Colorblindness is bad, multiculturalism is good

So… does this mean that we can go back to “seperate but equal”, which was most assuredly NOT color-blind?

/ sarc

My drill sergeant (a black man) was very much colorblind.  On our first day of basic training, he made it clear that, in the Army, everybody is the same color: GREEN.  All us dumb, green privates worked and especially suffered equally as a result.

JWH – The more general blindness is ignoring the discrimination that people of a given race experience on a day-to-day basis.  I think the author means to say that if a person is “color-blind,” that perceptive approach can lead to people taking on the more general cultural blindness.

This is an excellent point; too bad that the author apparently did NOT mean that.

I suggest that there’s a fine line between recognizing the sins of the past and constantly atoning for them.  This is where the professional racebaiters like Sharpton, Jackson, and Holder make their hay: “Because your ancestors did bad things to my ancestors, you owe me a debt that, frankly, can never be paid… but I’m going to make you try to do so, anyway.”

Another thought occurs to me: the official line about multiculturalism is that every culture has something positive to offer.  Yet, it’s built explicitly on such ideas as “colorblind messages cause stress in ethnic minorities, resulting in decreased cognitive performance”.  In other words, people of certain races / cultures are so psychologically delicate that they have to be coddled and given special treatment.  That’s not a “positive contribution” that anybody would welcome; it’s a HANDICAP.

Finally, I find the term “muliculturalism” to be offensively Orwellian.  It has NOTHING to do with cultures in our American milieu such as the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, etc., all of whom suffered the effects of discrimination at various times in our history*.  It really has nothing to do with Asians, and not much to do with Hispanics.  The proponents of multiculturalism dare not call their program what it is, which is really nothing more than affirmative action implicitly for black Americans.  They dare not because the concept is infuriating to white people who refuse to feel guilty – much less pay – for things they didn’t do, and probably more than a little insulting to other minorities who are treated as (dare I say it?) second class citizens in a system that exists implicitly only for black people.

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(*) Does my white Southern “poor ignorant stupid redneck dirt farmer” culture deserve special treatment, too?

Let’s see.
First we had racism. Obvious overt racism.
Then we had covert racism.
Next was institutional racism followed by economic racism.
I seem to recall a subconscious racism somewhere along the line.
And now, in the final effort to render white middle class america as hopelessly racist, we
have colorblindness as racism.

Ok. I get it. Only by embracing the white-hating mantle of multiculteralism can I be saved.
And even then, with this constantly shifting position, I may still be racist sometime in the future when the label is redefined again.

Well, screw it all.

I still plan on judging people by their character, by who they are and what they do, race be damned. And if that make me a racist, I’ll gladly accept the label.