All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

Color blindness is a racial ideology defined as the belief that race and ethnicity should not influence how people are treated in society. Since the Civil Rights era, individuals and groups in the United States have used the term to describe the desired or ostensibly achieved state of freedom from racial prejudice, or to ban policies and laws that explicitly take race into consideration, such as race-based affirmative action. Proponents of color blindness argue that policies that differentiate according to race can deepen racial divisions.

Nicole’s adoptive parents raised her without regard for her race, insisting, “Of course we don’t think of you as Asian” (31). As Nicole notes, her adoptive parents “wanted to ignore the fact that I was the product of people from the other side of the world, unknown foreigners turned Americans. To them, I was not the daughter of these immigrants at all: by adopting me, my parents had made me one of them” (31).

The colorblindness of Nicole’s parents, though well-meaning, was problematic for two reasons: First, it cut Nicole off from her heritage, and second, it was at odds with the treatment she received outside the home, in her predominantly white community. Nicole writes: “Caught between my family’s ‘colorblind’ ideal and the obvious notice of others, perhaps it isn’t surprising which made me feel safer—which I preferred and tried to adopt as my own” (32). It was not until Nicole was in her early twenties that she began questioning her parents’ race-blind approach to childrearing. As for her parents, they were never warned of the unique challenges of adopting across racial and cultural lines. Rather, their colorblindness reflected the ideals they had grown up with in the second half of the 20th century.

Critiques of colorblindness emerged in the late-20th century. In 1997, Leslie G. Carr published Color-Blind Racism, arguing that color blindness undercuts the possible progressive gains of affirmative action. Experts have since remarked that color blindness fails to recognize systems of privilege and disadvantage. Indeed, promoting a merit-based, raceless worldview not only ignores the hardships minorities experience, but also perpetuates the myth that hard work alone leads to success—without taking whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, ableness, and other privileges into account. The phrase, “I don’t see color,” became common after the Civil Rights era, in precisely the period that Nicole’s parents came of age. Color blindness, however, is now widely seen as a mechanism that reproduces racial inequity. The refusal to acknowledge race not only allows people to avoid addressing manifestations of persistent discrimination, but also perpetuates and legitimizes racial inequalities in a wide range of contexts, including policing, housing, healthcare, and employment. Color blindness glosses over racial inequity, while admitting that racial bias exists is the first step to creating a more equitable society.