This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Genealogy of Race, given by Patricia Williams, was originally broadcast in 1997.

My son attends a small nursery school. Over the past year, three different teachers in his school assured me he was colorblind.

Resigned to this diagnosis,

I took my son to an ophthalmologist who tested him and pronounced his vision perfect.

I could not figure out what was going on until I began to listen carefully to what he was saying about color. As it turned out, my son did not misidentify color.

He resisted identifying color at all.

I don't know, he would say when asked what color the grass was,

or most peculiarly, it makes no difference.

This latter, this assertion of the greenness of grass making no difference, was such a

precociously cynical retort that I began to suspect some social complication in which he was

somehow invested.

The long and the short of it are that the well-meaning teachers at his predominantly white school had valiantly and repeatedly assured their charges that color makes no difference.

It doesn't matter, they told the children, whether you're black or white or red or green or blue.

Yet upon further investigation, the very reason that the teachers had felt it necessary to impart

this lesson in the first place was that it did matter and in predictably cruel ways.

Some of the children had been fighting about whether black people could play good guys.

My son's anxious response was redefined by his teachers as physical deficiency.

This anxiety redefined as deficiency suggests to me that it may be illustrative of the way in which

the liberal ideal of color blindness is too often confounded. That is to say, the very notion of blindness about color constitutes an ideological confusion

at best and denial at its very worst.

I recognize certainly that the teachers were inspired by a desire to make whole a division in the ranks.

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