Color-blind Ideology Research Articles

Situating questions of data, power, and racial formation

This special theme of Big Data & Society explores connections, relationships, and tensions that coalesce around data, power, and racial formation. This collection of articles and commentaries builds upon scholarly observations of data substantiating and transforming racial hierarchies. Contributors consider how racial projects intersect with interlocking systems of oppression across concerns of class, coloniality, dis/ability, gendered difference, and sexuality across contexts and jurisdictions. In doing so, this special issue illuminates how data can both reinforce and challenge colorblind ideologies as well as how data might be mobilized in support of anti-racist movements.

Navigating diversity: Maternal ideologies and associations with child interethnic prejudice in the Netherlands

AbstractParental diversity ideologies are linked to their own interethnic prejudice, but how do they relate to children's prejudice? This study examined self‐reported endorsement of colorblind ideology and multiculturalism among mothers (138 White Dutch, 65 Turkish‐Dutch, and 45 Afro‐Dutch) of 6‐to 10‐year old children (55% girls), and its association with child interethnic prejudice. Endorsement of multiculturalism was lowest among White Dutch mothers, and endorsement of colorblind ideology was lowest among Afro‐Dutch mothers. Maternal endorsement of multiculturalism was negatively related to child outgroup prejudice among White Dutch families and among Turkish‐Dutch families in the context of underrepresented outgroups, and results suggest no or opposite associations for colorblind ideology. Future research should explore what parenting based on these ideologies looks like, but the present study points parents in the direction of a multicultural, rather than colorblind, approach.

‘Wij doen immers niet aan ras’

This contribution takes the striking near-absence of intercultural and post-/ colonial issues from the first twenty-five editions of the journal Nederlandse letterkunde as the starting-point for a reflection on the monocultural focus and dazzling whiteness of the study of Dutch literature more in general. It starts with an overview of the origination of the debate about diversity within Dutch literature in the 1990’s, after which it continues to excavate three specific aspects of this debate and the racial mechanisms that play a role in this. First of all, it discusses the compartimentalisation of both Neerlandophone migration and postcolonial literature itself, and the study of this literature. Second, it examines the exoticization of ‘foreign-Dutch’ writers vis-à-vis their invisibility. And third, it analyzes several expressions of Dutch innocence and white victimhood. The contribution concludes with a plea to exchange the Dutch ideology of color-blindness, that works to cover up white privileges, for a form of critical race studies that addresses the multi-layered-ness of Dutch diversity, including that of whiteness.

“Being colorblind is one of the worst things”: White teachers’ attitudes and ethnic‐racial socialization in a rural elementary school

AbstractA phenomenological approach was used to explore White elementary school teachers’ attitudes about and strategies for addressing ethnicity and race in their classrooms. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with teachers (N = 12) in first, third, and fifth grade, art, and English language learning classrooms at a racially diverse, rural elementary school in the Midwest United States. Results highlighted a paradox in teachers’ attitudes and socialization. Teachers reported an appreciation for the school‐level ethnic‐racial diversity, while simultaneously endorsing a colorblind ideology. They incorporated conversations about ethnicity and race, but more frequently in reaction to holidays and student‐initiated questions and not as part of a more integrative curriculum. Additionally, teachers’ attitudes and discussions about ethnicity and race intersected with religion. Findings highlight the need for professional development to support White teachers in examining their attitudes about ethnicity, race, and religion to move away from colorblindness and engage in anti‐bias and anti‐racist education.

Review: Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics, by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith

Review: <i>Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics</i>, by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith

Современная американская школа в эпоху кризиса идеологии «расовой слепоты» (colorblindness racial ideology)

The article analyses the ideological crisis, which the US system of education faces nowadays. It evaluates the colorblind racial ideology that has remained predominant for several decades, its basic features, strong and weak points, and a number of social racial problems, which arose due to the prevalence of this ideology in schools and colleges of education in the USA. The author brings a set of reasons given by supporters of the considered ideology, and proves the fact that despite its original right-mindedness this ideology often gives reverse results. The study dwells upon the ways of how the colorblind racial ideology negatively influences the educational process of the black US citizens. It also highlights the XXI century’s alternative trends, which advocate for multicultural education and encourage instructing people on racial problems and interaction. The conclusion goes that the search of optimal ways to integrate the culturally relevant pedagogy into the USA’s system of education has started but is still far from being completed, which provides space for a wide range of further scientific and methodological research.

