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My mother used to tell a certain story at family parties when trying to explain why my sisters and I didn’t really speak Cantonese, my parents’ primary language. It’s probably a familiar narrative, especially to kids of immigrants in America. Still, it stung every time I heard it.
When my oldest sister, Steph, was in her suburban-Connecticut kindergarten, she returned home one afternoon embarrassed and upset, and insisted that our parents talk to her only in English. Steph was young and doesn’t remember the specifics, though the scenario is easy to imagine: some kid, probably oblivious but still cruel. Our parents, who came to the United States separately from Guangzhou, China, in the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Hong Kong, spoke mostly the Chinese dialects Cantonese and Taishanese to us, but also possessed fluent English from their education in colonial Hong Kong. They conceded to Steph’s request, my father told me, and we became a primarily English-speaking household. Although my sisters and I could understand and speak some Cantonese (mine was the most limited, because I was the youngest; I was born a few years after Steph’s kindergarten incident), the ability faded as we aged.
The term for what my sisters and I experienced—the forgetting of a language by a once-proficient speaker and a family’s subsequent intergenerational dilution of the skill—is language attrition, and research shows that it occurs rapidly. Linguists say that in many cases, a heritage language becomes all but extinct by the time a family’s third generation is living in a new country. The reason is simple, according to scholars I spoke with: A language stays alive when used out of necessity. And the longer a group lives in a new country, the more likely another language will take its place.
Attrition can feel like an inevitable side effect of immigration. For me, though, the outcome also feels dire. The thought of future generations of our family having even less of a connection to my parents’ language than I do stirs a specific melancholy in me, a sense of relinquishing something greater than myself—a shared history, perhaps. For a long time, I experimented with different methods of learning Cantonese, as well as Mandarin, the most common Chinese dialect and the one for which learning resources are easier to find. I tried a college course, a tutor, online classes, Duolingo, watching films from Hong Kong. Throughout, I asked myself: What was the hole that I was trying to fill by attempting to absorb my family’s language? And was it possible to reverse this attrition, so that the next generation wouldn’t have to experience it?
Three and a half decades after my sister Steph renounced her Chinese, these questions return to me when I’m visiting her in the suburbs of New York City. I’m helping her take care of her children, who suffer none of my language anxieties.
Her 3-year-old daughter is home from day care and hunched over an iPad that is playing Frozen II in Mandarin. She turns to me beseechingly. “Wo yao li,” she says. Translation: She wants something, though I don’t know what.
“‘Li’? ‘Li’ shi shenme? What is ‘li’ in English?” I ask her, translating myself.
She studies me with a cool, appraising expression. She knows the English word for li. She’s just hazing me, Steph will confirm later. Bored, my niece turns back to the movie.
I type different fruit names into Google Translate. After a few minutes, I learn with sheepish amusement that li, spoken in a rising tone, means “pear.”
My niece and her 5-year-old brother speak mostly Mandarin to their parents. My sister’s in-laws—Mandarin speakers—live nearby and often look after the kids, which has helped reinforce the dialect as the household’s dominant language. That, plus the Saturday Chinese school the kids attend every week. And—crucially—my sister’s hard work.
Steph primarily speaks to her children in a mix of English and elementary, self-taught Mandarin. She has spent hours translating her kids’ books and labeling mundane objects around the house with their Chinese names, memorizing the characters for “light switch” and “refrigerator” in the process. The family watches the Mandarin versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Bluey, and Moana, and in her free time, Steph uses Duolingo for her own lessons.
The result is that I’m constantly amazed by my niece’s and nephew’s linguistic abilities. I’ve also had a preview of the incredible parental labor required to raise children in a language one is also learning.
Much of it involves making peace with being outsmarted by children who toggle seamlessly between two languages, and who, in my case, sometimes correct my pronunciation. My nephew and niece sense that my Chinese is lacking, and converse with me in English. This behavior isn’t a snub, but kind of feels like a cause for shame, because it comes from a child. I try to cobble together my broken Mandarin to keep up. I realize that I can no longer joke that my Chinese is “toddler level,” because my toddler niece has far surpassed my abilities.
