I’ve posted a bunch of things on the internet through the years, across multiple blogs and Facebook and whathaveyou. In an attempt to consolidate all that—and to have a place for my better Facebook writing to live, away from that wretched platform—I will periodically be posting the old stuff here, unedited, though perhaps occasionally contextualized or clarified.

The following was first posted 29 April, 2015, probably as a response to one of my cousins being terrible online.

"I don't see race."

The thing that leads to these sorts of outbursts from me is that I reach the point where metaphor is no longer an adequate tool for understanding and attempting to explain the world. I get so stuck on the reality of what is happening that I can no longer imagine a way to tell a story about it that isn't speaking directly to that reality, as best I can perceive it.

The problem with metaphor is that it is bound to be misunderstood or reinterpreted to fit someone's own ideas, to amplify wrong ideas beyond the control of the writer. The problem with leaving metaphor behind is that I'll find myself saying things in definitive terms that should not be said definitively, pretending to a completeness of understanding that I recognize isn't there yet--assuming it ever could be achieved at all.

Leave it to 1000+ comment chains full of people saying terrible, terrible things to suck all the metaphors dry.

So what ends up happening is that I end up saying nothing at all, and it eats at my brain and there's nothing else I can think about until it's out, right or wrong, complete or lacking. And here we are, saying things that need not be said, lecturing to blank walls.

“I don't see race” is not a proclamation of your virtue. “I don't see race” does not exempt you from the responsibility to try to understand the experience of people that don't look like you. “I don't see race” doesn't mean that there is anyone else out there in the world who has evolved to your transcendent plane of post-pigmentation existence.

“I don't see race” is a place to go hide in the dark, oblivious to the reality of the world around you. A place where you can feel righteously aggrieved while the world burns around you. It forsakes history and it forsakes the weight of that history on today's reality. “I don't see race” precludes any possibility of empathy for people of all races upon whom that weight rests so heavily.

“I don't see race” is very often probably a well-intentioned platitude that actually says to a countless number of your fellow human beings that you have determined that a portion of the way they might self-identify is not acceptable, as if that was up to you. The phrase seems innocuous, pretends to virtue, and is at its core, absolutely supremacist.

And it's mighty white of you, isn't it?

You have a responsibility to “see race” because it is impossible to honestly conclude, looking at even a fraction of the available evidence, that our powerful institutions and the human beings that run those institutions do not see race.

The lie that you “don't see race” is most vicious because it allows a racist system to continue to sell that lie as it goes about its racist business.

We can't start from zero just because you say we should.

“I don't see race” is a normative statement disguised as a descriptive one. It is a wish. It is a statement of principle, a hope for equal treatment from others and from the law that does not concern itself with whether or not that equal treatment ever happens in reality.

Here is what I believe: I believe it is impossible to say anything of moral value about any one individual based on the traits (objectively or subjectively perceived) of the group. I believe it is impossible to say anything of moral value about a group based on the traits of any one individual. I believe it is immoral to self-identify as part of a group, in part because it necessitates the sacrificing of your own agency. I believe it is immoral for anyone external to you to affix your identity to a group, in part because it denies you your agency.

And I believe we do these things all the time, practically without fail. Sometimes we do it in furtherance of a cause of justice. Sometimes we do it to build a community. And sometimes we do it to justify terrible things. What's absolutely certain is that we do it, and we do it all the time.

It's fine—laudable, even—to not “see race” when you see a bunch of kids playing on a playground, or a couple holding hands as they walk down the sidewalk, or when you look around your church. We are all children of God, after all—finally grasped a metaphor!—and we are all equally human and equally deserving of justice. But saying it doesn't make it so. And claiming an inability to see race doesn't mean that race isn't a factor in real world outcomes, whether you want it to be or not.

Maybe all of us post-boomers, we X-ers and Y-ers and Millenials, maybe we're confused about this because of the way we were taught about race. The fear of being called a racist or admitting to ourselves that our own prejudices might sometimes be informed by race was so debilitating that we denied even our ability to see pigment. But that should never have been the goal, and it was a mistake to imagine it was possible.

We have fetishized the THOUGHTCRIME of racism in much the same way we have fetishized the crime of rape. We have turned it into something unforgivable, something that only monsters do, an absolutist test of one's decency and humanity. The stench of it is so powerful that we seek to distance ourselves from these crimes at the cost of seeing them for what they are—pervasive and pernicious, for sure—but also solvable, when confronted honestly, with eyes open.