Years ago, I watched the news as they mentioned a restaurant that did not have required prices. I don’t remember if they had suggestions or minimums, but I believe that you could literally pay nothing. The concept is called Pay-What-You-Want and it’s not limited to restaurants. My family owned two restaurants, and I worked on many more before I graduated college. There are real costs to running a restaurant of which most patrons are not aware. The notion that our livelihood relied on a stranger’s good will would be unsettling. Still, today the notion of running your business in a PWYW model is still your choice to make.
Imagine the suggestion that all restaurants (or businesses) should run this way. Have we reached the level of collective trust that allows businesses to run this way? Is that patron really paying only $10 for that fillet mignon because that’s precisely what they thought it was worth? You believe that an iPhone is only worth $250, can you drop that cash on the counter and walk off with the device? If we build a model where our collective well-being is dependent on others’ honesty, are we at peace with the instances where people aren’t honest?
If we find the idea of our financial livelihood hinging on others’ honesty to be unsettling, how do we feel about more important issues? What about our freedoms and our civil rights?
Colorblindness: To not see race
Some maintain that our aspiration should not be to recognize and identify racism, that we should instead aspire to be colorblind. If you don’t see color… if you don’t notice that someone is Black, Asian, or Caucasian, then you can’t possibly discriminate. As such, there is no need to develop guards to keep people accountable, such as laws against racial discrimination or companies looking at diversity numbers. On a very simple level, this sounds aspirational and optimistic, much like the way Starfleet officers in Star Trek have no need for money. We can get there someday. To suggest this now is profoundly and criminally naïve.
Let’s gloss over the fact that most people who suggest this idea are the ones who are least likely to be impacted by racism. Is there not a conflict of interest? Do we really believe they aspire for a world expunged from all traces of racism? Or do we believe that they tire of Dr. Seuss books taken out of print by the publisher due to racist pictures? Do they simply look for a ticket to ride the ‘I can discriminate against anyone’ train?
Let’s reflect on the Pay-What-You-Want business model. Are we ready for our freedoms and civil rights to be managed similarly? To make them dependent on the honesty and good will of others is profoundly naïve. For us to even contemplate the idea of colorblindness, we need to expunge the instances of intentional racism, like hate groups. Once that occurs, we educate people about unintentional racism. Otherwise, why are we turning the other cheek to someone who delights in slapping us a thousand times? We’re not there yet, not even close.
Colorblindness is not immune to racism
When the Fifteenth Amendment passed, it granted our black citizens the right to vote, some states passed laws shortly after that discriminated against these very citizens. Legislators composed these laws cleverly; they do not mention race. They made rationalizations that certainly sounded plausible, but each cleverly disproportionately targeted our black citizens. Voters need a certain level of literacy and comprehension, so they established tests that must be passed. It takes money to run a polling place, so they would charge you a modest fee for voting. They were dishonest and established for the sole purpose of diluting the black vote. These became known as Jim Crow laws, and they were ruled unconstitutional.
In the 1980’s, there was a big push to minimize drug use; it became a felony to possess cocaine. The threshold for powder cocaine was 500g (over a pound); the threshold for crack cocaine was 5g (weight of a quarter). They’re chemically the same by weight, so why the 100:1 disparity? Is it a mere coincidence that crack cocaine is used significantly more frequently by black people? Even if we debate whether they established these thresholds intentionally, we can’t deny that they disproportionately impacted black people. That law does not mention race either.
By the letter of the law, both of these policies are colorblind. A policy doesn’t need to explicitly mention race to be racist, yet you suggest that I should implicitly trust that you don’t see color. Forgive me if I’m skeptical, but I have history on my side.
Allyship is not colorblind
You walk through the park on a warm afternoon; you see boys horse playing in the distance. It’s normal for boys to play rough while dissipating nervous energy. You maintain that you don’t see race, and true to form you do not. You do not see that three Caucasian boys push around an Asian boy. Maybe you are too far away to hear one of them utter, “Let’s jump on the Chinaman.” This was life at twelve-years-old.
On March 16, 2021, a man shot eight women to death in the Atlanta area, six of them were Asian. They did not initially file it as a hate crime against Asians. Given the number of Asians in the Atlanta area, what is the likelihood of six of those eight women being Asian at random? I did the math, it’s 1 in 13,919,756. How lopsided do the odds need to be to conclude that this is not, in fact, random? To be colorblind is to not notice the gross disparity.
To suggest that colorblindness is the solution is to figuratively turn a blind eye to these problems. It’s willful blindness. Then the question becomes: Are you so profoundly naïve that you believe that given the chance, people will ‘do the right thing’? Or are you instead unsympathetic because it doesn’t directly impact you? Is there a third option?
The irony with literal colorblindness
To become colorblind to race is to assert that it doesn’t exist and to refuse to acknowledge the differences.
Actual literal colorblindness is pretty common among men, occurring in about 1 in 20 men. The most common is red/green colorblindness. I have at least three friends and colleagues who are colorblind. Do we encounter conventions in real life that use green and red to convey different ideas, like traffic lights? How many other websites and services use the same color scheme to communicate positive and negative? Have you browsed the charts in Bloomberg lately? How many traffic maps use color to convey congestion? Have you thought about how these all look to a colorblind person?
The solution to the colorblind dilemma is to educate everyone, to speak up the moment someone creates a chart with green for pass and red for fail. We all need to be aware of the use of color, and how it affects everyone, even if you are not affected. It is the aspiration to spend a little time and energy to make life a little better for everyone. That we should all want to not stick our heads in the sand and pretend that it doesn’t exist… or that it is not our problem… or that it’s a negligible part of our population.
And similarly, we should not be colorblind to race.