Steph has told me that having her children speak Chinese—whether that’s her Cantonese dialect or her husband’s Mandarin—is one of the most meaningful ways for them to engage with their lineage. To be proficient in a language makes you not merely a cultural spectator that passively enjoys food or classic films with subtitles, but an active participant. You can contribute information to a conversation; you can entertain others with your wit; you can give rather than just take.
I’ve always wondered about the relationship that any future children of mine might have to their family history. Yet there’s a comfort in what my sister has achieved. To me, she has wrested back some semblance of control. Her kids—and maybe even Steph herself—are connected to their past in a manner that I am not.
The key to reversing language attrition is simple in theory and difficult in practice: Expose your children to the language. “It’s really about time with that language—and high-quality time,” Krista Byers-Heinlein, a psychology professor at Concordia University, in Montreal, whose work focuses on infant development and language acquisition, told me. “When we say ‘high quality,’ we mean interactions with real people, with the things that parents and adults normally do, so just talking back and forth.”
Byers-Heinlein said the figure varies, but a child typically has to have a minimum of 20 to 25 percent of their waking time with those high-quality interactions in order to be able to speak a second language proficiently. She walked me through a hypothetical scenario: Say a kid attends a three-hour Chinese school each Saturday, and hears Chinese only in that environment. If this child were to sleep 12 hours a night (optimistic!), that would mean they were awake for 84 hours that week. The child would need at least an additional 14 hours a week of Chinese interactions.
The challenge is how to boost a child’s exposure when the parents don’t speak the language well themselves. In these cases, a parent’s key resource is a community, Maria M. Carreira, a Spanish professor at California State University at Long Beach and a co-founder of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, told me. For parents to rustle up the 20 to 25 percent of waking hours needed in a language, perhaps they can rely on schools or day-care centers that teach in multiple languages, extended family close by, play groups or library storytimes, caregivers who speak the language.
Of course, so much depends on where someone lives in the U.S. and how many generations their family has been in the country. A nationwide survey that Carreira and colleagues conducted from 2007 to 2009 analyzed people learning their heritage languages, among them Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Persian. Carreira and the late UCLA professor Olga E. Kagan noted in a subsequent report on their findings that Spanish-speaking respondents had some of the highest levels of proficiency, which they attributed to the closeness of Latin America to the U.S., as well as to the country’s large population of Spanish speakers. Though most Mandarin and Cantonese heritage-language learners surveyed were—like the Spanish speakers—born in the U.S. or had arrived before age 11, their exposure to their heritage language “was considerably more limited than that of Spanish speakers.” The researchers pointed out some potential reasons: Compared with Spanish speakers, fewer Mandarin and Cantonese speakers visited their (or their parents’) birth country each year, and nearly half of them reported never having read in their heritage language.
These data fed my curiosity about how Asian American parents in particular navigate teaching their children a heritage language they’ve lost. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed an influx of newcomers from Asian countries, my parents included; many Asian Americans around my age were thus the first in our families to be born in America. Through our immigrant parents, we understand our heritage. And we’re also, by virtue of being born here, indelibly American. How we raise children—and in what language—can feel like an inflection point for our cultures.
[Read: My novel is a love letter my mother can’t read]
These challenges are hardly unique to Asian Americans, however. Silvina Montrul, a linguist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, notes in her recent book, Native Speakers, Interrupted, that “in the United States, English is the language of power and the language children choose to speak with their peers.” She nods to the work of colleagues who found that in Miami, some children who grew up speaking Spanish at home and English and Spanish at school still chose to converse in English outside school.
