Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Your Black Life: Does Racial "Colorblindness" Do More Harm Than Good?
The tendency of some white people to go silent or act "colorblind" on the topic of race could do more harm than good, new research shows.
White people — including children as young as 10 — may avoid talking about race so as not to appear prejudiced, but that approach often backfires as black people tend to view this approach as evidence of prejudice, especially when race is clearly relevant.
These results are from two separate sets of experiments led by researchers from Tufts University and Harvard Business School. Their findings are reported in the October issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the September issue of Developmental Psychology.
"Efforts to talk about race are fraught with the potential for misunderstandings," said researcher Evan Apfelbaum, a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University. "One way that whites try to appear unbiased is to avoid talking about race altogether, a tendency we refer to as strategic colorblindness."
Continued:
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1 comment:
Of course it does. Dr. Cress Welsing once described Colorblindness as "being blind to the conditions of colored people."
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