The topic for this week, apparently, is Dawn is frustrated by white people who deny that race is an issue. First there were my fruitless hair debates and then I found this discussion on Boomerific’s blog.

I’m an amateur sociologist at heart and so I roll my eyes when people start telling me to stop making such a fuss ‘cuz love sees no color. Maybe love doesn’t but the rest of us do.

In August 2002, the American Sociological Association took a stand against such attempts to abolish “race” as untrue and irrelevant. In a statement, the professional society urged social scientists not to ignore race classifications or stop using them as a research tool, even though they may be biological fiction. “Those who favor ignoring race as an explicit administrative matter, in the hope that it will cease to exist as a social concept, ignore the weight of a vast body of sociological research that shows that racial hierarchies are embedded in the routine practices of social groups and institutions,” the society wrote.

From Colorblind Racism

Race is a social construct. As such, it isn’t “true” because there is no biological basis for dividing human beings up by race. Race is just something we all made up and collectively we make it so. Social constructs have their own truth — witness our worldly obsession with gender (also a social construct). Besides to deny the existence of race is to deny the existence of racism, which is ludicrous.

I’ve decided that a rigid, unedifying color blindness cannot reign in my house. It is by taking note of race and all that accompanies it — the assumptions, the stereotypes flying to and fro like flaming arrows — that we can achieve a transcendental compassion, a unifying respect for the power of experience. People are people, there’s no doubt about it, but you have to understand why things are the way they are. Not to take note of race or, more important, discuss it, would leave my sons in the dark. They must know where they stand and what to look out for, welcoming the surprise of those who reject the rules attached to skin color because to cleave to them would frustrate their inner truth. Luckily for my children, those rules are eroding, but they will endure if not consciously challenged.

from Was he black or white?

You see, it’s a liberal ideal — one held by people of varying colors and hues — to think that we can ignore the social construct of race and thus dismantle it; this is too simplified.

In America, more African American men are in prison than in college. People still get pulled over for Driving While Black. Racism, sadly, is not dead yet.

Many Americans believe racism has all but disappeared, and that we live in a truly colorblind society. Yet people of color lag behind whites in almost all social indicators. They are poorer, less educated, and have less access to health care. If race has become largely irrelevant–and racists are few and far between–how can these conditions persist?

from a blurb for the book Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States

This presents an interesting dilemma. How do we talk to our children about race without making it all about racism? To tell Madison about her African American heritage only in the context of the social construction of race is a little like telling Noah that what makes him Jewish is the holocaust. You see, there is the truth of Madison’s brown skin and her dark eyes and her curly hair and then there is the social truth of her race. They are separate but also deeply entwined.

Sure, we can say that in our home, color doesn’t matter but sooner or later our kids have to leave the house where race most certainly matters.

That’s the great injury of race — it is not rational. It does matter, and yet it shouldn’t. And yet it does. … I have not found a sensible way to talk about race to my son. I do not want to poison him with the kinds of demarcations that would most effectively explain what racism is. Racism means that certain people don’t like you. I guess my concern is that most children, black children in particular, understand the negative consequences of race before they have words to understand the great complexity of what’s embodied in its history. It’s a little bit like wondering how you explain war to a child.

from Seeing A Colorblind Future

I’m not telling people that there’s only one right way to handle the issue of race with their children but I will say that I know that pretending race doesn’t exist is just foolish. How else do we explain all that racism? How else do we explain white privilege? It would be easy for me to say that there’s no such thing as race, seeing as how I’m sitting in the catbird seat.

So don’t you tell anyone they’re making a big deal out of nothing when they fret about transracial adoption. Don’t you say, “perhaps your worry gives credence to the very beliefs about which you worry.” Ignorance is not bliss, trust me. Especially not when it comes to raising kids.

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