“We Foreigners Lived In Our Foreign Bubble”: Understanding Colorblind Ideology In Expatriate Narratives1

Racial colorblindness—the desire to not “see color”—or avoiding any use of the term “race” itself, has been an antiracist imperative in post‐WWII Sweden in order to leave behind the prior era of eugenics and racial thinking. Through a multi‐sited linguistic ethnographic study, this article examines how 46 returning Swedish expatriate women talk about race and whiteness in race‐related experiences and interactions, using colorblind language. By analyzing the implicit contextual associations and dissociations made between race, language, subjectivity, and nation, a system of ideas and cognitive structures mapping perceptions and constructions of the world is exposed; of national belonging, racialized bodies, racial hierarchies, and perceptions of the West itself. In their migrant narratives, however, the categories used could be ascribed opposite meanings, depending on subjectivity and context. In this logic, language and nationality becomes “visible” or “hidden” depending on time and place, while “visible whiteness” can be associated with either an undesirable sense of difference or a set of unspoken privileges.

Comparing genderblind and colorblind ideologies in public and private contexts

AbstractPeople endorse colorblind and genderblind ideologies to appear unbiased toward race or gender, but although they have similar meanings these two ideologies have not been compared across public and private contexts. Given that laws make both gender and race discrimination illegal in public settings, such as schools and workplaces, people may hold similar ideologies in public, professional settings. However, differences in how gender and race are viewed in private contexts, such as friendships or families, could contribute to differential endorsement and use of the ideologies. The current research measured the self‐reported endorsement of genderblind or colorblind ideologies in different contexts (Studies 2 and 3) and a behavioral manifestation of blindness within a decision‐making paradigm (Studies 1, 2, and 3). In this paradigm, participants imagined themselves in an academic and/or social situation and chose which of two targets of different genders or races should join them in a group. Being blind to race or gender involved opting out of this choice. Participants also rated the appropriateness of using gender and race to make these decisions (Study 3). As predicted, in private, social situations participants (a) endorsed colorblindness more than genderblindness, (b) were more likely to show blind decision‐making in cross‐race than cross‐gender choices, and (c) perceived race‐based decisions as more inappropriate than gender‐based decisions. In public (academic and work) situations, colorblind and genderblind measures were equivalent. Thus, people's beliefs about the value of being blind to gender and race differ in social situations and this difference has implications for equality.

Narrating normalcy: a critical autoethnographic analysis of the impact racial ideology can have on teaching

I, like many White people, have been complicit in perpetuating a normalization of Whiteness. My early adherence to an ideology of colorblindness manifested in racial insensitivities that affected me in all contexts of my life. In this critical autoethnography, I use two tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy to analyze how these racial insensitivities affected my instructional and relational practices as a teacher. I do so in an effort to provide deeper understanding regarding the relationship between ideology and teaching. Implications to this work are aimed at providing ways to better support preservice and inservice teachers in designing racially-equitable teaching practices.

Discourses about race in the United States: A thematic analysis of short essays

Conversations around race have come to the forefront of public discourses in the United States with incidents of police brutality leading to movements such as Black Lives Matter and its opposition, All Lives Matter. Although there is substantial psychological literature focusing on racial attitudes and intergroup relations, much of this research is experimental, failing to capture diverse and evolving viewpoints of people in the United States. In the present study, our aim was to understand folk definitions and diverse perspectives about the role of race in the United States in participants’ own words. We thematically analyzed submissions to The Race Card Project (n = 913), a publicly available platform, and responses from a sample of college students describing perspectives on race (n = 1092). A total of 27 identified themes were organized in four domains: opinions about race, race-based interactions, race and identity, and emotions. Opinions about race ranged from color-blind ideology to racial equality, race as divisive or providing community, and excessive focus on race. References were made to historic and current race relations, assumptions based on skin color, prejudice and discrimination, White privilege, and “reverse racism.” These findings contribute to evolving scholarly understanding of race in the United States, with implications for informing initiatives to promote race relations and reduce experiences of discrimination for individuals of color.

A White Race Blindness?

Drawing on observations and on interviews conducted in a préfecture and in a municipalité of the Paris periphery, this article analyzes how republican universalism operates as a “particularizing” tool that enacts Whiteness. Starting from the paradoxical situation in which White state officials are reluctant to engage with the notion of racial discrimination when they are keen to ascribe racial categories to people of color, I argue that race blindness is in fact a form of White blindness to racialization. People of color who subscribe to the ideology of colorblindness tend to adopt a position whereby their loyalty toward the requirement of race blindness is supposed to protect them from suspicions raised by the racialized identity they are assigned to. But in practice, this stance internalizes the way they are viewed by Whites. The article concludes by discussing the link between White race blindness and the failure of republican policies against racial discrimination.

