Color Blind In The 20th Century

The prejudice dilemma is exasperated by the distinctive treatment black people receive from the world, consequently strengthening the feeling of mediocrity in the colored community and forming their negative perspectives on whites. As Jablonski noted, associating “skin color with inferiority has been one of the most powerful and destructive intellectual ideas of all time, leading directly to slavery, civil war, and, more recently, segregation and apartheid.” Racial discrimination still causes hardships suffered by many people. Wilkins expresses deep concern regarding racial integration “not only because of the past but also because of the future.” Even though the former segregation laws have been done away

Police departments across the country have come under scrutiny for racial bias in their stops and

Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “ I look to a day when people will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the contents of their character.” Judging by the outward physical appearance is a huge problem that people in our world face every day, yet, there's still no solution to fix it. In John Wyndham’s book, The Chrysalids, many forms of prejudice can be seen between the norms and the deviants through discrimination, hypocrisy, and assumptions.

“No one is born hating another person because the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” – Nelson Mandela. In today’s society, minorities deal with racial issues such as racial profiling, racial bullying in institutions, and because of these racial attitudes, groups and movements have formed due to these acts. To this day, society is still burdened with many people who do not fully grasp the concept of equality; because of this, outdated racial attitudes are still an ongoing issue in modern society.

First, those leaders who demonstrate a colorblind perspective do so in varied ways. The variation is characterized by a version of what Bonilla-Silva refers to as minimization. According to Bonilla-Silva, the issue of minimization is that while “whites and blacks believe discrimination is still a problem, they dispute its salience as a factor explaining blacks’ collective standing” (p. 91). Among these leaders, minimization occurs in two types of school settings – either school settings with small populations of students of color or diverse high-poverty settings. In these settings, race is constructed as a non-issue or as insignificant in comparison to poverty and therefore ignored.

When we think of racism, we think of the horrific past events in America. Most people consider racism to be a terminated concept, however it is far from the truth. With the resources provided to me in this class, I have learned that many veiled discriminatory practices are still embedded in our society today, causing minorities to be limited in opportunities that would have helped them live a successful life in America. I would like to shed some light on how minorities are currently being affected due to how our society is structured. First of all, the reading titled “Sociologists on the Colorblind Question” written by Elaine McArdle illuminates the idea of how our societies way of thinking that there is no prejudice towards people of color

It has been a common assumption that the moral character of an individual is linked to their race. Consequently, this has been a major propagator of racism. Furthermore, this has been spread people who the author refers to as “dog whistle politicians” who think that the whites have to succeed because they have the values, work ethics, and orientations required for success. According to Lopez, using colorblindness as a means of looking beyond the skin color of an individual would be helpful in dealing with racism as a whole. Colorblindness has a great role in fighting the establishment of racial policies and in dealing with dog whistle themes. Some of the chief advocates of colorblindness such as Martin Luther King, ending segregation were not the only drive in fighting for civil rights, but also changing the common mindset of linking some races with misery. (82) In recent times, a lot has been done to try and fight the racial stereotyping “deep connection between race and disadvantage” although some gains have been achieved, the author states that a lot has to be done yet.

With the recent upheaval in Ferguson, Missouri, racial tensions have taken a center stage role in the daily lives of many Americans. Color-blindness remains the gut response to inequality, but this ignores the fact that heritage makes us inevitably different. Thus, the question, why does society continue to assimilate other races into a color-blind whiteness instead of recognizing and affirming difference?

Regardless of our unpredictability on how many Americans sustain to hold racist points of views and perspectives, aside from the exceeding decreases in percentage of discrimination among people, racism continues to have significance in American life. “You see, researchers have coined this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem.“ says Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel

Throughout everyone’s life, there will always be a point in time where they will experience some form of racial bias. After the Civil War in America, there was racial bias towards many African Americans. Many African Americans are being judged too quickly and facing terrible outcomes just because of the color of their skin. Some good examples of African Americans being considered dangerous is in the article by Brent Staples’ “Black Men and Public Space.” One of the traits that described African Americans were that African Americas are huge, threatening people, “…perceived as dangerous…” (1). As mentioned earlier in this paragraph, racial bias still exists, even in me. Just like Staples, I will explain my racial bias towards my classmates, here at CSM, and explain how that racial bias affected me.

Color-blindness or race blindness refers to the degree to which nations discriminate the minorities (generally the Black) from their local citizens. A color-blind society does not make such discriminations and treats all the individuals equally irrespective of their color, race, ethnicity, or nationality (Morrison, Plaut, & Ybarra, 2010). Color-blindness is one of the major issues the World has been facing since Globalization has evolved into every aspect of life. Since I have grown up, I have observed that the United States citizens do not have strong color-blind societal beliefs; they consider the people from other nations and races as inferior. This thing has created big cultural differences in whatever these minorities act, participate, or perform while they are in the United States (Cassano & Buono, 2010).

In 20th century England women, especially women of color were treated as second class citizens. The British Colonial Empire, fell apart after World War II, yet the lasting scars of colonialism live with colonized people today. Centuries of racism and violence came with colonialism and those affected by it were stripped of their culture and identity, then forced to adopt Western ideals. People of color were discriminated against based on the color of their skin and were considered a second class citizen compared to their white peers. In these cases, men were stripped of their dignity and took it out on their wives back home. Lois Tyson wrote, “Colonizers picked up their guns and went home, but the devastating effects of their colonial rule remain

I think that many people do not notice they are degrading groups of people or making them feel unwelcome. Oftentimes, people think that certain groups are inferior subconsciously. I notice that bias can put marginalized people down, and leave the “we’s” of a community unsupervised. For example, it has been shown through a Yale experiment that bias is often used in a classroom setting. They used eye-scanning technology for this experiment and told the teachers to look for any signs of trouble in the scene (when there actually was no trouble.) In the end, most teachers focused on the black students more than the white students. This connects to my old school in Concord, as I remember that there used to be a group of Black students who were in my classroom in kindergarten. These students did not cause any more trouble than the rest of us, but the teacher seemed to constantly watch them. She yelled at the Black students much more than the White. I remember that these students never got away with any form of trouble, even if it was not very significant (such as dropping a small piece of trash on the ground). This left the White students unsupervised while she was dealing with these minor incidents. While I was not a student to get in too much trouble, I remember I used to take little multi-colored gems from the playground’s sandbox. While my teacher checked the Black student’s pockets, she did not check the white student’s pockets (for the gemstones). This extra attention given to the Black students often signaled them out, so less White students were friends with the Black students because we were treated differently. The only reason I still remember this incident is because my mother noticed that gems started appearing around the house and she did not know where they came from. I remember using the excuse that my friend gave them to me, and I never got in trouble for this minor crime. Overall, while this may seem

John Dalton has been known to have discovered his own colour blindness in the year of 1794, seeing pink as blue and scarlet as green. The vitreous humor is known as a gel that can fill a space that is in-between the lens and retina of the eyeball, it’s also known as vitreous body. There are around 1 in 12 man and 1 out of 200 women that colour blindness affects in their everyday life, there are also different types of colour blindness that affects many such as Deuteranomaly or Protanomaly are also known as red-green where they find it difficult to see reds, greens, browns and oranges (Colour Blindness Awareness, Accessed 17.08.2015). Monochromatic which is seeing no colour at all. In a person’s eye there are three colours that make up all

The study of prejudice, stereotyping, and racism has been a major theme in social psychology reflecting concerns of society (Jost & Kay, 2010). History of colonization contributed to Europeans’ prejudice against people of color (Tuffin, 2004). For centuries, racism was used to justify the advancement of European nations. In the 18th century, the