COLOR UNCONSCIOUSNESS
Opposition to Ward Connerly’s Proposition
54—the "color conscious" initiative—has centered around what opponents
call it’s "hidden agenda." Prop 54, they say, is the unholy companion to
Proposition 209, the 1996 initiative that gutted California’s affirmative action
programs. Prop 209 made it more difficult to operate programs in California to counter
discrimination against African-Americans and Latinos. In preventing the government
from collecting race-based data, the argument continues, Prop 54 would cover up the
effects of continuing anti-black and anti-brown discrimination. First the stab in
the neck by the assassin’s stiletto. Then the assistant comes to sop up the blood
and destroy any evidence of a crime.
All of that may be true. But actually, it’s the unhidden agenda
of Prop 54 that worries me the most.
"We are a multi-racial society that defies box-checking,"
Mr. Connerly said two years ago in announcing the beginning of the Prop 54 petition
campaign, the "boxes" referring to those little squares on forms we fill
out, now and then, to designate our race or ethnicity. "The goal of [Prop 54]
is to move us beyond the box and closer to a color-blind society. The government
should respect our privacy and not collect such personal information, especially
since our state constitution no longer allows discrimination or preferences based
on an arbitrary social construct such as ‘race.’ Race classifications have never
helped anyone. … It’s time California learned this history lesson, and became truly
colorblind. "
The problem is, I don’t think it’s possible for human beings to
be colorblind. And if some great god came by offering that as a "gift"
to humanity, for myself, I’d pass up the opportunity.
As far as I can tell from my limited studies and readings, from
the very beginnings of our existence, it has been in the nature of humans to gather
ourselves into small, distinct groups. At first, in the days when we first walked
the African savannahs, you couldn’t make out an overall physical difference between
these little bands of survivors. If you scrambled the bones of various groups from
those early days, an anthropologist would find it impossible to put them all back
beside the right campfire. This was before our wanderings into new environments colored
our skins, broadened or narrowed our noses, retextured our hair, and generally shaped
our bodies into the broad categories we call "race". And yet, early on,
with no physical distinction yet formed, we seem to have developed the habit of creating
group distinctions among ourselves.
Part of this human drive for distinction is of the "us against
them" category—the "my clan must survive by controlling the water hole
and driving every other clan away" category—that type of visceral, antagonistic,
hate-filled distinction from which all religious and racial intolerance has flowed…the
Holocaust, the Maafa (the displacement of Africans through the slave trade), the
tribal butcherings that have swept every continent, the witch hunts, the Inquisition,
and all the world’s holy wars. It is a fear of difference.
But part of the human drive to divide ourselves into smaller categories
comes not because we seek to deny the humanity of those outside our group, but because
we can only begin to grasp the enormity of our human connection in small doses. How
many people live in the world today? 6 billion? Try spending a second…a pitifully
inadequate period of time…just looking at the face of each person on earth. If you
did that your entire, life, and that’s all you did, and your life took up 80 years,
at the end of it you’d have only looked at 2 and a half billion faces.
Or take a more horrific example.
Without looking it up on the internet, I couldn’t tell you the
number of people who died in the attack on the World Trade Towers on September 11th.
The number wouldn’t mean anything to me, if I could remember it. What is most painful
to me about that day…what resonates most in my mind…is the picture of a single individual
jumping out of one of the topmost floors, arms flailing, endlessly descending to
a certain death. They knew they were going to die in the jump, yet they preferred
to jump rather than burn to death in their office. Understanding that single moment
of horror allows me a small inroad into the overwhelming, unimaginable horror of
that day.
And that was only one day in thousands and thousands of days of
horror on this planet.
We understand humanity, first, in small doses, and from that which
is closest to us. Something strikes a baby, and he experiences pain. At some point,
he learns that if he strikes or scratches someone else, their experience will be
similar. It is the beginning of empathic consciousness, the understanding that makes
all human society possible.
Consciousness of ourselves…consciousness of our family…consciousness
of our clan and tribe…consciousness of our race—these are all paths along the way
towards consciousness of our common humanity. The problem is not in the path, I think,
but how far we walk it, and what we do along the way.
To make ourselves colorblind, I think, would be to do away with
what allows us to see. I think you’re wrong on this one, Mr. Connerly.