The

The Welcome to the second patron-only episode of Conversations with Coleman.

I'm right now on coronavirus quarantine, like I imagine many of you are, and I hope

you're all safe and healthy. Just a reminder, only supporters of the podcast will get the full

35-minute episode, but I'm sharing the first 10 minutes with everyone. Today I'm going to talk about colorblindness.

The idea of being colorblind is now widely attacked in intellectual circles as a form of

either naive idealism or a way of ignoring racism and white supremacy rather than dealing with it or overturning

quote-unquote systems of oppression. And it's come under attack so fully that I really don't find

anyone willing to defend it as an ideal, even though the intellectual and

moral and political case for it seems very solid to me. So before I try to make that case,

I just want to get clear on the terminology here. Colorblind is a word like warm-hearted or cold-blooded,

which is to say it uses a physical metaphor, namely not being able to see color,

to name an underlying ethical principle, which is just the principle that, in matters of ethics and politics, your race does

not and should not matter. Many people get confused just about the terminology. Often the notion of

colorblindness is attacked as if the physical metaphor were a literal statement.

The idea behind being colorblind is not that you actually can't notice another person's race.

Everyone notices race.

Certainly everyone raised in America.

But to say that colorblindness is impossible because the literal physical metaphor is impossible

is a bit like saying that no one can be cold-blooded because actually our blood is warm.

It's a simple misunderstanding.

So what I'm defending here is not the literal metaphor of colorblindness.

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