Colorblindness: Does It Foster Racism

Colorblindness: Does it foster racism and support white supremacy?

Picture this, you pick up the Sunday newspaper and read this story.

Final exams are vastly approaching at Harvard law school and as usual they are going to be brutal. Students across the campus are spending the majority of their time in the library preparing for the gauntlet of exams.

Peter is a student at Harvard and he too, like the other students, is getting prepared for final exams. It's Thursday night and Peter has been at the library studying for six hours. He has taken every measure he can think of to stay awake including coffee and Red Bull but now he can't keep his eyes open any longer. He decides to call it quits for the night when he looks at his watch and notices that it is 2:30 a.m. He knows that the last campus bus comes in ten minutes and that the bus stop is on the other side of the quad. If he misses the bus he will have to walk the four miles to his apartment. He quickly packs up his books and puts on his Alpha Tau Omega hooded sweatshirt. He then begins to run from the library across quad to the bus stop. In his haste, Peter does not notice the police on the quad and runs right past them because he has to make the bus.

Before he knows Peter is tackled by the police and forcibly detained. The police start to berate him with questions and Peter's only thought is to get his student identification card so the police will let him go. The police realize that Peter is reaching into his pocket and they begin to beat him. Peter is so badly beaten by the police that his nose is broken, and he suffers two broken ribs. Peter is then arrested and taken to jail. He is thrown into a holding cell and not allowed to nurse his

injuries. Peter is held overnight and released the next day once the police realize that he is a student and he explains his story.

Peter wants to sue because he feels that this was an incident of brutality and overreaction on the part of the police. The police attempt to justify their actions on the account that Peter looked suspicious and when Peter reached into his pocket they feared he was going for a weapon.

You are a student at Harvard and you are outraged by this event. You think about all the times you have been at the library late and the times you had to run for the bus. You wonder why there has not been a big issue made out of this tragic story and want to take action. However, you later find out that Peter is 6'6" tall and he weighs around 250 lbs. To go along with that Peter is also African-American.

Does this change the way you think about the situation? Now do you think the police had a right to be suspicious of Peter running across campus or their being scared when he reached into his pocket? Did race play a part into the police's actions? The way the story is told in the newspaper is how it would be told under the colorblind approach. The factor of race is ignored and all of the others factors remain the same. However, as you can see in this story when you add in the factor of race it completely changes the situation.

I added this story to see if the factor of race changes the way a reader thinks of the situation. I purposefully attempted to portray Peter as Caucasian in the story with the descriptions I used, while also keeping his actual race concealed. I thought

that almost everyone would be outraged by the story before the race of Peter was revealed. However, once his race was revealed I believed that some readers would think that the actions of the police were justified. Some readers may feel that a large black