Counter-storytelling: toward a critical race praxis for participatory action research

As university-based educational researchers who have engaged in participatory methods with marginalized populations, we have rising concerns about how interpersonal and institutional power dynamics affect co-researchers from racial and ethnic minority groups. In this manuscript, we use critical race and critical whiteness theory and counter-storytelling methodology to examine three experiences of the same event, which occurred in the context of an ongoing participatory action research project with youth of color, from the perspectives of three female, early career scholars: an Asian American doctoral candidate, a Black doctoral candidate, and a White junior faculty member. Our goals are to encourage increased reflexivity about racial dynamics in participatory research and to grapple with the ways in which educational institutions often subtly perpetuate colorblind ideologies and prop up White privilege. We conclude with considerations for enacting a critical race praxis in intergenerational and multiracial educational research.

Unlearning racism through transformative interracial dialogue

Presenting an empirical study of critical public pedagogy, this paper analyzes interracial dialogues on an internet forum run by conscious Black people who set the terms and challenge White participants who reflect a colorblind ideology. Drawing on Freire’s education for critical consciousness and bell hooks’ work on unlearning racism – understood as structural and interpersonal dominance relations – the paper shows how transformative interracial dialogues are possible despite difficulties. It proposes that epistemological change is required from White participants to cross the perception gap. Analysis of empirical examples shows how Blacks; who follow Patricia Hill Collins’ Black feminist epistemology, and show emotions, speak from experience, and demand rhetoric to be translated into action; challenge White people’s detached, Eurocentric perspectives, and dominating communicative behavior. Honest confrontation and critical dialogue lead several White participants to acknowledge their subjectivity, become aware of White privilege, and examine and change dominating communicative behavior towards Blacks.

I Am Not Your Negro Movie Review: Critical Reflection and Discourse to Advance Social Equity

This article reviews I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary film based on Remember this House, an unfinished manuscript written by James Baldwin. I Am Not Your Negro is a critical film for any public service professional who impacts the lives and livelihoods of Black people in the United States. The critical nature of this film rests in the tragedy of lives lost in a quest for justice for Black people in the US. Baldwin’s conceptualization of “the Negro problem” is an ethical concern that undergirds a strong rationale to advance social equity in American society. Using the tenets of critical race theory, we argue public service personnel have an ethical duty to actively oppose racism, reject color-blind ideology, engage in critical reflection and discourse about justice and the denial of the American dream, and pursue social equity as a means of achieving justice for all.

Colorblind and Colorbound: Everyday Neoliberalism in the Discourses on Romantic Interracial Relationships

ABSTRACT This study examines the construction of racial ideology in the discourses on romantic interracial relationships. Through a critical discourse analysis of online comments, I show how neoliberalism is adopted in ordinary sense-making about racialized dating practices, and how it motivates boundary work at the public-private divide. Boundary work defines the acceptable values and practices within dating life and correspondingly gives rise to colorboundness, an explicit defense of race as an acceptable category for exclusion. Colorboundness prompts a deeper understanding of how colorblind ideology accommodates tensions and contradictions and yet remains the dominant form of racial ideology.

White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights by Justin Gomer

Reviewed by: White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights by Justin Gomer Megan Hunt White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights. By Justin Gomer. Studies in United States Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 252. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5580-2.) Neoliberal concepts of color blindness have hindered meaningful engagement with race since the 1970s. But amid ambiguous race-neutral discourse, white Americans found a conceptual space to visualize the racial conflict they [End Page 546] could no longer articulate. That space, according to Justin Gomer's White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights, was the cinema. Gomer's analysis begins with Dirty Harry (1971) and Claudine (1974), which communicated divergent voices of color blindness and antistatism in the early 1970s. Color-blind marketing undermined Claudine's "black nationalist critique of the welfare state," while Dirty Harry's frequent implications of overblown state protections for criminals reflected white America's lurch to the Right (p. 47). Gomer highlights the latter film's explicit references to the Miranda and Escobedo Supreme Court decisions, the constitutional rights to counsel secured in the 1960s, as evidence of the film's concern with a bureaucratic "coddling of the accused" (p. 29). However, Cape Fear (1962) had offered a similarly cathartic engagement with white racial anxieties and increased civil rights protections for the obviously criminal almost a decade earlier. By the mid-1970s, continued battles over integration produced a coherent color-blind ideology, which Gomer convincingly argues is at the heart of individualist narratives like Rocky (1976). White northerners, celebrating Jim Crow's demise in the South while upholding exclusionary practices closer to home, strategically reframed white supremacy. They resented busing and affirmative action, and those who could adopted an increased identification with their immigrant ancestry, like Rocky Balboa, the Italian Stallion, himself, sponsored by his friends at Shamrock Meats. Narrative and aesthetic choices in Rocky make it clear that its protagonist has not benefited from America's racist past. Rather, he is the hardworking, self-reliant descendant of immigrants, pitted against the entitled Apollo Creed, the African American champion Rocky is plucked from obscurity to fight, repositioning the spectacle of interracial boxing for the color-blind era. It is, Gomer writes, "one giant Bakke metaphor on the silver screen" (p. 81). Rocky and Apollo reunited in Rocky III (1982) to face a mutual threat from the urban ghetto. Apollo Creed, now the image of bourgeois respectability, provides color-blind credibility to Rocky's resentment of Clubber Lang's young Black upstart. As Gomer shows in an accessible and convincing account of 1980s political culture, Ronald Reagan was simultaneously providing White House credibility to previously localized white resentments. By the time he left office, Reagan had cemented color blindness as national creed, prompting Hollywood to reconstitute Black history through the white savior, a trope that readers are perhaps more familiar with than the neoliberal, color-blind individualist Gomer's book foregrounds. By the advent of the 1990s, color blindness was more than Hollywood's preferred lens. It became its approach to both the past and the present, shaping films as diverse as Glory (1989) and Dangerous Minds (1995). Here, Gomer expands existing explorations of the civil rights melodramas of the late twentieth century. But his book offers more than filmic analysis alone, providing a sociopolitical exploration of color blindness from contested idea to neoliberal ideology that would be useful regardless of whether it was applied to films. That Gomer provides such potent cinematic examples is a testament to the central premise of the book: that the conditions and consequences of the color-blind ideology warrant our attention in a multitude of fields. [End Page 547] Megan Hunt University of Edinburgh Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association