Montrul, who is Argentinian, went to remarkable lengths to make sure that her two daughters spoke Spanish. She formed the University Language Academy, an after-school and summer immersion program for children ages 4 to 17. She recalls that she was particularly firm in making Spanish the primary language she used to interact with her daughters, even when one—in an echo of my sister Steph’s story—begged her not to. Montrul says that if a child picks up another language before puberty, there’s a good chance they’ll sound like a native speaker with continued exposure and use. But without that practice, the language can just as easily fade. “As I say in my work, children are great language learners,” Montrul told me over the phone, “but they are also great language losers.”
Even though America is full of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, Americans tend not to speak multiple languages. According to the nonprofit American Councils for International Education, only 20 percent of K–12 students take foreign-language classes. In Norway, Romania, and Luxembourg, by contrast, every primary- and secondary-school student takes foreign-language classes. And even European countries with lower percentages of students learning a foreign language far outpace the U.S.: Greece with 87 percent, Portugal with 69 percent, and Belgium with 64 percent. Large immigrant populations have historically brought new languages to America, yet as the scholars Rubén G. Rumbaut and Douglas S. Massey note, the country has a “well established reputation as a graveyard for immigrant languages.” This is no aberration; it is grounded in decades of policy and sentiment.
Efforts to suppress languages other than English were present even in the country’s earliest days. Starting in the 1800s, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to so-called residential schools to be educated according to white American standards; they were punished for speaking their own languages.
In 1915, speaking at Carnegie Hall on Columbus Day, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that there was “no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.” He would proclaim four years later in a letter to the American Defense Society that the U.S. had “room for but one language here, and that is the English language.” Roosevelt’s words foreshadowed a posture of monolingualism. The following century of American hegemony allowed this approach: People in other countries have had to learn English to apply to study at American colleges, to conduct business with American companies, or to understand the nuances of Hollywood films. Americans have felt far less pressure to reciprocate by learning foreign languages.
Today, true fluency in multiple languages is uncommon in most of the United States, even as it exists in English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada, where the government weaves multiple languages into daily life through street signs and official forms. Legislation in Wales and Quebec have established Welsh and French, respectively, as official languages. In Wales, nearly 30 percent of people age 3 or older can speak Welsh—about 900,000 people—according to a population survey from 2022. In Quebec, just under 86 percent of people said in a 2021 analysis that they spoke French regularly at home.
[Read: How to save a dying language]
Compare that with Hawaii, where U.S. authorities banned teaching in the native language in the 19th century. Not until 1978 was the state constitution amended and Hawaiian recognized as an official language; prior to this change, fewer than 2,500 people spoke Hawaiian, most of them 60 years or older, according to Larry Kimura, a professor of Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. To try to save the language, educators created a nonprofit preschool, ‘Aha Pūnana Leo, a Hawaiian immersion program that has become a model for indigenous-language revitalization around the world. ‘Aha Pūnana Leo and its Hi’ipēpē Infant Program now have more than 6,000 alumni, and the organization has offshoots that extend Hawaiian immersion schooling all the way to college. If language can be decimated by government policies, efforts around the world have shown that language can also be saved from extinction, even if progress is often fragile.
In the U.S., bringing a heritage language back into a family usually comes down to the efforts of individuals. The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort.
Betty Choi, a pediatrician who lives outside Santa Barbara, California, and is the author of the children’s book Human Body Learning Lab, is another remarkable example of just how far a dedicated approach to language instruction can go. Choi grew up in Syracuse, New York, and wanted to connect her two young children to the memory of her late parents, who spoke various dialects of Chinese, and to her husband’s family, who live across the country and speak Korean. So Choi set about teaching herself and her children Mandarin and Korean.
Over a few years, she cycled through different methods: enrolling herself in language classes; seeking out multilingual child-care providers; and exposing her children to books, songs, and videos in those languages. (Few other Asian Americans live where Choi does, which presents a particular challenge, she told me, in her effort to expose her children to Chinese and Korean outside the house.) Eventually, Choi created her own curriculum, which she parlayed into what is now Chalk Academy, an online resource for raising multilingual children that includes worksheets; articles; and suggestions for books, toys, and activities that help facilitate learning Chinese and Korean.
