On "Color-blind Ideology"

     In a journal titled "There Is No 'Race' in the Schoolyard: Color-Blind Ideology in an (Almost) All-White School", Amanda Lewis analyzes a case study she did on a mostly white suburban elementary school. In the journal, Lewis identifies that the schools focus is on being white and staying white. She mentions the school's routine for black history month where one of the teachers puts up posters of famous blacks in history, but immediately following the end of the month she takes the posters down. Instead of making blacks history a sort of holiday, Lewis wants to see it embedded into the curriculum. I remember a similar experience in my elementary school growing up, black history month our teacher made us make posters for black history month, and I remember seeing it as something separate from my own history and something that was more blindly celebrated than actually learned. Amanda Lewis calls for “critical multiculturalism,” replacing this broken system of turning black history into a holiday to celebrate, which would not be bad if there was something other than this for students to have the opportunities to learn about black history.
     Lewis talks about how people within the community talk about how they do not see race as a problem, and how if anything it is avoided rather than faced head on. She calls this a color-blind ideology: when people believe that the best way to end racial discrimination is to avoid acknowledging race. Thinking back on my own experience in school, sometimes when people say "black people" or "black person" there is the occasional gasp because to identify somebody as black is to acknowledge that their skin color is different from my own. A color-blind ideology benefits white people and hurts minorities because it gives white people the privilege to ignore racial issues, ironically enough when many towns in the US are a majority one race or another. Instead of adopting a color-blind ideology, white America needs to learn how to fully acknowledge and value differences among different races and teach and learn about differences among races because we are largely the people who created these differences.