Harlan's Dissent: Citizenship, Education, and the Color-Conscious Constitution

In his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Racial conservatives have argued that Harlan’s dissent should invalidate policies that partially redress the historical injuries inflicted on African Americans. This article contends that the concept of colorblindness misstates Harlan’s central claim. His dissent insisted black Americans are entitled to the full fruits of citizenship. This rearticulation reveals that race-conscious policies, particularly within public education, fulfill, rather than undermine, Harlan’s primary objective of defending black citizenship. The article shows that racial conservatives’ colorblind ideology emerged as a strategic response to their legal defeats over segregated schools and to attack affirmative action. The Supreme Court’s later use of colorblind principles is contrasted with empirical evidence of the efficacy of color-conscious pedagogies within schools. The recent Gary B. v. Whitmer case highlights the linkages between full citizenship and race-conscious pedagogies.

The Prevalence, Correlates, and Consequences of Racial Apathy Among Black Teenagers

Racial apathy is a socially desirable and contemporary form of white racial prejudice that resonates with color-blind ideologies. Survey researchers assert it indicates whether whites do not care about racial equality. Deviating from prior studies, we investigate racial apathy among black teenagers. Specifically, we examine racial apathy’s prevalence and correlates, and associations with emotional well-being and alcohol use. Analyzing data from the 2003 National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR, n = 3290), we find one in four black teenagers does not care about racial equality. In terms of correlates, we find daily importance of faith links negatively with racial apathy. Low grades and school difficulties directly predict racial apathy among black teenagers. Living in the West, compared to other regions, associates with larger odds of expressing racial apathy. Finally, black teenagers’ expressions of racial apathy do not predict their emotional well-being or alcohol use.

Membership categorization analysis of racism in an online discussion among neighbors

AbstractThis article addresses relationships between micro and macro aspects of language use through analyzing online interactions among neighbors discussing racism in their neighborhood. Membership categorization analysis supplemented with critical theory highlights how the ways neighbors name, characterize, and position categories orients to their rhetorical and identity goals (to construct reasonable stances, to seem not racist), which in turn motivates alignment with critical, folk, or colorblind ideologies of racism. Thus, ideologies do not determine interactional choices participants make, but rather are constituted by those choices. Findings also illustrate how discursive strategies such as reported speech, absurdity, three-part lists, and metadiscourse support ways that neighbors organize categories and achieve their aims. Additional contributions to this study include demonstrating the utility of membership categorization analysis for analyzing discourses of racism and providing practical insight into how racially diverse groups can have productive conversations about racism. (Racism, ideology, membership categorization analysis)*

Sourcing Diversity, Shifting Culture: Building “Cultural Competence” in Public Media

This study looks at the “cultural competency” efforts of one U.S. public media station as it attempts to shift a culture of whiteness and increase the representation of people of color within both staffing and online and broadcast coverage. Using a field theory framework and a combination of ethnographic observation and interviews, it follows a project that seeks to change sourcing and community engagement practices. The study charts where colorblind ideology and traditions of journalistic objectivity are and are not disrupted—and the challenges of moving from a project to an institutionalized process of culture change that embraces reflexive journalism.