Raising colorblind kids in a country with a color-obsessed government
by Dr. Steven J. AllenRecently, my daughter brought home a form from school – a form with two questions that triggered an ethical crisis in our household. It was a crisis rooted in my own childhood.
I was born in Anniston, Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I was four months old when Martin Luther King Jr. first appeared on the cover of Time, and eleven months old when President Eisenhower federalized the National Guard to integrate schools in Little Rock.When I was four years old, a bus carrying civil rights activists through my hometown was attacked by a mob and firebombed. The attack began about four blocks from my home.
I was six years old when, in Birmingham, sixty miles to the west, “Bull” Connor sicced police dogs and turned firehoses on civil rights marchers. That year, George Wallace stood in the door at the University of Alabama, Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi, and, in Washington, Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Twenty-two days before my seventh birthday, four girls ages 11 to 14 were killed by a KKK bomb that exploded at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church.
I don’t know when I decided not to be a racist. I remember that, by the time I was eight, relatives and friends were ridiculing me for my stubborn refusal to use the N-word. My mother’s friends kidded her that one day I’d bring home a bride who would call her “Mammy.” (Ironically, prior to the 1967 Supreme Court ruling overturning anti-“race mixing” laws, my parents’ marriage would have been invalid in some places due to my father’s part-Indian heritage.)
As I grew up, I took seriously the words of Dr. King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. . . [that] one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Dr. King’s oldest child was a year older than me, and his second child a year younger than me, so his dream for his children was a dream for my generation. I resolved that I would never accept the essential element of racism – that, based on science and logic, humanity can be divided into a small number of discrete “races.”
I studied the origins of racial classification systems and discovered that they were utterly without merit. Such classifications are grounded in myth and legend and in efforts to justify prejudice, discrimination, and slavery. There are cultural and physical differences among humans, of course, but, depending on criteria, humanity is made up either of countless races or of one race, with no in-between.
The categories used by governments, academic institutions, and corporations – and by every entity that divides us into “races” – are arbitrary and capricious. They are nonsense, like grouping people by astrological sign, like the blood-type categories that are the basis for discrimination in Japan, like the caste system in India, like the prejudice against red-haired “gingers” in Britain, and like the system on that “Star Trek” planet where people whose faces were white on one side and black on the other dominated the people whose tones were reversed.
Today, some racial classifications are based on skin color – but not consistently; one government system classifies Barack Obama as black and the late Anwar Sadat as white. Some are based on the perceived geographical origin of a person’s family – but not consistently; Hispanics are considered a separate category from people of European descent, even though Spain is in Europe. Some classification systems count Hispanics as a separate race, others as an ethnicity overlapping races, and, in some systems, all non-Hispanics are dumped into the same ethnic category. Some racial categories are based on mere convenience (Japanese and Pakistanis are both “Asian”). Some systems divide the world into “white” and “People of Color,” usually for the purpose of demonizing one or the other. If this sounds confusing, well, that’s the point. Racial systems don’t work, because they can’t work. We would laugh at a biologist who put mosquitoes, bats, blue jays, and jetliners in the same category because they all have wings and fly. Yet we accept racial classifications that seem rooted in the anti-logic of Lewis Carroll and George Orwell.
Racial systems aren’t even consistent within themselves. The U.S. Census changes its system at least once every decade, adding, subtracting, merging, and splitting categories. And, at any moment, systems used by various federal agencies, by public schools, and by other government entities are inconsistent with each other. This inconsistency makes it scientifically impossible to make legitimate use of “racial” data.
(It also makes it easy to commit scientific error or fraud. Remember those news stories about the U.S. soon becoming a “majority-minority” country? To get that result, demographers simply concocted a new classification, Hispanic/Latino, almost doubling the number of “minority” members.)
Is a person from the Indian subcontinent in the Asian category, the white one, or the black one? How about someone of Ethiopian descent? Is an American from Libya or South Africa an African-American? How about someone with no known slaves among his ancestors, whose father came to the U.S. from Kenya? Is someone of Portuguese descent from Brazil somehow Hispanic? Is a “brown” person someone whose family came from the Philippines, Malaysia, Australia, or Mexico? Does the classification “black” include people from Ireland? The answers to those questions have depended on who was asking the question and when they were asking. “It depends” is not science. As I grew up, America moved away from the horrific racism I witnessed as a child. By the time I was in college, racial classifications were being taken less and less seriously. Yes, we were still required to classify ourselves on government forms (a practice I protested by listing myself as “Sasquatch”). Yes, when I was in law school, the Supreme Court effectively authorized racial discrimination in college admissions (a decision I protested with a multi-part commentary in the school paper). Nonetheless, over the years, in electoral politics, in the media and business, and in personal relationships, the American people moved slowly but methodically toward non-consciousness of race… toward “colorblindness.”
