Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World. - Review - book review

Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World By Ellis Cose (Harper Collins, 1997, xxvii + 260 pp. $24.)

Imagine two strangers passing by: an Asian man and a Caucasian woman. Who more likely is the tourist and who probably speaks Chinese? What answer might be reasonable and what response "politically correct?"

Or consider a criminal justice system that arrests, prosecutes, and imprisons a disproportionate number of African American men. If one observer voices concerns over this pattern of punishment and another warns of violence from black males, who is playing the proverbial "race card?"

And so on, with affirmative action and immigration, diversity and demographics, being discussed with the blend of optimism and pessimism that marks the turn of the millennium, two thoughtful books on the subject of race have appeared: Ellis Cose's "Color Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World" and K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann's "Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race"

After the success of his "The Rage of a Privileged Class," which described the situation of middle-class African Americans, journalist Cose has returned to race. His book represents a welcome trend: the author of a book on immigration, Cose knows that a black and white view of race relations does not match reality. He includes the increasing number of groups and individuals who are neither black nor white.

Cose begins with the topic of Census Bureau racial classifications and the mixed race movement. He is sympathetic to individuals who refuse to be confined to simple categories or forced to reject their ancestries, but sensitive to the hierarchies that become clear as soon as people who have options choose white instead of black or light over dark.

Cose is ambivalent about affirmative action. His principled doubts should be heeded. He observes that the late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be surprised by the uses of his words. He points out that some opponents of affirmative action seem to care about only innocent white victims of so-called reverse discrimination, and he emphasizes the importance of having an alternative before abolishing affirmative action. Yet he notes that King strongly supported policies that benefit the disadvantaged regardless of race, and he doubts the wisdom of current remedial programs.

In a wide-ranging work, with comparisons of the U.S. scene to Brazil and South Africa, Cose closes with a dozen suggestions for "race neutrality." They range from becoming serious about fighting racial discrimination to not believing time will solve the problems, not hoping for a single solution, and not playing the "blame game"

Professors of philosophy at Harvard and politics at Princeton, respectively, Appiah and Gutmann have based their book on their talks given for the distinguished Tanner lecture series. Their book is an impressive intellectual achievement.

Synthesizing thinkers such as Charles Darwin and W.E.B. DuBois, Appiah asks whether the notion of race has a basis in either biology or sociology. He shows how our common-sense perceptions of race are based on assumptions that racial groups share sets of characteristics but that these presumptions are neither accurate nor useful. The assign. ment of races and corresponding characteristics to individuals also is emphatically involuntary.

According to Appiah, "We expect people of a certain race to behave a certain way not simply because they are conforming to the script for that identity, performing that role, but because they have certain antecedent properties that are consequences of the labels properly applying to them." He concludes, "If I had to choose between Uncle Tom and Black Power, I would, of course, choose the latter. But I would like not to have to choose. I would like other options."

Gutmann hopes to envision such options. She rejects race consciousness for a color consciousness she defines as a project of recognizing how color functions and responding to its effects, in order to achieve specific substantive goals of social justice Her color consciousness is a color conscience. Like Appiah,

Gutmann recognizes that while race is a social construction rather than a scientific reality, it nonetheless can be powerful and damaging. Gutmann reasons through her form of color consciousness that affirmative action programs, even in the strong sense of preferential treatment, can be considered fair. If integration is a proper goal for a school, for example, then being black can serve as a "tie-breaker" qualification if there otherwise would be no blacks at all on the faculty, as in the controversial Piscataway case Gutmann gives a cogent interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, showing that securing the right of blacks to chose a representative, who might not be black, and to advance their principled interests is compatible with equality in the democratic process.

Color-blindness is contradictory. Some of the same people who implore us to ignore race themselves make assumptions about not only who is probably a tourist, but also who has a propensity to commit crime Many people who invoke the phrase "color-blind" do not intend its practice, not because of bad faith, but because of how bizarre its actual operation would be for them; they are obsessed without being aware Cose quotes a teacher who argues that presenting images only of whites in the classroom is acceptable, because, after all, race shouldn't matter.

Trying to be color-blind, instead of reducing the role of race, reveals assumptions we share unconsciously. Perhaps the alternative to colorblindness is not necessarily old-fashioned racism. Comprehending how race functions may be a complex and more difficult approach, but pragmatic as well as moral. An allwhite university has a different history, purpose, and effect than a predominantly black college--incidentally, the black institutions almost always have been integrated. Appiah and Gutmann think about race by considering contexts and consequences, giving a richer understanding of what we mean by race itself.

Cose, Appiah, and Gutmann offer reasoned responses to two successful but spectacularly wrong books on race: "The Bell Curve," which argued that blacks were genetically inferior, and "The End of Racism," which countered that they are culturally pathological. Cose, Appiah, and Gutmann confront the basic issue of what is wrong with racial discrimination.

The easy answer is that racial prejudices are generally irrational--they are based on erroneous or exaggerated perceptions. But the harder problem is that a few racial stereotypes, both complimentary and derogatory, are "true"--if only as to invented groups The latter type of racial generalizations are what Thomas Sowell and Dinesh D'Souza have termed "rational discrimination." They assert that truth serves as the defense; if it is more likely than not that members of a racial group display a trait, then it is acceptable for us to treat individuals accordingly.

The best responses to such rationalization may be some combination of Cose, Appiah, and Gutmann. However much each of us could enjoy short-term gain from mistreatment of others based on race, even if we are not the perpetrators of the wrong, all of us in the long run benefit from a principled rejection of the negative use of race

The remaining issue is whether there can be any positive references to race For individuals and communities, the dual dilemmas are welcoming diversity without losing all distinctions, as well as accepting differences without imposing them.

Cose, Appiah, and Gutmann offer ideas, not ideologies, on race relations Their books can be highly recommended as a matched set continuing an important tradition of public dialogue on race relations.

Frank H. Wu is an associate professor of law at Howard University.

COPYRIGHT 1997 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group