Color blind?

I grew up attending Unitarian Churches. I was the child of what some people called a mixed marriage, now days I am told that we were a bi-racial family. The word my father used to describe us is not considered a nice word to use in public. Something about being partially breed.

My Cherokee background father experienced two kinds of responses from white liberals, insulting responses, and the responses of folks who tried to be "color blind." Some Unitarians called him chief. I noticed that they didn't treat him like a chief. Some said weird "ha ha" comments like "where is your squaw."

But others tried hard to ignore what being of Cherokee descent may have meant to him, they tried to treat him like a "white" man. In the process they made him invisible.

The assumption in our society is being colorblind is a good thing. Why? Is being unaware of the other person's identity good? Isn't the assumption in the term "color blind" that seeing color is being prejudiced against that color?

Why can't we see people in all their various colors, see them in the depth of their identity and respond with positive human feelings toward them because the content of their character is embodied in one of the many colors of humanity?

Color blindness is pretending that conquest, slavery, genocide and oppression isn't part of our common history. It is pretending that we have healed our nation's brokenness when the consequences of that history is borne by communities of color today. Color blindness is pretending that racism doesn't happen among us now.

But the problem with color blindness is deeper still, it contains the presumption that subordinate and oppressed cultures are not different from the dominant culture and have no merit, and it further presumes that subordinate and oppressed cultures do not continue to sustain and empower the people in resistance to the dominant culture. If these cultures had merit and power, why recommend that we be blind to them?

Most people of color don't seek to be just like white folk, they seek to honor their own communities of origin, their diverse cultures and their identity. They seek to be solidarity with each other and they seek a transformed relationship with white America. Unitarian Universalists of color invite people of the dominant culture to see their "color" and affirm that "color" as a wonderful way of being human.