the blueshift journal

Color Blind

 

I grew up color blind. I saw everyone I encountered – my fellow African Americans, whites, Latinos, Asians – as all the same. Throughout my childhood, years at boarding school and college and into young adulthood colorblindness was the lens in which I viewed the world and everyone in it.  In a culture where clashes over civil rights were common, where violence against people because of their skin color was rife, I orbited outside of the divisions that seemed to define most people. Or so I thought.

 

 

This perspective helped me live harmoniously in a multicultural world. My friendship circles were a racial collage of Anglos, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. In my workplaces I was always the one who got along well with everyone.  When, after college, I joined the Washington bureau of Time magazine, my best buddy was a tall white red-haired reporter. We were known as Salt and Pepper.

 

The broad mix of friends and close colleagues in my inner circles extended beyond race to religions. My high school roommate was WASP, my best friends were Jewish, Catholic and Atheist.

 

Not until well into adulthood did it hit me that colorblindness was a myth.  It was as if the opaque glasses I was wearing were crushed right in front of me.

 

What I call my enlightenment began when I started researching my own family’s genealogy. I discovered that my mother was descended from blacks that had migrated to Oklahoma from Arkansas and points deeper in the South. My own maternal great grandfather, Henry Eliot, had been a slave. Thus, in the recent past, whites had owned my ancestors. They had been part of the culture of brutality and cruelness that was slavery in the American South.

 

On my father’s side, there was also history of slavery and the discrimination that Native Americans suffered. My dad’s mother was descended from Creek Indians. Her family had been part of the removals that displaced Creeks from their homes in Alabama and other points south to Oklahoma. The discrimination Indians suffered during this Trail of Tears has been well documented.

 

The more I learned about my history, the more I understood and embraced what it means to be a person of color. The strife that my forbearers suffered became part of my own story.

 

In fact, I did not have to reach far back to realize how much racial divisions had affected me. My hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma had been deeply segregated through the 1960s, formative years for me. I was born in Moten, the only hospital in town where blacks could receive medical care in those days. My first nine years of school were in segregated schools, where my teachers administrators and fellow classmates where almost all black. My family lived in a part of town that was 90 percent black, where the churches, stores, even the movie theater was patronized almost exclusively by blacks.

 

These reflections helped me realize how much the politics of race had shaped me. Growing up, I had tried to embrace the most positive aspects of the world I had lived in: the warmth and awareness of my Afrocentric family; the dedication of my teachers and mentors to bettering me and my generation through education; the wonderfully talented culture of my friends, neighbors and classmates.

 

Rich as it all was, it was still not a world we had chosen. The Jim Crow laws and the politics and attitudes of the society we lived in had created these divisions. And we were required to comply.

 

My new, more realistic perspective on what it means to be a person of color helped me to approach others differently.  Instead of assuming that everyone was the same, I wanted to find out how race had shaped them. Had my Jewish best friend’s family suffered the discrimination that many Jews experience? Were my white acquaintances the products of privilege? 

 

Through this newfound lens, I also process everyday experiences differently. Not long ago I went to a CVS drug store to pick up a prescription. The pharmacist on duty approached me in an abrasive condescending way. I looked at him and understood that he was not color blind. And neither was I. I called for the manager to report what I felt was an act of discrimination.

 

My changed perspective has also made me more curious about the experiences of my fellow African Americans. Did their roots and early encounters parallel mine?  What kind of discrimination had they faced? How had they dealt with it? Did they encounter microagressions? How did they address with them?

 

The more I engage my African American friends, co-workers and acquaintances, the more I understand how varied the experience of blacks are in contemporary America.  Some felt very much a product of a racially charged world. Others reported having long ago processed racist experiences and moved into a post racial world. Still others believed they lived in a largely egalitarian culture, in which they were educated and treated more or less like whites, Latinos and Asians. And so, the black experience in America is far from monolithic.

 

For me, being colorblind was easier, more blissful. Trying to process the world and the people I encounter for who they are and the experiences that shaped them is far more complex. But in the end I continue to try to use my own perspective in a positive way. If racial awareness can be compared to a tool, I feel far better equipped to play my part in fixing the societal problems I encounter.