Choi’s children are now conversational in Mandarin and have retained a small number of Korean words. (“It was painful to watch my children forget Korean so quickly,” Choi wrote in an email, sharing that the Korean words they mostly say now are: ttong (poop), bang-gu (fart), and saja (lion), referring to a favorite stuffed animal.) She’s worried they will start to lose their Mandarin, too, as the English terms they’re learning at school and with friends outpace the amount of self-taught Mandarin she can speak to them at home. “But my kids know that Chinese language is a family value, not simply an extracurricular activity. As such, Mandarin is still the primary language that I speak with my children,” Choi wrote. Still, the children might reply in English, Mandarin, or a mix of the two.
[Read: Ukrainian is my native language, but I had to learn it]
There is, of course, another alternative to either total fluency or abandoning a language. Hieu Truong, who lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in the area, has a 4-year-old son and a six-month-old baby. She’s slowly trying to introduce her children to Vietnamese, but has remained realistic about their potential bilingualism and her own abilities.
Truong, whose parents left Vietnam for the U.S. in the early ’80s, says she can understand, speak, and read only a little Vietnamese—enough to order in a restaurant, but maybe not enough to digest the newspaper. Truong sometimes reads her son children’s books in Vietnamese—through those books, she learned the words for, say, “zebra” and “giraffe” herself, and he’s now familiar with basic Vietnamese words, like the one for “numbers.” Truong also benefits from resources that didn’t exist when she grew up: Netflix shows and movies dubbed in Vietnamese; activity books and flashcards sold online; resources such as the SEAD Project, a Minneapolis-based organization that offers Hmong, Vietnamese, Khmer, and Lao language courses, and emphasizes the history and culture of the Southeast Asian diaspora through its programming.
For her son, “fluency isn’t necessarily the goal,” Truong told me. She knows personally how hard it is to maintain proficiency and doesn’t want to add that pressure. “But I do want him exposed to it. I want him to go into a Vietnamese restaurant and be like, ‘Okay, I know what’s going on.’ I want him, when he talks to his older relatives, to know how to properly greet them—know how to say ‘Thank you.’”
[Read: Forgetting and remembering your first language]
Ultimately, Truong said that a big part of teaching her son Vietnamese is “untangling” the objective for herself versus the one for her toddler. Here, I relate to her, even though our goals differ. Being far from family and a network of Cantonese speakers with whom I could interact on a daily basis makes the goal of everyday fluency difficult to attain. But I long for the emotional closeness that comes with an ease of interaction. Having only a vague familiarity with a language is like navigating the world with blurred vision. Everything appears with softened edges, and I am forever grasping for true meaning, deciphering fuzzy translations. I can see the outline of things, but I can’t be confident that I truly know what I’m seeing.
Fluency would sharpen my focus. It would allow me to see and participate in the small details of my life that are rendered in Cantonese: the textures of a conversation with extended family, the jokes that unfold at the dinner table, the subtext that is begging to be teased out with a gentle question. I’m seeking to know more of these tiny moments.
This is what I want for any potential children of mine, too. I don’t desire fluency for them merely to compensate for what I lost as a kid. Rather, I yearn for them to have a closeness to the culture and the little joys of everyday life that such proximity can reveal. Language facilitates many things: at its most basic, a transfer of information, and at its most complex, an exchange of emotion. But perhaps what I value above all else is that it grants intimacy.
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www.euronews.com › 2023 › 09 › 22 › brazils-top-court-rules-in-favour-of-indigenous-land-rights
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On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars. The memos, signed by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, are the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions.
“Unacceptable funding inequities have forced many of our nation’s distinguished Historically Black Colleges and Universities to operate with inadequate resources and delay critical investments in everything from campus infrastructure to research and development to student support services,” Cardona said in a statement. (There are more than 100 HBCUs in the nation, but just 19 of them are land-grant institutions, or colleges designated for funding under the Second Morrill Act of 1890; it is these 19 institutions whose funding the government analyzed.)
