There is a new study by psychology researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Louisville that maintains that those people who maintain a “color-blind” racial philosophy are actually fostering racism. There is a growing movement from elementary schools to colleges that it is not enough to be non-racist. You must be anti-racist. A collateral position is that color blindness allows white people to evade racism or racial justice questions. The question is whether the study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology will be used to support universities requiring affirmative anti-racism statements and other direct responses from faculty and students.
Researchers Jacqueline Yi, Helen Neville, Nathan Todd and Yara Mekawi refer to “color-blindness” as either “color evasion or power evasion.” They maintain that “colorblind racial ideology (CBRI) provide information on barriers to naming the problem of structural racism against Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) as a source of racial inequities in society.” The study is dismissive of the view that color blindness is anything other than conscious evasion, stating that it is intentional for many white people: “conceptually, color evasion or denial of race and racial categorization is an intentional strategy some White people adopt in interpersonal relationships to appear nonbiased and ultimately to promote greater racial harmony.”
In an interview, Lead researcher Jacqueline Yi asserted that
“The denial of structural racism appears to be a big barrier to racial equity because it allows for more victim-blaming explanations of systemic inequality. The more that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) individuals are blamed for racial disparities, the less likely it is for white people and institutions to take responsibility for the continued effects of systemic racism.”
The researchers argue that color blindness ignores race to “reduce prejudice and possible tension or focusing on human similarity rather than differences linked to racial group membership,” while the latter is the “denial [or] minimization” of structural racism.
If the study is accepted, the question is how such findings translate to school policies on the training and expectations for faculty and students. The study states “[o]ur meta-analysis established that CBRI, specifically power evasion, is associated with greater prejudice against Black people, thus providing evidence against the idea that CBRI is a way to ‘get past’ racism.”
The study specifically recommends changes in light of the findings that include:
• Create opportunities for CP students and faculty to support organizations in naming the role of LIs in their policies
• Change the racial makeup of institutions and CP programs by increasing representation of Black folx
• Train CP students to challenge the racial status quo and engage in structural analysis
• Incorporate the role of structural racism and anti-Blackness in mental health diagnosis and treatment
into CP curriculum
• Use multicultural, SJ, and anti-Black frameworksin CP supervision models
• Educate policymakers in helping professions on the role of CBRI in perpetuating anti-Blackness and systemic racism (e.g., licensing boards, funding agencies)
The expectation is that this study will receive broad application as universities address diversity and anti-racism priorities.
Roughly speaking:
Asian High School students study, on average, 2-hours a night.
White High School students study, on average, 1-hour a night.
Black High School students study, on average, 30-minutes a night.
Asian students get the best grades and best SAT scores.
White students do okay, but as a population, clearly don’t keep with Asians.
Black students, as a population, fall to bottom.
Anti-racism can’t change these things. Color-blindness can because, if enforced (which it obviously isn’t) it incentivize black-students to work harder. Instead they get AA admissions and preferences which causes them to fail disproportionately as they’re not prepared for the rigors of college.
So now you see people colorless but maybe for their merit, your inner racist is showing. The concept is still the same, perpetuate the myth of “racial injustice & bias” to put you on defense. You challenge this mumbo jumbo and your called a racist, supremacist, whatever. They’ll be hailed as visionary in the fight for equity by white self hating liberals who’ll do anything to be viewed as woke.
Now take Dr Watson’s publication a pioneer in DNA and uh oh, strip him of his Noble. How about you challenge him with proof he’s wrong that’s how things were done in the good ole day’s.
Of course, this is exactly what would you might say if you were trying to get appointed to a university faculty.
If there is a life after death, Hitler and Goebbels must be laughing their a**es off at the irony of hard leftists adopting their methods and so much of their ideology. And, that Jews are already in the cross-hairs.
RE:”””””Hitler and Goebbels must be laughing their a**es off at the irony of hard leftists adopting their methods and so much of their ideology. And, that Jews are already in the cross-hairs.”””” https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2014/09/i-want-to-make-sure-i-dont-educate-monsters/
They did indeed make a mistake when they used the word folx in their manifesto. They word volk would have been more appropriate.
RE: “””They did indeed make a mistake when they used the word folx in their manifesto””””.
“Folks[folx] is an ‘Obama-ism’. A word he often used, during speaking engagements, when refencing people of color.
What the H is wrong with you people? Don’t you understand that being colorblind is not enough? Sacrifices on the alter must be made and you must understand that you are responsible for the slavery of hundred and fifty years ago. That is unless you were a black slave holder then your all good. Are you only fifty percent guilty if your mother is white and your father is black. Are you guilty if your black but one percent of your blood comes from a white ancestor? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this kind of thinking is only made by a bunch of con artist. As an example I present to you the manager of BLM who has now filled for bankruptcy. I’d say it was a pretty good gig that allow an avowed Marxist to become wealthy.
It’s ludicrous for these “researchers” to promote more black representation on campuses. Not only is it racist, according to NAEP test scores, only 7% of black 12th graders are proficient in math and 25% in reading. Compare that with asians who are proficient at 52%/50% respectively. These wacked out woke progressives are promoting the illiterate/innumerate as the new standard. No wonder that blue states aren’t able to get anything done whether it’s building affordable housing, dealing with homelessness/drought/wildfires/electricity capacity. It’s akin to Soviet Lysenkoism and we’ve seen how well that worked. Idiocracy, the movie, is now real life.
