Denial doesn't change the truth about racism in New Hampshire

“I don’t see race.” How many times have you heard this phrase from well-meaning white people?

It sounds ideal, doesn’t it? A person saying this generally means that when meeting and getting to know people, she ascribes no racial stereotypes to their characters. She takes only their personalities into account when forming friendships, assesses only professionally relevant traits if that is the context for their meeting. She’s not saying she literally doesn’t see race, of course. If you ask her the actual color of a lunch partner’s skin, she is able to answer the question. What she wants you to know when she says “I don’t see race” is that she does not make race-based judgments. In short, she’s telling you she’s not a racist.

The problem with an individual saying “I don’t see race,” however, is that he’s not seeing the truth. If you don’t see race, you don’t see the whole person standing in front of you, including her heritage and her culture. A white person saying “I don’t see race” is saying “I don’t see you.” He, a white person, is choosing to erase part of that person’s identity – an identity of which she may be quite proud. And dismissing the value of someone else’s racial identity is not a white person’s choice to make.

Telling a person of color “I don’t see you” also ignores the aspects of her life that necessarily exist in response to white oppression. It doesn’t matter if you believe in white oppression or not; it’s both a historical and a current fact. If you listen to people of color – and in a conversation about race, you should – you will begin to understand how this oppression is happening now. Asian Americans, for example, continually endure a litany of “Where are you really from?” that clearly implies they are not sufficiently American. The discomfort those questions impose have transformed into fear due to the elevated violence of the past 14 months. “The talk” Black parents have with their sons is not a single conversation, but a lifelong, reality-based fear that their young adult kids will face unavoidable death at the hands of white law enforcement. That fear changes behavior and creates painful scars.

Read more: https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2021/04/15/commentary-denial-doesnt-change-the-truth-about-racism-in-new-hampshire/