Color Blind Hearts and Minds

Abstract

There is an elephant in the room that is this book. We have danced daintily around an enormous truth that is interwoven with all the various other truths making up the suffering of so many in this country. And that gigantic reality is what is glossed as “race” in this country. The fact of bigotry and discrimination remains a powerful variable in all the social problems discussed in earlier chapters. And, of course, this fact is put, almost exclusively, in psychotherapeutic and hyperindividualistic terms. Bigotry and discrimination, couched as they are so often in terms of flawed or virtuous interiorities, are discussed in this society, by the Left anyway, as though all that is needed is some kind of education (or reeducation). The Right argues, in contrast, that bigotry and discrimination are largely relics of the past, due in large part lately, they say, to the horror of affirmative action. It is now “white” people against whom discrimination is active, and, in particular, “white” men. Once more, nowhere in any of these discussions, except very lightly by the Left and, almost unheard, by members of some ethnicities (Pitts 2008) is there a demand for fundamental, structural change.