At the outset of the Civil War, in 1861, shortly after southern legislators were expelled from Congress, Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced a bill to educate the American workforce. Across the country, agricultural productivity was down sharply, and Morrill believed that education was the answer. There were only a smattering of colleges in the United States at the time, and they served primarily as finishing schools for the elite. “We have schools to teach the art of manslaying,” Morrill told his colleagues, “and shall we not have schools to teach men the way to feed, clothe, and enlighten the great brotherhood of man?” His idea was for the federal government to give states land that they could sell in order to fund a college. The bill, known as the First Morrill Act, was signed into law in July 1862.
[Read: Attending an HBCU has always been an act of courage]
Iowa was the first state to accept the land grant, which it used to fund Iowa State University; other states followed suit. By the time each state had taken advantage of its land grant, more than 17 million acres of land—10 million of which had been expropriated from hundreds of Indigenous tribes—had been doled out under the act. The institutions rarely, if ever, enrolled Black students.
By 1890, the colleges were starting to work as intended: They were, on average, enrolling more students than non-land-grant colleges were and expanding the college-going population. But the leaders of the institutions argued that they needed more money to do their work, and Morrill agreed. “Let me urge that the land-grant colleges are American institutions, established by Congress, and, if a small pittance is needed to perfect and complete their organization … I shall confidently hope that it will be granted without reluctance and with the full faith in the national benefits that cannot fail to accrue,” Morrill said.
He proposed a Second Morrill Act—one that came with a caveat: States could not receive funds to support a college that made a “distinction of race and color” in admitting students; states could, however, operate a separate but equal college for Black students. The bill was signed into law on August 30, 1890. Most southern states chose the separate-but-equal route; other states, like Iowa, where George Washington Carver enrolled at Iowa State University as its first Black student, in 1891, admitted Black students to their already established land grants.
Within two decades, however, it was clear that the states were shirking their duty to the equal part of separate but equal. On February 5, 1914, senators convened to discuss a sharp disparity among land-grant colleges. Wesley Jones, a Republican from Washington, had gathered data on the differences between the white land grants and the Black land grants. Georgia, Jones told his colleagues, was a prime example of the disparity in funding. There were 423 students at the white land grant—the University of Georgia—and 568 at the one for Black students, Savannah State College, but the University of Georgia’s funding far outpaced that of Savannah State. The government had provided UGA with $249,656—$50,287 of that coming from the federal land grant—whereas Savannah State had received just $24,667, with $8,000 coming from the federal government.
“Does that mean that they were trying to teach 500 colored students on $24,000 and 400 white students on $240,000, in round numbers?” Senator Albert B. Cummins of Iowa asked Jones during floor debate. “That seems to me a very startling disparity.”
[Read: The steep cost of decades of discrimination]
The very least the government could do, Jones argued, would be to require states to report how they spent their money, and he introduced legislation to make it so. But southern senators thought that went too far. The measure was voted down. Time passed. Other reports came and went, such as the Truman Commission for Higher Education and American Democracy’s analysis, which showed that no state in the union funded white and Black higher education equally—including at a rate of 42 to 1 in Kentucky. Still, it took more than a century for the federal government to finally require states to report their land-grant spending, which it did in the 2018 Farm Bill.
Cardona and Vilsack’s letters to the governors outline the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated. If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie.
The land-grant colleges are not the only Black colleges that have been mistreated by state governments; each institution has many stories of unfair policies it has faced. Savannah State is no longer Georgia’s historically Black land grant—that designation now lies with Fort Valley State University—but it still must deal with the consequences of a state government that has failed to adequately fund it since its founding.
There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades. The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.
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Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I asked, “What roles should ‘color-blindness’ and race-consciousness play in personal interactions?”
Replies have been edited for length and clarity.
