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[sebastian_dangerfield]

You are completely focused on intent. There are times (and I gave you an example with Trump (and Kelly Ann Conway is employing the same approach on her rounds as well as we speak--"The question is racist") when people intentionally use the concept of colorblindness to end any real discussion on race. And they do it because it works with white people.

I agree with this 100%.

But--and here's where you get stuck because you have determined already that being colorblind is the best way to be--the problem with the concept of colorblindness is that it is impossible.

I agree with this. My only point was, when people profess to attempt to be colorblind, it's often not just a dodge. A lot of people really believe they can do this. They're wrong. But it's not a significantly disingenuous behavior.

I gave you the reasons why--namely, we are programmed from very early on which races are supposed to be superior and then we reinforce that hierarchy in absolutely every possible way in this country. Therefore, in reality, one simply cannot be colorblind. Anyone who says they are is lying.

Here's an area where we differ. I don't see the programming element. I see people observing that blacks are often treated as second class citizens and just assuming that's how society works. Not all people believe the hierarchy is a just or sensible system. Most people think it is not. Most people believe life is unfair.

I sense, perhaps incorrectly, that you believe that most non-minorities have a hierarchy of races in their heads. That's soft white supremacy. There are people with that bizarre and twisted mindset, but not a huge number.

You shift to an argument where we need to strive for colorblindness. Surely this in not controversial. In theory, in a vacuum, no. But the conditions in which colorblindness can exist will never come about. You then mention some distant future in which there will be no such thing as race. Fun to think about in a freshman-in-college-smoking-weed-after-sociology/anthropology-class sort of way, but beyond that, pointless.

Agreed 100% again. But I see no harm from striving to be colorblind. So you fail at attempting to be unrealistically decent. And that striving is not mutually exclusive with considering and addressing racism. One can attempt to be as colorblind as he can be, to hold that as an ideal, and still recognize and try to remedy racism around him in practical ways.

Your underlying point about how it is something to strive for is a common refrain. I challenge you to think about why anyone would focus on the idea of colorblindness when the concept is completely unnecessary if there is no racism. If there is no racism, we wouldn't treat people differently based on race prejudice. Cultural and physical differences wouldn't be deemed negative simply because of who possesses them. So the concept is impossible in our current reality and completely unnecessary in future-world in which racism doesn't exist.

I was using colorblindedness to mean a situation in which one does not care about color or race. Color and race were synonyms. You and I disagree, I think, about how much of racism is based on the cultural and how much is based on the physical. I still see the physical as significant -- the color and feature differences that enable the simple lizard brain circuits of a racist mind label someone an "other."

Once it is clear that the concept has no use outside of what people use it for right now, we need to address why people use it right now. It sounds good to say, "I don't see color." The inference to be drawn is that you don't (or don't want to) make decisions based on color. That's where we all want to be, right? This is your main point. But this isn't true for anyone, so it serves to act as a barrier to a genuine conversation and any efforts toward actual change. If someone refuses to acknowledge that their decisions are always influenced by how they have been conditioned by a lifetime of programming when it comes to race, one cannot have a productive conversation with that person.

I agree with this. I can understand how it's frustrating for someone to say they strive to not see color or race. Perhaps they shouldn't say that out loud. But it's very hard for me to say that they shouldn't privately think of that as a goal because it should be the goal. As a basic matter of common sense and logic, fixing how you act toward another, particularly in a negative manner, based on his or her race or color is intellectually indefensible. It's moronic.

But I do understand your point about not making the ideal the enemy of the practical solution needed.

And to be clear, I don't exempt myself from that conditioning. I see it in myself all the time. I am extremely light-skinned and I find myself trading on that and expecting better treatment because of it. It disgusts me, but it's there.

The book runs through a number of examples of people applying this good/bad binary through color-blindness to squelch conversation and to shift the focus away from them being a bad person. I don't know if you will read it with an open mind, but it would be interesting to have this conversation again after you have.

I will read it. I'm far too invested in considering the topic not to do so, and every review of it has deemed it excellent.

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You also said: "I do not agree with the definition of racism having nothing to do with intent."

I never said this. I cannot believe you got this from anything in our conversation. I said it has become almost impossible to discuss or address racism with white people because they have limited racism to something that only bad people do. Once they feel like they are put in the "bad people" box, no conversation about what they did or said can be had because they are so focused on defining themselves as a good person (thus the term "fragility"). Hell, you can't even talk pure numbers and impact because any such discussion is immediately turned back towards how the white person was raised or who their ancestors are or how they came from nothing, etc. Do you see what I'm saying? The goal is to remove "intent" from the conversation when we would like to talk about impact. White people cannot do this because they don't want to be labeled bad and because of that, any practical discussion beyond how that white person is not bad is impossible.

I think intent and impact are two different issues. I agree with the proposition that impact is the more important consideration.

There are surely people who are intentionally racist. But, as we know, implicit bias, confirmation bias, etc. are examples of ways in which how we've been conditioned influences our decisions. We need to be able to discuss things like that with white people without having every conversation get stuck on how they feel like they are being attacked for being "bad."

Again, I agree. I think the best way to approach this is to simply focus on impact. There's no sensible white person who'll argue with the statement, "It's easier to be white, and you've all kinds of advantages over blacks." That's just a fact. From there, the conversation naturally goes to, how does society start to remedy that? Where I think the conversation goes sideways is when the suggestion is made that a white person is complicit in this inequity. For a lot of white people, that's true. They take actions to protect the status quo inequity. But for a lot of white people, it's not true. They were simply lucky -- born white in a society where it helps a lot to be white.

But if the conversation focuses on fixing the inequity, there's no reason to get bogged down in according blame or complicity. If an honest white person sincerely engages in a conversation on how to fix the problem and learn how it feels to endure systemic racism from a black person's perspective, just focus on the solution, long and arduous as it may be.