This isn't the week to expect Mayan curses or celeb news.
Instead, I wanted to address something political, so if you get all worked up by anything and everything going on in the #racetotheoval2k16 and think you're going to change the world on a comment feed, I urge you to just stop reading. I'm not trying to stir things up. I'm just a girl with an outlet.
In Ivanka Trump's speech praising her father and how he's going to "Make America Great Again," etc., she uttered a small statement that troubled me: that her father is "colorblind." Not in the way where certain people can't see red and green, but in the way that she claims Donald Trump does not even see that people are of different races.
This isn't going to be about Donald Trump and how, let's be honest, that statement in itself isn't even true anyway. It's about why I don't find the term "colorblind" to be a positive thing that someone would want to use to make themselves look good. If anything, it's rather counter-productive given that he is trying to win the votes of people of color, as his track record in appealing to minorities has not been...great.
First of all, you can't simply be colorblind when it comes to people. If you have the gift of sight, then you can see that there are many different kinds of people, in different shapes, in different colors, in different sizes, etc. People are not all one color, nor do they all dress or act the same across the world. By saying you're color-blind, you're completely ignoring a major part of someone's life. You're ignoring their entire culture, whether it be reflective of your own or someone else's.
By saying you're colorblind, you're ignoring an entire peoples' past. You're not being a hero for ignoring every bad thing that has happened in the past, quite the opposite. To be theoretically colorblind is to ignore the obstacles and triumphs of an entire race. Michelle Obama's speech at the DNC about waking up every morning in a house slaves built is an example of this. She will not ignore it, instead, she finds strength in how far her family and race as a whole has come. How her husband wakes up in that house every morning and leads the free world. You can't ignore the past, but you can learn from it and be stronger for it.
By saying you're colorblind, you're choosing to ignore racism going on in the world. You're ignoring the discrimination around you. Every Black Lives Matter hashtag, every shooting recorded on someone's iPhone, every time discrimination occurs against someone or multiple people of the same race, you're refusing to see the racism at the forefront of the violence. In ignoring it, you may be perpetuating it.
If you actually read to this point in the article then hey, what's up. Also, if there's anything to take away from my point, it's that race and ethnicity aren't something to turn a blind eye to. If anything, in the face of discrimination, it is something that you should pay even more attention to. Ivanka may have meant well, but if she is trying to say that being colorblind is the way to, I don't know, end racism, then she has another thing coming.
