I'm not sure what you mean by "sanctioned", because it's not like there's a nifty little club or an official organization or something. It's not like "we" have someone somewhere putting a stamp on something. It's not like there's a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval going on here or anything.
There are some terms and phrases which are commonly used short hand, especially among those who discuss racism frequently. I think this post here (http://hth-the-first.livejournal.com/53171.html) may also help.
I don't know if you read the links I mentioned in the post or not, because that may help to answer a lot of questions that you have.
The problem is not about someone claiming that "I see a black person and automatically think they're lazy" - it's about someone saying, "I don't even notice that they're black!", which is a blatant lie and a function of white privilege. She notices people's races, she just tries to pretend that everything is just fine.
Saying that you acknowledge someone's race and do not automatically apply stereotypes because of that has nothing to do with colorblindness. Colorblindness is about pretending you don't have reactions, conscious and unconscious, to the races of others around you and that you don't have certain hurtful behaviors due to that. It's about pretending that you don't "notice" that someone is not white. Which is a lie.
It's always been my understanding that the phrase means something more like "doesn't see the colors with the usual negative connotations attached."
I'm not sure where you picked up that definition from. Colorblindness, AFAIK, has always been used to connotate that someone doesn't even realize that people are of other colors, that to them Black = White = Latino = Asian = Native Americans, etc, that everyone is the same.
Your definition, for the purposes of this post, what either arhyalon or karnythia were referring to. The discussion at hand involves a white woman claiming that she does not "see" or "notice" race, that she is oblivious to it and that therefore her actions, thoughts, and words are never dictated by race.
This is, of course, ludicrous. Because as I stated above, she obviously notices race enough to know the people around her are different and to point them out and to at least nominally acknowledge some kind of prejudice.
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Date: 2009-08-13 02:18 am (UTC)There are some terms and phrases which are commonly used short hand, especially among those who discuss racism frequently. I think this post here (http://hth-the-first.livejournal.com/53171.html) may also help.
I don't know if you read the links I mentioned in the post or not, because that may help to answer a lot of questions that you have.
The problem is not about someone claiming that "I see a black person and automatically think they're lazy" - it's about someone saying, "I don't even notice that they're black!", which is a blatant lie and a function of white privilege. She notices people's races, she just tries to pretend that everything is just fine.
Saying that you acknowledge someone's race and do not automatically apply stereotypes because of that has nothing to do with colorblindness. Colorblindness is about pretending you don't have reactions, conscious and unconscious, to the races of others around you and that you don't have certain hurtful behaviors due to that. It's about pretending that you don't "notice" that someone is not white. Which is a lie.
It's always been my understanding that the phrase means something more like "doesn't see the colors with the usual negative connotations attached."
I'm not sure where you picked up that definition from. Colorblindness, AFAIK, has always been used to connotate that someone doesn't even realize that people are of other colors, that to them Black = White = Latino = Asian = Native Americans, etc, that everyone is the same.
Your definition, for the purposes of this post, what either
This is, of course, ludicrous. Because as I stated above, she obviously notices race enough to know the people around her are different and to point them out and to at least nominally acknowledge some kind of prejudice.