As someone who teaches about the psychological pitfalls of racial colorblindness, it’s been jolting to see this ideology being touted as an ideal way of relating to one another. For example, President Trump has repeatedly used this term, including during his inauguration speech. Recently, against the backdrop of the current public sentiments about racial colorblindness, I found myself gearing up for a lecture on the different types of racial microaggressions commonly experienced and perceived by people of color, including – you guessed it – the expression of racial colorblindness.1
Note: I recognize that some of these current sentiments are focused on hiring and admission policies, whereas my blog post contains thoughts on the interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of racial colorblindness. While I do think that these domains are ultimately related and can reflect the same mentality (e.g., a false sense of neutrality or objectivity about race), please note that the current essay is a reflection on racial colorblindness when it is perceived and expressed in interpersonal settings.
Because of the current climate, I was much more deliberate in preparing my lecture materials. This was not because I was wanting to “water down” the content, or because I was somehow wavering on the importance of discussing the topic in the Christian classroom; if anything, I felt even more resolute that now is the time for my students to wrestle with this idea from the perspective of, “how do we love people in a way that is pleasing to God, and how can psychological science help us in answering that question?” As such, in framing the conversation for my students, I felt the urgency of the moment to be clear and nuanced about the concept. In this blog post, I share some thoughts as I stepped into this conversation with my students – strategies, struggles, even confessions – with the hope that these might inspire you in your own teaching.
First, as I began class, I chose to open up to my students about the feeling of dissonance that I brought up earlier in this blog post. I disclosed to students that I was approaching this topic with a heightened sense of prayerfulness.
Moreover, upfront, I shared with students where I personally landed – that the endorsement of racial colorblindness can interfere with our individual and communal responsibility to love our neighbors well (more on this later). As I was doing this, I was keenly aware that I was self-disclosing, something that I tend to be purposeful in doing when I teach. But with especially a topic like racial colorblindness that is not just scholarly but personal, I took the risk of being transparent with my own position; not unlike a positionality statement in a qualitative research paper, one that describes how I as a researcher might be influenced by my own experiences and perspectives when analyzing the qualitative data.2
Second, I relied on empirical evidence. That is, how do we know the validity of racial colorblindness (and racial microaggressions in general) as psychological harm? One way we know is through the host of studies demonstrating the link between racial microaggressions and deleterious health and mental health outcomes.3
Moreover, not only might racial microaggressions be linked to emotional and physical health, which is the primary interest in my field of psychology; but they might also be associated with other outcomes that we care about in Christian communities.
Here is an example that requires some context and research methodology. Some time ago, I started noticing a troubling trend in my Korean and Korean American Christian settings: use of images that portrayed Christianity as a white religion (e.g., white Jesus). Printed materials at church, PowerPoint slides shown during service, and even paintings outside of church buildings reflected this. When I brought up my observations to fellow churchgoers, the response I got was a shrug and something to the effect of, “Yes, I see that. But what’s the harm?”
My undergraduate research students and I empirically identified a couple of potential harms in a recent publication.4 We examined the implicit bias held by Asian and Asian American college students–bias regarding Jesus’s race. Briefly, the way that we assessed the implicit bias followed the typical implicit bias test5(IAT) format; we showed participants two groups of pictures (white Jesus [e.g., Head of Christ by Warner Sallman], non-white Jesus [e.g., Black Jesus by John Campbell]) and also had two categories of words that were positive (e.g., caring) and negative (e.g., cruel). Basically, a bias that favors one group (white Jesus or non-white Jesus) would be reflected in the images from that group being more quickly associated with the positive words than the negative ones. And indeed, we found an implicit bias of our participants favoring the white Jesus images.
More central to this blog post, we also asked participants questions about their internalized racial colorblindness.6 Strikingly, participants who endorsed more racial colorblind beliefs were also more likely to have higher IAT scores (remember, higher score meant more tendency to see white Jesus as more positive). Bluntly stated, the belief that one is being neutral (i.e., racial colorblindness) is not always aligned with unbiased outcomes. Yet another way to put it: when we claim colorblindness, we might actually be endorsing the status quo in a way that we do not even realize it.
Third, I appealed to the senses of seeing and hearing (listening). I encouraged students to think of the antidote to racial colorblindness as deep listening to the experiences of others; to validate the stories of those who are most impacted by racial experiences. Likewise, a counter to racial colorblindness is to see the other person, and to see them fully. I recently found myself exclaiming to a particularly supportive colleague, “I feel very seen by you.” In contrast, when I have been told things like “I don’t see you as an Asian” or “when I talk to you, you don’t seem like a Korean,” it seems like a glossing over of something so obviously in front of us; not seeing me in the full, messy, God-orchestrated contexts that include my racial and ethnic identity.
Finally, as difficult as it is, I told students about some of my own shortcomings related to racial colorblindness; it truly feels confessional when I disclose my sins in this area. I often remark to students that we are all microaggressors at times, from the perspective that we might harm others with our comments and actions, whether intended or not. There are times when I have assumed certain things about my students in a manner that was not reflective of their actual experiences; when I have utilized cultural references sans a critical reflection on their generalizability, only to have the several blank faces in the room provide feedback to me about the incorrect assumption. I might not have utilized white Jesus images, but I can think of the times when, through my colorblind approach, I upheld certain aspects of Western Christianity as the standard in my classroom. Again, this type of public confession is so challenging to do, and it delivers a blow to my prideful heart. But I do think it is an effective practice for Christian educators, to not only be authentic in our teaching, but also to open doors for students to be vulnerable in their own sharing.
In closing, I pray that what I have shared in this blog post can inspire further conversations and practices around the topic of racial colorblindness, especially in how we can talk to our students about the topic during this time.
Footnotes
- Derald Wing Sue, Christina M. Capodilupo, Gina C. Torino, Jennifer M. Bucceri, Aisha M. B. Holder, Kevin L. Nadal, and Marta Esquilin. “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Implications for Clinical Practice,” American Psychologist 62, no. 4 (2007): 271–86.
- Sherry Hamby, “Know Thyself: How to Write a Reflexivity Statement,” Psychology Today, May 22, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-web-of-violence/201805/know-thyself-how-to-write-a-reflexivity-statement
- For a review of health and mental health outcomes, see Gloria Wong, Annie O. Derthick, E. J. R. David, Anne Saw, and Sumie Okazaki. “The What, the Why, and the How: A Review of Racial Microaggressions Research in Psychology,” Race and Social Problems 6, no. 2 (2014): 181–200.
- Paul Youngbin Kim, Marcella A. Locke, Esal Shakil, Joo-Hwan Lee, and Nicole V. Chiangpradit. “Beliefs About Jesus’s Race, Implicit Bias, and Cultural Correlates Among Asian American College Students,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 51, no. 3 (2023): 333–51.
- Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz. “Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 6 (1998): 1464–80.
- Helen A. Neville, Roderick L. Lilly, Georgia Duran, Richard M. Lee, and LaVonne Browne. “Construction and Initial Validation of the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS),” Journal of Counseling Psychology 47, no. 1 (2000): 59–70.