Adam is of two minds:
The phrase “I don’t see color” is deservedly a joke; it’s hard to imagine growing up in America and never noticing the racial category that society has placed the person into. Occasionally, that awareness is helpful. I might have doubted a Black friend’s stories of discrimination if I didn’t have an awareness of her race and what that can mean. But, as a white person, color and race are not things I usually try to think about when I’m talking to individuals. I thought it was a good thing when, after moving to an urban area with a racially diverse population, I realized that I no longer always took note of the racial composition of the passengers when I rode city buses. To me, keeping race in the forefront of personal interactions is more likely to lead to false assumptions than real understanding.
And who prefers to be treated as a type?
So long as race means something in our society, and means something to individuals, it’s something to keep in mind. But kept in mind too much, it can create distance, not understanding.
Jaleelah believes that Americans and Canadians tend to approach interpersonal interactions differently:
This question only makes sense in the context of the U.S.A.’s “melting pot,” which replaces ethnocultural identity with racial identity. Slaves and their descendants did not choose to give up their heritage, but many white and Asian immigrants did: They either assimilated happily or assimilated to avoid discrimination. The “melting pot” framework creates taboos against asking people where they are from and being curious about their unique cultures. It dictates that people of all ethnicities should be treated as Americans, and that inquiring about their non-American ancestors and traditions is a rude form of questioning their Americanness. But while the melting pot can blur cultural differences, it cannot obscure the fact that people from different ethnic groups look different. That is why race’s role in American interpersonal interactions needs to be explored.
Ethnicity is much more relevant than race when it comes to casual conversation. In Toronto, which is highly multicultural, asking where someone is from is practically a standard icebreaker. Of course the conversation that ensues will include speaking about ethnicity. There’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t “divide people”; it just helps us share basic parts of our lives and selves. Canada’s “mosaic” model makes it easier to perceive different cultural histories and values as beneficial to the identity of the country as a whole.
Karen struggles with how best to interact in Canada:
My prior hairdresser hated that people kept asking her where she was from. She was a person of colour, but she was fifth-generation Canadian on one side and seventh-generation on the other—deeply Canadian, indeed, in a country that continues to experience significant immigration. I am an immigrant—but from the U.S.A., and white, so mostly invisible. My hairdresser’s unfailing answer was “I’m from Victoria (B.C.),” and if people kept pressing, as they often did, with “But where are your parents from?,” she’d just repeat “Victoria.”
My daughter-in-law, when asked about this response, said, “I disagree, at least for myself. I like to tell people about my heritage (which is Malaysian Chinese on the one side, and Filipino on the other). I’m proud of my background.” She feels this way despite receiving significant, sometimes very overt racist comments, and despite people often assuming she is her own children’s nanny, not their mother, since, unless observed closely, her children, my grandchildren, look white. These comments hurt her, and make her angry, but don’t change her desire to discuss her background forthrightly.
It is polite in our First Nations context to describe one’s origins in the process of introductions, which in my case, allows me to say I am mostly of Northern European settler stock. Where appropriate, I can mention my plantation-owning, slave-owning maternal ancestors. But this is mostly not appropriate in majority-white contexts—people look at me like, “Why are you bringing this up?” The answer, of course, is that I am attempting to honestly locate myself as a person who has benefitted from centuries of unjust acquisition and privilege. Colour-blindness in my case would be incredibly self-serving.
Given that I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where as of 2021, over 54 percent of the inhabitants were visible minorities—meaning, of course, that people of colour as a whole are a majority of our population—this question [of where a person is from] is a vexing one. I tend to ask other questions now, assuming that those who want to tell me more will do so. And I tolerate a degree of chronic anxiety about getting it right, not least because it mirrors what people of colour have [to contend with] all the time, even in a majority people-of-colour city, when dealing with us white people. Finally, most of the people of colour I meet are very gracious about all of this, so long as they can assume that one is trying to understand and engage out of a position of humility and human interest.
