Tuesday, September 28, 2010

In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality

As if we needed more proof that the "colorblind" approach to race and racism doesn't work, this study:
"Colorblindness" has emerged as central strategy for managing racial diversity in schools, business, politics, and the law, with the hope that deemphasizing racial differences will lead to equality, tolerance and inclusion. However, new research from the Kellogg School of Management shows that promoting colorblindness can lead people to turn a blind eye to even overt examples of racial discrimination and hamper the prospect for intervention.

In a new study entitled "In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality?," researchers sought to determine the impact of colorblindness on elementary school students' capacity to recognize racially motivated incidents and subsequently report them to facilitate adult intervention.

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In their experiment, the researchers explored the effects of promoting a colorblind approach to diversity among 8- to 11-year-old students. First, students reviewed different versions of a multimedia storybook, half received a colorblind version and the other half received a value-diversity version. In both stories, the narrator championed racial justice, but the colorblind version encouraged minimizing race-based distinctions, whereas the value-diversity version encouraged embracing these differences. ("We need to focus on how we are similar to our neighbors rather than how we are different" vs. "We want to show everyone that race is important because our racial differences make us special.")

After the storybooks were read, the students listened to three stories featuring varying degrees of racial bias: a control story in which a White child was marginalized by his White schoolmate's contribution to a school science project; an ambiguous story regarding a White student's exclusion of a Black student from his birthday party; and an explicitly biased story describing a White student's unprovoked assault of a Black student in a soccer game. After the stories, students were asked to describe the three events and their responses were video recorded.

The results found that students who had read the value-diversity version of the storybook were more likely to detect evidence of racial discrimination: 43 percent of students perceived discrimination in the ambiguous story and 77 percent perceived discrimination in the explicitly biased story.

In the colorblind condition, on the other hand, the frequency with which students detected discrimination dropped significantly, to 10 percent of children for the ambiguous story, and to only 50 percent in the explicit story—a scenario that portrayed overt evidence of racially biased behavior.

This decline in sensitivity has potentially severe consequences, according to the researchers. The students were later asked to recall the three stories presented to them via the storybook, and their video recorded descriptions were then presented to real schoolteachers. The students initially primed with a colorblind mindset described the stories in a manner significantly less likely to trigger adult intervention than students exposed to the value-diversity mindset.

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"Despite good intentions to promote egalitarianism through colorblindness, our findings show that doing so sometimes elicits the exact opposite outcome, permitting even explicit forms of racial discrimination to go undetected and unaddressed," said Apfelbaum. "Perhaps most alarming, on the surface, colorblindness appears to work quite well—reported incidents of bias do decrease. In spite of such encouraging signs, however, our study suggests that colorblindness may not reduce bias as much as it adjusts the lens through which bias is perceived."
Think of the implications of that last paragraph for a minority child raised in a "colorblind" home -- the parents will hear very little about racialized incidents toward the child and think that their colorblind approach is working.  The child is likely to be confused by the difference between what she hears and what occurs to her.  She may well internalize incidences of bias, thinking there's something wrong with her instead of the bad actors.  And she'll never tell her parents . . . .

3 comments:

The Declassified Adoptee said...

I read somewhere that colorblindness is the new, modern racism. It's a priviledge for someone to be able to say "race doesn't matter." Perhaps it has never mattered to them because they've never been discriminated against. But for ethnic and racial minorities who are discriminated against, it does matter.

Colorblindness insinuates that there is something wrong with being of a different race or ethnicity that you are just so gracious for being able to be "blind" to it.

Race and diversity are beautiful. I'm gladly not blind to it. I embrace everyone around me as equal and am thankful when they do the same for me.

Von said...

How very white liberal!Damaging and dangerous.

Anonymous said...

As a person of color and an immigrant to the US...

Color blindness is not the new racism. That's actually old racism from the prior generaton. Reverse racism is the new racism for the 21st century.

Color blindness is an ideological perjorative used commonly in discussion today (by both left and right) to talk around the fact that racism still thrives and flourishes in the US. Particularly within the older conservative segments of the population.

Color blindenss today is not real, it's just that people are afraid to be called out as racist for their thoughts or actions so it is used as a veil of sorts for the framework of discussion.

Color blindness one day will be real and will be genuine, when we as a world have moved beyond highlighting persistently in the conflict model "us and them" (ie: differences designed to segregate rather then bring together people from many backgrounds, as equals).

The US is just as racist today as it was 30 years or 50 years ago. In some cases, even more so (read: Muslims).

White people talking about color blindness, or racism is hypocrisy. Serious Hypocrisy.