color blindness

As I was searching for photos to put in my initial post, I found many photos of people sewing: women, men, and children around the globe, for many different reasons. I'd like to see some of these "designers" meet some of the people who will be constructing their garments when they are produced in factories. Some of the workers should be judges on Project Runway. Would their definitions of "expensive" be different from Michael Kors?

Anyway, I wanted to write down some thoughts on color blindness. Back in the Spring, I was discussing race, class and gender with a friend of mine. In the context of this conversation, she told me that she didn't "see color". This person is very intelligent and kind so this was surprising to me. She didn't mean that she was medically color blind and I doubt that she meant that she could not tell the difference between someone that was Black and someone that was White or Latino or Eskimo or Asian or whatever. I guess she meant that race didn't factor into the way that she treated people. I wish that was the way the world works! Ha!

As I saw in the first part of the Race ("the power of an illusion") documentary (from Tuesday), there is no biological basis to race. Race is a pure construction, and one of the most powerful in the world, a true testament to the power of belief systems. So if we lived in my friend's world, I think that would be great. I wish that no one took color into account when they interacted with another person. I bet that as a White person, I would be treated very differently than I am treated now. (For example, I bet people would be more skeptical of me and my ideas and actions.)

The problem is that even if there was a way to not see color, the fact is that in the past, color (and sex and gender and social class) has been a way to assign people to certain types of work, lands, and statuses. Remember that the meaning of difference initially depended on one's religion or nationality in the New World (from yesterday's episode of the same documentary). When the European settlers of America realized that they would need more labor in order to work all of the crops that were being planted, they started importing people from Africa. Now a person's skin color meant something - what work they did. Poor and working class Europeans in new America started to associate themselves with the European aristocracy and that is when "whiteness" evolved. It seems like social class was obscured by racial categories at the very beginning of our history as a country.

Because life chances have been and are still unequally distributed along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender and social class, we have to pay attention. One of the goals of this class is to tune into the ways we reproduce difference in our daily lives. One thing I want to tune into is the ways I confuse race and ethnicity with social class. (In the very popular blog, Stuff White People Like, I see this). For example, I need to watch out in assuming that all people of color are of the working class or only work certain types of jobs. But I want to come up with a more precise example of this happening. I will try to and return to this post.