John describes another approach:
I’m not color-blind; I’m conscious of your race. I just don’t care. Do you want to go fishing with me this weekend? If so, I could use the help on deck. Do you want to get out of the house and go see the world, from my boat or the windshield of the truck on the way to go hunting? Then you are in. Do you want to talk about fishing for hours, comparing tactics and past success? Then we are friends. In fact, I could simplify. Are you a friendly person? If you don’t have too many friends already (and nobody has too many friends), I’m in.
On several of these trips, the subject of race has come up. And I’m better for it. I’m sure this sounds clichéd, but unless you meet people where they are, you might never know.
Jake lays out a case against interpersonal color-blindness:
Racism still affects individuals; these experiences become part of their identity, and you can’t fully understand the person without understanding that. By analogy, having been raised Mormon or being a former Division 1 athlete or having a disability will color one’s experience in a way that makes it impossible to know someone without understanding the implications.
But what logically follows departs from the constant centering of race as progressives sometimes practice it. First, this should only begin to matter if you’re close friends with someone—if you’re trying to actually know and understand them. Interactions with strangers truly should be color-blind. Second, there’s not really a need to proactively bring up a person’s identity. One should familiarize oneself—from pop culture, literature, and patient friends— with what it means to be Black or Asian or Hispanic or Indigenous (or gay or trans or a woman or disabled) to be a good citizen and a good (potential) friend to those who have those identities. But the effect should be on how one listens and reacts, not approval-seeking or showing off of how educated and understanding you are.
The goal of interpersonal non-color-blindness is to reduce gaps of understanding as much as possible, but also having the discipline to make it about making others feel more comfortable rather than making oneself seem cultured. Put that way, any excesses can be self-correcting: If part of life as a person of color in America is dealing with overbearing apologetic white people, those who care should understand that and take it into account.
Maureen argues that “color-blindness has no role in personal relationships.” She writes:
Color-blindness diminishes the enormously valuable lessons history has taught each race; it ignores the cultural treasures unique to each race; it requires us to be blind to our own race, whatever it may be, and thus, the gifts we can offer others. Race-consciousness, on the other hand, opens wide the gates of understanding. Awareness of our inherent and experiential differences sparks new ideas, solutions, and—surprise—cooperation! All races have yet to explore the potential power of race-consciousness, the exponential growth and advancement of all races. Race-consciousness is a worthy aspiration, available to each of us. May we embrace the qualities unique to each race, and those common to all.
Nan distinguishes between race and culture:
In my view, being color-blind means and feels like no longer seeing skin color as a dominant characteristic––like when people fall in love with a beautiful person, but after some years, that beauty has faded into one of many characteristics instead of the dominant one. In my friendships with people of color, the comfort factor that occurs after years working side by side makes skin color more and more irrelevant. Culture and personal experience, however, remain, as they do for all exchanges in all friendships.
Jerome, who is 80 and white, discusses his interracial marriage of more than 50 years:
When we were first married, interracial marriage was uncommon, and my wife and I felt like we were living in a fishbowl. But I can recall only one overtly racist comment ever directed at us. Interracial marriage is more common now. People don’t even give us a second glance. Perhaps I was naive about my white friends, or fortunate in my choice of white friends, but I never encountered any overt racism among them, and there was never any talk of racial politics. If I had brought up issues of race with them, I feel like they would have responded with puzzlement and disinterest. They were too busy living their lives.
After we married and moved away, seeking work and new opportunities, I naturally gravitated to my wife’s family and her friends. They seemed to have no interest in my take on issues regarding race either, perhaps for a different reason than my white friends, but in any case, they were not consumed on a personal level by racial issues. I believe that Jamelle Bouie’s assessment about being color-blind in our day-to-day relationships is correct. By and large, our better angels seem to be in charge in regard to our personal relationships, and in the interest of preserving social comity, it’s best to follow the instincts of our better angels.
When first married, I think we were both race-conscious on a personal level. Now, after all these years, I think we can honestly say that on a personal level, we are really color-blind. It just never enters our mind. True color-blindness isn’t easy. It takes familiarity and practice.
