What “I Don’t See Color” Really Says
You have probably heard someone say it. You may have said it yourself: “I don’t see color.” It is usually offered with good intentions, as a promise of fairness. I treat everyone the same. Your skin doesn’t matter to me.
I want to suggest a more honest version of that sentence, at least for people who look like me: “I’m White, and I don’t have to see color.”
That isn’t a promise. It’s a description of a privilege. Not seeing color is easiest for the people whose color has never cost them anything. People who look like me are rarely followed around a store because of our skin, or asked where we are “really” from. When your color is never the first thing anyone notices about you, you are free to notice nothing at all.
The Boy Who Couldn’t Swim in the City Pool
In 1977, I taught reading to seventh and eighth graders in rural Georgia. Of my 120 students, 118 were Black. One day I asked them whether they would swim at the city pool over the summer. A boy slowly raised his hand and told me they weren’t allowed.
I wrote about that year in my recent article, Who Decided What Our Skin Would Mean? What I keep coming back to is this: that boy had no option of not seeing color. His color decided where he could swim, which school he could attend and how carefully his family had to move through their own town. He saw color every summer, from the outside of a fence.
I could leave that town at the end of the year, and I did. I could choose to stop noticing. That choice was the privilege. When a White person says “I don’t see color,” the sentence often means “color has never forced itself on me.” It tells us more about the speaker’s life than about the world.
Learning to See Yourself as Others See You
The philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff has helped me think about this. In The Future of Whiteness (2015), she starts from W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous idea of double consciousness: the experience of Black Americans who must always see themselves through two sets of eyes, their own and White America’s. Du Bois described it as “two warring ideals in one dark body.”
Alcoff then asks what happens when White people begin to sense how they look to people who are not White. Her answer is that this is often where real understanding starts. White people, she writes, may come to realize “the social meanings of [W]hiteness, its unearned privileges and moral collusion, once they begin to intuit how they are viewed by non[W]hite others” (p. 170).
She is careful about one thing, and I want to be too. This split awareness is not the same as what Du Bois described. A White person who glimpses how others see them is not being oppressed by that gaze. They are simply meeting the truth about a system that was built to center them. Alcoff calls that discomfort a potential source of a more accurate understanding, and a step toward what she calls an identity that is “both [W]hite and morally defensible” (p. 171).
That is the opposite of “I don’t see color.” Colorblindness asks never to look. Double consciousness asks us to look twice, once at the world and once at ourselves in it.
“I Have Friends Who Are Black”
“I don’t see color” has a companion line: “I have friends who are Black.” It is usually said in self-defense, when someone feels accused. But it tells us about a person’s relationships. It doesn’t settle the question of their assumptions. Friendship doesn’t automatically undo what any of us absorbed growing up about who is normal and who is different.
Both lines do the same quiet work. They close the conversation. They let the speaker stop listening, stop questioning and declare himself beyond examination. I know the pull of that, because examining yourself is uncomfortable. It’s much easier to announce that you’re one of the good ones.
Seeing Color Well
I’m not asking anyone to become obsessed with race, or to treat every person as a category. I’m suggesting something harder and more human: to see color well. That means noticing when someone’s color is shaping how they are treated. It means listening when people describe a world you don’t have to live in. And it means being willing, now and then, to see yourself as others see you, even when the view is unflattering.
The boy at the pool didn’t need me to be colorblind. He needed someone to see what was happening to him and say it was wrong.
So I’ll ask you: Have you said “I don’t see color,” or heard someone say it? What did it mean to the person saying it, and what might it have meant to the person hearing it? I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if you see it differently.
