, but you have destroyed “racism.”I
** “racism is ultimately a systemic problem that requires putting social significance in race in order to understand and address the problem” **
Or for that matter, in order for the problem of Racism to even exist in the first place
Is it possible that the otherwise intelligent architects of CRT don’t understand this obvious flaw in the “Theory”?
I think not
Especially given that this ideal, the color blind society, shared in Dr MLK Jr’s “I have a dream” speech, inspired the civil rights movement and its millions of every skin color to profoundly change a nation to ensure that Dr King’s dream of a day when
“his children would be judged by the quality of their character not the color of their skin”
would no longer be just a dream, it would be reality
Dr King would’ve never imagined the election of a black man as US president within his natural lifetime. How joyful he’d have been
How profoundly saddened he’d be to witness this thing antithetical to his dream, CRT
James