This “study” is a meta-analysis, an analysis of 83 other studies. Such analyses can be valuable but require care with statistics. I was put off by their use of the word “folx” for “folks”, where they meant “people.” Fine for Obama in a political speech, but not in a “scientific” paper. On the good side, they do distinguish two kinds of “color blindness.” The bad kind is an ideological belief that racism doesn’t exist or is minimal. The other kind, “color evasion,” trying to see people as individuals, looking beyond their race, showed some beneficial traits, but the authors are still suspicious of it. I speculate it runs counter to their identity politics.
I had a hard time finding the meaning of ‘CP’. A Google search gave me result after result for ‘cerebral palsy’, but I also got results for ‘Canadian Pacific’ and ‘Clipperton Island’. Wiktionary finally came through with ‘college prep’, along with the meaning of the last two characters in ‘NAACP’.
An earlier post used ‘systemic’ for ‘systematic’. (I think. ‘Systemic’ is not a clearly defined word.) Not to labor a minor point, but the copy editing here has been poor for the last week or so.
CP is in the footnotes of the table, means Consulting Psychology.
Bluffs and Bludgeons
“Structural racism,” says Loury, is largely a fabrication employed as a “bluff and a bludgeon.” It is a bluff in the sense that it is presented as an explanation that is not a legitimate one, and a bludgeon in that it is leveraged as a rhetorical weapon to shame and defeat one’s opponents.
An example of the bluff is the left’s obsessions with the narrative of police brutality against black victims. Yet more whites are killed by police every year, and although blacks are overrepresented in that statistic, they are far less than the majority (about one-fourth of just over 1,000 fatal shootings by police annually).
The left-wing narrative also typically elides that many of the persons killed are engaged in violent conflict with police officers, and that, as Loury notes, almost half of the 17,000 homicides in the United States every year involve black perpetrators. “For every black killed by the police, more than twenty-five other black people meet their end because of homicides committed by other blacks,” writes Loury.
The bludgeon, of course, is even easier to identify. That weapon is employed every time someone claims that this or that institution is permeated with systemic racism, or claims systemic racism explains some news event. The reaction to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock is explained by structural racism; gun rights are based on it, and the disproportionate number of black Americans killed by Covid is because of it.
These are either overly simplistic or fallacious. Although the use of this weapon is pervasive and quite damaging, Loury is hopeful: “I believe we are already beginning to see the collapse of this house of cards.”
https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/13/read-this-book-to-counter-the-hopeless-lies-of-1619-project-racial-determinists/
Jonathan, hoping you will eventually have time to write about the compelled speech issues in U of I’s new DEI mandate. See https://wirepoints.org/two-compelled-speech-matters-beg-for-litigation-in-illinois-wirepoints/
At first , the Professor wasn’t a colored person, and there would no colored people on Gilligan’s Island until 1965, the year in which all of our beloved castaways became colored people.
n.b. One has to wonder what has happened to the peer review process.
This is looking more and more like Lysenkoism in the old Soviet Union. And, there too, people died, lots of them.
MLK argued that a person should be judged on character not by the color of their skin. Character is a superior way to judge people.
The ivory tower denizens prove, once again that you can’t fix stupid.
Judging someone on something like physical appearance, is the cheapest, shallowest, most simplistic, most discriminatory and racist way to dismiss someone I can imagine. It allows the most vile to prop up their bigotry.
“[P]eople who maintain a “color-blind” racial philosophy are actually fostering racism.” (JT)
So if you evaluate individuals on the basis of their race, you’re a racist.
And if you do *not* evaluate people on the basis of their race, you’re a racist.
That’s quite a racket.
The study states “[o]ur meta-analysis established that CBRI, specifically power evasion, is associated with greater prejudice against Black people, thus providing evidence against the idea that CBRI is a way to ‘get past’ racism.”
oh really…. will “the study” be neutrally peer reviewed – – or just another book publication that academia will rely on…
Just jibberish posing as scholarly research. As I often opine, folks like these are the “real” racists among us — looking everywhere and anywhere in their quest for systemic racism and its victims to justify what they teach, how they teach, how they think, what they write, etc. etc.
Sorry. I judge people on two factors alone: Are you competent, and are you a decent human being? Nothing else is relevant. I’m not your activist, I’m not going to be your idiotic activist. Call me what you like I could not care less what you label me. Don’t care what you look like, don’t care about your past, don’t care about your history, don’t care about your upbringing, don’t care how hard you claim you had it. There are ZERO EXCUSES to not be a decent person and to be good at what you do.
At last! The politics of identity come full circle: a “color-blind” philosophy is now deemed racist.
Let’s call this “thinking” what it really is: the New Racism. Born, with so much other toxic drivel, in our intellectually-pathetic universities.
Well said.
Besides affirmative action, disparate impact-based disciplinary codes (or anything that has been codified based on DIT), and preferential government contracting there is no systemic racism in the US. Merit-based advancement is not systemic racism.
Sorry, not sorry.
More proof — if we needed it — that US universities have become hotbeds of racism.