Sita Nataraj Slavov Quotes

But today, many people no longer consider a colorblind society a worthy goal. Aspiring to colorblindness is racist, they tell us, as it uses the guise of neutrality to reinforce the white supremacy that underpins our institutions. Instead, we need to go in the opposite direction by instilling in everyone a strong awareness of their racial identity and associated cultural heritage, and by explicitly considering race in hiring and admissions.

The underlying assumption is that racial diversity translates into diversity of experience or perspective, and that all people of the same race share common interests or cultural traits. This assumption is questionable at best, and can cement crude racial stereotypes at worst.

In “An Immigrant’s Plea: Don’t Convert to Whiteness,” Johann N. Neem, who was born in India and immigrated to the U.S. as a child, put his finger on why this bothers me so much. He wrote that, “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.” Neem says of his progressive white friends, “Sometimes they’ll attribute something to whiteness and I’ll think, I’m not white and I believe that or do that. That’s just American. I’ve noticed a lot of the things they now think of as ‘white’ are things we used to share.” And while those friends intend to be inclusive, their “minding of racial borders [makes] it more difficult for immigrants…to be part of the nation” and “essentializes people’s culture by their racial category.”

I’m not “acting like a white American.” I’m acting like myself—an American who resents having our shared culture parceled out by race.