Should I "see" color? My reflections on colorblindness:

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Vocabulary: 

• color blindness: an assertion that color can't be seen. It's typically used to "combat" racism from a privileged perspective: I can't be racist if I can't see color. 
• color insight: now referred to as color consciousness, the understanding and recognition that different races exist and these differences impact life differently 
• racism (most palatable definition):  discrimination towards a group of marginalized people
• culturally responsive teaching: an asset based pedagogy that incorporates student's cultural backgrounds and perspectives into teaching. I highly (highly highly) recommend that every educator read Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond (I hyperlinked a free pdf to the book, please read it, bookmark it, internalize it, it fundamentally changed my classroom practices and understanding of students)
• subaltern: marginalized groups (popularized by postcolonial studies)
• categorical identities: membership based identities (ex: race, gender, religion, etc)
• antiracism: actively opposing racism and actively promoting or working towards racial equality through conscious and deliberate choices 
• cultural appropriation: the (disrespectful) misuse of characteristics of culture of a marginalized group from a dominant group 
• implicit bias: unconscious beliefs 
• compounding oppression: marginalization from intersecting identities multiplies together, not adds

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    Acknowledgement of race (for white people specifically*)exits, just like every other sociological concept we have constructed, in a spectrum (enjoy the spectrum I made :) ). 

    Note: to see this image clearer, click here

    To make matters more complicated, the way I see it, there's an invisible Y axis on the spectrum that identifies white people as how they see race outside of themselves and how they see race within themselves.[Note: quadrant 1 would also hold being "color brave" because of the active work that people would be having to have conversations about race.] 

Within it all though, is color and an innate and specific either acknowledgement or refusal to acknowledge race (race through skin color).  

Note: to make this image bigger/clearer, click here 

    Main Argument: Which, of course, brings me to the discussion of "Colorblindness is the New Racism" (Margalynne J. Armstrong and Stephanie M. Wildman) who assert the importance of racial consciousness (or what they label "color insight") as an antidote to color blindness, while naming the harms of color blindness. In addition, the chapter mentions some classroom techniques (secondary focused) about how to talk about race and different activities to do within classrooms for students to notice race. 

"Color insight provides an appropriate antidote to the colorblindness, one that remedies the omission of context in racial discourse" (p65). I agree that color consciousness is the first STEP towards breaking a cycle of racism, but I would disagree that it is the antidote. Color consciousness/color insight as described in the chapter is the observation and recognition of race within the classroom, within everyday life, etc. However, I would argue that color blindness isn't at the 0 (zero) point in the scale, it is actively doing harm (-), where racial acknowledgement would act as a neutral place holder. In the case that color blindness is causing harm (because the dismissal of people DOES cause harm, because the invalidation of people's accounts DOES cause harm, etc) work needs to actively be done to push towards racial equity. Additionally, the authors jump into writing about strategies and activities that classes can do to have their students notice race. While White people may not notice race, people of color notice race all the time. My partner is Black and every time we step into a new space he'll let me know "oh there are only x number of Black people here"... which isn't something I even noticed. At all. (Privileges of being white passing).

Anyway, in my opinion, a much more accessible method to combat the active negative harm that color blindness is enacting is to adapt practices of culturally responsive teaching. Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain (a groundbreaking work in the world of CRT by  Zaretta Hammond) follows a ready for rigor framework that has four principles. 

1) Awareness (understanding the three levels of culture, acknowledging sociopolitical context, knowing your own cultural lens, etc)

2) Leading partnerships (reimagining the student/teacher partnership, building self efficacy, etc)

3) Information processing (providing appropriate challenges, helping students process content using methods from culturally relevant examples, teaching cognitive routines, etc) and

4) Sustaining a community of learners and a learning environment (creating an environment that is intellectually and socially safe, using principles of restorative justice to manage conflicts, etc)

I feel very deeply that not only do the competencies, frameworks, and principles of CRT address the demographic of the learners in front of us (at least for me), but also that it is much more accessible because these are techniques that can work across grade levels. 

The authors continue on to discuss how we (in the United States) are a "nation of cowards" and how our inability to talk about race makes it "difficult to dismantle racial inequality", furthermore that "white people may fear engaging in the topic of race makes them seem racist" (66). There is generally, a fear not only that perpetuates racial ignorance but also worsens racism. People are afraid to talk about race, and people are afraid of racial differences. For example, in California in 1998 there was a bill passed, Proposition 227 (or Prop 227) (passed at 61%) that reduced and strictly limited the dual language schools in California. Considering the ethnic and language demographics of CA (at the time and now), this was a decision that affected many students and families. Prop 227 wasn't repealed until 2016. There was a general fear of the unknown, fear of Spanish and a general lack of understanding about literacy scores in DLE (Dual Language Education)**. We are not only a nation of cowards, we are a nation of uneducated cowards. 

One thing that I appreciated about these authors in general was a deeper understanding of intersectionality. They mentioned many times throughout the chapter the idea that categorical identities all work together to impede equality, they absolutely do. One thing that I was thinking about as I was reading their thoughts on intersectionality is if they thought intersectional oppressions compound (similar to how Gloría Anzaldua believes in her monumentally important book, Borderlands/ Las Fronteras about the intersectionality of being Chicana and LGBT+) or if they think it's non-compounding. 

Connection: As I was reading and writing I was thinking a lot about the examples that were given in the chapter to help students be able to visualize race, it reminded me a lot of a presentation I did when I was in my first year of college. I was the first undergraduate student to present at MABE, the MultiState Association for Bilingual Educators. I presented on identity and education (building dual identities through voice, value, and narrative) where I approached my research and assertions on tenants and realities of postcolonial education. I had about 55 participants present and during the presentation, I had my participants participate in an activity. It was a fairly basic "spaghetti/marshmallow tower" building structure activity where the team that built the biggest tower won a prize. However, I needed to make it abundantly clear to my participants that resources impact outcome (something easy to talk about but hard to understand), so I made my groups all different sizes. One group was a group of one, some groups had 4, some groups had 6. Groups had all different amounts of materials-- ranging from number of spaghetti and number of marshmallows to some groups having a blueprint of how to build the biggest tower and some groups having tape to hold their structure together. At the end of the activity, I revealed the realities of the different groups and all participants were able to clearly identify how different resources impacted outcome (which I of course later in the presentation connected back to narrative of teachers and narratives of students). Regardless, reading the ideas that the authors had to help students visualize race reminded me a lot of the project that I did at MABE, it can be easy to talk about something, it can maybe even be easy to imagine something, but the affects of taking time out to notice and live your observations changes your relationship with reality. 

* it's important that I name my audience 

** many DLE students will start reading in both languages below benchmark however not only will they catch up to their peers, but they will SURPASS their peers by 6th grade (I believe, I could be wrong about the exact grade)

Note to readers/request: If you're commenting on my post-- HI! Second of all, does my XY graph make sense to you? Would anything make it make more sense or does anything seem like it needs to be added or taken away from one of the quadrants?

Note: AI was used for this response. In my ideas about how I wanted to word and describe my quadrants when making my X,Y graph, it was really helpful to use AI to tighten up my ideas. I used ChatGPT and said: "I'm working on a project where I'm making an XY graph for how white people view race, the x axis ranges from color blindness to color consciousness with 0 being racial consciousness and the y axis is how white people view external race, so the space of coordinate (1,1) would be someone who recognizes race AND recognizes that they have implicit bias that makes racism worse. Lets' talk through the other quadrants."