color blindness

poet Pat Parker said it best, in her poem, "For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend": "The first thing you do is to forget that i'm Black. / Second, you must never forget that i'm Black." The new rhetoric of "color blindness" ignores the astonishing complexity of racism and the depth to which it's become embedded in our social institutions and in the national consciousness. "Color blindness" sounds good—"We're all family here!" No, we're not. Not yet. And until we are, we need to see who's getting the biggest pieces of pie and who's not getting any pie at all. We need to be, at one and the same, aware of color—in order "to analyze what difference difference really makes" (Kimberlé Crenshaw, in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Forever)—and blind to color. See also racism.