Colorblind Racism by Meghan Burke

Author:Meghan Burke [Burke Meghan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Interracial Interactions

Colorblindness also has a way of traveling between formal and informal spaces, in our personal interactions with one another. However, those interactions tend to be deeply structured by the pervasive segregation, both residential and social, that shapes our lives – particularly the lives of whites, who experience higher levels of racial isolation than blacks and other people of color. Bonilla-Silva and Embrick (2007) argue that this creates a white habitus: “a racialized uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, emotions, and views on racial matters” (324–5). They argue that this white habitus prevents whites from understanding their isolation and segregation as the result of racial dynamics, using instead a colorblind lens of preference or naturalization. This, of course, has consequences. They write, “Despite the Civil Rights revolution, whites, young and old, live fundamentally segregated lives that have attitudinal, emotional, and political implications” (341). Again, I found much the same thing among whites in stably racially diverse communities, who reproduced a white habitus inside of these diverse spaces that upheld the privileges of whites in communities that are ostensibly committed to racial diversity and progressive values (Burke 2012b).

Norton et al. (2006) found the same to be true in experimental interactions across the color line. Their participants indicated an unwillingness to acknowledge their ability to notice race, even when they were able successfully to use physical cues to sort people into racial categories – a process that is not alone racist! In particular, they “propose that the incongruity between trying to appear color-blind while automatically noticing color complicates strategic efforts to appear unbiased, creating an inevitable tension between efforts to achieve color blindness and actual success at doing so” (949). Their participants’ logic seems to be that refusing to acknowledge the reality of socially constructed races forecloses the possibility that they can thus attach meanings to these racial markers, i.e. to be racist. They further write that “although we have focused on the negative impact for whites – on communication, performance, and self-presentation – these costs may ultimately extend to both whites and blacks, in the form of strained interracial interactions” (952).

All of the studies discussed in this section speak to the extent to which racial tensions, created primarily by whites’ discomfort with the realities of racial categorizations and racial inequalities, create tremendous levels of denial and social distance, as well as the perpetuation of privileges, for whites. The chapters that follow will consider such “denials” more deeply, as they also reveal an awareness that many individuals actively choose to sidestep or ignore. But fundamentally they also both reflect and assert colorblind ideology. They reflect it in the often-genuine belief that race does not matter, and assert it in action and forms of race talk that are made on that basis. This protects the status quo where whites can continue to glean unearned advantages, ranging from economic policy to personal comfort and safety, and people of color are left grappling with unfair systems and the stress

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