The new U.S. Administration has vowed to end diversity initiatives and “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.”
Do its policies herald a new era in which all are welcome? Does its “color-blindness” realize Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”?
Or is there a case to be made for sustaining education about past racial injustices and welcoming racial inclusion?
Today’s controversy is the latest chapter in an ongoing debate over assimilation (merging everyone’s identity, values, and habits into the prevailing culture) versus multiculturalism (recognizing and affirming differences).
Those in a majority racial group have tended to favor assimilation—to agree, for example, that “there should be a single center on campus for all students, rather than separate cultural centers for students of different groups.” Better to unify people, say assimilation advocates, than to emphasize differences that can heighten hostility amid conflict. Thus, after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the country’s government-controlled media ceased referring to Hutu and Tutsi, declaring that “there is no ethnicity here. We are all Rwandan.”
On the multicultural-supporting side consider Canada, whose longstanding national policy inverts the new U.S. stance: “Multiculturalism ensures that all citizens can maintain their identities, take pride in their ancestry and have a sense of belonging. It supports our shared values of human rights, inclusion and mutual respect. Our country’s collective identity is rooted in the recognition that our many languages, traditions and beliefs enrich our social fabric.”
In his new book, The Science of Racism, social psychologist Keon West argues that color-blindness—“the belief that race should not and does not matter”—fails on three counts:
- Humans are not color-blind. Humans are predisposed to divide people into categories. When meeting people or seeing their pictures, we immediately see racial identities, much as we see gender. When in a numerical minority—as a Black person among White folks, or a White person amid Black folks—we are also conscious of our own racial identity. When traveling from my mostly White community to visit my daughter in South Africa, I become mindful of my racial identity.
- Discrimination persists. Since the mid-twentieth century—when only 4 percent of Americans approved of Black-White marriage (unlike today’s 94 percent)—both explicit and implicit prejudices have subsided. Yet much as we might wish or pretend it weren’t so, hate groups have increased. And discrimination persists:
- Inequitable access. Color-blind policies conceal enduring inequities in access to health care, housing, and voting.
- Hiring. Study after study after study after study find hiring managers more likely to call back, for example, a “Greg” than a “Jamal,” or an “Emily” over a “Lakisha.”
- Policing. Studies reveal that in the United States, Black drivers more often than White drivers are stopped by police, and—even when traveling at the same speed as others—are more often cited for speeding and charged higher fines (with less “speed discounting” from sympathetic officers).
- Color-blindness entrenches White advantage. Color-blind advocates, West documents, express more prejudice, behave more negatively toward ethnic minorities, and more often oppose “actions that might make minorities’ lives better.” They are also less likely to notice workplace discrimination and more likely to dislike a person of color who identifies discrimination. West argues that color-blindness “is not a strategy of improving the world, merely for growing more comfortable with the world as it is.”
How, then, can we both recognize and affirm the reality of diversity while promoting unity? Former Spelman College president Beverly Daniel Tatum offers a positive ABC formula:
- A = affirm identity. Welcome people for who they are and what they uniquely bring.
- B = build community. Engage by collaborating across differences, harnessing diverse gifts. Identify overarching values and aims.
- C = cultivate leadership. As my social psychologist colleague Charles Green observes, when “leadership is representative, there is a significantly greater likelihood that the values, concerns, and perspectives of all” will be included.
By affirming identity, building community, and cultivating leadership we can, says Green, enhance the experience of all people in an organization. As former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, “Most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are . . . [and we] can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others.”
David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.
