on being colourblind

[pensnest]

Back in the dark ages when I was a poor student, I somehow ended up going out for dinner in London with a bunch of other students and some people who worked in a casino. At the end of the dinner, the guy who was somehow in charge divvied up the bill and told us how much everybody owed. It was scary, because I'd ordered what I could afford and didn't have much in my purse at the time. (Student behaviour would have been that eveyone paid for what they'd had.)

I was reminded of this by a year-old comment I found while following a bunch of links this morning.

...your ability (and mine) to say "it shouldn't be that way, so I'll behave as if it isn't" is the *definition* of privilege. Deciding that we'll just treat everyone as if they had privileges *that they don't get* doesn't end in equality, it never does no matter how much we try it. It leads to racism. Foolishly, I didn't note who said this, but she said it very well.

When you have a healthy income, treating income-free students as your exact equals isn't exactly the right way to go. When you have the advantages of being white (and in my case, middle class and well educated and well off too), treating not-white people as exact equals isn't exactly the right way to go. It's an assumption with far too many flaws.

My apologies to any PoCs reading this - the analogy isn't very good, but it makes sense in my head.

Comments

a few pence o' me own . . .

[pieds-joyeux.livejournal.com]

interesting comments. maybe i'm miss reading something or it's the difference in culture/nationality, but is the point that people of color are thus not capable of enjoying (or in the position to enjoy) priviledge, e.g., "middle class and well educated and well off"? i'm sure it's just me and i'm not reading it right. in a mixed group of people on an outing, usually the terms are discussed before, such as, "we're all going dutch," or "i'm covering the tab for us all," or, "let's all chip in and i'll cover the difference", right?

regards

Re: a few pence o' me own . . .

[pensnest]

is the point that people of color are thus not capable of enjoying (or in the position to enjoy) priviledge

No, not at all - there are plenty of people of colour who are middle class and/or well off and/or educated, and are privileged accordingly. And, indeed, plenty of white people who are working class (or underclass, if that's a valid definition) and poor and undereducated, who lack those particular privileges.

I was really thinking about the 'colourblind' argument, that we should treat everyone the same - I'd been reading about why that isn't actually a good idea, and it was something I had to think about quite hard, because it had always seemed to me that treating everybody as equals would be the right way to behave. But if people don't start out equal, it doesn't help to *treat* them as equals, because there's still a discrepancy, and ignoring it means that it continues to exist.

As you can see I had to dig quite hard into my own life to find some kind of example that works on *me*, because I'm in a pretty good starting position.

On that particular occasion I don't think we discussed the way we were covering the bill very well beforehand - something like 'everyone pays their share' is a very ambiguous statement, and those with money and the habit of splitting the bill equally just weren't on the same wavelength as those who ate only what they could afford that week. Trouble is, both systems are fair—especially with Chinese food, where people are likely to share the dishes—but only one system is fair to the people who don't have much money.