The Mask that is American Color-Blindness

At the beginning of Another Kind of Public Education, I was suspicious of Collins’ use of the term “color-blind” to describe our society. I started thinking about how this book was written before 2016, before America’s underlying race problem blew up in our faces, and I was wondering if Collins use of the “color-blind” no longer applied in today’s America. In 2016, it seems that we started to talk about race on a national level (not talk about it well, per se, but, you know, increasingly call out celebrities for saying racist things).

In 2016 we also, as Alexander so perfectly encapsulates, experienced the beginnings of a major rise in hate speech and hate crimes. She writes, “We are now living in an era not of post-racialism but of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political and economic dominance could be taken for granted — no apologies required. Racial bigotry, fearmongering and scapegoating are no longer subterranean in our political discourse; the dog whistles have been replaced by bullhorns. White nationalist movements are operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks” (3). I thought: how can we be color-blind when neo-nazis are on the front pages of every news source in the country?

But as I read through this chapter, I started to understand that what’s most important (because it is the most unseen) is not the interpersonal, but the structural. And on the structural level, on the policy level, we absolutely still live in a color-blind society.

There are lots of reasons why we can pretend we don’t. Collins states that, since the Brown decision, “social movements by African Americans, Latinos, women, indigenous groups, and LGBT populations, among others, took on the task of challenging the numerous ways in which the social institutions of American society were organized to reproduce inequality from one generation to the next. Within the United States, the shifting legal structure and concomitant reorganization of American society that characterized the 1950s and 1960s suggested that a more democratic, multicultural America was at hand” (58).

This provided the American public with a false sense of progress. I don’t blame us: we so badly want to see ourselves as a nation capable of change and progress — but we are so misguided in this way. When the legal structures change, in most cases the inequality and oppression simply transforms — because we haven’t approached the fact that racism is a power structure, and that everything in our world feeds into that structure. One very clear example of this is what Alexander has spent years studying and writing about: how slavery, when “abolished,” led to the the prison system becoming, essentially, the new slavery.

So often, even the social movements themselves do not address root causes. I think of how the fight for (and subsequent win of) gay marriage rights distracted from issues that more immediately affected the LGBT+ community (housing issues, access to healthcare, HIV/AIDS, youth homelessness) and pushed an assimilation rhetoric that was harmful to those in the community who didn’t want to buy into the system of marriage. Again, we see major legal shifts convincing the public that we are on the right track, which subsequently hides issues that were always, and will remain, there.

We are also able to pretend we don’t live in a color-blind society by boosting representation of minority groups in media, and patting ourselves on the back for it. Not that representation is bad — it’s great, especially when the people who make it happen are marginalized people themselves! — but it does create a false sense of progress that is hard to see beneath. This is exemplified by Obama’s election. Alexander writes that “we had not faced our racial history and could not tell the truth about our racial present, yet growing numbers of Americans wanted to elect a black president and leap into a ‘colorblind’ future” (2). Representation without reflection and structural change just doesn’t work. Without this reflection and change — is representation just another word for tokenism?

Again, this all exemplifies how deep everything is beneath the surface of what we see, understand, and discuss. Collins illustrates this in a very hard-hitting way when she notes how those who “travel across racial borders (through going into racially different spaces), class borders (through upward or downward social class mobility), or national borders (new immigrant populations trying to understand America’s racial politics) routinely bump into sets of expectations that reveal the hidden structures of race” (44). This illustrates very clearly how “the power to define race lies in the context and not necessarily in the person” (44). “Progress” in how we usually conceptualize it, is often not as significant as we think it is — it often only changes the meaning and structure of one situation. This might, I imagine, even have a ripple effect that might make other situations more difficult for marginalized people to manage.

Collins writes that, “Dismissing the impact of practices in the structural and disciplinary domains leaves us looking to culture itself and individual values and beliefs as being the primary sources of racism” (71). If we decide as a nation that public institutions are color-blind and, as such, don’t cause racial inequality, it becomes not our problem to deal with. It is simply “up to those who choose to say racist stuff” to stop saying racist stuff.

Alexander write, “If we fail to understand the historical relationship between these systems, especially the racial politics that enabled them, we will be unable to build a truly united front that will prevent the continual re-formation of systems of racial and social control” (5). Being able to address systems of inequality is all about understanding the history of our social institutions and structures in a very deep, very real sense. If we consider that most progress is (most likely) false, that lets us know that whatever systems of oppression were in place in the past are still here. This means, at least (on the bright side of things) that we can study these systems—a slight silver lining in a very depressing statement.

In my “Now What?” section, I will continue to touch on structural domains of power. In the beginning of this section, Collins brings in journalist Jill Nelson’s work to discuss our rigged systems. White people, Nelson states, are no more hardworking, no smarter, no more deserving of what they have than anyone else. They have simply rigged the system to make it seem like they are (57). They have created the myth of the American meritocracy, and the myth of the American dream — all so we all cannot help but think that it’s a personal shortcoming when a person of color doesn’t reach the top. This illustrates, in Collins’ words, how “color-blind racism operates within the structural domain of power” (57). This functions in all our social institutions: our banks, our schools, our police department, and so on. She writes that, prior to the Brown decision, “everyone knew that the system was rigged” (57) — everything was much more obvious then. In today’s world, I think rigged structures are easier to ignore because, if institutions are indeed color-blind (which we think they are, because their policies say they are), then we can blame the inequality on the individual who “didn’t work hard enough.”

This connects so directly to anti-immigrant rhetoric. The meritocracy and the American Dream serve as easy (but false) explanations for why it is so difficult for immigrants to establish themselves in this country. The complexity and impossibility of the structural barriers and rigged systems that are put up against immigrants means that it’s just that much harder for the American public to understand that it is the structures that are the problem. This leads to the students in the Canal Alliance ESL Program having to constantly fight against the assumption that they’re not working hard enough — and hopefully not internalizing these messages. All I hope is that the people the system works against understand how rigged it is, and that the people who the system works for understand that they need to sacrifice some of their power in order for things to become actually fair.