Welcome to the Colette podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young,

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Hello and welcome to the Colette Podcast.

My name's Toby Young and I'm an associate editor.

One of the most frequently written about subjects in Quillette is racism.

As a white male, a cishet white male, no less, I'm never going to win a medal in the

Oppression Olympics. But am I racist? I like to think of myself as colorblind.

I judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, to paraphrase

Dr Martin Luther King. but is color blindness itself a form of racism?

That's certainly the view of Eduardo Bernilla Silva, the president of the American Sociological Association Association who's written a book called

racism without racists, colorblind racism and the persistence of racial

inequality in America. The reason claiming to be colorblind is racist apparently is that it lets people like me off the hook

We absolve ourselves of any responsibility for racial inequality and blame the racism of others or worse imagine that racial

inequality might have a variety of causes of which racism is only one and perhaps not even

the biggest one.

In the eyes of Bonillo Silver, who's also a professor of sociology. not are in fact racist, systematic white racism is the sole cause of racial inequality and the only

way to do something about it is if white people acknowledge their racism and check their privilege.

Indeed, on some American college campuses claiming to be colorblind

...