{"id":41733,"date":"2015-07-10T19:04:24","date_gmt":"2015-07-10T19:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41733"},"modified":"2015-07-10T19:04:24","modified_gmt":"2015-07-10T19:04:24","slug":"maybe-white-people-really-dont-see-race-maybe-thats-the-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41733","title":{"rendered":"Maybe White People Really Don\u2019t See Race \u2014 Maybe That\u2019s The Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe White People Really Don\u2019t See Race \u2014 Maybe That\u2019s The Problem<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Scenarios USA<\/a>
\n2015-07-08<\/p>\n

Ijeoma Oluo<\/a><\/strong>
\nSeattle, Washington<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It started with a simple question: \u201cWhen is the first time you became aware of your race?\u201d But as answers from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers started to roll in, the question came to represent more of a challenge about what I thought I knew about race relations today.<\/p>\n

The idea started with the Rachel Dolezal<\/a> fiasco. Like many people of color, I was completely baffled by the fervent defense many white people gave \u2014 people who had made it very clear that they didn\u2019t want to be black were now arguing for the white Rachel Dolezal\u2019s right to be black. \u201cRace is just a construct,\u201d they argued<\/a>, \u201cif you\u2019re really anti-racist, you\u2019ll recognize that people can be any race they want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Had the world gone mad? If people could really be \u201cany race they wanted to be\u201d there wouldn\u2019t have been an NAACP<\/a> for Rachel Dolezal to scam in the first place. I am, as are many of my friends, acutely aware of how definitive and unrelenting my blackness is. I tried to imagine any scenario where I could stop being black and even factoring for Halloween, I came up with nothing…<\/p>\n

…As a Black woman myself, I used to always laugh at white people who claim to \u201cnot see color\u201d as I imagined them running red lights and walking around in hilariously mismatched clothes; it\u2019s impossible to be able to see the color of your shirt and not the color of someone\u2019s skin. What I\u2019ve begun to suspect after this survey is that when people say \u201cI don\u2019t see color\u201d what they mean is \u201cI don\u2019t see race\u201d \u2013 or, at least, they don\u2019t see it accurately. My race as a Black woman doesn\u2019t exist in a vacuum, it exists in relationship to and interaction with whiteness. Like so many POC, I know whiteness as a race \u2013 I know it from our media, our holidays, our government and our police. Whiteness is the measurement of success, the goal we\u2019ll never obtain. Every day we have to be aware of whiteness. It is a matter of survival. For us, there is no place in the Western world where it can be escaped…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe White People Really Don\u2019t See Race \u2014 Maybe That\u2019s The Problem Scenarios USA 2015-07-08 Ijeoma Oluo Seattle, Washington It started with a simple question: \u201cWhen is the first time you became aware of your race?\u201d But as answers from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers started to roll in, the question came to represent more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,394,20],"tags":[20411,20412],"class_list":["post-41733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-ijeoma-oluo","tag-scenarios-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}