“I don’t see color” ???

"I don’t see color"

Recently, these were the words spoken to me by a woman who had been a humanitarian for over 25 years. I am always puzzled by this sentence and yet, I have heard many people say this quite often. Each time, I am un-eased by it—the very opposite emotion I believe those words intend to bring about.

I admired the woman’s work and her brilliance, but the moment she uttered this four-worded sentence to me was the moment the process of our community building halted. Surely, we could still build bridges together and believe in each other’s work, but now, the process would be ever more slower, because now, I must struggle through the sludge of wondering if she really saw me for who I was, am, and will always be. Was she even the slightest bit aware of what the world looked and felt like through my lens of all her years of practice? And more importantly, why turn to me with intention—me, the only person of color in the room—and then say those words ‘I don’t see color’? No one even brought it up. Wasn’t this very act intentional acknowledgment that she did in fact, felt the need to say it to me because she saw my color? Where’s the gain in that? Did she mean to say ‘I don’t want to see your color?’ did she mean to say, ‘I don’t want to acknowledge my own whiteness’?

Don’t get me wrong, I was certain she meant well and that her heart was in the right place, but how could I move at a 100% ‘I trust you’ kind of pace when it has now been stated that she didn’t see something on me, which I was fully aware existed?

I literally sat there and said to myself, ‘so, that hasn’t really been a Black woman staring back at me in the mirror for the past 35 years’...um, okay...

My question is why would anyone not want to see color? Color is beautiful! And I love my color. I want people to see it. I love my brownness, my curly-kinky black hair, my African full lips, and my Native American nose. I love everything about being a Black woman despite the historic mockery of such features. For that very reason, I appreciate my color even more. But, I love to see all human beings in various shades, hair types and body shapes. We are beautifully made—all of us. I wouldn’t want to ignore anything about our unique bodies.

Why would anyone with half decent vision not see color unless they chose not to?

Besides, how boring would we be if we took away all our varieties and differences? Would it then, be socially acceptable to say things like, ‘I don’t see color’? Is that what we’re after? If so, what’s next? … ‘I don’t see you as a man or a woman because I don’t see gender’?

That just seems silly.

Declaring that you don’t see color, or obvious differences doesn’t increase our human similarities; it just declares that you are going to imagine that differences are invisible because it makes you uncomfortable. It says that you are relying on an elementary lesson that differences are strange and strangers are bad and you’re too afraid or lazy to wrestle with what is unfamiliar. It says, that you’re going to pretend to erase the differences from your sight. And out of sight, out of mind, right? Well, not really.

Perhaps a more culturally sensitive thing to say instead of ‘ I don’t see color’ would be ‘I am becoming less and less confined by the constraints of the concept of race’.

Or something like that. It’s longer winded than ‘I don’t see color’, but at least with this, one’s differences can be validated and appreciated—not overlooked. In this, both parties can be included in each other’s reality without having to betray, forfeit, or ignore whom which they see in the mirror everyday.

Let’s face it; human beings are not color blind. We just aren’t. But, that’s not a bad thing. The color of one’s skin is God given and or a genetic/birth trait of whom they are; much like the gift of sight, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, or denied. Race however, is socially constructed. Racism is real the issue. Color-ism is not. We ought not pretend to not see racism either. After all, when has there ever been a victory gained where pretending not to see the real issue helped alleviate it?