J. describes a change in perspective:
I always believed I was color-blind and tried my best to treat everyone the same. I’ve never made a big deal of race or espoused any type of acknowledgment practice to any person of color.
Several years ago, my nephew asked me to review and critique an admissions essay he wrote for a summer engineering program. He's the perfect mix of brains and brawn, with an easy-going personality and quick-witted sense of humor. His essay stopped me cold. My nephew is half Native American and half white. I neither thought of nor treated him as different. He’s just my nephew, whom I love and adore. I also never thought about the difficulties he faces as a child of two very different cultures. His words cut like a knife, shredding my self-perceived color-blindness and leaving it in tatters. My idealistic view of equality was naive at best and ignorant at worst. He’s faced maltreatment from both sides of his heritage. He’s too Native for some whites and too white for some Natives. That, alone, blew my mind. He described many instances and situations from his unique perspective. When I finished, I gave him a hug and suggested a few changes to wording. I reiterated how proud I was of him and thanked him for opening my eyes.
At home that night I cried for my nephew and the struggles he has faced. I cried for the stupidity of humanity and its ignorant belief that one color is superior to another. And I cried for myself, for not realizing that I’m white and I’ll never truly understand what any person of color goes through. I haven’t changed the way I treat others and never will. But for me, that is the day I realized color-blindness doesn’t exist. It's a made-up term used by those who’ll never understand the ignorance of its perceived meaning.
Seth asks, “Is it even possible to be color-blind?” He writes:
While it’s nice to aspire to be better, it’s counterproductive to aim to be something we’re not capable of. Race, like other personal traits, contributes to, but doesn’t define, who we are. We shouldn’t let race dictate how we relate to anyone, nor should it be factored out. Everybody wants to be seen and heard as an individual, and your race is one of the many elements that contribute to who you are. A better goal in our interactions would be self-awareness. Recognize our prejudices. Question our assumptions. Then relate to everybody with a sense of curiosity, openness, and compassion.
Leo stakes out a middle ground:
I don’t think there’s a “should.” There’s more of a natural sorting process. There will always be proponents on both sides of this debate, but we will naturally gravitate to those people more in line with our own thoughts and feelings. And we should be left in peace to do so. My main issue with this debate is when activists or individuals on one side or the other attempt to impose their view on others. I’m not opposed to debating the issue with people who disagree with me, but the topic is often just too heated for a calm and reasonable conversation. And there seems to be little point in such debate when modern anti-racists rush to declare anyone inclined toward color-blindness to be an evil bigot.
I am inclined toward color-blindness. I do not think that the best response to racial discrimination is more racial discrimination. I don’t think that fire is the best substance for putting out a fire. I acknowledge, however, that there may be a place, in certain circumstances, for race-consciousness. I try to remain open-minded. I believe in entertaining doubt. But if I sense that race-conscious leftists have zero receptivity toward anything I say, I avoid them. That’s how this issue impacts my interpersonal relationships.
David argues:
It shows respect to treat people as equals, and it shows arrogance to act as if one is on top of a social hierarchy—even when that may be true. I never learned much about race issues in America until I started reading history in my late 30s. The violence directed at people of color that was officially sanctioned, or condoned by silence, was shocking. I do now have a basic understanding of the systemic racism that has held African Americans and others back. That sort of “race consciousness” should inform policy choices. However, it seems to me (a 65-year-old moderately progressive white guy) that race-consciousness might get in the way of normal interpersonal interactions with people of color.
Being too self-conscious can interfere with social interactions, because one cannot be fully present. Being race conscious in personal interactions seems more likely to create barriers to understanding and relating to the individual in front of you than to invite discourse and understanding. One should be attuned to potential societal burdens experienced by others and how that may manifest, but excessive sensitivity seems to create a new form of “white man’s burden” thinking coming from the left. Like accommodating a disability for people who are not disabled, it seems patronizing.