Science: The ‘Colorblind’ Approach to Racism Doesn’t Work

When it comes to everyday practices that teachers are encouraged to try in school settings to address racial issues, empathy, wise feedback, affirmation, and high-quality contact tend to get short shrift. Instead, one of the most common practices schools foster is the strategy of color blindness. Try not to notice color. Try not to think about color. If you don’t allow yourself to think about race, you can never be biased.

That may sound like a fine ideal, but it’s unsupported by science and difficult to accomplish. Our brains, our culture, our instincts, all lead us to use color as a sorting tool. And yet the color-blind message is so esteemed in American society that even our children pick up the idea that noticing skin color is rude. By the age of ten, children tend to refrain from discussing race, even in situations where mentioning race would be useful, like trying to describe the only black person in a group.

Our adult discomfort is conveyed to our children and our students. When we’re afraid, unwilling, or ill equipped to talk about race, we leave young people to their own devices to make sense of the conflicts and disparities they see. In fact, the color-blind approach has consequences that can actually impede our move toward equality. When people focus on not seeing color, they may also fail to see discrimination.

In a study led by social psychologists Evan Apfelbaum and Nalini Ambady, that idea was put to the test. The researchers exposed sixty mostly white fourth- and fifth-grade students from public schools in the Boston area to a videotaped message promoting racial equality. For some of the children, color blindness was encouraged: “We all have to work hard to support racial equality. That means we need to focus on how we are similar to our neighbors rather than how we are different. We want to show everyone that race is not important and we are all the same.” For the remaining children, valuing diversity was encouraged: “We all have to work hard to support racial equality. That means we need to recognize how we are different from our neighbors and appreciate those differences. We want to show everyone that race is important because our racial differences make each of us special.”

Next, all of the children listened to stories about incidents that involved other children. Some had clear racial components, like the story of a black child being intentionally tripped by another child while playing soccer, simply because he was black. Even in a situation like that, only 50 percent of those in the color-blind mind-set identified the action as discriminatory. In the diversity-minded group, nearly 80 percent saw discrimination as a factor. And when teachers later watched video recordings of the children describing the incidents, the teachers who listened to the descriptions of children in the color-blind mind-set rated the actions as less problematic and were less inclined to intervene to protect the targeted child. Encouraging children to remain blind to race dampened their detection of discrimination, which had ripple effects. Color blindness promoted exactly the opposite of what was intended: racial inequality. It left minority children to fend for themselves in an environment where the harms they endured could not be seen.

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Our children are not blind to the racial and ethnic divisions that have racked this country since its beginnings. Now social media gives them access to every slight, provocation, and indignity: Black
men in handcuffs, arrested for not buying anything at Starbucks. White college students in blackface, bellowing fraternity chants laced with racial epithets. Brown children confined in wire enclosures, crying desperately for their border-crossing parents.

We need to help children process the disparities and racial animus they see. We know that close relationships with people unlike ourselves—at school, at work, at church, in neighborhoods—can help mute the impact of prejudice and blur group boundaries.

Journalist Walter Lippmann, who coined the term “stereotypes,” said it best: without individual contact that breaks through our categorization, “we notice a trait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads.”

But it takes more than interpersonal connection to break the bonds of institutional bias and promote the sort of equality that allows us all to thrive. That is where education can play an important role. How did certain people or entire social groups land in the positions they are in? Young people need to understand the history that created structural barriers to integration and equity.

History, Lippmann said, is the “antiseptic” that can disinfect the stain of stereotypes by allowing us “to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them.”

History shapes our view of the present. With a comprehensive history curriculum, well-prepared teachers would be able to offer students context for vexatious issues that roil us today—from the noxious rise of anti-Semitism to the contentious images of black football players kneeling while the national anthem plays. Yet studies show that we are falling short on both accounts: The history lessons that most students receive are woefully inadequate and often dreadfully biased. And teachers are often ill equipped to teach the subject with the breadth and depth it deserves.

According to a survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 22 percent of young Americans who came of age in the 21st century said they never heard of the Holocaust. Two-thirds of them—four in ten Americans overall—failed to identify “Auschwitz” as a Nazi death camp.

It can be particularly challenging to teach a racially charged topic like slavery, and because of that it is often simply not taught or watered down beyond meaning. A Southern Poverty Law Center survey of high school seniors and social studies teachers in 2017 found students struggling on even basic questions about the enslavement of blacks in the United States. Only 8 percent of high school seniors could identify slavery as the primary reason the South seceded from the Union. Nearly half of the students said it was to protest taxes on imported goods.

“Teachers are serious about teaching slavery,” the survey found. “But there’s a lack of deep coverage of the subject in the classroom.” Nine in ten high school social studies teachers said they are committed to teaching about slavery, but almost six in ten find their textbooks inadequate. As recently as 2015, one of the nation’s largest textbook companies was still publishing a high school geography text in Texas that portrayed slaves as “workers” who’d cruised here on ships from their native Africa to toil in southern agricultural fields.

There’s a tendency for textbooks and teachers to shrink or sanitize a subject that stains our nation’s legacy. That shields students from the true horror of the institution. But it also deprives them of the opportunity to explore both the brutality of oppression and the bravery of endurance, and to understand how the legacy of slavery still shapes our country’s racial dynamic, influencing us in ways we don’t even recognize.

“Teachers—like most Americans—struggle to have open and honest conversations about race,” the survey confirmed. “How do they talk about slavery’s legacy of racial violence in their classrooms without making their black students feel singled out? How do they discuss it without engendering feelings of guilt, anger or defensiveness among their white students?”

One teacher in California told the pollster why it’s hard. She worries about its emotional effect on the black students, the message it sends to their classmates: “Although I teach it through the lens of injustice, just the fact that it was a widely accepted practice in our nation seems to give the concept of inferiority more weight in some students’ eyes. Like if it happened, then it must be true.”

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From Biased by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, PhD, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer L. Eberhardt.