Tahi

[paradox]

Today I am grateful for this excerpt from dolphin__girl's post, "A Moment of Contemplation":

Yelling Class began with one of those circle games, where you write in circles on a page aspects of you that define who you are. Mine were things like "female", "teacher", "writer", "geek", "fat". When everyone began to read theirs out, interesting trends emerged. Almost none of the white students included "white" in their circles. All most all of the black students included "black."

What I can see, looking back on that circle game after graduation, was that most people included in their circles things about themselves for which they had, at some point, been the victims of abuse. "Fat" and "geek" were mine. Others from the white students included "Jewish", "gay", "[immigrant background]". It should have been telling that "black" appeared on so many of the black students' pages. But it took me a while.

At the beginning of Yelling Class, I also prided myself on all the work I had done to make myself "colourblind". It was in Yelling Class that I learned how incredibly racist that was.

One of the best vocalizations of how awful the term "colourblind" really is came back to the circle game, and how many of the students listed black (or Korean, or whatever they happened to be) as ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL, DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF WHO THEY ARE AS A PERSON. When you try to be colourblind, you are actually discounting an entire aspect of who a person is. For white people, who almost unanimously did not list their colour as a defining characteristic of who they are, this doesn't appear to be a big deal. But for someone who DOES, you are essentially saying "I dismiss this entire part of you that is integral to your personality and part of your definition of who you are as unimportant and of no concern to me."