On page 63, Hartigan says, “At the same time, in a contrary gesture, the inherent instability and even arbitrariness of racial classification could as well lead to the opposite conclusion: that we should entirely ignore race altogether, adopting something like the “color-blind” approach discussed in Chapter 1.” My question is, is it even possible to “entirely ignore race altogether”? And if so, isn’t this different from the colorblind approach?
I was kind of confused when Hartigan mentioned this, because I don't think it's possible for us to ignore race altogether - at least within Western culture. The way we see race is so ingrained in us that it takes place even at an unconscious level. I think the only way to "ignore" race would be not to see it at all - that is, we would have had to have been raised in a culture that doesn't see racial categories... at least the way we define them.
He says this would be adopting something like the color-blind approach mentioned in chapter 1, but I disagree with that mentality. I think ignoring race and color-blind racism are two different things - at least how I understood it. Ignoring race would actually be ignoring it - NOT seeing it, not paying attention to it, not even realizing it. Color-blind racism, on the other hand, is knowing that it's there but not actively applying it to our world consciously... like Hartigan said, whites disagree there are real racial disparities, but the categories and classifications that reinforce these categories is still there. I guess the way I viewed it is 2 separate ways.. one would be not seeing race at all/completely ignoring it, whereas color-blind racism is claiming not to believe in it, but it is still obviously there. I don't even believe the former is an option in our culture, because of how instilled in us racial categories really are.
Am I interpreting Hartigan wrong or did you interpret it in a different way? Rather, what's your opinion on this matter - you don't even need to reference Hartigan. What do YOU think?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think we would be able to ignore race to an extent if we were in a place where race didn't factor so much into daily interactions, politics, etc. A place like Brazil, for instance. But in our Western society, if we were able to ignore race entirely, we probably wouldn't have organizations like the KKK and people who commit heinous hate crimes against others.
ReplyDeleteI actually remember having a similar conversation my senior year of high school in my English composition class. We were discussing an article of some sort and our teacher asked the class if there was such a thing as not being able to see race? We thought about it for a while and she shared a story with us about her son when he was younger. She told us that they lived in a predominantly white neighborhood. One day, her son (who was 5 at the time) went over to play with a few of his friends and there was a new family on the block. When my teacher went to pick up her son, he was eager to tell her about his new friend (who was Chinese). Instead of describing him in racial terms, however, her son told her that it's the boy "in the blue shirt".
So maybe there is a possibility for people to ignore race, but as we grow up in a society that continues to put an emphasis on racial relations, I don't think we'll ever be able to simply ignore race all-together. And I'm not sure it's what we should do in the first place.