3

Color Blind, not Color Brave

Tasked with choosing a theme for my Civic Issues Blog, I struggled to make a selection about what I wanted to write about. I spent much of CAS 137H discussing the environment or education in some capacity, I don’t find politics particularly interesting, and while discussing gender and sexuality does spark my interest, I felt compelled to choose a topic that I have never taken a deeper look at before. Thus, I was left with “race” as my final topic. Initially, I was worried that, as a white American female, this topic was out of my jurisdiction to discuss. I can’t speak to the experiences of having skin any color other than my own, and I would never want to misrepresent the experiences of another person, regardless of their race. But after a period of contemplation, I realized that it is precisely because of my skin color that I have an obligation to initiate conversations about race and its place in American culture. I come from a race that has for far too long attempted to silence or rewrite voices of those who do not look like us, and I am proud to be part of a generation who has recognized the dangers of this trend, and who is taking action to reverse it. In the end, I believe that the conversation of race, much like the rest of the Civic Issues topics, can be boiled down to the matter of respect: respect for opinions and experiences different than our own, respect for the people who share these experiences, and respect for ourselves as we are on this journey of learning and practicing compassion and empathy towards all.

It is because of this belief that I have decided to keep the topic of race for this portion of my blog. For each post, I plan to watch a TED Talk that discusses a subject regarding race or diversity, and to relay what I have taken to be its most important message. It is my hope that in doing this, I not only educate myself, but that I also engage all of you in these discussions, because without conversation (especially when it makes us uncomfortable), we can’t expect to make any progress.

So, without further ado, the TED Talk I selected to view for my first CIB post was entitled “Color Blind or Color Brave” by Mellody Hobson. In her talk, Mellody discusses the importance of being color brave — of “being willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage” rather than being color blind — choosing to ignore race. Specifically, she relates this practice to the business world, where she argues that to pretend that race does not exist in a hiring process or business strategy does not make the decision between candidates any fairer, it simply ignores the component of race and thereby facilitates the notion that candidates’ identities are not important or valued. Instead, she suggests that we lean into conversations around race and get used to being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

In one of my favorite examples of leaning into hard questions, Mellody suggests the following to the audience: “Imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation, like ExxonMobil, and every single person around the boardroom were black, you would think that were weird. But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company, and everyone around the table is a white male, when will it be that we think that’s weird too?”

Overall, Mellody’s stark examples of the problems behind colorblindness are thought-provoking and necessary for listeners to hear. I have a feeling that her line about the Fortune 500 companies will stick with me for a long time, and her TED Talk as a whole has only made me more intrigued to hear other perspectives and dig deeper into the big questions around race in America as this thread of my blog continues.