Margalynne J. Armstrong and Stephanie M. Wildman, “Colorblindness is the New Racism”

Margalynne J. Armstrong and Stephanie M. Wildman, “Colorblindness is the New Racism”

Armstrong and Wildman have many arguments. The argument I want to address in this post is their argument if so many educators continue to be colorblind and fail to address the normative role played by whiteness then we will all fail in our efforts to dismantle inequality and discrimination. The authors assert that teachers can develop color insight through four key steps:

1. Considering the context for any discussion about race
2. Examining systems of privilege
3. Unmasking perspectivelessness and white normativeness
4. Combating stereotyping and looking for the “me” in each individual

I feel as though there have been many opportunities this year for me to not be colorblind of which I have failed to take advantage. For example, I played a video in class about the human genome project. All of the families that were shown in the video, with diseases like Huntington’s, BRCA mutations, and Tay Sachs, were all white families. One student asked me why none of the families were black. I am not sure if she was genuinely offended, or if she was doing it to put me on the spot to see what I would say because after trying to come up with an explanation she laughed and said she was just kidding. Regardless of how seriously she took it, I still think I needed to take it seriously and I found that I was on the spot and I was reeling to find a good answer.

At first, I said that minorities are underrepresented in the media, but these were real families, not actors, and most of the diseases were more prevalent in white people. If the video mentioned sickle cell anemia as one of the featured genetic diseases then there would definitely have been a black family mentioned. But at this point, I was just rambling and that is when she said ‘just kidding’. However, I feel like I failed to handle the situation appropriately because I did not take any of these 4 steps above. My thought process grew from the fact that I have so much privilege and don’t even realize it. My first thought was why would she want to see black people having diseases and dying? All of the cases of diseases in the video were so sad, why would she want to see a bunch of black families being affected by these diseases? Now I realize, my thought process came from a perspective where white is the norm, and that not even just media, but also in factual sources like documentaries and the news, white people are predominantly featured.

This realization also links to the article by Kevin Roose, “The next time someone says ‘all lives matter,’ show them these 5 paragraphs” where Roose states that there is a news bias towards people who are white because people identify better with stories of people of their own race. Societally, we don’t pay as much attention to the diseases of some races as we do to diseases that impact white people. In one of my genetics classes, I also learned about how racially biased research is now and how there are a disproportionate amount of genetics studies done to research diseases that impact people with European ancestry.

Now that I have realized that I was looking at it from a place where whiteness was the norm I can attempt to look at it from her perspective and see the “me” in her. If I were a student, I would want to see people like me on screen in a documentary even if it was about people getting genetic diseases. I need to work on becoming less colorblind, and hopefully next time I will realize my skewed perspectives before a student has to point it out to me.

This also makes me think about that time in class when we talked about whether or not it was okay to have students make Native American headdresses while teaching a lesson about Thanksgiving. Everyone pretty much agreed that it would only be acceptable to do if it was taught in the "right way" or the "appropriate way" but we didn't explicitly define what the right way would be. I feel like it is so hard to know how to teach something the "right way" because I thought the video I showed was very informative and accessible, but upon closer examination, it is not. It also has me thinking about how students will be successful in different environments and that students of color need to address race in the classroom to be successful while white students are more successful when they don't address race. I think we also need to teach our white students how not to be colorblind. At this point, I don't feel qualified to take on that responsibility, but to not even try would definitely be worse than trying while not really being qualified.

Below is a link to a cool blog I found that could be useful for teachers if anyone wants to check it out. https://teachingwhilewhite.org/about-teaching-while-whhite