I've seen a lot musing on being colorblind, racially. I don't think that's a thing, as they say. Imagine a photo with one lone (pick any "color") individual, a male in this case. Nobody says, "the guy on the left, next to the guy with the red shirt, behind the guy with his eyes closed." Everybody says, "the (whatever the lone color is) guy." And we all get it, we all understand immediately. Innocuous, you say, and maybe it is. But if you're not colorblind there, how do you know you're colorblind when it's not so innocuous?
Go watch the doll experiment for a demonstration of how color-seeing people are.
Furthermore, to claim colorblindness is to miss things. Not only richness, but also some important context. Take "playing the dozens." (Google it, you'll find countless sites discussing it.) A racially colorblind person would miss that this is a uniquely African-American activity. Again, might seem innocuous enough. So black men one-up each other with cutting insults--usually about each other's mothers...so what?
Dig a little further, and you find that the roots of this game go back at least to slave days (and possibly to the W. African societies from which America's African slaves were taken). Then consider that most historians agree the game served several purposes of social organization and engagement.
For one, some historians think that social orderings and conflict resolution among the slaves were partly handled by playing the dozens. Slaves could not fight among themselves--the penalties were heavy, so verbal combat stood in for fighting.
Moreover, historians all agree that field slaves certainly were subordinate to house slaves, so verbal "attacks" were the only thing available for field slaves to express anger and address conflicts. Since it's not hard to imagine the white master's "preference" for the house slave did not extend to allowing physical attack on the field hand (that risks damaging the owner's capital investment, after all) an interesting social order and arrangement among the slaves likely arose--a world with some internal autonomy, so long as a general order and productivity were maintained. Sure, the house slave was higher in the white master's pecking order, but all the slaves knew this or that particular field hand had "won" where it really mattered, by throwing shade on the house slave when playing the dozens. (Yes, I'm using my sociological imagination, in conjunction with the histories, memoirs, etc., I've read or seen.)
Some historians even wonder if parents taught their children a kind of self-control with the dozens. You can't get mad, you can't fight back, but you can turn it into a dozens rhyme (some say that dozens insults should be rhyming, and some even point to this being a precursor to rap).
So, an old verbal combat game that has lasted down to today. It's uniquely African-American in style and intent. And it has some important sociological roots.
I also wonder about its "consequences" today. I'm not saying I like it, but maybe this helps explain the anger and frustration in rap. Other avenues of expression and pursuit of redress feel somewhat blocked--and certainly comparatively less available than for the white people around them, so you turn to something, music, where you can express those things.
And a personal example....I remember being a 17-year-old white suburban kid on an all-star football team drawn from around the area. The team included 3 players from an "inner-city" black school. Whenever we had a break from practice, they'd sit together playing variations on the dozens. I remember them laughing and laughing, and I also remember a creeping anxiety that was basically rooted in wondering if they were laughing at me for some reason.
It's not hard to imagine how, if I'd had a position of power over them, and I'd thought they were indeed laughing at me, I could find them "disrespectful." They were just playing the dozens...it had nothing to do with me.
This is NOT to say that disrespect doesn't ever happen. It does.
I'd say, however, that the cumulative total of disrespect in American history is much greater white toward black than black toward white.
The point is that I don't think colorblindness--racially--is real. And to claim colorblindness is to miss important stuff.
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