Members of the political, media, and academic elite focus so much on race that it’s easy to miss the change that has occurred at the grassroots level. Today, regular Americans may be among the least race-conscious of any people ever to walk the earth. Consider just one indicator: Television programs from “Grey’s Anatomy” to “Battlestar Galactica,” from “Bones” to “The Office” – I could name dozens more – have featured prominent storylines of so-called interracial romances in which race is barely mentioned or never mentioned at all. We have come a long way from the days of my youth, when most states banned interracial marriage and when a theater showing a film like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” could expect an anonymous telephone message along the lines of “Guess who’s going to blow up your theater?”
To the members of the political class, this trend is a bad thing. To them, colorblindness is an existential threat. Much of the power of politicians, bureaucrats, and other members of the elite is rooted in race-consciousness and racism. Based on race, they gerrymander electoral districts, distribute pork so to as to buy votes, and nurture grievances that keep them in office and give them control over the lives of others.
So they need their race lists. When my first child, a girl, was born, I was 43, old enough to have grown stubborn about core values. My wife and I resolved that we would raise our children to be colorblind. We would never use a racial term to describe someone when an alternative description was available (say, “the woman in the yellow dress,” not “the white woman”). When “racial” descriptions were unavoidable, we would make them as neutral as possible (“the fellow of African descent”).
We told our kids that the way we look comes from where our ancestors lived over the last few thousand years… that, if your ancestors lived in places with lots of sunshine, you probably have darker skin… that color has nothing to do with a person’s talents or intelligence or goodness or worth.
Our first daughter is now ten years old. We are proud that her heroes include Dr. King and Rosa Parks, Alabamians like her dad. We are proud that her choices of friends, and even of dolls, are colorblind. We are proud that our daughter sees differences of skin color and family background as no more significant than differences in height or weight or eye color. Our son, age six, has those attitudes, as we expect the same of our younger daughter, born last November.
But it’s tough raising colorblind kids in a country with a color-obsessed government. In March, my daughter brought home a form demanding information on her “race/ethnicity.” The form required the selection of one ethnic category -- Hispanic or non-Hispanic -- and up to five “racial” categories -- American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black/African American, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, and White. (Remember that, because the categories and criteria change constantly, such information is invalid even for statistical purposes.)
My inclination was to send the form back blank with a sharply written note, or to write-in a new category such as “race: human” or perhaps “American, as described by Crevecoeur: ‘Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man.’” I imagined myself charging into a school board meeting, passionately stating my case, and converting everyone there to the cause of colorblindness.
Alas, I’m no hero. I feared that my daughter would pay a price for my uppityness. And I feared that, if I raised a ruckus, I’d have trouble if I ever wanted a job with the government or with a big corporation. Anyone who questions the idea of racial classification runs the risk of being marked as racist, and their children as the spawn of racists. That’s not a stain that’s easily washed away.
So I just ignored the school system’s questions and let the bureaucracy take its course. The letter accompanying the questionnaire declared that, “As called for in the new federal requirements, if the forms are not completed by parents/guardians, then a staff member will observe and select racial and ethnic categories on the student’s behalf.” That, presumably, is what happened.
Later, the Census form arrived. More than one-fifth of it was about race. I couldn’t bear to touch it. My wife filled it out. I can’t bear to ask her what she wrote.
Through it all, my pain was like that felt by a person who must claim a religious conversion to avoid execution. It’s just a little thing, giving up your principles so that nobody hurts your daughter or your career. Just a little thing, right? A few years ago, as I filled out the final paperwork for my PhD, a university official told me to be sure to answer the race questions. I declined, pointing to a clause on the forms that declared the race section voluntary. She said okay, but noted that, in her experience, no one had ever refused to answer the questions. I believe her. The last thing an almost-PhD needs is conflict with the university bureaucracy.
But why can’t every race form make it clear that filling out the form is voluntary? Why can’t our government respect the beliefs of those who are deeply opposed to racism of all kinds? Why is there no anti-racist counterpart to Conscientious Objector status?
Because an ethical exemption would expose the invalidity of the concept of racial classification, and start to bring down the whole system of racial spoils and racial power-brokering and racism. And that is something the political class can never abide.
5/25/10
Dr. Allen's dissertation, on President Nixon's decision to shut down the U.S. biological weapons program, is posted here. His e-mail "Why science policy should not be made by scientists" is posted here. His article "Theodor Rosebury and the beginning of the biological Cold War," from the Biodefense Journal (2007), is posted here. Dr. Allen's articles written with Richard Viguerie include Sliming conservatives: A short history (The American Thinker); Politicians earned the distrust of the American people (The Washington Times); and Whose side are you on -- the populists or the elitists? (The Washington Examiner), as well as the 2001 piece "Attacks on Ashcroft are grounded in religious bigotry," posted here.Dr. Allen is available for weddings, birthdays, and Bar Mitzvahs. In other words, he's looking for work. His resume is here.