I have experienced racism in the US and Indonesia. I've experienced religious and cultural intolerance and prejudice, and even sexualism, genderism and ageism, as well as the less-tangible discriminatory motivations behind bullying. I've even been discriminated against because I was too helpful, and because others chose to distort my intent because of their own biases, and rejected the truth in favor of their own distorted viewpoints.
However, despite these experiences, I do not choose to perceive my life, my opportunities, and my future through the lens of those experiences because I know, having previously chosen to look at the world through the distortions caused by pessimism and depression, what the consequences are; they are bad. I move forward.
I suggest that the fight must continue to achieve full equity for all groups (setting aside those which seek to damage, destroy and commit other crimes), but the fight to cleanse our minds of perceptual distortions brought on by past experiences, stories and lies must also be waged to pull people out of the situations they create for themselves, or that they were indoctrinated to believe.
I have a question - one which you may not be able to answer. When I lived in Indonesia, I sometimes got invitations to events for students or teachers. I knew that many of them felt uncomfortable around Caucasians. I knew it was because of long-standing beliefs of inferiority when compared to Caucasians (primarily due to the Dutch), as well as cultural, ethnic and religious conflicts between different groups of Indonesians. In order to put my audience (which was almost always multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious) at ease, I told my audiences (in Indonesian) that it wasn't important to me what ethnic group they were from or what color skin they had. To make them laugh, I'd say we all had purple skin. I told them that, to me, we were all the same and should be treated the same. I was sometimes presenting in front of people who'd never seen Caucasians before. The response was very positive and helped people to feel more comfortable.
Yet, when I shared this experience in an online business forum that was primarily composed of Blacks, many of them condemned this as being something bad, as if my trying to put everyone on the same level was unfair or derogatory because I was being "color-blind". I've also seen this anti-color-blindness sentiment online. It's sometimes claimed to be a racist strategy or, at the very least, that it invalidates the experiences of those people who've been treated poorly because of their race or skin color. Although I'm sure this is true for some people, it is not true for every person and every situation. For me, there was no intent to invalidate or be racist, and I have to say that intent is not trumped by interpretation, although it is never easy to determine someone's true intent, nor is it easy to convince someone who has chosen the wrong interpretation that they are wrong.
I found this reaction mind-boggling in one way, but it makes a certain distorted sense at the same time.
My best guess is that they feel that, by erasing the perception of color, that will take away their power and place in society which, ironically, is not a good one for many. I think it's more rooted in the psychological scars caused by racists, perceptually biased stories (both true and false), and hanging onto certain things that it would be better off to discard. I would certainly welcome an intelligent, thoughtful, and polite explanation from someone who is Black and feels this way or, at least, understands this sentiment. Can you help?
I don't write this to diminish the very real experiences that some Blacks (and other minorities) have had. There have been some very horrible things done to Blacks, Native Americans, Chinese, and other groups, and these things continue to be performed in some places by the police, business owners, and politicians, although it is not - I think - as systemic as some groups and people represent.
For example, the activist group, Color of Change, deliberately provokes discord and conflict through their website and emails by providing information that mixes fact with fiction, primarily regarding police shootings of Blacks. I've been monitoring their emails for some time now and researched several of them to discover that they deliberately distorted the facts and even outright lied to their members. How do I know this? By watching police and witness footage of events that CoC had claimed were police brutality and/or police racism. One example was of how they distorted the truth in the case of the Hakim Littleton shooting, for which CoC made several false claims to make the police look bad when, in fact, Hakim started shooting first and continued to shoot even after he was tackled to the ground by the BLACK officer he'd tried to shoot the head of!
Another example is of false stories told within families and communities of universal racism by Whites against others, despite the fact that there is a huge amount of evidence to the contrary, including people who work(ed) alongside Black leaders. One Black acquaintance told me of the myth passed down as fact in her family of the extraction of melanin from murdered Black prisoners, that Blacks are the only source of melanin, and that mass murdering of Black prisoners is periodically performed to get more melanin, which commands a high price on the open market, while also making space for more Blacks. A quick search shows that almost ALL living organisms have melanin in them, and it's generally extracted from plant matter. There are, certainly, prisoners murdered by the people running the prisons, but there are certainly more convict-on-convict murders. The penal system is a horrible one that should be drastically changed.
Perceptual bias, because of the passing on of false stories as well as legitimate stories, affects their reactions in interracial encounters and puts them at higher risk of being in an escalated situation. I'm not saying it's the only reason, but it plays a significant role in some cases. For example, I've sometimes been mistaken for a store employee because of the clothes I was wearing (or, perhaps, hopefulness brought on by confusion or frustration) yet, I've heard from Blacks who have had the exact same experience and automatically assumed it was because of their skin color. THAT is perceptual bias. As with pessimism, perceptual bias distorts reality and tends to cause to happen the things we hope for (as in the so-called Law of Attraction) and fear because our attitude predisposes us to say and do things that make that more likely.
As another example of such bias, I once had my car destroyed because of another driver (fortunately, I was not in it when it was pushed under a tractor-trailer and spewed across the highway). The driver's insurance company called and their agent asked me how much I wanted. I had already been depressed before the accident and, thus, my mind was frozen to the possibilities. Despite the fact that she was kind enough to repeatedly try to get a reasonable amount from me, I couldn't even think to say "blue book value" - so stuck in a rut was I - or even name a rational number, so I took next to nothing for a car I couldn't afford to replace but would've been able to if my perceptual bias of the situation hadn't stopped me.
So, in case it hasn't been made clear, why is "color-blindness" - as a way to forge an equal relationship between people of different colors - wrong? Why must color-blindness automatically be labeled as racist, demeaning or invalidating? It is a tool I've used successfully in a positive way, so why can't it be used like that?