Honestly color blind racism is a bunch of bull, but you knew
that already right? If you ask me it goes way beyond color. The basic idea of
color blind racism is that when we look at a person, we should not look at the
color of their skin but instead in the famous words of Dr. Martin Luther King
we should “be judged by the content of our character. In chapter 4 of Racism without
Racist, Bonilla Silva analyzes color blind racism racial stories. He takes a
closer look at how Caucasians view affirmative action or in other words the
government compensation to blacks for past discrimination. According to several
of the testimonies given by Caucasians is Bonilla-Silva’s book, they feel that affirmative
action was put in place because of what happened between our ancestors and the
slavery era. They also feel that because they were not around during slavery
that they should not have to “pay” for what happened and that everyone should
move on with their lives because no other group, i.e. the Jewish has complained
or been compensated for what happened to them. Discrimination rotates at 360
degrees. If a minority yells discrimination they are pulling the race card, if
a white feels they were denied an opportunity, its automatically because they
figure affirmative action was in place and a minority was rewarded. Here at
Northern and many other universities, they have the chance program. The chance
program is for students who probably did not perform all that well in high
school but still are capable of succeeding in college. I have had several white people on
this very campus ask me did I come in through chance. I didn’t even know what
chance was but after being asked about it a few times I decided it was time to
investigate. Majority of the people that I knew on this campus my freshman year
were admitted through chance and after going to program presented by one of the
orgs on campus I learned that supposedly, majority of the students in the
chance program were black and that NIU was thinking about cutting the program
because the students were not performing. I guess because I am black I am not
supposed to be smart enough to be accepted through regular admissions. With
that being said we all have our own story lines of what happened and what we
seem to think is true and what we want to accept. In the case of Fisher v.
University of Texas at Austin, Fisher believed that she was denied entry
because of her race, but at the same time Fisher failed to meet the school’s
academic requirements for automatic admission. Did she think for one second
that maybe she did not qualify? What made it ok for Fisher to pull out her race
card? If she were black would we automatically expect that it was a scheme and
that this black person does not have the academic background to be admitted? Color
blind racism will never work because there is no way to break the chain and we will continue to go back and forth about what happened then and what is happening now.
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