Whereas I believe it will be important to not fake our society is post-racial or colour-blind now, I insist on the significance of colour-blindness (in a racial sense) as a future ideal to strive for. And I keep that the perfect of a colour-blind society, a post-racial world, just isn’t a pipe dream. How do I do know that? As a result of I’ve lived it.
A short while in the past I took a “privilege points questionnaire“, a kind of questionnaires that assess how a lot “privilege” you supposedly have on the idea of your race. After I took it, my outcomes put me within the most racially privileged class, proclaiming to me that “In U.S. society many sources can be supplied to you, whether or not or not you need them or ask for them, that may help you to get the issues required to have what the society considers an excellent life, merely due to your race.” Have in mind, I’m not white! With my visibly brown pores and skin and Indian title, the Indian facet of my ethnicity is obvious to observers. But no one’s ever referred to as me a credit score to my race, I’ve by no means been hassled by retailer safety due to my race, no one’s thought I used to be financially unreliable due to my race – or in the event that they did, they hid it nicely sufficient that I by no means seen.
I’ve had this “privilege” for many of my life, regardless that I’m visibly non-white. The racism I’ve been a sufferer of is actual, however it all the time stood out as a result of it was an exception. The bullies who bullied me for my pores and skin color have been identified bullies who would have discovered one thing else to bully this nerd about even when I had been white. (After I got here dwelling from faculty one afternoon and requested my mom “what’s a Paki?” I believe it was way more traumatic for her than for me.) When the taxi driver sped away from me on 11 September 2001, one in every of my ideas quickly after was “oh, I suppose that’s what it’s prefer to be black.” That had by no means occurred to me earlier than in my earlier twenty-five years.
After I was a baby, I wished to be prime minister of Canada. There had by no means been a non-white prime minister; there nonetheless has not. There have been no non-white politicians whose profile was excessive sufficient for me to think about them fashions. (Ujjal Dosanjh wouldn’t grow to be premier of British Columbia till I used to be an grownup.) But for all that, it simply by no means occurred to me that my race could possibly be a barrier to my changing into prime minister. The thought simply by no means crossed my thoughts. Was {that a} product of a kid’s naïveté? Maybe. Within the Nineteen Eighties there was good cause to count on that the racism that was such a minor presence in my childhood world would have grow to be extra vital had I grow to be a public determine. However I don’t suppose even such naïveté would have been potential if race and race consciousness had been main options of my childhood. And because it seems – fortunately – they weren’t. The oppressions I’ve confronted in my life have been less racial and more generational.
I don’t fake that my expertise is typical for non-white folks in majority-white societies, however it’s not distinctive both. In Eire, which is significantly much less numerous than Canada, Leo Varadkar, who’s about my age and the identical racial background, doesn’t appear to have been held again by that background. He proclaimed: “I’m not a half-Indian politician, or a physician politician or a homosexual politician for that matter. It’s simply a part of who I’m. It doesn’t outline me.” And maybe extra poignantly: “I do know when my father travelled 5,000 miles to construct a brand new dwelling in Eire, I doubt that he ever dreamed that someday his son would develop as much as be its chief and regardless of his variations, his son could be judged by his actions not his id.” He and I, it seems, have been judged by the content material of our characters greater than by the color of our pores and skin – in a approach that we wouldn’t have had we been born fifty years earlier, within the period of Bhagat Singh Thind. Martin Luther King’s dream did not come true for his own children, and has largely not but come true for American black folks, however it had come true for different non-white folks, whose lives started not lengthy after King’s ended. I rely myself fortunate to be amongst them.
One of many main themes in contemporary racial movements is illustration: we want extra non-white folks in excessive locations and in in style tradition in order that non-white youngsters can think about themselves in these roles. I believe that’s an excellent factor to help, as a result of I can see the way it could be essential for some folks. But it surely additionally issues that it wasn’t essential for me. (It doesn’t appear to have been essential for Varadkar both.) I didn’t want to be represented by folks whose pores and skin seemed like mine, as a result of I simply didn’t consider my pores and skin color as essential to who I used to be. I could possibly be myself, not my race. That was a present that society had unintentionally given me, and it’s a present that I hope many extra could have sooner or later. I desire a world the place youngsters can have a look at careers carried out by folks with completely different bodily options and suppose “I’m going to do this”, not “I can’t do this as a result of they don’t seem like me” – and I need them to be proper.
All for this reason I believe one thing has gone very flawed when, as Ibram X. Kendi appears to do, we deny even the potential of being not racist (versus proactively antiracist.) For whether it is not possible to be not racist, underneath any circumstances ever, then the world of Martin Luther King’s dream – the world he advocated and hunted for – can by no means exist. That world is one the place racism is a minor sufficient downside that one does not must be actively antiracist, one can merely be not racist. And I believe that world stays each potential and value combating for – with affirmative action as a key weapon in the fight. It’s a world the place black folks get handled in the best way that I, of combined Indian and white inventory, was handled. Absolutely that’s not even an implausible dream, not to mention an not possible one.
I believe one may plausibly argue that underneath the present system, given present circumstances, it isn’t potential to be merely non-racist. (I hope that that is what Kendi intends to imply; I haven’t but learn sufficient of his work to see whether or not it’s.) However one would then must specify: at what level would this technique have modified sufficiently that it could be potential to be non-racist? If no such level may exist even hypothetically, that might doom anti-racist struggles to failure, which essentially raises the query of whether or not such a doomed quest would even be well worth the time. Luckily, I believe my very own lived expertise, as a non-white particular person in North America, is superb proof that it may well. We are able to construct a post-racial, non-racist society the place different non-white folks have a life expertise like mine. Allow us to accomplish that.
